RACKING UP THE POINTS

As anyone I went to school with will tell you, I am not a competitive person.  There is not one bone in my body that cares whether someone can else hit a baseball better than me (they all can), jump over a high jump bar better than I can (everyone can), or run faster than I can (again ... ).   This fact has a two part explanation – firstly that I was born with a most uncoordinated, clumsy body, and secondly that this body is equipped with a mind quite unconcerned that 97.2% of other humans on the planet can do anything athletic better than it can. 

The closest thing to exercise I take on is walking the dog.  He never judges me, all he wants is the company and I can do that at any speed I choose.

Also, I do not possess a killer’s instinct.  There are plenty of hunters in this family but I am not interested in going out and shooting anything ... not gophers, not skunks, not even paper targets.  If this is a defect then just add it to my list.

On the other hand, I do enjoy a challenge.  Not one like a ‘can I get this basketball into the net’ kind of challenge – I mean, who wants to fail miserably with a crowd watching your every move?  I’m more of a solitary game player.  Give me a round or two of Tetris or computer Mah-jong instead.  I can waste all kinds of time matching up shapes for no good reason – it must be the music and sound effects that reward my psyche.  Heaven knows I don’t pay any attention to the points that I’m getting and I certainly never share my score with my friends on Face book.  If they’ve known me for any length of time at all they already pity me my dismal gaming skills.  I do have some pride.

This time of year, though, these traits of mine - the sports ineptitude and the competitive indifference - take a wonky turn and I suddenly have a need to rack up points that I am quite prepared to brag about.

It’s ‘Invasion of the Flies’ season.  Oh yes, I know that there have been flies all summer long; the horse flies that bite me when I’m working in the garden, the nuisance ones that buzz around my face when I’m mowing the grass, and the hordes that like to hang out on the deck when I barbeque, but as annoying as these insects are at least they possess meagre intelligence (well, as much as their two brain cells can muster) and follow patterns of predictable behavior. 

Come mid September flying insects are down to one misfiring brain cell possibly caused by age-related dementia, hypothermia, or spending too much time where the apples are fermenting in the back yard.  What this means is that they have morphed from a commonplace annoyance to a plague of hideous, creepy, brain dead, zombie-like creatures who are too stupid to continue living and too dumb to die.  And there are thousands of them.

Perhaps it’s my passionate hatred for them that brings out the killer in me.

At any rate I play this game each fall. Multiple times per day I fire up my vacuum cleaner and go hunting.  One would think that these bumbling idiots would be easy marks, but they are not.  Just like it’s the chronic drunk driver who never seems to get caught, these guys are crazily adept at wobble-flying out of reach in the nick of time.  Sucking them up to their doom is my favorite sport.

So much so that I have devised a scoring system for “kills”:  it’s 5 points for catching them on a window surface (for some reason they just don’t see you coming while they’re on glass), 15 points for a capture on a wall, 20 on a horizontal surface such a table or counter, and a full 50 if I can catch them in flight (it’s the drunk driver thing – you just can’t guess their next move).

It’s been ten days since the season opened.  My score as of this morning is 5,070.  I guess I like my sports to have an actual purpose.

RUNNING OUT OF SUMMER

I’m pretty sure that the hummingbirds should have all left by now.  I can’t imagine how they do the flight to Mexico on their tiny little wings – do they find a certain airstream and just coast?  I know they fuel up on sugar water for a couple weeks in August at a rate that keeps me busy just trying to stay ahead of the demand, but honestly, how far can that take them?  I know that Mother Nature is full of miracles but her hummingbird life/migration is right up there with the best of them.

My best guess is that we had four or five nesting pairs this year – a person has to guess, there’s no way you count anything that moves that fast and erratically.  Sometime after the first week of May the males show up to claim territory, followed shortly afterward by the womenfolk.  For a few weeks the feeders are busy and then they disappear.  For many years I worried that I had done something to offend them, or that the sugar water had not been up to snuff, but then one day I discovered that they were all in the carraganas – apparently hummingbirds consider carragana nectar quite the treat.

As time goes by these tiny birds come and go at my feeders, it all depends what’s in bloom.  They become scarce when the alfalfa is in bloom and it was pretty quiet on the deck when the pea crop across the road was blooming too.  The experts say to grow trumpet shaped flowers to attract them so I have lots of morning glories, hollyhocks and honeysuckle although I see them visiting flowers of all descriptions.  With the energy levels that they have to maintain to keep humming along they can’t be too fussy about their diet, and they take in protein too – God bless anything that eats bugs!

The peak of hummingbird summer is August when the juveniles join their parents at the feeders.  The term for a group of hummingbirds is a “charm”.  During any other month of the year I would agree that these pretty little birds are charming, but come August when they are fueling up for their trip south they are the opposite of charming.  They are feisty and aggressive.  They are angry and warlike.  They are greedy and obnoxious.  They are noisy and dangerous.

Seriously: you have to watch or you could lose and eye.

We have three feeders on the go and for a while I was filling them daily, which is amazing because they spend all their time and energy chasing each other away from the food.  They chirp at each other, not in the usual friendly way a bird chirps, but in a threatening, angry way.  In their bright colours and battle stance I see miniscule Samurai warriors, ready to battle to the death – pointlessly, I might add – a typical scene would involve five birds fighting over three feeders with four stations per feeder.  It never seems like anyone gets to drink but since I do have to keep making more juice there must be some kind of truce called to allow for nourishment.  Google says that they tend to double their weight from 3 grams to 6 before they head out.  I wish I had that kind of magic – to look the same, even if my weight doubled!

Google also says that the males are the first to leave; I noticed that things slowed down a bit the third week in August: there were 20 or so, then maybe 10, and then for a while 5, then 3.  It’s not like they come to have their passports stamped before they leave – they just come and go at their own pace.

And then one morning the deck was quiet and I thought summer was officially over.  There were still two feeders with a little left in each one.  If I had taken them down right away I might have never realized that there was still one female left.  Slowly she is finishing off the rest of the sugar water while I dither about whether I should take the feeders away, or does she need the last of it to fuel up?  Again I consulted Google and learned that they tend to be solitary migrators, leaving on their own individual instincts and flying solo, making Mother Nature’s hummingbird miracle even more impressive in my books.  As of today the feeder is empty and will not be refilled.  If she stays longer she will have to exist on flower power; I have no control over that.  I have to admit though, I’m worried about her.

I hope her “time to go” alarm goes off and she is soon a thousand miles south of here.  I hope no hurricanes or other catastrophes keep her from getting to Mexico.  I hope she makes it back here next spring and I can help her raise her 2020 family.

Heck, best case scenario, I hope I can visit her in Mexico this winter.  Isn’t this the time of year when humans start feeling their migration instincts kick in?

 

 

 

COMMITMENT ISSUES

I hardly know what to do with myself these days.  The last two weeks are a blur of grandchildren and company and cooking for a crowd.  And now here I am, wandering around in the quiet, eating leftovers, and asking myself just how serious I was when I mentioned I might try my hand at canning tomatoes this year.  I know one thing for sure, I never should have said it out loud in front of witnesses.

At any rate, I needn’t worry about that today.  The tomatoes are only just starting to ripen – a legal reason to procrastinate.

And so ... what else can I find to do?  Yesterday I finished a gardening project that took me all summer.  I now have a whole new space to fill with flowers next spring.  I suppose I could go through nursery catalogues and dream of spending money but that is a pastime better spent in the dead of winter when I really need an antidote for winter depression.

There is always weeding and the cleanup of other gardens.  I’ve started pulling out things I don’t want to deal with any more but the resolve I show for that job peters out by this time of the season.  Instead of a methodical row by row marathon I end up meandering from one place to another wondering what a cantaloupe looks like when it’s ripe and how many friends one has to have to make having two zucchini plants a good idea.  Luckily I have three people who want spaghetti squash – that might be enough.  The bees went crazy out there this year.

With no clear destination in mind I find myself back at the house looking for shade – it’s obviously too hot out there for physical labour so I go in, make myself lunch and ponder life some more.

About this time the dog gives me one of his disgruntled, I-can’t-believe-you’re-just-going-to-sit-there looks, backed up with a groan of exasperation. 

I may, or may not have, been talking about a walk.  I mean out loud.  I have been on my case to get back to doing that two mile walk every day for months now, but knowing that if I say it out loud people hold you to such craziness, I really try to avoid having witnesses to my folly.  Turbo is a pretty smart dog: can he read my mind?  Surely I didn’t say the word w-a-l-k out loud!  Heck I don’t even tie my shoes in front of him!  There’s nothing worse than having a dissatisfied dog following you around threatening to sue you for Breach of Contract for not coming through with a walk after letting him witness the tying of shoes.

I consulted my list of laziness excuses and found nothing that was going to save me – I hate it when that happens.

So we hit the road; one mile north and one mile back.  For the human pretty boring scenery, for the dog a great adventure of scents and sounds and chases that I knew nothing about from my position in the middle of a gravel road.  Instead, as I walked I did some math.  In dog years Turbo is almost as old as I am and I would say we are both the same amount of pudgy for our body build.  Most definitely we need to do this exersize thing on a regular basis.  I did NOT say that out loud.  But I probably should ...