Thursday May 26th, 2011

The exercise:

The word of the day is: tame.

With more crappy weather all morning and most of the afternoon, Kat and I spent some time in the greenhouse potting up eggplant and pepper plants. Things calmed down after dinner so we went back out and did some work in the garden but it wasn't exactly warm.

Mine:

Just before lunch today I loaded up the truck with various bits of junk and then early this afternoon I took it to the dump. While I was dropping off the recycling just outside the gates, I spotted maybe five or six marmots hanging about. Up to no good, no doubt.

Anyway, I went in and made my first stop at the concrete station. I started dumping out the blocks that had been taking up space in our yard, when I noticed a couple of the marmots had come over to watch me. Cute, right?

Right. Except these guys are way, way too tame.

One of them came over and stood right where I was throwing pieces of concrete. So I started throwing them a bit more to the right and he went over to check that out.

Those blocks were in the 30 pound ballpark. One in particular was probably closer to 40. In other words, if I hadn't been watching out for this marmot's well being, he would have gone squish.

Come on, little dude. Show at least a little shred of survival instinct. Please.

3 comments:

Greg said...

I imagine that your greenhouse is quite a nice place actually; warm, slightly humid, smelling of growing things and possibly compost. I think a morning of potting pepper plants would be quite therapeutic.
Were you keeping an eye out for your snake, Mr. Wriggles, when you were collecting the junk from the yard? The marmots do sound very cute -- perhaps they're substituting that for survival instinct?

Tame
"Are they tame?" she yelled, scrabbling with her feet to try and climb higher. The shoes, stupid, inappropriate high heels, slipped from her feet and fell to the dogs below. They barked louder.
"Yes!" I called back, stuck on the other side of a river that hadn't been there an hour ago. The rain kept falling, and I and she were both soaked to the skin. "They're just a bit excited!"
"A bit?" With her feet finally free she could climb further into the tree, and the dogs started to calm down.
"Yeah," I called back, wishing I wasn't the bearer of bad news. "They're trying to get away from him, and he's not tame at all."
I pointed, and she saw the alligator crawling from the water towards her tree.

Heather said...

I wanted to do so much more with this, but when Jimmy comes on its time to go to bed.
-----

Steadily, I raised my hand in the air and brought it gently down on the wiggling child's wild hair. "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" he yelled with each stroke as if I were beating him over the head.

"If you held still it wouldn't pull," I said, fatigue filling my voice.

He continued to wiggle, throwing up a hand to block me from continuing to brush that area. "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!" he bellowed again, removing his hand to reveal the now unruly hair that had once been tamed.

"Stand still, will you?" I growled and brought the brush down again. He dodged to the side, causing the brush to rake lightly over his ear.

"You're hurting me!" Glee colored his cheeks. I grabbed the top of his head and turned it so I could see his eyes back to the mirror.

"Don't move on pain of death." My voice was low and measured, heavy with seriousness. I gripped the brush tighter and brushed his hair, relieved he was acting the role of a statue. With a last flourish, I laid the brush down and placed my hands on his shoulders. "What do you think?"

He brushed a hand over the strict lines the brush had made in his damp hair. "It's perfect," he responded, a happy color in his cheeks again.

Marc said...

Greg - it is quite nice, but much too small. We're planning on building a much larger one this fall.

Also: the snake does not have a name, much less that one.

I could picture that scene quite clearly. The poor woman!

Heather - well, you can always carry on with it once you get some sleep :)

I can relate to this, seeing as I tried to tame my own curly hair for much of my life. Things are much easier now that I just let it be curly :P