Don’t Eat Where You Poop!

A wise man made that statement many years ago – it may have been Abraham Lincoln or possibly Gore Vidal. I heard it again a few days ago, and it got me to thinking about my sparrow, Larry – he isn’t actually mine, he just lives on my deck quite a bit of the time, so I call him mine. HE IS MINE! . . . . So . . . . I’ve written about him recently on my blog and even included a picture of him. But about his eating arrangements . . . I have a planter box that was filled with potting soil, waiting for me to plant spring flowers. But that’s where I’ve been putting Larry’s birdseed. He gets in it and scratches around and has a great time. But he also poops in it, and I don’t know how good that is for him. So yesterday I scraped off the top layer of soil, poop and birdseed and threw it way. Then I put in new soil and birdseed. He’s been scratching around in it ever since. It’s a mystery to me why he has been here so long and why always alone. Maybe he’ll be like my last Larry, the pigeon, who stayed with me for several months and then appeared with a girlfriend, showed her off to me and left – never to be seen again. Maybe I don’t manage long-term relationships all that well. We’ll see how long this one lasts. I couldn’t find a picture of me holding a sparrow, so I found an old one of me holding a bullfrog. I always liked bullfrogs and raised one from a tadpole to a big frog in a fish pond on my deck a few years ago. But then a raccoon ate all the fish and the frog. Just another crazy animal experience for me.

This morning I put out more birdseed for Larry and also a mirror. I put the mirror on the floor of the deck near the planter box where he eats. I’m wondering what he’ll think of that. It’s upright so he can see himself if he walks by. But can birds see themselves in mirrors? We’ll see. After that I decided to go to a movie, and I saw "The Reader" which was quite an experience. It was a very good movie, and Kate Winslet deserved the Oscar for it, but I could find not one good characteristic in the person she portrayed. The people whose lives she touched were worse off than before – some were even dead. It must have been incredibly difficult for her to play a character without one redeeming quality, but then, that’s why Kate is such a good actor.

Upon my arrival home from the movie, I turned on the Sci Fi channel and watched "Megasnake" with Michael Shanks. Michael is my grandson Harry’s favorite actor. The movie was an old one and quite terrible. But Michael’s career has become much better since then and now appears on top-rated shows. Many of our present-day actors got their starts in movies about giant snakes, spiders, ants, worms, etc. But most of them went on to bigger and better things. But those goofy, old movies are sometimes fun to watch, and I ended my day in a pretty good mood.