My floor is covered with cookie crumbs

[botias]

Lessee, on Friday I took the two older kiddos to the blacksmithing conference at the fairgrounds. That was a bit of a bust, for although they advertised it fairly extensively to the public, there was very little that the public had access to. But I learned that blacksmithing tools are very expensive, blacksmiths tend to have dogs and facial hair regardless of their sex, and I also saw a really cool, really large piece of art. It was a couple of boulders from which sprouted long strands of seaweed crafted from iron, curling and curving, up over my head some eight or ten feet to plateau against an imaginary ocean surface. The patterns they made against the sky were wonderful. If I ever have 60 large to spare, I shall have to indulge.

We checked out the horse racetrack which is only in use at fair time so far as I know. Right now it is a big oval of yellow flowers. We ran up and down the stairs in the grandstand. I'm guessing there are bats that like it there, since there were great drifts of moth wings. On the way out, we found raptor pellets of some kind on the landing. Rodent skulls and pelvic bones and femurs and scapulas, as clean and mathematical as tiny shells. Well, the ones not covered in soft grey rodent felt. I wonder how the raptor gullets do it, dissolve the flesh, but not the chaff.

Yesterday, I rode in the Rhododendron Parade. It's actually really fun to wave at smiling sprogs. I even got some nods from goth kids. I keep thinking I should come up with an entry to promote my business some year. Maybe I will.

I really wish people would stop trying to break down the back gate. The drug dealers dun live there no more! I need to make a sign.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Oooh, the sculptures sound lovely.

re: raptors [1]... I dunno; it sounds like owl pellets, but I don't know if other hawks and things also barf up skellies, or if they subject them to the same kind of intense digestive processes that snakes do. I should look that up, and seeing as how I work in a store that sells owl pellets, it seems like a potentially useful and job-related thing for me to know!

re: riding in parade - I remember doing that one year for 4-H. It was terribly geeky, horribly embarrassing, cold and annoying, and yes, it was incredibly fun. :D Now that I'm older and don't take myself so seriously [2], it seems like a much more fun thing to do.


[1] Yes, at first I thought you meant velociraptors, and was quite confused.
[2] Which isn't to say that I don't take myself seriously at all, but that my self-seriousness has decreased to, oh, around a three to five out of ten range, instead of what it was in high school, which as I recall peaked at around twelve million.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Aha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_pellet - Hawk and owl pellets are grey or brown, and range in shape from spherical to oblong or plug-shaped. In large birds, they are one to two inches long, and in songbirds, about half an inch. Many other species produce pellets, including grebes, herons, cormorants, gulls, terns, kingfishers, crows, jays, dippers, shrikes, swallows, and most shorebirds.

Wow... I had no idea. o.O

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

*wink* Just for the record I have a friend in NJ who is a blacksmith (a historical blacksmith, FWIW, http://www.oldmillstoneforge.org) who has neither dogs nor facial hair. Her SO does have significant facial hair, though.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Must have been owl pellets. I wasn't sure about other raptors, but now that I think about it, I have heard of researchers inquiring into the diets of other raptors by shooting and dissecting. I don't think they would do that if there were handy pellets.

I looked it up a little this morning, mostly because I referred to them as fewmets to the kids and then was mildly horrified by the suspicion that I was teaching them the word for dragon puke from some fantasy series or other. Turns out fewmets is a perfectly real (if antiquated and British) word for animal droppings (but perhaps not puke?) and immediately found a site that sells barn own pellets. :) Big dollars for ones guaranteed to have bones of larger mammals like weasels or squirrels.

Yes, teens are funny that way. Most all of them were too cool to wave. :) How joyless to be so cool, thank goodness it passes.

[botias.livejournal.com]

No dogs or facial hair? Hard to say if she would be welcome here on the west coast. :) Personally, I am all for people bucking convention.

[botias.livejournal.com]

loon, grebe, cormorant...

I had no idea either. Somehow the notion of a pellet with frog bones squicks me. Maybe because I am thinking it would be slimy.