This week's lack of blog entries has again not ben anything to do with a lack of events, but because I've been having Company to stay in the palatial shed of Beacon Street. Which means we've been running around, cramming in all the possible activities in West Alabama into a few short days and combining that with drinking a lot of beer and a lot of late-night conversations. But it has been a lot of fun, especially given the blissful weather over the last few days - a hot, sunny spell that ended in a huge thunderstorm last night.
We had been at my bandmate Brian's house picking and eating hotdogs, because his parents were in town and they'd never heard the band play, and afterwards we decided to go out to Perry Lakes Park to see the Rural Studio projects there together. We got there as the sky was darkening and incredibly bright, jagged flashes of pink lightning sheeted across the sky. By the time we finished walking round the projects, it was dark and the first drops of rain were beginning to fall. So what to do but to take our moist selves to the Shack, to sip beers and play dominoes for hours while the rain catapulted down outside and the TVs played endless tornado and severe weather warnings, their brightly colored doppler maps showing the storm circling around us. There is something rather wonderful about being holed up in a bar in weather like that, the click of the dominoes and the terse game-related conversation. By the time we left, six hours later, only a few drops were still falling.
My feathered charges are growing at a rate of knots. On Wednesday my rooster crowed for the first time. He'd been trying to learn how, with the occasional thwarted cluck, but finally a full cock-a-doodle-doo rang out across the yard and I felt terribly proud. The duck is growing his adult feathers and when I go out to feed him in the morning, he makes a terrible racket when I take his bowl away from him to fill it up. He eats out of my hand. The chick is, as always, the sultriest and moodiest of the lot, which is why I named him after Debbie Harry who to me always seemed to embody the sort of 'I'll be moody if I want and I don't give a damn' feel I get from the chickling.
We had been at my bandmate Brian's house picking and eating hotdogs, because his parents were in town and they'd never heard the band play, and afterwards we decided to go out to Perry Lakes Park to see the Rural Studio projects there together. We got there as the sky was darkening and incredibly bright, jagged flashes of pink lightning sheeted across the sky. By the time we finished walking round the projects, it was dark and the first drops of rain were beginning to fall. So what to do but to take our moist selves to the Shack, to sip beers and play dominoes for hours while the rain catapulted down outside and the TVs played endless tornado and severe weather warnings, their brightly colored doppler maps showing the storm circling around us. There is something rather wonderful about being holed up in a bar in weather like that, the click of the dominoes and the terse game-related conversation. By the time we left, six hours later, only a few drops were still falling.
My feathered charges are growing at a rate of knots. On Wednesday my rooster crowed for the first time. He'd been trying to learn how, with the occasional thwarted cluck, but finally a full cock-a-doodle-doo rang out across the yard and I felt terribly proud. The duck is growing his adult feathers and when I go out to feed him in the morning, he makes a terrible racket when I take his bowl away from him to fill it up. He eats out of my hand. The chick is, as always, the sultriest and moodiest of the lot, which is why I named him after Debbie Harry who to me always seemed to embody the sort of 'I'll be moody if I want and I don't give a damn' feel I get from the chickling.
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