It's May! [Insert Camelot-like dance number here]

And, finally, it almost feels like May. Therefore:

What: Picnic!
When: Saturday (tomorrow), 11:30
Where: Audobon Park (S. Goodlet and Southern, over where the SCA'ers meet)
Why: Crave outdoors. NEED OUTDOORS. ...also, I own a spiffy picnic basket, and wish to use it.

I'll provide cookies and egg salad sandwiches. Anyone is welcome - just let me know if you're going to attend, so I know, vaguely, how many sammiches to make. BYOB, and anything else you want to eat or share.

I am outdone.

So.

Mom (AKA 'The Captain') and G.T. are out of town this weekend. This is great, as far as I'm concerned, except that while Cap'n has hired somebody to feed her dogs, she has asked me to feed her birds.

...Where, by 'birds', I do not mean, 'kept-in-a-cage' birds. I mean the birds. The outside ones. That fly around. In the wild.

...And where, by 'feed', I do not mean 'throw out some wild bird seed when the feeders run low.' I mean soaked cat food and mealworms. Twice a day. She has threatened to call and wake me if I don't get up myself at 7 every morning, to go take catfood and mealworms to 'Baby,' a mockingbird she believes is one of a brood she raised several years ago.

Because, you see, Baby has a nest now, and comes to collect worms for her youngsters. "She depends on me!" Mom informed me several times, when I gave her a really funny look for approaching the feeder to move the worms out into the open, afraid Baby could not find them in the four-inch-diameter hanging feeder after they had dared to crawl under the catfood.

Aside from the issue of me getting up at 7am to feed a wild bird who has probably been catching her own worms since five, the whole thing is pretty amusing, and just a little enchanting. Because even if 90% of this is my mother's empty nest syndrome - pun bloody well intended - the result is that this mockingbird comes when you calls it, and will approach the feeder if you're standing just four feet away, to take her worms. (Note: Yes. I have strict instructions to stand guard over the feeder till Baby eats all the worms, because a bluejay and a cardinal have figured out the feeding trick, too.)

...

...

...All I'm saying is, I come by it honestly.