Bambi, hugs, and geese

There has not been a great deal of excitement here recently. We’re still having a good time at the Furnace, routinely making citizens arrests of Day Use Area abusers; your loiterers, litter bugs, loud talkers, speeders, furnace climbers, restricted area violators and we’ve issued a few warnings for PDA’s (public displays of affection) and nudity. I tend to go light on that. We even have a couple of drug busts and one noise pollution arrest. All for a better America and in the name of senior citizens everywhere. Well……….. Wishful thinking anyway. Kat said I’m just full of ‘BS’.

We’ve been down to see my old neighborhood friend and ‘Best Man’ Doug and his wife Karen. They’re about 30 minutes or so away in Marietta. We spent a day around their pool and then had a nice dinner last Saturday. We’ll be going down again one more time over the ‘Fourth’ before we get outt’a here!

We bought a new version of the Family Tree Maker software and we’re both working on our family lineage. I’ve had to reload mine from hard copy after losing our laptop hard drive some months ago. So that’s all coming along and the new software has lots of neat and new ‘bells and whistles’.

There is a new fawn in the area. This little deer isn’t much bigger than a minute, maybe the size of a small German Shepard. Nothing like Bambi, it has stubby little legs and a husky body and seems as quick, sure footed, and as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. But I haven’t been able to get a picture yet. The little guy is camera shy.

Our homeless friends Steve and Patricia have not been around lately. They are a ‘down on their luck’ couple who spend lots of time here during the day and up to closing time. Then its load up their picnic stuff and head out to spend the night over on some county property on the other side of the mountain. They have a nice pick-up and are well read and enjoyable to talk to. It seems they did well until he lost his job sometime ago. Now he has the beginnings of Parkinson’s and she just lost her dishwashing job and was looking for another. We think she may have got something up the road in Rome. They are just a couple of months away from Social Security and Kat encouraged them to make an appointment and check out their eligibility including the disability issue. Supposedly they did and will starting getting checks in September? Anyway, Kat’s all worried about them and wants to go to McDonalds tonight where they spend some time and check on them. Soooo……….probably??

Our other regular customers are still coming about three or four times a week. This is an older mother and her disadvantaged son. Is that the Politically Correct thing to say? He is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. But he is a nice and harmless guy. He has to give me hugs when he sees me. This began to happen after the aforementioned Steve and his (not Steve but the disadvantaged son) mother and I had a conversation about the current political situation and I referred to our current crop of legislators as ‘535’ plus a courtroom full of morons and buffoons. They agreed and I was upset and obviously needed a ‘hug’. His mother, and by default, he, go to Shelter A and sit for hours and collect little fossils that are in the gravel by that shelter. I ask what they were doing one time and she said she’s collecting fossils for her kids, by the jar full. I was puzzled enough by that, that I never got around to the why?? Just one of those things that I really didn’t need to know. Yesterday he was waiting for me with open arms in the parking lot outside the restroom as I rode by on my bike. He’s kind of leery of Kat though. I think he understands he won’t be hugging her.

We do meet lots of real regular people too. Hikers, bikers, joggers, walkers, picnickers, sightseers, and just plain folk. But this wasn’t about that.

Most recently we had some young women drop off and abandon four young Canada geese in the park. As geese go they would probably be teenagers, who didn’t even know they were geese. As eggs they had been stolen and then raised by the girls who dropped them off. No geese to train them or imprint on. So the first two people they see here are Patricia and Kat. Guess who they kept trying to follow. We weren’t sure if they would make it through the night and were hoping they would not find out where we lived. They did not and the next morning when I rode my bike through the area, I thought they were gone, maybe with the other geese down at the river, or maybe even something worse. So I’m riding through the park and notice some movement out of the corner of my eye, look back and see one of the geese trying to catch me doing a young goose kind of a running, hopping, flying, goose-two- step kind of a thing, which was really pretty funny. The poor guy must have been desperate. I went back and looked down the steps (see picture) to the water and found the other three. We left a bit later, and the geese, by themselves again, started following Debbie, the cleaning lady, when she showed up. As morning wore on it became apparent that two of them were not doing well. We later found out they had been previously injured. Anyway we were trying to get them down to the river to the other geese but had no means of transport. I have a rule against geese in our car so that was not an option. They were under a picnic table, crapping all over and I rousted them out and started them after Kat who had started down the 200 yards (+-) to the river. I’m thinking, if we can get them that far, I’ll throw them in, and they’ll float down to the other geese and “viola”, problem solved. Wrong answer! The two healthy ones follow Kat OK, but I’m stuck with the other two who are not doing well. I carried them a ways but that doesn’t work when they flop around and don’t want to be carried, even if they’re not totally healthy, and you don’t want to be covered in goose crap. So I left them with Debbie and went to see how Kat was doing. She had gotten lost on the way and I straightened her and her two geese out and we got them to the water. So I started throwing geese in and when I got to the count of 8 I realized they were coming back faster than I could throw them in. This was my first real clue that this plan, in addition to being tough to execute, was a real bad plan or more likely just a complete failure. So back to the picnic area and the other geese. Now we have four geese again and they’re all pretty fagged. We left for a while with the geese resting and crapping under the picnic table much to the delight of Debbie. This called for a call to the Rangers. So Kat calls and leaves a report and we ignore the situation for a while. In the afternoon Kat thinks she sees one of the girls who dropped them off drive into the park and she goes to check. I meandered down just a bit later not quite fully involved in this fiasco and happen to run into our 12 year old Boy Scout/Ranger, Stephan. Actually he just looks 12. He asked me to give him the rundown before he takes any official action, because like most people now, they don’t want to take official action. The girl had shown up and I think he didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news or anything else. So I say I’ll check it out and let him know where we stand when he comes back. By now Steve and Patricia are there and the geese are still fagged so we give them water and talk it over. I finally have to break the bad news. The geese can not stay here and if they do they will be destroyed. This is bad news to Patricia who starts moaning but it does get the girl owners attention who says she’ll let her friend know and they’ll try to come back and get them. As an end to this Goose Rodeo, they did! That day! So it wasn’t a bad ending like you thought it might be, and the goose crap is even gone. Stephen, the Ranger, by the way, did not show up. But to be fair, most of the Rangers we have worked with would have.