When Screws Come Loose, I'm Right There

I love my humble, handy screwdriver. Recently I've used it to tighten:

-the knob on a kettle lid.
-the toilet seat onto the bowl.
-a doorknob-plate onto the door.
-a child's tandem bike attachment on the back of my bike.

I also like Allen wrenches and pliers, but I'm not much good with a hammer.

Thanksgiving Visitors

We have four extra guests at our house for Thanksgiving this year, but they don't take up much space and are light eaters. They do seem to complain quite a bit, but I can't really understand what they're saying.

Even if they might have a bad attitude, all is forgiven because they are so CUTE!

Yes, three baby chicks hatched from a 5th-grade science class incubator. I happened to be in the classroom at the right/wrong time on Wednesday morning as the science teacher was apparently feeling a little anxious about plans for the wee ones. You can't see the 4th chick in this photo--it's a little bitty quail chick. I'll post him soon.


The chicks had been living in a series of "habitats"--boxes decorated to look like farms or forests or meadows, taped together with doorways cut between. We took two boxes, one of which someone had thoughtfully decorated with a jungle theme, complete with pipe-cleaner vines, construction paper trees, acorns dangling from yarn, and photos of wild animals from an old Ranger Rick magazine.

So you've never seen a quail chick? Neither had I.

Bailey the quail is about the size of a cotton ball on toothpicks. Here, he's lurking around near Ronnie, who is likely to trod upon him out of sheer obliviousness.


At least the big chicks don't pick on poor Bailey, who needs them for warmth. He keeps trying to hop up on their backs when they sit down to sleep, or nuzzle under someone's wing.









All four fluffies operate on a random on-off schedule. They'll be pecking around, cheeping and scratching the floor, when suddenly they'll fall silent and nod off for two or three minutes. Then someone will wake up and complain that everyone else is a lazy, boring oaf, and they'll all wake up and do whatever they were doing before.

The chicks usually sit down to sleep, but the quail seems unable to manage the leg trick to make this happen. He'll waver back and forth, eyes closed. When he really sinks into sleep, his head drifts forward until his beak is almost touching the ground.

At one point during the day, someone stuffed an old sock into a Lego unit and put it into the habitat, possibly to serve as a nest. Bailey discovered that if he stood right in front of it, he could lean against it to sleep:

(See how he's up on his tiptoes, as if he fell asleep trying to scramble into bed? Awwww!)