Puff, that is some tale of woe! Poor Michael! I cannot imagine how he rides a motorcycle , or did he go in a car to watch them?
The next time you need a flag, call your Senator and they will send you one that was flown over the Capitol! A nice thing, I think! I worked with a young lady who was on the last helicopter to leave the US embassy in Saigon. She had to decide quickly if she would go or stay! She left her family (she was single, no children) and every thing she had and her journey was not easy. Anyway, when she took her citizenship exam the only question she missed was related to Ted Kennedy. I called his office and explained that she lived in Virginia but given the circumstances of her missed question, I wondered if they would send her a flag to help celebrate her citizenship! They were delighted and he enclosed a great personal note! She was thrilled!
Thanks for all the funnies today snd for the nest and bird reports! Hope all stay safe! Seds
Karen, I love that story of your friend from Saigon!
So good to see you back in The Beak! And so glad you and Piper are safe, and hope all the storm cleanup and repair will not take too long.
P.S. I find dead tree frogs in my house from time to time. They mummify!
It's always unsettling when I find one - not often, but a handful over the 17+ years I've been in my current home. I'm always sad to find one - I just adore them, and try to be on the lookout for them when I open and close the door, especially at night. They can get past you so easily without getting noticed, and I've never had one "chirp" inside the house - they must stay silent as a defense mechanism so as not to be found. I have managed to chase down and catch a few over the years when they tried to hop in through my open door by surprise, and then I can put them back out in a safe spot. I imagine the one you found hopped in, surreptitiously. Glad Piper ignored it. Sorry for the dead Mockingbird, too. Maybe it was a natural death. Hopefully, Piper left it alone, since it could've had an illness. The wild bird websites all recommend not handling any dead bird you come across, for that reason - or to use gloves, or a shovel, or what-have-you, to wrap it in newspaper or a bag, and dispose of the carcass, and the gloves used to handle it. Sadly, there have been a couple of highly contagious illnesses spreading among songbirds the last several years, and Mockingbirds are a known species suffering from that. I think you're smart to hold off on the tree work... I hope your neighbors hired a legit company... so many stories of the opposite doing that kind of work after big storms. Fingers crossed for them.
