Home Improvement, Ol' Folks Stylee

 My bathroom is now a beautiful shade of blue.  It no longer looks like a place where crack is manufactured.  It looks like a really pleasant place to take a dump.

I have also gone over all the railing and house trim with black paint, and it perked the joint up something fierce!  My crib is looking smart.  Now I have to go around with the grey paint and use ladders and tie-ons and shit because there's places on my house that the paint has just flaked off of for whatever reason.  I - me! - painted the house about twelve; fifteen years ago and got it looking nice.  This year I took a big old flake of the faded grey paint to the store and had them mix up a batch and lo:  I can spot-treat my house without it's looking like I had to hire day labor.  Tomorrow is the big day.  I'll begin on the shade side, and then just chip my way around and touch it up as the sun leads.

Except that the local plant nursery is open on Sundays, and they have a few plants that I've been wanting at freakishly reasonable prices ( Cloud Mountain Nursery, Nooksack, WA) - probably because they are a teaching establishment and use a lot of slave labor/interns to do the heavy lifting. So yeah, Monday. Monday I'll be touching up the paint.

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The tenor of my entries has been homeowner based ever since we paid off the joint, and I know I haven't been the funny monkey that people have come to know and be appalled by, but owning, really OWNING property is...it changes your outlook.  After having rented my whole adult life, suddenly I OWN this chunk of ant-chewed wood and insufficient insulation.  

It's oddly like when I was a little kid and I had Barbies.  I used to take their clothes and alter them, add stuff, subtract stuff, restyle...right? I know, me?  Using a sewing machine?  Playing with Barbies?  But I did, and I was nuts about them because there were so many patterns for Barbie clothes (put out by Butterick, as I recall) and I used to use old  Goodwill-thrift shop clothes for yard goods.  My Barbies looked like the first night of a new season of RuPauls Drag Race.  They had crazy Carnaby street fashions and wild, extreme minis and microminis,  Emma Peel high fashion togs and accessories, just everything I could get my hands on for...geeze, I don't recall the patterns being any more than .69 cents.

This is not to say that my house looks like a giant, ant-chewed drag queen.  That's not what I mean at all. Just that I own the fucker and I'm doing things to prink it up so that it's an asset to our little town, right by the 'Welcome To Sumas' sign.  I really take pride in this.  

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Today as we were sitting here enjoying multiple tasty beverages and watching videos of cute pets doing cute things, who should come in peeking around the sofa but Chica!

We leave the house open to let the air blow through during nice weather.  I get the occasional swallow and hummingbird, but this is the first time I've ever had a Staffie come in, grinning like a clown, to say howdy.  Neighborhood Crackhead was outside calling for her, and the Biker and I were cracking up, and finally I got a hold of her harness and carried her outside to her Dad.  Staggering.  That dog is a CHONK.  Then we shut the joint up for a few hours.

Depressed Black Kitty often lets herself travel through my house, just passin' through.  Says 'Mewoo?' as she walks from the kitchen to the front room and out the front door.  Just an informal visit.  

I've had starlings fly in and land on my head while I was washing dishes, and swallows will fly through during midsummer, back and forth, just playing.  Hummingbirds will zip through, stop in front of my face to cuss me out, and then continue on.  

Yesterday I had a newly fledged crow (certainly a son or daughter of Alice and Ralph) court me with 'feed me' calls until I got it a hamburger bun.  I taught it my 'treats' whistle and made sure that lil' bird saw my face in association with treats, and learned to associate a certain whistle I've made up specifically to signal 'Crow Treats!'  and a certain face (mine, duh) with those treats.  I waited in sight quietly until lil' bird came and took a few bites, and repeated my 'food lady' whistle, and made sure the bird saw me.

Think what you will. That crow and I communicated.  It did the same thing with me - 'asked' for food, made sure that I saw its body from all sides, and then retreated to wait.  It was an extremely rudimentary exchange, but a question was asked of a known source of food, (me) and the KSoF identified herself and provided food in answer to the request.  I'm trying to replicate the studies that are being done in the Seattle Arboretum with wild crows - assessing their powers of sonic, visual and routine memory. There's a link out there, go hit it.  It's incredibly interesting.

There are similar experiments being done with the New Zealand Kea.  It's an alpine parrot (?) that is so deviously clever that we'd probably never know if they took over the reins of global government.  I kind of hope they do.

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This time of year the queens are hatching.  Hornets, Wasps and Bumblebees, kids.  They pupate in the soil until it reaches a certain warm temperature for a few days in succession, then shed their shiny brown shells and emerge from the earth fat, groggy, lost and hungry.  Any 'stingy' insect you see here around May is a queen, and is looking for carbohydrates so that it can get laid and begin building a nest for it's eggs.  I am prejudiced in favor of bumbles and honeybees.  Let a wasp or a hornet get in here? Motherfucker dies.  I have enough problems in my life without tiny flying carnivores.