Saturday, May 23, 2015

4040 Final bird entry

Saturday, May 23, 2015

I found the baby bird dead Wednesday morning.  I think there was something wrong with him all along.  He never made the fecal sacs that chicks his age are supposed to make, and his cloaca looked prolapsed.  It may have happened when he fell from the nest, or it may have been that way all along so he'd been kicked out of the nest.  We'll never know.

I called Daughter, and she was sad.  She told Nugget, and Nugget was excited, wanted to see the bird right away.
 "Aren't you sad?"
"No.  I like to see dead bodies!"

Oh, my.  Not sure what's going on with that kid.

Well, Daughter has a lot of anatomy books, has even participated in a human dissection, maybe that explains it?

Hercules, Daughter, and Nugget left Thursday for a five-day trip to West Virginia (some kind of caching shindig) and Pennsylvania (Hercules' family), so there wasn't time for a proper funeral.  So the bird is in a box in a freezer bag in my freezer.  Daughter said I could go ahead and bury him while they were away, but I don't want to --- mainly because I am incapable of digging a hole these days, and putting him out with the garbage is distasteful.  On the other hand, given Nugget's ghoulish fascination with "dead bodies", maybe it's a good idea if she doesn't know where he's buried.

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More chain-jerks:
  • Weary and wary are different words.
  • We are all frustrated by "I could care less" (meaning "I couldn't care less").  Believe it or not, in the past few days I have seen at least three examples in three different places, of  "I could careless."  Don't people think about what they say (write) anymore?
  • Exacerbate and exasperate are different words.
  • Disorientate is not a word.  Yes, disorientation is the noun, but the verb is simply disorient.  Same with orientate/orientation/orient. 
  • This one drives me crazy:  "calm, cool, and collective."  That one I hear as well as read.  How does one be collective?
  • Sew and sow are different words.  You can't sew the seeds of discord.
  • Invite is a verb.  It is not a noun. 
  • Ask is a verb.  You don't have an ask of someone.  You have a request or a question.
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2 comments:

Becs said...

One making the rounds in the business world lately is making "task" a verb.

"I've tasked Sheila with taking the minutes."

Shudder.

And you cannot deny that child comes from your family tree. I'll bet you wanted to see dead bodies, too, when you were four.

~~Silk said...

See them? Heck, I wanted to dissect them!