Birdland

I’m one step away from having bats in my belfrey… something twittery has taken up residence in my chimney. At first I thought it was bats, but the 2nd time I pulled out the dinner plate and looked, there were tiny feathers, and one pea-sized egg sitting among the cinders. The twittering is pretty constant these days, and I was beginning to fear a colony had taken up residence. Not sure what fires up the avian monologue - sometimes it seems to be my heavy steps on the wood floor, but other times I’m quietly typing up a blog post - maybe I have phantom editors? At other times it might be my cooking - tho I haven’t had poultry for dinner in weeks. It sounds like a particularly squeaky stationary bike is being ridden in my chimney! Or a demented hamster on a wheel…

Today I pulled off the dinner plate --okay, what else should I call it? That metal thing that looks like a fluted paper plate with some flower or landscape collaged on it, that covers the round hole that every old brick chimney seems to have? The thing with the twin wire “legs” that supposedly grip the sides of the hole but in reality spring off as soon as you pull it out, and at that point not even duct tape will keep the dang thing together?? Anyhoo, that’s the thing I removed and looked to see if perhaps the nest was blocking the chimney. I used a compact mirror (I always seem to get some sort of makeup with mirrors from a relative; I save them for looking under the house or up chimneys. The makeup just gets stale). There was some definitely irate twittering at that point, but no matter which way I angled it, I couldn’t see much… either they are tunneling in from another dimension (my chimney is channeling?), or the dark splodges of stuff I thought was creosote are actually disguised nests. I kind of feel like a monster scaring the phantom twitterer like that, but I just wanted to remind it whose house it is… these last days have had a distinct hint of Fall, and I want to be sure this squatter isn’t feeling too comfortable. I don’t mind it launching the fledglings and then heading South, provided they’re not stopping over through Thanksgiving. And now it seems like an even better idea to have a chimney sweep in before I start the first fire. Last thing I want is fireworks coming out the chimney.

I’m glad to be back on the blog, though Vista is still giving me about a dozen Line Errors every time I arrive on my own page, and I still can’t leave comments for almost every blog I enjoy reading (so guys, if you’re reading this, I’m not ignoring you!). According to Crooks and Liars, there was some glitch with sitetracking (but why now? why suddenly? And why did it only seem to be the left-leaning sites??), and gradually I’m finding I can load sites that crashed two days ago… it’s that kind of thing that’s really encouraging my hair to fall out. When I wonder why I just don’t have any time, I need to remember how many hours I spent trying to figure out why it was one site but not another, and then as a last ditch effort, working through eight pages of onlineVista tech support instructions of “what to do when a webpage won’t load” -- they don’t get that problem often, do they? (snark) And then, after it all, nothing I did had any effect…it was some pixels getting stuck in the internet tubes.