Portent

I have often found birds to be portentous. I remember seeing a great blue heron fly over the day I moved to Connecticut in 1981. That character has shown up again and again at significant moments in my life. My daughter has since taken on the great blue as an omen of good as well.

And there are the recurring "visits" from the purple finches that I have found to represent my sister-in-law who passed away in 1990. The first time I'd ever heard one sing was when it sat outside my window on the day she died.

So yesterday morning I didn't know what to make of the turkey who flapped and flopped up into a tree in our back yard. From a practical perspective, he appeared to have been fleeing a cranky rival who kept squawking on ground below. But it was still an odd sight.

Our hero stayed up there for 15-20 minutes until the rival wandered off, then he very unceremoniously fell out of the tree; flapping and flopping down through the branches until he landed with a FWUMP! and just walked away.

I guess sometimes a bird is an omen, and sometimes a big, dumb turkey in a tree is just a big, dumb turkey in a tree.

And three days later....

We are definitely phasing out the siezure medication. I can't WAIT until we put that behind us.

This was the scene we returned to from a party on Saturday night. Notice he ripped the pantry door right off the track!

Here it is Sunday afternoon and we're still not sure if we've seen all the after effects. What really got under the Dad's skin is the fact that the dog had to drag ALL of his loot into the family room.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like MaDuncan?

"There's many a thing you know you'd like to tell him,

Many a thing he ought to understand!!!!"

Soooo, psycho dog strikes again. Our best guess is there was thunder at home while we were at work. We came home to find he'd taken out:

• 10 panels of curtains
• three curtain rods
• Three sets of blinds
• chewed through a suitcase
• knocked the keyboard and mouse off the desk
• and left a "present" under the piano in the office!!!!

All in a day's work, apparently. We can't tell which parts were weather-related, which parts were medication-related and which part was just Duncan being Duncan, but he is obviously caninus non gratis at the moment!

A Little Poke

Sometimes we are prodded by the unexpected to do the right thing. Case in point:

I recently read a very sad blog written by a friend of mine. He told the story of losing a dear friend quite suddenly to skin cancer. It was wrenching because his friend was only in his 40s and died just weeks after being diagnosed.

That was all I needed. The next day I made an appointment with my dermatologist to finally have him look at this sketchy patch on my shoulder. It had been there for a while and I'd kept putting off having it looked at. Well the dermatologist didn't much like what he saw. He said it could be pre-cancerous (not good) or basal cell carcinoma (still less good). He treated it immediately, and, God willing, that will be the end of that.

The take away -- if you feel like you're getting a cosmic poke ... pay attention!