Brain Dump

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No.28
6/01/09
17:30
More photos at www.flickr.com/photos/vangoat


The only good thing about the long Minnesota winter is that when it's over, it's over. One day you're hunkering around in your goose-down parka and the next some ninny in jorts cuts you off on his rented bicycle. Around here there's none of this sloppy grey area in March and April when winter and spring bicker about the handoff. No, like a Chris Brown backhand, spring just hits suddenly.

It's like everything- people, animals and greenery- is just so ready for the end of winter that it all appears at once. Dogs and bicycles are everywhere that tulips and motorcycles aren't. In our yard, newly-nubbed deer and turkeys rule the daytime while skunks, coyotes and raccoons take over at night.

We've turned the yard into a sort of bird-nirvana. Finches, orioles, bluebirds and woodpeckers fight over feeder facetime with cardinals, grossbeaks and bluejays (the white trash of the bird world!). A gang of turkeys spends most mornings pecking away at whatever corn the deer left the night before.

Airika's named the turkey gang 'The Parliment', which makes this guy 'El Presidente' almost by default.

Also, I caved to the pressure and bought a boat. And by 'boat', I mean a vaguely canoe-shaped fiberglass husk. I never intended to get a boat, mostly because I'm of the strong belief that if I was meant to be surrounded by water, I'da come with gills. But living this close to the Mississippi, staring at it all day every day at work...it does something to you. Makes you want to float away.

So I found a drunken Wisconsonite who, in his Milwaukee's Best-soaked stupor, accidentally cut his price in half and now we have the World's Worst Canoe, which is great because it perfectly matches the World's Worst 4X4. It's not much, but at least we can tool around the buttload of ponds and lakes in the 'hood, taking pictures of beavers and muskrats and pissed-off geese. Also, I have a method of escape when the Mighty 'Miss inevitably floods.

The surest sign of spring is when a robin farts out an egg or two. We have a nest built just beneath our deck, so we've been able to track two birdlings from their gummy origins to the noisy, flappity, constantly needy mouths they are today.

Hey...that's robin-egg blue! Look closely and you can see a dirty little birdy feet.


The tubby mother robin has an issue with her babies being photographed. Or maybe her issue is with Tulip the Dog trying her damndest to dig through the wood and gum some tiny bird beaks.


This cat lives in our garage. Only sometimes he spends a significant portion of his day hanging from a poorly-posted telephone pole thanks to Tulip and Tilly. Yeah, you go ahead and look pissed off, cat. I'm hoping an eagle snatches him.


Just a note for all you recent graduates: This is what happens when you roll in coyote shit.


And finally, your obligatory deer and eagle pictures.