A lesson learned?

 My mother's house was home to several foster children. One was a young girl who loved animals, as did my mother. Probably because of her situation, the girl had a particular interest in rescuing needy animals. And there was plenty of housing for her to do this. She once found a young rabbit who seemed lost and abandoned and installed it in an outdoor hutch with a roomy attached enclosed wire run. The rabbit seemed to thrive. 

  Some time later, maybe weeks or a few months, the girl also rescued a young opposum, and added it to the rabbits's habitat in the back yard.There was plenty of room for the 2 little apparently orphaned animals, and they shared the hutch and the run  and seemed to enjoy each other's company.

Until they didn't. One day when the young girl went to give them their morning feeding, she came upon the possum as usual, but she found the rabbit with its head chewed off.  

If you see a moral to this tale, don't blame me.

  

He saw it coming....

 A while ago, James Carville said things would start falling apart by Memorial Day. 

Jeopardy questionable ruling

 I know he wan't a particulary appealing contestant, as some saw him as young and brash, but I think he was robbed.  (I qualify this because I did not hear him speak his answer, but the only rationale for Jeopardy's decision is he must have over-enunciated his answer.)   His answer was in response to Vermeer's  painting of  "Girl With A Pearl Earring." He was ruled wrong because he said Girl With The Pearl Earring. 

  The word "a" is pronounced with the long a sound unless it is followed by a word beginning with a consonant and then is commonly pronounced "uh" as per the schwa pronunciation.   As in "Lend me a hand. I sat with a friend. Tell me a story.  Have a good day."  

Say  "girl with a pearl earring" , and then say  "girl with the pearl earring."  I don't know how they could have told the difference. They sound the same to me. But who am I to judge.

Animal Life

 My mother loved animals and we grew up surrounded by them:  dogs, cats, ponys, goats, sheep, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, including bantams, ducklings, birds, goldfish, even a turtle or two. My childhood special dog was Lassie, a spaniel, not a collie, and my favorite cat, Joris.  I also had a hamster named Elgius and a rabbit named Harvey. 

  Later, in my own home, we always owned a dog and a  cat. Our collies were Chance, Lex and Cosmo, who was  Dave's pride and joy. We started out with a cat called BlackCat, and then a kitten named Tiger, followed by Roger, Nike, and  Napster. 

 ( Maybe also hated being groomed, even though mostly by traveling vet.)

Our kids had some pets of their own, a rabbit named Argyle, goldfish and other aquarium creatures. 

  Except for a few tragedies on the speedway in front of our house, most of our pets lived a normal life span.  Somewaht ironically, because time now passes so quickly, our last pet, Maybe, had the longest lifespan of any of the dozens or even hundreds of the animals in my life. 

  Maybe was born on June 9, 2005, the offspring of a purebred Persian mother and a purebred Maine Coon Cat father, and she died at home on October 20, 2024. She was 19 years and 4 months old, and was never outside the house except for vet appointments. She hated traveling. When I brought her home as a young kitten, she had hated the car ride, escaped from the cat carrier she was in and clung to the roof of the car, which was a kind of fabric. I had to stop in Clifton Park to peel her off and put her back in the container and stack some books on top. When we got home, I let her out of the carrier  and she disappeared. I searched all over and couldn't find her.  I was the only one home and didn't think she could have gotten outside, but what else could have happened. Someone asked me if I had gotten a  kitten and I said maybe. Joe T. helped me search the next day, and located her under  the hutch in the kitchen. I had already looked there and could only assume that she kept changing hiding places. So my answer of maybe I have a cat changed to maybe I'll keep her. And we lived together for almost 20 years.

New Product

 Haven't been to sNs for a while. I found a new product in the soda aisle:  Irish Ginger Ale. Knowing that online Dr. Jeremy London calls soda liquid poison, I felt compelled to buy it anyway. Who could resist a product with "Vitamins, Antioxidants, Energy & Zero Sugar,  0 Calories and Aspartame-free." True, while "Irish-Inspired,"  it is made in the U.S.A. and bottled by Polar Corp.  in Worcester MA. It does contain 46mg* of caffeine and 37mg of Green Tea Extract plus some other stuff. It is a "Sparkling beverage with ginger flavor and other natural flavors."   (The check-out clerk made me promise to tell her how it was. I was going to leave her a can but thought that might be against company policy.)  Each can bears the message, "Sparkling Love, Frannie's"  

* about half of the caffeine in  a cup of coffee

Case in Point, Ma

 "Climbing up the tower"  in SPOT 518 , which  tower BTW is on the Siena College campus. How else would you climb but up. Well, clamber down maybe.

Word Sounds

   Dr. Tommy Martin, of FB Shorts fame, says that food sounds are real, as applied to uneaten  food, and maybe so, and maybe the same principle applies to unspoken words. Just as the leftover food cries out to be eaten, words left unuttered cry out to be, if not heard, at least released. Dreams are typically not the substance of any welcomed conversation, regardless of Elaine Benis' s recounting the tale of George Washington's wooden teeth.

 Anyway, here's a dream that will not leave my mind, un-exhorted:

  A man approached from the long driveway of a  house I've never lived in outside the dream, and he asked if he could have some arrangement that was at the bottom of the driveway. I guess it must have been some type of flower box or such. At first I was going to say take it, but I liked its being there so I told him where he could get one of his own, for free I think. He didn't know how to get there or do this, so he asked if I would help. I agreed. He seemed like  a simple person, otherwise well, but he had extreme difficulty trying to communicate, so I had to intercede. When he spoke, he made a deep growling-type sound which accompanied his words, rather off-putting to all those in the area. After many and varied machinations, we finally succeeded in resolving the issue at hand.  So I hoped anyway.

   I had already decided that I would not ride with him in his car, so I would drive him home. The trip turned out to be far from a simple rural drive, but a  tortuous  and twisted route until we reached his home. His home seemed almost like a cave, whose interior housed many individuals. One was a child who needed to go to school and another was an older woman who seemed to want to relocate to another place, what she called her real home. The child's school, which we eventually found, was in a downtown urban area, almost like chinatown. I felt relief at finally accomplishing my mission when I dropped the child off, but then the grandma, forgotten til now in the backseat, spoke up, saying she wanted to go home. But she didn't know where in this crowded section of town she lived. We stopped at place after place, including at a diner with outdoor cooking where the streetwise chef tried to direct us. 

I didn't know where I was or how to get out of the situation to get back home. The growling echoes of the man's voice were consuming my senses. All seemed gone wrong. Then the phone rang. Thanks, Snookie.