In Which Spring Says Never Mind

The hummingbirds were out in force today!  Our in-resident hummingbird, Gus, spent the morning following me around the yard buzzing me and yelling at me until I refilled his feeder.  Every morning he sits up in the neighbor's flowering cherry tree and announces to the entire neighborhood that our house is his.  This morning at Connor's school, another hummingbird was sitting in a tree right next to our car making the same announcement about his turf.  

I had no idea hummingbirds were so incredibly loud before I moved up here, but they really are.  Gus sounds a bit like a cross between a digital watch and an electric pencil sharpener.  Also he is really, really bossy.  I'm pretty sure Gus believes we live in this house solely for his convenience.

I hope our little fluffy dictator stays nice and warm in the next few days; the temperature is supposed to get down in the 'teens a few nights this week.  It's been really nice and sunny lately, and balmy enough around here that my dutch iris are actually blooming already, so I may have to run out and cover them up tomorrow before the really frosty weather gets here.  

I'll have to make sure our walk is clear of ice too; Eden definitely has more issues with falls in the winter time if the conditions outside are slick.  Her balance and walking really have improved an incredible amount though; she's been working hard on picking her toes up instead of dragging them, and it's amazing to see the difference in how she's moving.  I think once we go back to visit Thailand in a year or two (provided things have settled down over there) that her friends will be amazed at how differently she carries herself!

~Jess

In Which I Have A Close Encounter Of The Adorable Kind

Our plans for visiting the Lunar New Year festival were derailed today when I got an e-mail about a Saturday morning swim practice for Eden.  Her swim team was planning a trip up to Port Orchard to get a chance to practice in the long course pool there.  So we got up ridiculously early in the morning and made the hour-or-so trip up that way to join her teammates.

Her practice was three hours long, and I didn't feel like sitting on those metal bleachers the whole time watching the kids swim back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth ad nauseam.  I'm all about being a supportive parent, but swimming, I'm sad to say, is not exactly the most exciting sport to watch.  So I put Connor back in the van and drove up the coast until I saw signs for Manchester State Park and decided to check it out.  Access to all of the state parks is free for disabled park visitors and their caretakers, which is pretty awesome, so when the chance for a spontaneous visit to one I haven't seen before comes up, I almost always take advantage of it.

Manchester State Park turned out to not be the most accessible park ever-- many of the trails were sort-of paved in chunks of asphalt and large pebbles-- but Connor was okay with that because it made for a bouncy ride, which he thought was fun.  I took him down the path along the coast for a bit, and we stopped and watched a small group of grebes diving for fish out in the sound.  It was very peaceful, if a little cold, and since it was only nine in the morning it seemed like we pretty much had the park to ourselves.  

On the bouncy way back to the car Connor started rubbing his eyes, and shortly after we reached the paved park of the trail again he was asleep against the side of his wheelchair.  I didn't want to put him back in the car immediately since that would wake him up, so I kept going and took the short paved path down by a little rocky beach.  I parked him on the trail where I could see him easily and walked down the beach towards a large speckled granite boulder to sit for a minute and let him have a rest.

I was about three feet away when the top of the boulder rose up and locked eyes with me.

I froze in shock.  The harbor seal and I stared at one another.  His plump, grey mottled body was almost the exact same color as the lichen-covered stone, and he'd curled himself neatly into a cup-shaped depression on top of the rock so from the trail he was nearly invisible.  He regarded me solemnly for a minute while I did my best not to breathe, blinked his huge black eyes a few times, seemed to come to some sort of conclusion about me, yawned widely and then flopped back down like a cat and went to sleep. 

I stood there for a while and watched his side rise and fall as he napped.  A few of his long white whiskers curled up at the ends, and every once in a while his nose would twitch like he was dreaming.  Finally Connor woke up and began making his happy "train whistle noise" from his chair, so I knew it was time to go.  I carefully backed away from the rock, but halfway back to where Connor waited the seal lifted his head again, and he locked eyes with me one more time before casually turning and sliding down the boulder into the ocean.  His head popped up in the water about thirty feet away, and he seemed curious about me and Connor because he swam along beside us, keeping pace until the trail turned off towards the parking lot.

So that was my accidental seal encounter, and it was pretty amazing.  I never would have approached so closely had I know he was there, but I'm glad he didn't seem to find me much of a threat.  I seem to have a knack for stumbling into really close encounters with wild animals, like when this and this happened.  Also that time I opened the front door after a big storm and a bat crawled into my house, though I may not have blogged about that because I think it happened during that big break I took from blogging.  Did I tell you guys about that?  I can't remember, but if I haven't I totally should, because, you know, there was a bat.  In my house.  

Anyway, so after that incredible morning we went home and all took a nap, which was much-needed by everybody.  Then we got up and headed out to the grocery store where Connor proceeded to have a thirteen-and-a-half minute seizure in the middle of the pasta aisle, because apparently this day was going way, way too well and the universe likes to mess with me.  He's currently sleeping off his emergency seizure medication, and we'll see how he's feeling in the morning.

Oh well.  Seals are still awesome.

~Jess

In Which We Chill Out And Enjoy The View

Thank goodness, today was so much cooler!  I spent most of the day trying to catch up on dishes, laundry and all the other chores I needed to catch up on.  It's amazing how quickly things can pile up when you aren't running any of your appliances!

Connor spent the day loudly protesting the fact that I was doing chores; even the old "laundry on the head" ploy didn't last him more than a few minutes.  I think he was protesting the contrast between our stimulation-filled mall time of the last few days and the boring quiet time of today.

It wasn't all boring.  The neighbor's cat kept getting into our yard and eating my birds, using my blooming astilbes as cover to pounce from, so I moved the feeder into the middle of the yard on clear ground so that the birds could see her coming. 

Apparently I just exchanged one set of predators for another; we have now become Large Predatory Bird Central as a result.  Not only has our barred owl taken to visiting every single night, but a juvenile Cooper's Hawk has apparently decided that my bird feeder is the perfect place to figure out how to hunt.  He spent a good portion of the morning high up in the tree, taking the occasional break from yelling for mom to try an experimental swoop or two at the feeder.  Once down he'd hop around on the ground, peering in at all the birds hiding in our bushes.  He didn't catch anything, but it wasn't for lack of trying. 

Good thing the cat wasn't around today.  That could have been unpleasant.
It kind of reminded me a little bit of the trip Jer and I took to a B&B on Whidbey Island a few years ago that fed the wild rabbit population.  As a result they had nearly 100 rabbits living in their yard, and every snag, tall tree and power line ringing the property sported a very fat, very happy hawk.  This guy shouldn't stick around too much longer before he starts his migration south, but he's pretty neat to watch now as long as he doesn't eat all of my other birds! 

I swear we live in the suburbs, so I don't know where the heck all this wildlife is coming from.  I love it though, and I hope we see more soon, though to tell you the truth I could do without the aforementioned cat leaving it partially decapitated on my porch.  At least the hawk would eat whatever it is he caught-- once he figures out the whole 'catching it' part of the equation, that is.

Oh well.

~Jess

In Which Connor Has A Rough Day And We Have A Cheeky Visitor

We took it easy today; Connor had a pretty good sized seizure about five minutes into his stander time and spent most of the rest of the day dozing.  I think that other than the ones he has on the highway, seizures in his stander are my least favorite because I have to race to get his straps undone so I can lay him on his side before he has major aspiration issues.  Luckily he doesn't have them in the stander very often.

So I spent the day in the house, piddling around the kitchen and the living room while the kid snoozed away on the living room couch.  I made a big batch of papaya salad and ate almost all of it immediately because that stuff is delicious.  It's Ellen's favorite food, so once she's home I'll have to make a couple of batches at a time or between the two of us we'll go through it too quickly.  Unless she doesn't like the recipe I use, in which case, well, more for me. 

We probably won't be sharing with Jer because he mostly cooks his own food so he can track his caloric intake.  He's into powerlifting in a major way now, and in order to be able to lift more weight but still be able to pass the army physical fitness test he goes through bulking and cutting cycles.  This lets him build more muscle but not put on a lot of extra fat.  He's got it down to a science, so I've learned to let him do his own thing-- as hard as it is to turn my Feed People gene off. 

Since Connor gets most of his nutrition through his g-tube I usually end up cooking just for me, and I find that a lot harder to do, for whatever reason.  So it will be nice to have someone to make meals for! 

I was worried that with all the sleeping he did today Connor would be up until the wee hours of the morning, but he actually crashed shortly after I put him down and (knock on wood) it looks like he'll probably sleep through the night.  Since he was completely out, I took the monitor outside with me and sat on the porch for a little bit with a cup of tea.  It's light outside until past nine in the evening this time of year, so it was still a couple of hours before sunset.

I sat out there long enough for the wildlife to forget about me, and I was delighted to see my first chipmunk in the garden!  He spent quite a bit of time at my profusely blooming rose bush, and it didn't take long to figure out why.  He would stand up on his hind legs and reach as high as he could to snag buds, delicately nip them off at the stem and then sit back to nibble them down to nothing but the golden centers.  I didn't begrudge him a few as the plant was loaded with more than he could possibly eat, and it didn't hurt that he was so ridiculously cute to watch.  After he'd eaten his fill he scampered off, holding his tail straight up in the air behind him like a bushy exclamation point.

I hope I see him again as he was very fun to watch, but my house is a favorite hangout for our local barred owl (I heard him out in our big tree at dusk) so that chipmunk is living dangerously if he decides to spend very much time over in my neck of the woods!

~Jess

In Which I Find A Bouncing Baby Bird

After Jeremy came home this evening I ran off to the grocery store to pick up a few things.  I had just come up the front walk of the house with the groceries and had my hand on the door handle when I heard a tremendous fluttering racket.  A bird hopped up onto one of the chairs on my porch three feet away from me, and from there onto the table.  A very large, very black bird.  We stared at each other.

At first I thought it was a sick crow-- it was certainly the size to be a large crow-- but the proportions seemed off; its beak and feet were too large for its body and its feathers looked like they weren't quite grown in.  Also it had blue eyes.  Once it opened its mouth really wide and started yelling (and I mean yelling; it was loud) for food I finally figured out that what I was looking at was a newly fledged baby raven.

I didn't know a thing about ravens before we moved up here beyond the fact that they're featured prominently in Gothic literature and that according to my great grandmother, who knew someone with a pet raven named Jeb, they can be taught to talk and they like to steal cornbread.  I thought they were basically just slightly bigger versions of crows.  So I was blown away the first time I actually saw one here, because those suckers are huge.  We're talking a four foot wingspan, people. 

So now I wasn't nervous because I thought there was a sick bird on my front porch, I was nervous because there was a baby bird on my front porch with parents who are capable of killing baby cows (really) with their giant, stabbity beaks and who might be a wee bit overprotective of junior. 

I eased the door open and carefully slid inside.  The baby raven completely ignored me and continued pecking at the holes in the top of my patio table.  I opened the blinds so I could see what the heck he was doing out there and whether or not Mom and Dad were making a visit. 

The cats took one look and went nuts.  Despite the fact that this bird was literally half their size, had a beak almost two inches long and probably had homicidal parents hanging out somewhere nearby, they were both convinced they could eat him.  Good thing that they're indoor cats, because things probably would not have ended well.

Of course I had to take pictures, and not only was the window dirty but the cats kept blocking the view with their furry butts.  So I eased the door back open and, braving possible Death-By-Raven-Parents, snapped a few shots.  The baby didn't care in the slightest. 

He eventually hopped up on to the top of my geranium pot-- nearly knocking it over-- and spent another twenty minutes alternating between pecking curiously at the leaves and emitting air horn volume demands for food.  Then he clumsily flew off across the yard, hopped the fence and ended up over somewhere in our neighbor's backyard, where we heard him yelling for the rest of the evening. 

So that was my glorious Wildlife Encounter of the day!

~Jess

In Which We Have An Unexpected Visitor

Connor was feeling much, much better today-- we think he probably overheated due to all the exercise he did and that's why his temperature was up.  He woke up in a fantastic mood and though his muscle tone was a bit off due to yesterday's seizures and the Diastat, he did very well.  So hopefully that means we won't see any more seizures for a while.

Today was a day for wildlife!  Loki has been gluing his nose to the sliding door and going nuts at random times during the past few nights, and I think we now know why.  He started growling and puffing up in the window on the side of our house today, and when I looked outside I saw the neighbors cat standing on our ramp harassing a very small possum, who was trundling down the ramp and doing his very best to ignore the cat completely .  I threw open the sliding door and ran outside to rescue the little guy.  The cat took off as soon as he heard the door bang open.

The possum continued waddling his slow way down the ramp, none the worse for wear.  He slipped under our fence and I could hear him making his very noisy way across the leaf mold in our neighbor's yard.  The little guy was just barely big enough to be out on his own; his body was probably about seven inches long and he was still in the ridiculously adorable phase, which doesn't last very long for possums as they are not exactly the world's most attractive creatures.  I suspect this one has taken up residence underneath our deck, which explains why I actually have hostas that are not completely full of holes this year.  Possums absolutely love to eat slugs and snails.  They usually only stick around in one place for a few days before moving on, so we probably won't see the little guy again-- especially since that darn cat discovered his hiding place.  I wouldn't mind if he stuck around; my plants have never looked so good.

Then later today I saw a ruffed grouse sitting on a wall across the street from one of the local heavily wooded parks.  I was really surprised because they aren't common around here-- usually they avoid urban areas-- and also they're pretty big birds.  So I guess it was just a day for unusual wildlife!

We finished one small project today; Jer dug out the small pathway off the deck stairs and I shoveled, leveled and tamped down paving sand, laid down some old brick, planted the spaces in between with some creeping thyme, put down a top coat of mulch and finished off with a river rock border.  Right now the pathway ends in a giant hole, but that should change soon.  Hopefully we'll have the rest of the patio hole dug out this weekend, and then I can order a couple of cubic yards of crushed stone to start the next stage of the project. 

We're slowly getting there!

~Jess