Squirrels

Veruca Salt: Daddy, I want a squirrel. Get me one of those squirrels, I want one!

Mr. Salt: Veruca dear, you have many marvelous pets.

Veruca Salt: All I've got at home is one pony and two dogs and four cats and six bunny rabbits and two parakeets and three canaries and a green parrot and a turtle, and a silly old hamster! I WANT a SQUIRREL!

Mr. Salt: All right, pet. Daddy'll get you a squirrel just as soon as he possibly can.

Veruca Salt: But I don't want any old squirrel! I want a *trained* squirrel!

Mr. Salt: [wearily] Very well. Mr. Wonka? How much do you want for one of these squirrels? Name your price.

Willy Wonka: Oh they're not for sale. She can't have one.

Veruca Salt: Daddy!

Willy Wonka: [imitating Mr. Salt] I'm sorry, darling. Mr. Wonka's being unreasonable.

From Charlie and The Chocolate Factory 2005

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Veruca would be welcome to the pesky squirrels in my yard. They aren't exactly trained. It was more that they had me trained. For a while any way.

I love having a bird feeder in my front yard. The front window of my home is large and is perfect for watching the birds while they feed. That is when the birds could get to the feeder. I had a bird feeder on a Shepard's hook, placed near my red bud tree. The tree is beautiful in the spring when the purple buds bloom. The feeder became more a squirrel feeder than bird feeder. I would fill the feeder up in the morning and it would be empty by early evening. I knew that the squirrels were eating the bird seed. I would look out the window toward the bird feeder and there would be a squirrel perched on the feeder eating to its little hearts content. I would go outside to chase her away. The look she would give me could have been bone chilling if it were coming from a larger animal. You might be wondering how I knew it was a female. That will reveal its self in time.

I became frustrated with buying bird seed and having it eaten up in no time at all. Not buying the bird seed was not an option for me. There were times the birds were actually able to get to the feeder. The solution seemed to be a bird feeder that is suction cupped to the front window. Excellent! I thought now the squirrels will not be able to get the bird seed and you know what? I was right! The little buggers cannot get to the bird seed on the window. That does not mean they didn't try.

One afternoon I had not opened the living room curtains yet trying to keep the sun from heating the room up. I am the only one home at the time. Sitting on the sofa, playing a word game on my lap top when I hear a noise at the front window. It sounds as if someone or something is trying to cut the screen. I peek out of the curtains and there she is, clinging to the window screen with her tiny squirrel paws. She is attempting to climb the screen to get to the bird feeder attached to the window. It is obvious that she is a she, possibly a recent momma. Only one problem, the screen only goes up about 26 inches. There is another 30 inches of window to get to the feeder. This did not stop her. She would climb to the top of the screen and try to jump to the feeder. That didn't work. She attempted this feat numerous times with no success. It was funny to watch. The window feeder is still in place, but larger birds, like cardinals, won't perch on the feeder. I love when red birds come into my yard. So what to do next?

A couple we know had purchased a "squirrel proof" feeder. My first thoughts were, yeah right, squirrel proof. Well I decided that the 20 bucks for the feeder would be well spent if it worked and then it was only 20 bucks if it didn't. I've lost 20 bucks playing Texas Hold'em, I could take it. My husband and I, well actually my husband moved the Shepard's hook to the center of the yard. Together we filled the feeder. It takes more than one pair of hands to deal with it. The feeder is spring loaded. The way it works is if anything heavier than a bird perches on it the spring causes the wire cage to shut off the feeder holes. So we are set. Feeder is full, set on the hook. Now I wait for the birds.

Were birds the first visitors? Nope! It was the squirrels. My first thought was well she can't get to the feeder since the Shepard's hook is in the center of the yard. How naive I am at times! She climbed that pole like she owned it! She jumped onto the feeder, her weight caused it to close off. I was so excited! It was going to to work!! It was so much fun to watch her trying to figure how to get into the feeder. She tried so many times and the feeder foiled her each time!

So now the squirrels seem content with taking what bird seed they can from the ground and I get to enjoy watching the birds. It was a good 20 dollars spent.

I Don't Like Spam!

As I sat eating a tin sardines, (skinless, boneless, water packed) the other day, I got to thinking about some of the foods I will not touch as an adult. Foods, that as a kid were staples of my diet. Now I know there are some folks who turn their noses up at sardines. I live with two of those kind of people. My husband and daughter have been grossed out by my sardine and saltine cracker eating. I usually eat them when no one else is at home. Sardines are a great source of protein and are low in calories as long as they are packed in water, not oil.



So what are some of those "foods" that I ate while growing up? Vienna Sausages. In the south vienna is pronounced vi-een-er, not vee-anna. The list of ingredients is kind of straight forward:



Chicken, Water, Beef, Pork, Salt, Corn Syrup, 2 Percent Or Less: Spices, Natural Flavorings, Dried Garlic, Sodium Nitrite.



I guess the scariest ingredient is the sodium nitrite. It is a preservative that keeps meats pink even after they have been cooked. Of course as a kid I didn't know about such things. I just knew that my daddy was eating vienna sausages and saltines so of course I wanted one.



Another "food" was Potted Meat. The ingredient list is far scarier for this one:



Beef tripe, beef hearts, chicken, partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue, water, salt, mustard, vinegar, dried garlic, sodium erythorbate, natural flavoring, sodium nitrite



I don't want to analyze these ingredients at all. Potted meat was usually eaten on a sandwich. Colonial white bread, potted meat spread on one slice of bread, mayonnaise spread on the other and placed together. If you wanted to be healthy you could put a piece of zero nutrients iceberg lettuce on the sandwich. You could eat the potted meat with saltines if you wanted. Hmm, there is a pattern developing here. Saltine crackers go with everything it seems.



Some of the other things I don't eat now that I'm a grown up are, fried pork rinds, bologna, Spam, dried beef and regular hot dogs. I actually love hot dogs. Nothing better in the summer, but they have to be Hebrew National, all beef, 97 percent fat free.


I'm really not a picky eater, let's just say I'm choosy.

Don't Call Me...

Grand maw, granny, mee maw or any of the other monikers that grandmother's get placed on them. Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about becoming a grandmother. Grandparents have special privileges that parents don't have. At least that is what all of the lovely folks who take my SilverSneakers classes tells me. "Oh, Sonya, you are just going to love being a grandmother." I have a few weeks until this new status is achieved.

Technically I am already a grandmother. Heather married a man with a couple of sons. Michael lives with them so Heather has been helping to raise him for a few years now. Michael calls me Sonya and that's okay. I also have a grand-dog named Butters. When Heather first got him she was still living at home. For some reason I became Nono to Butters. Whenever Heather comes to visit now she'll ask Butters if he wants to go to Nono's house. He gets all excited. He's very smart and he behaves very well when he visits. Just like a grandchild. When he is at his own home he can be a naughty little guy. Barking at everything, knocking his water bowl around.

All of my grandparents are deceased. My dad's parents passed away in the mid 1970's. I'm not sure of how old they were when they died. I did not spend a whole lot of time with them. I have some memories of them though. Granny Crowe was an awesome cook and believe me no one left her table hungry. If you did it was your own fault. She made the very best coconut cake. I remember watching television with Papa Crowe. We watched wrestling and roller derby. As a kid I wanted to join the roller derby. I was hell on wheels with my skates.

My mother's mother passed away in 1990. I spent a lot more time with Granny Coggins. Whenever we visited from whatever Army base we were living at at the time, we stayed with Granny Coggins. She was also the chosen babysitter when my parent's and my aunt's and uncle's decided they needed a weekend in the Smoky Mountains. One of those weekend trips resulted in the arrival of my baby brother nine months later. Mother swears it was the pancakes and mountain air. I have a sneaky suspicion it was something else, but we won't go into that here.

So my grandparenting adventure will begin soon. I cannot wait to meet Ian. I hope I get to be the cool grandmother, just don't call me Big Mama.

Acworth Women's Sprint Triathlon

The weather was perfect today for the Acworth Women's Triathlon. The distances for the race today were 400 yard swim, 13 mile bike ride and 3.7 mile run. The run is usually a 5k but due to road construction they had to change the run course. Did they tell us about the distance change before the race? Of course not! My overall time was 1:42:05.

Even though I have been participating in triathlons since 2001 I still have slight panic at the start of the swim. Having said that, the swim went well for me today. I was in the first wave which is always a nice place to start. The only obstacles I had to deal with today were the "side strokers". I understand being new to the sport, but 400 yards is only 8 laps in a 25 yard pool. Let's learn how to swim freestyle shall we?

The bike ride was good. My average bike speed was 17.5 mph. The course for the bike is slightly hilly, but nothing I couldn't handle on my tri bike. Nothing unusual happened on the bike ride.

The run course is a bit more challenging. It is hilly. The course meanders through a neighborhood. The extra 6/10 added was on a new trail. I started the run feeling pretty good coming off of the bike. My plan for the run was to walk through the aid stations with no other walk breaks. That didn't quite work out. My foot started hurting about half way through the run. (I've had problems with my left foot for a couple of years now. It was diagnosed as Morton's Neuroma. It's been shot up with Cortisone a couple times. That doesn't help for long.) So with very brief walk breaks I managed the run with a decent time even with the added bit of distance.

I'm happy with my overall time. I always say I'm gonna kick some butt, it might be my own butt, but I'm totally kicking it!!

Papa Don't Preach

Growing up an Army brat we didn't go to church all of the time. My parents would get on what I'll refer to as a "church kick" once in a while and we'd be off to church. Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings and Wednesday evenings.

While my dad was in Vietnam we lived in a farmhouse in a small town outside of Duluth, Georgia. The actual name of the "town" was Shake Rag. Don't ask me, I don't know why it was called that. So as a kid my mother would get the three of us ready (number four was not here yet) and we would go to church where most of our relatives went. It was a little country Methodist church with a cemetery on the same property. We would go to Sunday School, learn a Bible verse and sing a song or two. This was okay with me. I was having fun. I got to play with my cousins. There was punch and cookies. All was grand.

Over the years I would go to church once in a while. In Hawaii I went to a Pentecostal church with my boyfriend and his family. I also went to Catholic Mass every now and again with one of my girlfriend's on Saturday evenings. Her parents wouldn't let her go to the beach on Sunday unless she attended a Mass. When my girls were little I took them to church for a while. Then I just stopped going. About two years ago I decided I needed to get back to church. Living in the Bible Belt you are expected to attend church.

But you know what happened about 6 months ago? I finally figured out at the ripe age of 45, I don't HAVE to go to church! I don't like going. I don't understand most of what goes on and at this point I really don't know what I believe. One thing I do know, I'm way too liberal in my thinking to go to most churches.

So I'll enjoy my Sunday's going out on a bike ride or getting in a nice run. Enjoying the earth and sky. Glad to be alive and glad I'm not cooped up in church!

Premenopause

or as I like to think of it...the crazy times.

I have a book called The Complete Book of Running for Women. There is a list in the book titled "Signs of Menopause". There are 34 symptoms listed. Over the past few years I've had 19 of the symptoms at one time or another. Some are continuing bothers.

The one I'm dealing with lately is not sleeping through the night. It is as if my sleep button gets turned to the off position around 3:30am. If I were worrying about something specific I could understand, but I am not worrying over anything. So I am awake, laying there, eyes wide open trying to will my body and mind back to sleep. This is not a good thing on the nights before I have to be at the gym, ready to teach a class at 6am. Last night was one of those nights. Constantly looking at the clock. Thinking, "you have to get up at 4:45am, what is wrong with you?" Of course I did finally doze off and before I knew it the alarm was going off. Sigh.

There is no end in sight at the moment. This could go on for many more years. Guess I'll get use to it. Then maybe another symptom will appear. Let's hope it is not night sweats!!

Up The Creek With A Paddle

I recently had my first experience with paddling a canoe. This was while we were up in Dahlonega a couple of weekends ago. My husband Scott, our friend Shelly and myself had already rode our bikes 37 miles in the mountains. After lunch the three of us met Shelly's friend Nanette at the Appalachian Outfitters. We rented two, two person canoes. The rental fee included the use a smelly life jacket. The life jackets were almost unnecessary. The water was really low in spots. Before you set out the "guide" gives a talk about some important information. There were points on the river that I wished that we had listened a little closer to what he was saying.


Since I didn't have a clue to what I was doing I sat in the front of the canoe with my husband in the back. Scott grew up near a creek and they had a canoe. I can only imagine what he and 2 of his brothers got up to. So he knows how to paddle and keep us going in the right direction. Not that this kept us out of trouble the whole time. At one point we were trying to decide if the guide told us to stay to the left or the right of a certain area. As we are discussing this Scott and I end up in a downed tree! I really try not to cuss, but the only thing I could say at the point of contact with that tree was, "SHIT!!" We managed to get out of that predicament with little trouble. The water on the Chestatee River was mostly calm. There were some level 1 and 2 rapids. As I said earlier the water was low in spots. This of course caused some comical situations for us and Shelly and Nanette. At a couple of points we were stuck on the rocks. Instead of getting out of the canoe we would stay seated and "scooch" trying to push forward. This worked a couple of times. There was one time I did have to get out of the canoe and help get it unstuck. I managed to do that part semi gracefully, but had to ruin my gracefulness by missing my seat as I sat back down. This gave everyone, including me, a good laugh.

I was having a really good time. I had finally calmed down. At one point in a calm area I decided I needed a break from paddling. So I'm enjoying the water and looking around for wild life. As I'm sitting there doing nothing I proclaimed, "I love canoeing!" This cracked Shelly up because who wouldn't love to canoe if you weren't doing any work?

I'm ready to go out on the water again. Maybe next time we can take the longer tour on the Etowah River. I hear there are level 3 and 4 rapids there. That smelly life jacket will come in handy then I'm sure.