In followup to my story about falling on the ice while skating. Yes I did bruise my shoulder and my hip. My shoulder has healed well but my hip is still tender but doesn’t bother me while out walking.
I guess the Reach For The Top stories are done for I haven’t received anything more from which to draw, so I will move on to something else.
We feed the birds here in Edmonton. In Oliver we fed only the hummingbirds. The English sparrows helped themselves to the chicken feed in our hen house.
Wally tolerated the English sparrows when they were few in number, but found as the years went by their numbers grew to where they became a nuisance both with their food consumption and their guano production. It was at that time when he found he needed to do some crowd control.
He found a humane way to reduce their populations without disturbing the moods of his egg layers. You could tell when the hens were upset, there were blood spots in their eggs.
Today, we feed the odd English sparrow but mostly juncos and chickadees. On occasion we have seen a crossbill feeding on the squirrel’s stash of spruce cones.
We have two feeders with sunflower seeds because we have found that in the fall, the pine siskins sit and feed at either one of the stations, unlike the chickadees which fly in, take a seed and fly away to consume it. The chickadees will not feed with the pine siskins even though there is room for them to help themselves.
Someone gifted us with a suet roll for the birds. It was wrapped in a plastic mesh sleeve. I say ” was ” because when we hung it up for the birds to feed on, the squirrel discovered it and soon the suet was lying on the ground with the mesh hanging in the tree quite empty.
To remedy that we wrapped the suet in a copper mesh which we had purchased to put around plants to keep the slugs away. We hung the suet in the tree. Again the squirrel outfoxed us and chewed through the copper releasing the suet onto the ground.
Not to be out done, I went and found some old chicken wire, the kind we use to keep the neighborhood cats out of the dirt in our vegetable gardens, and wrapped up the suet and hung it in the tree.
The wire seems to be working for the birds are enjoying the suet again. I think the squirrel will be hard pressed to chew through that wire for I had to cut it with side cutters.
This is all part of retirement behavior and I’m getting used to it. By getting used to it I mean that I have seven days where I have to plan something for every day. When I worked, I didn’t have to plan anything for those days because I knew ahead of time what I was going to do.
It would be easy to stay in my pajamas all day and lay about reading or doing computer activities, but that gets old too. Fillers for each day is what I’m discovering now.
One of most enjoyable benefits is the ability to get up and go out of town at a moments notice, although I do have a mid-week commitment to tend to. But once that is covered, the sky is the limit!
I just need to remember, I ain’t 40 no more, and need to ignore the ice skates and spare myself some bruises.