The Sad Fate of Sidonie Canard

    I have been home with a cold for the past three days and now it looks like I will miss church tomorrow as well. I am so grateful for Quentin in that I can just stay home and be sick. We've taken in about 50 package bee orders during the three days I have been home sleeping my cold away. After the first day or so of serious cold as I started to feel a little better, I have taken advantage of the enforced indolence to watch a few more Rootstech videos. I really enjoyed one about getting the most from Ancestry.com. The speaker was telling the story of her nephews' first visit to a cemetery near her home where they have ancestors buried. The youngest child's reaction was "We're sure related to a lot of dead people." That is a serious understatement. Hopefully I will be back in the saddle by Monday evening when I am scheduled to teach yet another beginning beekeeping class.

    I am in the process of making another batch of sour dough bread.  It doesn't take all that much time to prepare the dough, but I do have to plan ahead so that the bread is ready to bake on a day when I will have about a five hour block of time at home. On one hand Peter Reinhart's instructions are a bit complicated for me to remember without referring back to his book. On the other hand the results were so wonderful and the actual time required to do the various steps is pretty minimal. I plan to buy the book eventually. In the meantime I can just keep renewing the book as it comes due. It's not like my recipe for sour dough pancakes or waffles, or my biscuit recipe. Those recipes were pretty easy to commit to memory. The sour dough bread recipe would take half a dozen note cards for all of the instructions.

    We had a very sad experience with our ducks last night.  I had let them out earlier in the day, then fell asleep on the couch upstairs and forgot about the ducks being out.  I woke up at about three in the morning with a need to drink another dose of Niquil in order to breath and fall back asleep. As I was stumbling to the kitchen I heard the ducks quacking and remembered that I had forgot to herd them back into their pen. The quacking wasn't their usual contented, all is right with the world kind of a quack, but a very frantic quacking.  By the time I got outside I had just two ducks and one little pile of feathers.  One female escaped unharmed but I noticed a bit of blood on the drake this morning. I'm assuming he had a close encounter with a coyote so he is very lucky to be alive.  I imagined Jean Luc Canard quacking with a French accent dismissing his own wound as merely a flesh wound as he mourned the loss of his lovely Sidonie Canard.

    I'm sure there is a significant moral here for teenagers who want to stay out late.  My ducks love to spend time outside the pen and were probably quite happy I had neglected to put them back in the pen. While the pen represents a significant restriction on their freedom, it also represents safety. Teenagers have their own kind of "coyotes" who mean them harm and are also somewhat nocturnal. Generally speaking, nothing good happens when teenagers are out late at night.