Watching Them Watching Me

Gary Larson , of  Far Side Comic fame, invented a phobia –  Anatidaephobia. He defined it as “the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.” (Anatidaephobia comes from the Greek word “anatidae”, (referring to ducks, geese or swans and “phobos” meaning fear.)

If I was inclined to have a phobia, it could certainly involve geese and ducks! Every spring, a pair of Canada Geese stand on the rocks behind our house. They do this every morning for several weeks – assessing, I suppose, the probability of whether there will be a slough around the rocks this year. I watch them and they watch me.

If the geese aren’t on the rock, then Mallard ducks might be. They watch me and I watch them.

On the other side of the house, Ma and Pa Mallard settle down on the driveway each morning. I can’t begin to guess why they do that, but… I watch them and they watch me.

The Geese and Ducks certainly don’t make me fearful, but if I try to approach them – they fly away. I suppose you could say they have Anthropophobia (fear of people)!

While I don’t have any phobias and I don’t think I Hate anyone or anything,  I really dislike certain creatures like Snakes, Scorpions and a certain politician.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
– Douglas Adams –

Silence is golden…duck tape is silver.
– Author Unknown –

I heard the Secret Service had to change their commands. They can’t say “Get down!” anymore when the President is under attack. Now it’s “Donald! Duck!”
– Joke during the Presidency of Donald Trump –

Quirky Quips and Quotes – The Well of Lost Thoughts

The growth in the internet, 24-hour television and mobile phones means that we now receive five times as much information every day as we did in 1986….
– The Telegraph –

1986! That’s recent history to someone who is my age! With decades and decades of information input, my memory hard drive is full. The only way to add something new is to delete something older.  Unfortunately, I don’t necessarily remember what I deleted, which results in a blank look on my face while my mind goes “to the store” looking for what might not have been deleted but stored on a different shelf or that which was deleted but might be recovered if I quickly delete the reason I’m walking from one room to another.

A while back I wrote a post about Absent- mindedness. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but my blog is my “Well of Lost Thoughts”,   so you (and I) can read what I wrote here:  Upside to Absent-mindedness.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We’ve created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.
– Daniel Levitin –

Are you filling your head with empty calories?
― Frank Sonnenberg, Soul Food: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life –

Acrylic Pouring – A Rocky Psychedelic Sunflower

One of the ‘big rivers’ in our yard.

If there is one thing we’ve got a lot of at our Arizona house, it is rocks. Thousands and thousands of rocks. Millions of rocks if you count the crushed gravel that blankets the entire yard.

The gravel is broken up by larger rocks that I have marshalled into wavy rows to form dry creek beds.

I’ve used some of the rocks to make two giant lizards. One is very dark in colour. The other is very light.

One of the two lizards. This one is a dark lizard made from lava type rock.

On the whole, the rocks in our yard are not very colorful. I thought I might remedy this by using outdoor acrylic pour paints. (Here is an excellent primer on this artsy craft – Acrylic Pour Painting.)

The sunflower is about the size of a real giant sunflower head.

I called my first project “Psychedelic Sunflower”.  It reminds me of 1960’s Trippy or Psychedelic art. Maybe you are old enough to remember the brightly coloured, abstract works of that time period.

This will be the first of more rock art if the paint withstands the Arizona summer sun!

Quirky Quips and Quotes – Laundry in Limp Mode

Preamble: A few years ago our Jeep suddenly lost it’s zippy acceleration while we were driving home from Arizona. We took it into a Chrysler dealership. They couldn’t repair it for days, but said we could drive it home. It would be a slower trip than usual because the Jeep would be running in ‘limp mode’.

Fast forward to this years snowbird return to The Red House. We unpacked and I started to do laundry. Oh, oh – our four year old washing machine quit after just one load. It’s electronic dial spit out an ‘E-11’ error code. The Car Guy did a reset (unplug and plug back in) but it didn’t help. He made sure the water wasn’t blocked and that the pressure was okay. Check, check. He contacted the warranty repair company. That put us on the list for repair, but it has been two weeks now and we still don’t have a date they can come out.

The pessimist in me thinks it could be a long time before the washer gets repaired – so I thought about whether a washing machine has a ‘limp mode’? I started to test various combinations of water temperature, wash cycles, etc. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve been able to use the machine on ‘tap cold’ mode on the ‘rinse again and spin’ cycle and one wash cycle – as long as I don’t push the ‘pods’ soap button. Fingers crossed.

I briefly wished I still had my trusty old Maytag washing machine. It would have been 44 years old now and it would not have given me grief about eating another ‘pod’. Mind you, it only had one cycle that reliably worked, it didn’t spin the clothes very well, it refused to wash sneakers or quilts and it sometimes took a walk about when it was out of balance… but it never had a hissy fit over the type of soap I gave it.

Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?
– Katherine Whitehorn –

I love those 17 seconds when the laundry is all caught up!
– Author Unknown –

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.
– Jerry Seinfeld –

One day my housework-challenged husband decided to wash his sweat-shirt. Seconds after he stepped into the laundry room, he shouted to me, “What setting do I use on the washing machine?”
“It depends,” I replied. “What does it say on the back of the shirt?”
He yelled back, “University of Oklahoma.”
– boardofwisdom.com –

A clever take on the song “I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)” by The Proclaimers. “But I would walk 500 miles, And I would walk 500 more, Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles, To fall down at your door.”

Other Posts of this nature: Clothing Quotations

Quirky Quips and Quotes – What Happens in Bed

My other posts with the same theme: Cleaning,  Housework Quotations.

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation!

Signage at my house.

Great Horned Owlets – Airborne

Though we are back in Alberta, the Arizona owlets are growing up under the watchful eyes of our neighbours!

One owlet was seen sitting on the wall that encloses our patio.

This owlet hopped and walked across the yard and right towards the photographer!

This owlet is flying short distances.

 

Quirky Quips and Quotes – Danger of Dung

For more like this, see Bulwer-Lytton Quotations #4

For more stories about Canada Geese, see my posts about Waterfowl.

Canada Geese used to sit in the trees that surrounded our cabin. They didn’t nest there, they just ‘rested’ there.