WARNING: If you have an inordinate fear of geese or waterfowl, stop reading and seek help immediately!

A few days ago I blogged about picking up my parents' geese as a party trick in my post: SECRET CHICKENS.
This morning I hand-fed the wild Canada geese and ugly ducks at Ft. McClellan after my Water Works classes were done.  Don't ask me why I get so much satisfaction from feeding waterfowl.  I just do.  I find it EXTREMELY satisfying, especially when a wild bird will take a chance on me and eat right out of my hand. 

I sat in the parking lot with a loaf of cheap bread and the ducks and geese came running when they saw me.  Some of the ducks are the ugliest birds I think I've ever seen.  Poor things have been hit with an ugly stick.  I have no idea what kind they are--if you know, please tell me--they have weird, red, rubbery growths on their heads (some more than others) and they look like a mix of mallard, white duck, and some bizarre Frankenstein duck.  But they like bread. A lot.

Slide Show below...

DISCLAIMER: No geese or ducks were picked up or harmed in today's blog, only shot with a camera.

This is me trying to capture a ghost in the bathroom mirror of my Victorian home.  I was going to make the picture with the shower curtain closed, but then thought about all those movies where there's something BEHIND the curtain and the audience is practically shouting, "OPEN the curtain!" or "Get OUT of the bathroom!"  So I opened the curtain.  Nothing there.  At least not that I could see.  My cat, Ernie, thought there was something to see.  He jumped up on the toilet seat and peered into the tub at SOMETHING.  I got out of the bathroom pronto. 

Why am I looking for ghosts in all the wrong places?

A friend of mine from high school has been posting some fascinating real-life stories about the ghosts in her Kansas home.  One is a creepy shadow man.  Her daughter made a selfie into the bathroom mirror and in the photograph there's the shadow of a man wearing a coat behind her.  The shadow does NOT match the daughter's body shape.  Whether you believe in ghosts or not, her posts about her ghosts are captivating. 

And it got me to thinking, if I knew I had ghosts in my house (and I used to and still might, but that's another story for another day), I'd be terribly self conscious.  Is the ghost watching me apply hemorrhoid cream?  Pop my zits? Wipe my ass?  Or any other number of embarrassingly intimate actions?  Would I care if it did? 

When we used to have a ghost, this potential for spiritual voyeurism didn't even occur to me.  But after seeing my friend's Shadow Man, I'd feel hinky about getting naked in my own house if I thought something like that was sharing my living space.  "Excuse me, Mr. Ghost, but could you please go haunt something else while the hubs and I do the wild thing?"

Note to self: Do not have sex in a haunted hotel room.

Now to add to the creepiness, I didn't capture any ghost or shadowman/woman images in the mirrors tonight, but the ceiling fan in my office did start running---all by itself--after three months of not working.  I didn't even realize it had started up until a huge dust bunny floated down on my face and I went, "What the frell?" and I look up and there's the ceiling fan just spinning merrily overhead.  Eeeee!

On a semi-related note, Moxie's birthday was on Halloween and I more or less forgot about it.  I feel like a bad dog mommy, but then, Moxie doesn't really care.  You can see her reaction below.  Just give her a tennis ball and a soft place to snooze and she's happy.  Happy birthday, old girl!

PS: Sorry Ernie's photo is blurry.  I was trying to take it quickly so that I could then get the hell out of the bathroom.   You know how it goes...

[Bo the Destructor who has the stomach of a goat]

Our dog, Bo, has eaten half of a hot tub. 

A wooden hot tub.

Why he has not perforated his stomach yet I don't know.  It's an animal medical mystery.  Personally, I think he's a goat who was somehow born looking like a dog.  We don't really know what Bo's parents were.  He wandered into our yard the day before Thanksgiving two years ago, thin, dirty, and no collar.  The vet said he was a six month puppy but that was before Bo ate our hot tub. 

He's also eaten our wood privacy fence. 

And there's no way to stop him from eating these things short of locking him in a cage 24/7.  Which would be a pretty cruel thing to do.  Sure, we'd be guaranteed that he wouldn't die from eating weird sh*t, but he'd also be stuck in a cage all the time and that's no way for a dog to live so we're just taking our chances

Check out the photos below where Bo has completely demolished an entire side of the huge hot tub.  All that's left are a couple of gnawed-on boards.  The rest got eaten. 

We find all sorts of weird crap in Bo's crap. Like fabric (he eats furniture and stuffed animals), plastic (ditto), metal (ditto again), and unidentified objects that I really don't care to examine too closely.

The weird thing of it is, he's perfectly healthy.  No constipation, no perforation, no vomiting or pooping blood.  Lots of energy.
Sees the vet regularly and is always given a clean bill of health.

I'm tellin' you, he's a goat in dog's clothing. 

Tod Browning's 1931 DRACULA is certainly a film classic.  Bela Legosi might be the oft parodied Dracula with his creepy hand gestures and thick Hungarian accent, but he's also the Dracula that has been indelibly imprinted on the world's psyche when it comes to the most famous of vampires. 

On the flip side, there's also much to make fun of in this film.  Jump ahead in the video clip to about 1:40 to get a gander at some of Dracula's Transylvanian pets...it's okay, I'll wait for ya...

...Are you going what the f*ck, too?  Armadillos???? In Transylvania???? And in Dracula's castle??? Seriously Tod Browning?  Did you really think the movie-going public would mistake them for giant rats?  You'd have been better off hiring a possum wrangler for that scene.  At least the Virginia opossum looks like a giant rat.  Armadillos look sorta like a mutant rat/kangaroo wearing armor. 

Maybe the possum people were on strike when this movie was filmed.  Maybe Tod Browing told his props people to get him giant Norway rats and someone misread his scribble for Texas armadillo. I mean the words rat and armadillo look so much alike.  Who the heck knows?  It's one of those movie-making mysteries for will forever plague me.

Happy Day of the Dead!

An hour later: okay, a writer friend of mine just told me that Universal Studios used armadillos in this scene because they thoughts rats would be too creepy.

Huh? 

As if a movie about a dead guy who sucks the blood of the living isn't creepy?  And what about vampire bats (which are obviously fake)?  I mean, why stop with substituting armadillos for rats?  Why not pigeons for bats?  Maybe poodles for wolves?  And maybe reindeer to pull Dracula's coach?  Hey, why not just scrap the whole horror movie idea altogether.  Lordy, lordy, lordy.