Scribe

I don't have to read it.



I wrote it!

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Black and Yellow Garden spider, aka Golden Orb Weaver, aka Writing Spider (Argiope aurantia).

Submitted to the Friday Ark.

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I don't check my sitemeter obsessively like I used to. But it can be barrel-o-monkeys funny now and then, so I try to look from time to time.

"Chicken nest boxes" has taken a back seat to both "white fuzzy caterpillar" and "yellow fuzzy caterpillar" as top search terms.

Apparently, googling "Alcohol and rambling pic" brings first Woody Guthrie, and then me (a post in which I rambled and offered that many alcohol laws were dumb). The ways of the internets are strange indeed.

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It's taking me a while to get back up to speed with all the blogs I read. But I noticed that a few of them had featured the same meme in the past month.

It's one of those "Things I have done" lists and I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing, but here are the things I've done that neither Stu, Ron, nor Chris have done:

11. Visited Paris
75. Gotten divorced
90. Gone to Thailand

I was going to add

108. Piloted an airplane

but that would probably be cheating. My uncle just let me take the controls for a little while.

One side of my family is a flying bunch. My mother flew an airplane before she drove a car. One uncle was an Air Force pilot, and another uncle and three cousins flew small planes for fun & profit. One of those cousins became a Delta pilot.

On the other hand, my Dad was afraid to fly. I used to tease him about it all the time. Especially later, after I had flown and really enjoyed it. Then somehow I developed a fear of it too. I can fly in a plane. I just really, really, really don't want to.

I'm rambling again.

Oh nooo...

One of my referrals yesterday - the phrase that someone searched on to find this blog - was "Middle Age Blogger".

In fact according to Google I'm currently #1 for "Middle Age Blogger".

Talk about your dubious distinctions.

I made the South Park me above with the South Park Character Generator a while back, and had titled it "Hard Day". (Note the bags under the eyes, grim expression, and dirt.) In light of the above I guess I should change the hair color though.

Search story

Several months ago I came across a hilarious search story on the blog Frogs and Ravens. She took some of the Google search terms that brought people to her site, and made a story of them.

At the time my blog was still new, and I only had a few searches per day. Then I seemed to achieve a critical mass (other than in my diet) and the search engines found me. Lately I remembered the search story meme and decided to try it myself.

I used all the searches, not just Google's, and I did them in the order that they appeared. This group of search strings is slightly different than usual, because it doesn't include searches for chicken and couscous salad, Leunig prayers, or turtle egg pictures, which I think are my top three search terms at present. But I writes 'em like I sees 'em, and just took the first 30 or so. So here you go. The search terms are bolded.

I needed a crash course in identifying caterpillars. While dining al fresco, I'd accidentally swallowed one that dropped into my zuchinni soup! I'd been worried and inattentive all day. With the chickens broody and denuding the trees of cedar berries, I couldn't stop agonizing: why do roosters pick on my hens?

That caterpillar must have been hallucinogenic. I imagined I could converse with weird looking turtles. They had good names no one else would think of, like Kitkitdizze! Their chief told me that they were all devoted arachnophiles. But their main job was to destroy all toads. Sevin was their preferred poison. After we spoke, they all crawled together into a chicken nest box, and enjoyed a catawba moth spread with witch butter that some Mergansers had sold them.

I set off on foot for the house of Jenny Zelle, who had a job sexing young chickens at the local hatchery. She liked my crazy chicken pictures, and knew a lot about herbal medicine.

Although it was broad daylight, a chorus of owls sounded from the trees. "At night they hunt catawba tree worms, Virginia" I whispered to my shadow.

Was I still hallucinating?

"A sapsucker! A chicken roosting in nest golf balls!" I exclaimed, when I reached the end of the country lane.

"You're not making sense," Jenny recoiled.

I sat down hard on her steps. "I need help identifying fuzzy caterpillars," I moaned.

I watched a Muscovy duck snatch a Japanese beetle from the Cataba in her yard, as I struggled to regain proper use of my tongue.

Jenny gasped. "Yellow fuzzy caterpillar?" she queried. "Near the chicken nesting boxes?"

I nodded vigorously. Jenny looked worried, but prescribed a strong dose of alcohol. "It's the worst caterpillar in Alabama. Buy Jack Daniels!"

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It's Friday! Don't forget to view the Friday Ark. And there is a new "I and the Bird" over at Charlie's Bird Blog this week too.