Scattered thoughts ...

There are so many stories going through my mind right now, I hardly know where to begin. I hope that this will not turn out to be the world's longest post but, if it looks like it might turn out to be so halfway through, I'll simply do a "part 2", OK?


To begin, I just finished watching Charles Osgood's weekly Sunday Morning show. It was just WONderful!! All of his shows have at least one good thing to offer, but this one was especially memorable.


There was a lengthy segment about mothers adopting babies. I'm not talking about humans here. This story began in Burlington, Iowa, where the Humane Society had taken in a mother and her pups. All of the puppies were adopted out pretty quickly, and the mother was now all alone.

As fate sometimes has it, into the Humane Society's doors came a litter of teeny kittens, ALL of whom needed a mommy with teets full of milk. The Humane Society personnel didn't know how they were going to be able to spend the amount of time that would be necessary to hand bottle-feed each tiny creature.

One of the workers suggested that the abandoned mother might be willing to 'adopt' them. Altho all of the other co-workers scoffed at the idea, they had nothing better to offer, and so they tried it. It worked!!

Many wonderful mother/'child' pictures were shown, followed by a bunch of other "odd" (to say the least!) m/c combos, including a cat adopting a faun, a leopard with a baboon, and a goat with a horse.

To view some more 'neat' photos, those of a dog adopting a piglet, follow this link to Tammy's site. (You'll have to move fast on this one, however, because Tammy's going private, the direct result of personal attacks on her blog site. And yes, that was the reason I wrote yesterday's post.)


There was a fairly short segment on Neil Diamond's return to his original gig, which I enjoyed very much. Made me wish that I had actually met and gotten to know -- at least a little bit -- this man. (Maybe I'll do a post down the road on "Famous people I've met", we'll see.)


Myanmar ... my goodness, what else can be said about those poor people? If you aren't glad that you live in the United States of America, why don't you go to Myanmar? So much world-wide aid has tried to arrive in that country, so much manpower has been offered, almost ALL of which has been rejected by the ruling military junta, 'afraid' that their power might be undermined ... the best guesstimates now are that one a half million lives will be lost, perhaps even more. Unimaginable! Incomprehensible!!



Let's get away, FAR away, from Myanmar, OK?



I had absolutely deLIGHTful lengthy phone conversations with DD (Darling Daughter, and a wonderful mother in her own right!) this morning.


Now that I have your attention focused elsewhere, let me tell you what happened last night. First, tho, I'll ask you, "Do any of you have a fireplace?"

I'm not talking about a faux fireplace here. I'm talking about a REAL fireplace ... one where you have to make sure you have the flue open before you ignite your fire, one where smoke goes up and out an actual chimney ... have you got one of those? I do.

Well, last night, as I was watching Good Will Hunting (not for the first time), I heard sounds that seemed to be coming from within my own home. They were strange sounds! At first, it almost sounded as though there was some thing/one scraping, clawing ... I couldn't immediately identify the sounds.

I thought, "My gosh, those termites have had babies out the wazoo, and the house is about to fall down on me!" (No, that's NOT what I thought. I just made that up, OK?)

My actual thought was, "It's the TV. Something's wrong with the TV." (You all know that I'm a dinosaur. I have an old analog TV, and have been tentatively expecting it to 'retire itself' just about every time I turn it on.) I turned the TV off. The sounds, wherever they were originating from, continued. So, I went exploring.

I turned on the light in the back porch area, which illuminates the whole yard. Nothing there of any consequence. I then focused on the roof. Couldn't see anything amiss. I went through all of the rooms of the house ... found nothing unusual.

Just as I was about to give up, I thought about the fireplace. [I always leave the flue open -- this due, I suppose, to many years ago when I started a fire with the flue closed and you wouldn't believe the amount of smoke that filled the house within (seemingly) a millisecond!]

Sure enuf, that's where the noise originated. It was dark in that room, but I could clearly hear the fluttering of wings as this IDIOT bird kept trying to escape back to where from whence he'd come.

I dasn't turn on a light. I didn't want said idiot to intrude any further into my private domain. I went back into the other room, turned the TV back on, and enjoyed the remainder of the movie.

Eventually, the noises ceased. And still no Xtra lights were turned on. I went to bed thinking, "What if this idiot ----- on me during my sleep?" I didn't bother my head further about that possibility. I hit the pillow.


Well, it's now MANY hours later ... broad daylight ... I've heard no extraneous sounds other than those normal to my everyday abode ... STILL, I have yet to venture near the fireplace to see if there is a corpse lying there. (Am I a gutless wonder, or what?!? Don't answer that, OK?)


Let me conclude this post by wishing any and all of you would be/expectant/actually are/wannabe mothers out there a most "Happy Mother's Day".