Out brief candle!

I came in this morning to find yesterday's captured critter supine. I asked Mrs Smith, "Why is Mr Roach on his back? Is he sleeping?" He smiled and said, "Yes." I went and looked at him again, then came back and said, "But I keep poking him and he won't wake up. Maybe he's sick?" He smiled again and replied, "This parrot isn't dead!"

Does that mean what I think it means?

How tragic! To spend your last day trapped under glass instead of roaming free across the walls or at least being surrounded by your children, your hundreds of grandchildren, and your thousands of great-grandchildren. Was it just the trauma of the experience that did him in? I don't think so. I smell a rat (or something just as filthy). Nobody touch that glass until I can get it dusted for prints!

My father's fer-de-lance story

(For those of you who don't know what a fer-de-lance is, it's the most venomous snake of the Americas. [Cue one of my Australian readers saying: {Crocodile Dundee voice} "Huh, huh. Thet's not a vinimis sneyk." {whips taipan out of trousers} "Neuw thet's a vinimis sneyk!"])

My father was a member of the Papal Volunteers (basically, a Catholic Peace Corps--Catholics have to have their own version of everything). Late one night, when he was living in Stann Creek, British Honduras [now Dangriga, Belize], he and two of his friends encountred a fer-de-lance. One of them killed it with a machete. Carl Burns, an Iowa farmboy, wanted to save the skin, but he didn't want to do the skinning in the middle of the night. Since this is the tropics, they knew the flesh would get pretty rank and nasty before morning, so they stowed the corpse in the kerosene-powered refrigerator.

Of course, no one warned the cook. A blood-curdling scream at the crack of dawn alerted them to this oversight. She was ready to quit on the spot, but they managed to convince her to stay by promising never to do something like that again.

Trees of my Childhood: Catalpa [Part One of a new series]

The catalpas are in bloom in Chicago. I meant to say something about this last week, when I noticed the first blossoms. Heck, I've been wishing for a while now that I'd bothered to mention every flowering species I've seen this year as it bloomed, but my head is such cheesecloth that the memory of what I've seen drips out before I get to a computer. Maybe next year, I'll keep a little notebook and do week-by-week updates. Maybe.

I've always looked forward to their tiny white blossoms. They remind me of orchids, plants I'd rarely seen outside of florist shops before I met monshu. An entire tree--and catalpas can grow very tall--covered in minature white orchids. And when there's a windstorm or thunderstorm, then the ground beneath becomes covered in tiny white flowers. (For a while, at least; they wilt quickly and, within a day or so, become ugly brown smears on the sidewalk.)

Dad was less than enchanted with them. He described the catalpa as a tree that "drops shit three times a year." First, the flowers. After these are gone, the long seed pods will begin to grow. They start out the same light green as the leaves, but by August or so, the outside skin will have become brown and woody. When these drop, they're a bitch to clean up. Like twigs, they're too heavy to rake up easily; they just slip between the tines. Finally, in early fall, the huge leaves--as big as a human hand with the fingers spread--turn an ugly yellow and fall. Leave them on the ground, add a little rainful, and they mat to form an effective grass-killing carpet.


Some of the pods remain hanging on the branches well into winter, augmenting the distinctiveness of the tree's leafless silhouette. (They're not well-turned trees, like maples or ashes. Without leaves, they can look a little scraggly despite their size.) For their long, slender shape and dark brown appearance we called them "cigars". One of my mom's treasured memories is a late summer afternoon playing with her cousins, pretending that catalpa pods were cigars and "smoking" them. "Cigar trees" was probably the only name I knew for them until a Boy Scout project that required me to identify two dozen or so local trees. I was able to do it almost without leaving the yard. We had a catalpa in back of the house in Troy which dad always talked about cutting down but never did.

I'm glad he didn't. We I finally read up on them, I discovered that they were generally bottomland trees. (So why did one grow in our yard, atop a small hill? Must've been planted.) They carried a whiff of the stinking swamps with them, which made them seem quite exotic in the middle of town. I felt lucky to have one. It came as a surprise to see so many growing in Chicago; I never thought they could survive this far north.

Yes, I'm still here

I meant to go to the local CAPS (community policing) meeting tonight, but I had a virus scare on my work PC shortly before quitting time. Over an hour and the virus scan still isn't finished. Can anyone tell me why I have 1,754,309 "Temporary Internet Files"? Some of them are apparently associated with pages I haven't visited in over a year, so I'm wondering what meaning of "temporary" Microsoft has in mind. Will anything bad happen if I delete them? How do I do that? I can't even find the folder they're in!

Ugh. I so totally deserve a big greasy burger at Big Chicks tonight! (It was meant to be a reward for my civic-mindedness, but I think this should as well.)