Remembering

* nothing to do with the post, the visuals just amused me 

I think I can be forgiven repeating a good story from the Ukrainian Village days yesterday.

I had little to say and no news to speak of.

Repeating a good story reminds me of being a child, when, my sister Janet and I would push for my grandmother to recount stories of daring do from her wartime years.

Of course we had heard them all before.

Many many times before…….

The embellished stories of getting trapped in a blackout on the sixth story of a warehouse only inches from an open pulley door and with rats running over her feel….of running for the shelter as the bombers were over and for dressing my uncle Jim in a chenille curtain and high heels as they were being evacuated from their bombed house on Louisa Street, Liverpool

We knew them all and delighted in how they were delivered, with a wry smile over the ironing board or sat behind the colander being filled with shelled peas 

I was only thinking of my grandmother’s storytelling yesterday when taking the dogs out for a walk

We were passed by a skinny man in Lycra out jogging and a phrase my grandmother other used suddenly popped into my head like an exploding firework , 

….fifty years after I first heard it

“ The muscles on his scrawny arms stuck out like sparrows’ Knees!” 

https://wordhistories.net/2019/12/01/muscles-sparrows-kneecaps/

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Cartoons

I have noticed how, from time to time, some bloggers like to post a bunch of cartoons they have discovered on the internet. Cartoons are meant to be funny but it is hard to laugh at the following five for painfully obvious reasons, including death, rising infection numbers, overwhelming hospital admissions and sheer defencelessness. We owe it to our fellow human beings and to overstretched hospital staff to get fully vaccinated. "One for all and all for one,"  as  Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan frequently pledged...

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Sexing Camilla ( a revisit)

 No news. On night shift so I will post an old post from way back in 2013

Enjoy

Sexing Camilla

My profession (aka. Paid job) is as a wildlife ecologist,so I can finally offer you some professional advice John! Since Canada geese are not sexually dimorphic (they have the same plumage), in order to tell the sex of the bird you have to get up close and personal with them. This entails grabbing the goose, putting it on its back between your legs on the ground with the head tucked under your body and pressing hard with your thumbs on either side of the vent/cloacal opening. If it is a gander, a corkscrew shaped appendage will pop out. If not, you have a female. On goose banding days we do hundreds of them at a go. We also do bag checks of duck hunters and it is much easier sexing a dead goose than a live one!

So said the delightful Sherry from Spinners End Farm and this morning I took her advice, grabbed Camilla/ Charles ( delete when appropriate) when I let the animals out of their houses and in one swift movement popped the goose on his back and straddled him.

Everything was going swimmingly, even though Camilla was honking like an express train, and I was just about to flex the old thumbs around the aforementioned cloacal opening when all hell let loose.

I had just had time to turn my head to the right when I was hit in the face by a flurry of claws, beak and red feathers.

No doubt spurred on by Camilla's distress calls, Eric the diminutive cockerel had suddenly decided to go all super hero and batter the shit out of me, and luckily for him I was in an ideal position ( with my hands busy) not to be able to defend myself.

Eric got several more karate chops in before I made a run for it.

Camilla remains unsexed

And I got my arse well and truly kicked by a six inch high cockerel

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