A Boiled Frog

This morning Starling looked at the cattails growing outside the boys' bedroom window and said, "Mom? Are those ... corndogs?" (I don't know why everyone stops at tomatoes and peaches when they might be bottling corndogs for the winter ahead—like we will be.)

In other news, I realized today that I am the poor, foolish frog gently boiling in a pot of slow-heating water. (You know what I’m talking about.) And my own husband, it must be told, is the one ever turning up the temperature! …

As you already know, Mike’s two, large, dewlap, Toulouse geese, James and Helen, now reside at the farm. (Resulting in me regularly needing to drive the kids over to get the geese watered and fed.) (While I was there on Friday, I noticed a bunch of large vehicles towards the back of the alfalfa field near the canal. I didn’t know what they were doing, but it made me nervous since, occasionally, the canal people [and who even are the canal people?] come along to clear it out and, in the process, dump mud here and there, break off enormous chunks of willow, and make an overall, careless mess of everything.) Also, Mike recently told me of a great money-making opportunity for our kids: trapping beavers for the $50 bounty on their heads! (Beavers dam up the canals around here and cause all sorts of problems.) “But,” I asked (my doubt undisguised), “would they have to be dead?”. “Oh they’d definitely have to be dead,” Mike responded. (Which caused me to wonder if he had ever even met our children.)

Anyway, today Mike and I were talking on the phone, and I mentioned that it was probably time to start doing some sort of thinking about what to get the kids for Christmas.

“We could give them goats,” Mike suggested.

“But then I’d just have to be driving to the farm to feed goats all day!” I protested.

“Well, …” he pointed out, “if you’re already there for the geese …" 

And before I could interject much of anything he continued on: "And then you may as well check a few beaver traps." 

And, sensing he'd already gone too far he figured he may as well throw in: "And while you’re at it, yell a few swear words at anyone you see messing up my canal.”

Hahahah. Oh my husband. I should have jumped out of that pot long ago (the first time he came home with a chicken probably). 

At least there is this: 

I had been worrying that all these fogs I've been loving might not stretch as far east as the farm, so Mike texted me these after driving past the farm on his way to work the other morning. Yes. At least there is that. Not a bad place for a frog to boil I suppose.