Come and get it!

Granddaughter's instructions for the day: "Take me to the duck pond. I need to give the ducks some food."

Red basket full of seeds from Reifel Island.

"Hurry, hurry, hurry! Half of it's gone already!"

Click on the duck to see the hint of purple in the blur of wings.

Shadows of joys to come

I babysat all day today, (Friday). The sun shone through the windows ...

Shadows of Jaya's window art on the curtains.

Mmmm... Boiled egg!

... and Sofia and I went out to explore the garden. There was plenty to see; daffodils, periwinkle and forsythia were in full bloom. So were two dandelions; Sofia picked them to put in a jar for Mommy. (Mommy thought they were just beautiful.) The old pear trees were putting out the first buds.

Budding pear branch

Early pear bud

The buds are not pretty at this stage; they remind me somewhat of the head end of a carnivorous marine worm. (Photo here.) They're even hairy, like the worm. But in a week or so, they'll have opened up into mountains of delicate, snowy blossoms.

The magnolia tree's packaging looks more like a mouse than a bud. A coarse-haired mouse, at that. Or a rough cocoon for a butterfly; a more appropriate metaphor, given the flower that bursts out and unfolds into spectacular fly-away petals.

Grey-haired mouse, with escapee.

First of the opened blooms. And look inside! There's a stowaway.

I found this old "cage" on the ground; all that's left of last year's flowers. I'm not sure what they were. but the new ones are sprouting.

Cage for a ladybug.

This was sprouting, too. (Don't ask; I don't have the faintest idea.)

Emergence!

And I found my first outdoor spiders of the season; a friendly jumping spider that put on a good show for Sofia, and this one:

Juvenile cross spider, with web.

And we brought in, to show Mommy, three pillbugs. Sofia calls them "picklebugs".

While I was away, Laurie went for a walk and brought home three big-cone pine cones for me. "They might have some bugs on them," he said. He knows what I like.

And yes, I found a globular springtail:

Collembola, about 1 mm.

Now that's what I call a proper spring day!

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Musings while in recovery

I'm too tired, after a day of babysitting, and traumatized, from almost 48 hours without an internet connection, to put together a coherent post. The best I can do is a series of wandering thoughts.

1. Because I had to reboot the computer and the modem as part of the attempt at locating the problem (which didn't help, at all; the outage was at the other end) and because the computer was useless, anyway, (Why do they put the help files online these days? When you need them for trouble-shooting, you can't get them. That's akin to the isp staff that e-mailed my dad to tell him that his e-mail was currently not available while they upgraded. Really! So helpful!) I unhooked everything, cleared and moved the desk, and sorted out the wiring. The desk had been in the same position for about 5 years.

It took all day Tuesday to do that, and to return everything to its place and hook it all up again.

It wasn't as dusty behind the desk as I would have expected. I only found one spider, which I carefully shooed into a crack before I vacuumed.

I keep an air filter running behind the computer at all times, to make sure it gets only the cleanest, most dust-free air possible. Tuesday, I vacuumed the computer thoroughly from every angle, and through every vent. Then I put a fresh, new dust bag into the vacuum, reversed the hose, and blew through the rear fan outlet. I should have done this outside; a huge cloud of fine dust spewed out of the intakes and all over the room. So I had to vacuum and dust everything in the room again.

Dust is not good for computers. Moral of the story; must clean computer much more frequently.

2. Travelling around with an almost-3-year-old, I stopped to watch a backhoe at work on a crumbling garden installation. It was picking up rotting beams, stacking them to one side, and levelling a small hill. After we started home, I was treated to the following conversation:

Sophia: "Backhoe bites wood."
Me: "Yes, a backhoe bites wood. And mud."
S: "Not people?"
Me: "No, not people. It doesn't bite people. Just wood and mud."
S: "Not Sophia?"
Me: "No, not Sophia. Just wood and mud."

And then a monologue, all the way home: "Bites wood. Bites mud. Not people. Not Sophia. Not people. Wood. Mud. Bites wood. Bites mud. Not Sophia. Not people. Bites ..."

If repeating a fact 10 times cements it in memory, I'm sure she's got this one down for life.

3. Eileen (Cicero) writes of squirrels being "ever so persistent." They are. So are kids. (Which is why you can't hide Christmas presents from them, and why (I think) some teens are such good hackers.) In the mall, we stopped to look at the loonie grabbers, the brightly-coloured bouncing "airplanes" and bunny rabbits and Noah's Arks. One, a kid-sized ice-cream truck, was still going, after the previous kid had left it. Sophia climbed in and entertained herself pushing all the buttons. ("Yum! Chocolate! My favourite!" the red one elicited.) Another kid, a boy around 5, climbed in, too.

The truck used up its loonie, and stopped. Sophia pushed buttons vainly. But the boy jiggled the coin return lever with one hand, and pushed the Start button with the other. Off they went again, for the full ride.

On the third time round, the trick failed. The kid kept trying, until his mother came over to take him off to pre-school. She told me he'd discovered the trick some weeks before. She's got a hacker in the making there.

4. The Great Backyard Bird Count. We did count, but without too much profit. Juncos, chickadees, crows, and pigeons, of course. Eagles, 10 in one small clump of trees along the Ladner Trunk Road. 4 Northern Harriers in and beside a field, a mass meeting of gulls along the highway to Richmond. Not much else.

Part of the problem was that we were on the go most of the weekend; we made observations from the car as I drove. And I took no photos. These two are from the week before:

A dozen crows. Otherwise known as a murder.


Wally's Woodpecker. This wouldn't have worked for the bird count, would it?

And Laurie did get a close shot at a hawk from the car, as I drove. Unfortunately, the car hit a bump just as he pressed the shutter:

Hawk backside. And, on the lamp, a liberal application of white hawk poop.

5. And tomorrow, I hope, life will return to its normal tempo. (I can dream, can't I?)

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Report on a quiet afternoon

"Grandma," she said after school, "Let's go downstairs and you take pictures of my kitties!"


So that's what we did. Grandmas are good at being bossed about.

Blue eyes and grey-green.


Friends for life


Still toddlers. Rug cats, as it were.


Complacent Mamma.


Imaginary mouse


Long, long thoughts.

Then we went back upstairs and tackled weighty problems, such as "How hot is hot milk? And "Do we have any more bananas?"

I needed a day like that.
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Green and brown, too

Reflections in Cougar Creek:




In the course of babysitting, I agitated about a dozen large bottles of semi-congealed poster paint until they re-liquified, pulled half a dozen boxes out of storage looking for said paints, repacked and replaced them, squished and massaged another dozen or more paint tubes. I may recover the use of my arms in the next few days. Posting will probably be light until it no longer hurts to type.
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Little Miss Muffet likes spiders!

Grandmas are made to be bossed around. Little Miss Muffet here wants me to find her a butterfly.


Done. Three cabbage whites.

"Bumblebee." Done. And a half-dozen wasps, which she calls "bumblebees".

"Snail." Done. Plenty of those.

"Where is spider?"

Zebra spider, Salticus scenicus.

Here he is! Isn't he pretty?

He was quite a jumper, and very curious. He kept turning towards me while I tried to maneuvre him into a good position for his portrait. When I brought the camera in close, watching him through the viewfinder, he disappeared all of a sudden. I thought to look at the camera itself; sure enough, he was on the extended lens.


Angled up to look at me. Those headlight eyes give these spiders excellent binocular vision (the better to jump at you, m'dear) and they can distinguish prey as far away as 30 cm. (1 ft.)

Back to work, Grandma! Snookums wants another snail!

I found her a pillbug, the kind that rolls up into a ball. When it unrolled, it frightened Miss Muffet away. Turns out spiders are ok, pillbugs are not.

Bonus, and this one wasn't scary at all: a nice, popsicle-green stink bug.

A dramatic head shot.

Then we went inside and drew pictures of butterflies, spiders, snails, and the pill bug.
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Jaya's Cat

I babysat all day today. I'm too tired to write.

Fingerpainting, stuck to back porch window by its own moisture.

The "artist", with blue hands.

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Kindred Spirit

It's amazing, sometimes, to watch the unfolding of children's personalities, and especially to trace family resemblances there. It's more understandable that they have Mommy's eyes, an aunt's long fingers and Grandpa's curly hair, etcetera, even recognizable family temperaments; but likes and dislikes? Or ways of interacting with their world? How is that inherited? And yet it seems to be. It boggles the mind!

Today my five-year-old granddaughter was laughing at the way her sister had positioned a rubber grasshopper, and it occurred to me to show her a real (albeit dead and a bit dilapidated) grasshopper from my son's collection.


She was fascinated.

She looked at it from all angles, and moved on to the butterflies. She asked questions; "Where are the eyes?" "What's that?" She was so interested that I got out a lens and my bright desk lamp. And for the next half hour or more, she pored over my insect collection, with her head bent low over the lens. She moved the insects around to see them top and bottom, always very carefully; she didn't break even one of the tiniest or most delicate. And she insisted on double-checking to make sure she hadn't missed even one.

She even noticed a tiny broken bit of butterfly in the case; "What's that thing?" The coiled proboscis, or siphoning tube, barely 2 mm. across.


And I remembered my early years, how I spent hours watching flies and crabs, investigating the "innards" of fish and sea urchins, permitting mosquitoes to bite me so that I could see how they looked up close. And my delight at my first microscope (at about 11), when Dad had to tell me to calm down and stand with my hands behind my back to tell him about the fly wings I had spent the afternoon looking at.

I had to promise Snookums that I would have more beasties to show her next time she comes so that she would allow me to put these ones away at lunch time.

Astounding! All the more, to me, because most of my other grandkids would be saying, "Ewwww!"

Almost a fish face.

Early night.

I'm babysitting tomorrow, early till late. I've child-proofed the house, defrosted goodies for them, tidied the toy box, set the alarms. (Three of them; I'll never manage to get up at the first one, and maybe not even the second.)

And now, I'm off to bed. See you tomorrow!

In which Grandma Weeta proves ...

... once again, that she's a pushover.

The evidence? Nap time:

Little Miss Attitude


Attitude, redux


Want the ball, kitty?


Now give it back!


Now what's she doing?


Look, kitty, I put all of Daddy's socks under the sheet!


I can so kill those socks!


You mean I can get up now?


Such a relaxing nap! I feel fresh as a daisy!


Yay! Up an' at 'em!


Well, I don't know about you two, but I'm ready for a nap.