so i’m sitting here in my jammies on this frigid thursday morning, and it’s four degrees outside with a wind chill of -10, and it’s just gonna be cold, cold, cold for a while now. but hey, spring is in sight! well, not exactly in sight, i don’t see it across the frozen water, but we know it’s gonna happen!
and this is something i keep forgetting to mention, with all the postings about our warm warm warm trip to florida – GUS THE GOOSE is back! gus, you probably remember, came to the yard last may, with a piece of fishing line wrapped around his ankle, which looked horrible. friends planned to come out and help cut off the line, but by the time it was going to take place, his foot had fallen off! horrible. we kept feeding him all summer, and he managed to get around, but sometime in the fall he disappeared and we assumed that something had eaten him.
but he came back! somebody told me he must have migrated, so i can’t imagine why the goose decided that it’d be nice and warm in january, but we’re glad to see him again. he still looks pretty good, but even more unsteady on his foot.
he comes to the front of the house a lot….
…and sometimes he’s in the back yard.
the problem, of course, is that there are frequently lots of geese around, especially when we feed gus. so we spend quite a bit of time going out and scaring off the interlopers, without disturbing gus. and then there are the imposters – plenty of time there are geese lying around in the yard, or maybe just one lone goose, but is it gus? we can kind of tell when it’s him, but kind of not. cause he’s a goose, and they kind of all look like geese.
so what with the interlopers and the imposters, we are pretty busy with the goose situation.
sometimes we can tell that it’s gus because he’s here with his four children, one of whom has a limp. but lots of times these two particular interlopers try to mix in with the family, and then it’s a little challenging to root them out and scare them away.
yesterday somebody asked me if gus is tame, which made me laugh. he might like us if we’d known him since he was a gosling, but he doesn’t really care much for us. he always hisses when we bring his food out to him, but he usually doesn’t hobble to far away, and eagerly struggles right back to gobble it up when we back away.
things will be easier for him when the weather is warmer.
as it will be for all of us!
ok then, i hope your thursday is spent in some tropical paradise gazing out at some big waves,
mrs. february hughes.