Skip to main content

Piglets without Poohs

Ode to Wild Wilburs

Four youngster piggies came into our yard
We saw them coming close and we tried real hard

To shoo them all away before they did their deed
But they toppled coffee trees with tremendous speed

With broom in hand, Ron ran, yelled and swung
We couldn't bear to shoot them, they were so young

They may have been piglets, but their noses dug well
enough to do damage, I'm writing here to tell

When the pigs get bigger, all bets are off
The oinkers will be braver, at us they will scoff 

So instead of just a broom, a .22's sting
Or a giant metal trap might be just the thing

Poor poor piggies, they're just trying to eat
Everybody wants them, to smoke their meat

A bounty's on their head, they're always on the run
When one yard gets to dicey, they find another one

Yes, the pigs returned with a vengeance tonight. They did topple one tree and were getting set to do what they do when we spotted them in the twilight.  Scat! Cute little buggahs.  Not for long, though. Da kine gonna grow biggah, fo'real!

I'm reading my textbooks for school and learning what a woefully poor fiction writer I am.  The beauty, however, is that I'm starting at the bottom, so the learning curve should be steep.  

$11.88 cents in recycling today!!  Oh, but it cost $75 to fill up the truck.  Cat food was on sale! The price of water at the reverse osmosis spigot rose from $1 for five gallons to $1.25.  Clearly, it was a mixed day when it came to financing my errands. 

I learned about leaf miners in Alaska.  My roommate Lisa showed me a leaf there as evidence of the destructive little critters.  They're like the pigs of the insect world.  Today, as I transplanted my tomatoes from small pots to larger ones, I spotted the tell-tale signs of leaf miner damage. That's what you see in the photo above.  I felt pretty damn smart, I must say.

Apparently, leaf miners live in both Alaska and Hawaii.  They've gone global!

These red leafed ti plants were some I planted as mere sticks, cut from a thick growth of them behind the water tank a year ago. 

A hui hou.  Aloha!



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mom

This is my beautiful mom. She died last Sunday. For those who knew her, my heart breaks with you. For those who did not, here's an introduction to the best confidante, role model and mother a girl could hope for in life. This is the obituary I'd planned to submit to the local paper, but have opted instead to publish here. Obituary: Beverly Todd Bev -- my mom -- was a longtime caregiver, advocate, and dear friend to countless elderly in South Salem. Hers was a kind and generous spirit. She devoted much of her life to the welfare of others, giving wholly of herself and doing so always with great affection and humor. She was born Beverly Marie Steinberger in Silverton, July 23, 1938, the first child and only daughter of Art and Marie Steinberger. Her brothers called her Bevvy Buns, a nickname she grew fond of and wore proudly within the family circle as an adult. Bev attended St. Paul’s Elementary School in Silverton, Silverton High School and Marylhurst Co...
2 comments
Read more

Back at it

It's been some time since I've written. My mom died in February, and I haven't had the gumption to write much, other than a couple of feature stories for the paper and the occasional pithy email to a friend. Tonight, sitting in my favorite burger joint with a pile of fries in front of me, I dunk them into a deep pool of ketchup mixed with a hot sauce. That's how Mom liked 'em. My burger? The Spicy Hawaiian, a nod to my 808 connections. It's a brilliant combination of peppers and pineapple, a favorite on the Power Stop menu. I'm sure she'd have loved it, too. There's a bubbly beer with a lime in it. That's not a homage to anything. I just like beer. These past months, I've done little but work, search and apply for jobs. Two rejection letters have landed in my email this week. Search-and-apply has become a futile obsession. It's time for a break, at least until I hear back from all those applications still floating around out there. I am...
Post a Comment
Read more

Goodbye Dan Fogelberg

Saturday started out as just another day to clean the house. Within a short time, however, I found myself on a mission; a mission of arachnid eradication. The spiders, for all their great bug-eating prowess, have a tendency to get a bit out of control in a place where there's no real winter. They're not only everywhere outside, but inside, too. I found webs with giant eight-leggers in corners, on the ceiling, hiding under window shades....everywhere! They were in places I vacuumed just two days before. Since the invasion of the beetles, the spiders have grown enormously fat and happy. So I sucked 'em all up. EEEEEEEEWWWWWW! I was none too keen on removing the vacuum bag. In addition to spider sucking, there was fun with fungi. What did the girl mushroom say to the boy mushroom? Gee your a fun-gi! Unfortunately, the prevailing fungus amongus was not shitakes or portabellos, but mold and mildew. Again.... eeeeeeeeewwwwww! I cleaned the top of the fridge, which was home to a n...
4 comments
Read more