Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Feral Fowl and Pool Fun

This morning we had a substitute Water Aerobics teacher - the wonderful Sandra is in Maui on vacation and we sure miss her. The woman was very cute and fun, but didn't really hold everyone's attention, so the conversations wandered even more than usual. Jerry said I should explain on my blog that Not-Lucille (Beverly, that is) reminded her family of Lucille Ball when she was younger, which made it even funnier that the teacher kept calling her the wrong name. Then Carol (I think) said she bet I only told stories on my blog that made me look good. So, of course, Barbara (who you might remember is my "girl-crush") says, "I'll bet you never wrote about the time I nearly ran off the road laughing at you mistaking a horse for a donkey". Which, of course, I had admitted here. (If it's grey, I thought it was a Donkey. Evidently Donkeys are a little more complex.) She went on to tell everyone how I also thought these sheep were young buffalo. (So, you can see why I like her so well. Plus, all the time she is making fun of me, she is giving me this cat type look that just cracks me up.) (She has mesmerizing eyes!) OK, my point, and I do have one, is that everyone kept coming up with more outrageous stories, most of them involving animals in the wild until the woman with the angelic face who has been married for more than 30 years to a Marine (bundle of surprises every time she opens her mouth) tells me that there are feral Emus running around the country side around Tulsa. Huh? And she knows this because she (up until 2 years ago) worked on a cattle ranch and the wild Emus would come out of nowhere and scare the cows. The reason there are all these feral Emus is that the best snake oil salesman in America sold all these rancher on the idea of raising Emus just like cattle - except it is way more difficult to ranch an emu than a cow. Who Knew? So these ranchers just abandoned the Emus, but the Emus turned out not to actually need Purina Emu Chow, and lived fine on all the native food freely available in the wild. And found each other and multiplied. Good (Emu) Times!

7 comments:

  1. I knew about farming emus - there is no body part that doesn't have a use, apparently. Had no idea about feral emus, though! Good on them for learning to survive...wonder if they are a hazard in any way?

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  2. Hi Beryl, I looked to find where to sign up to follow your blog but could not find the place. Am I overlooking it?

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  3. Hi Shelley! I actually read your comment yesterday, but waited until I could ask the people in the pool what they knew. I got some cute stories! Amy, the woman who first told me about them, said that she had a rancher who got all his cows rounded up to move to another pasture, and a group of Emus came out of nowhere and charged all the cows. He had to round them up all over again. Someone else, who lives in a really rural area (I think it's called Lake Skiatook) had to avoid hitting one on the road.

    Oh Sanda, How sweet of you to want to follow me! I am not the best at the blog business. When I want to follow someone, I go to Blogger Dashboard (which is part of Blogger) and go to the "Blogs I Follow" and add the address of the blog I want to follow. I just looked and found a Follow heading at the top of my blog on the left. But that heading might not show up for everyone. On some blogs there are buttons to push, but I never figured out if that does the same thing as what I am already doing. I took all but a couple of those cookies to the people at the pool at the Y and they loved them.

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  4. As if skunks and deer weren't enough of a nuisance!

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  5. And coyotoes and armadillos! I love this place!

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  6. Hey, I found the follow heading at the top and I'm now following your blog. I am so new at this blogging business and cannot yet do everything I need to!

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  7. Thank you, Sanda! Always something new to learn with computer stuff - and luckily I have kids to help me figure most of it out. But none of them blog, so I have had a hard time with some of it. Figuring out how to follow is the worst. I think there are all kinds of different ways to do it, too.

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