Project Purge started...and temporarily suspended due to avian interference
We started ripping apart the house a bit yesterday in the afternoon. I ended up taking Rhiannon over by my mom's to hang out while my mom put up her tree and got a call from Chris saying he'd moved a cabinet in the basement that probably hadn't been moved for upwards of 25 years and found a live bird behind it which promptly started flying all around. And did my dad fish or anything, because he wanted a net to try to catch it with.
By the time I got back to the house and Chris had come back from a sporting goods store, net in hand, the bird had apparently found a cozy nook to bed down in for the night because nary a peep, rustle, flutter, or scratch did we hear from him for the rest of the night, which we spent down in the basement excavating boxes and boxes of stuff.
The low point of the evening came when I started going through some boxes of old school papers that I had been keeping. It was like peeling back the layers of time in my psyche, and all this crap came bubbling up. I'll have to write about it later because I came to some useful conclusions, but I had a couple hours there where I started to feel really down and self-sabotaging. I mean, out of all the papers I produced in high school and junior high, this fairly random sampling of stuff I'd mostly just thrown into these boxes had every hot-button issue that I've been ranting about for the past few years preserved for posterity, right in a row...boom, boom, boom. It was uncanny. More later. Maybe.
This morning while I was getting ready to head out to my harp teacher's place for a lesson, I went downstairs and opened the door to the utility room, to find the bird flying around quite busily, bumping against the windows and everything, trying to find a way out. I spent about 20 minutes before I left trying to get him with the net, and almost hit him a few times. I think with some practice with wielding the net and familiarizing myself with the way the bird moved, I probably would have eventually got him, but I had to leave.
Chris spent some time trying to get him while I was gone and couldn't. And after a while he had to give up completely on trying to get anything done in the basement because the bird's flying around started to aggravate him. When I got home, we eventually decided to just lock the cats away, open up one of the outside doors upstairs, and try to herd him outside. After a lot of swearing and arguing about the best way to accomplish this, we got him out.
Turns out it was a starling.
Oh, and Tuck and Meij-no, the Great Clawed Outdoor Hunters? Useless. This morning Meij-no seemed mildly interested to see why I was peering furtively into the utility room, but after seeing the bird, left, apparently bored. For a while he was actually locked down there with the bird because he'd been sitting down on a pile of laundry while it flitted around and Chris tried to get some work done, and Chris just left and closed the door. Meij-no did nothing...not that I'd really /want/ him to catch the bird or anything, but it was pretty pathetic.
Tuck was even more pathetic. He came down to see what all the fuss was about this morning and apparently got freaked out when he saw the bird and spent the rest of the day traumatizing himself by repeatedly getting himself stuck in various small spaces for long periods of time and crying piteously.
My lesson was good, though. M and I talked more about the proper swing for reels and did some philosophizing about the possible roots of musical technique and interpretation in the psyche on both an individual and collective/ethnic scale. Now, if I can just manage to get some practice in this week, I think I'll be golden.
By the time I got back to the house and Chris had come back from a sporting goods store, net in hand, the bird had apparently found a cozy nook to bed down in for the night because nary a peep, rustle, flutter, or scratch did we hear from him for the rest of the night, which we spent down in the basement excavating boxes and boxes of stuff.
The low point of the evening came when I started going through some boxes of old school papers that I had been keeping. It was like peeling back the layers of time in my psyche, and all this crap came bubbling up. I'll have to write about it later because I came to some useful conclusions, but I had a couple hours there where I started to feel really down and self-sabotaging. I mean, out of all the papers I produced in high school and junior high, this fairly random sampling of stuff I'd mostly just thrown into these boxes had every hot-button issue that I've been ranting about for the past few years preserved for posterity, right in a row...boom, boom, boom. It was uncanny. More later. Maybe.
This morning while I was getting ready to head out to my harp teacher's place for a lesson, I went downstairs and opened the door to the utility room, to find the bird flying around quite busily, bumping against the windows and everything, trying to find a way out. I spent about 20 minutes before I left trying to get him with the net, and almost hit him a few times. I think with some practice with wielding the net and familiarizing myself with the way the bird moved, I probably would have eventually got him, but I had to leave.
Chris spent some time trying to get him while I was gone and couldn't. And after a while he had to give up completely on trying to get anything done in the basement because the bird's flying around started to aggravate him. When I got home, we eventually decided to just lock the cats away, open up one of the outside doors upstairs, and try to herd him outside. After a lot of swearing and arguing about the best way to accomplish this, we got him out.
Turns out it was a starling.
Oh, and Tuck and Meij-no, the Great Clawed Outdoor Hunters? Useless. This morning Meij-no seemed mildly interested to see why I was peering furtively into the utility room, but after seeing the bird, left, apparently bored. For a while he was actually locked down there with the bird because he'd been sitting down on a pile of laundry while it flitted around and Chris tried to get some work done, and Chris just left and closed the door. Meij-no did nothing...not that I'd really /want/ him to catch the bird or anything, but it was pretty pathetic.
Tuck was even more pathetic. He came down to see what all the fuss was about this morning and apparently got freaked out when he saw the bird and spent the rest of the day traumatizing himself by repeatedly getting himself stuck in various small spaces for long periods of time and crying piteously.
My lesson was good, though. M and I talked more about the proper swing for reels and did some philosophizing about the possible roots of musical technique and interpretation in the psyche on both an individual and collective/ethnic scale. Now, if I can just manage to get some practice in this week, I think I'll be golden.