Tuesday, May 26

Again, coughing spasms awakened me several times last night, but I must have finally slept soundly, because I didn't wake up until 8:30 this morning.



As soon as I arrived downstairs, Hubbie plunked the TV remote in my lap. "I can't change the channels," he said. The problem was that the cable company has changed the menu (in anticipation of the digital switch-over, I suppose) so that our TV needed to be programmed to set the clock and find the channels. A lady was on TV giving continuous-loop instructions on how to do this. If a viewer (like foggy-brained me) didn't comprehend it the first time, he or she could wait for the instructions to repeat. Because I wasn't fully awake and alert, it took me several tries to finally get the setup completed, even though the instructions are quite simple.



While I was doing this, Hubbie fired up the grill and cooked a dozen or so hamburgers and turkey burgers that we later stored in the camper freezer for the picnic gathering on Saturday at camp.



When Mother came over a little later, she informed us that one of the cats (one from mama cat's first litter) had been killed on the highway this morning. We don't need all these cats, but I really, really hate it when one of them is killed. That highway out front, though, just eats animals. A couple of days ago, a puppy was hit out there...we don't know who the pup belonged to, but some guy in a truck stopped and picked it up.



As soon as I was ready for the day, Hubbie and I ran errands. First, we went to the home medical office, where I dropped off the greeting cards Mother and I made, to be used for patients in another county, plus a batch of fruit-filled chocolate cookies, to be offered at the "chocolate escape sale" to raise funds for the Relay for Life event. Then we went to a grocery store that had low-sodium chicken broth at 59 cents a can, where we picked up a case, since we use a lot of the broth as a base for soups, gravies, and stir-fries, as well as for flavoring meats.



Then we went to the WDCS to pick up items that the store was out of yesterday...I guess the shelves were picked clean by Memorial Day shoppers. Today the items were restocked. Lastly, we stopped at the barbecue restaurant to pick up a few pounds of meat for the Saturday gathering at the campground. This also went into the camper freezer until needed.



Since it was after twelve when we got back home, we decided to sample the barbecue for lunch. Only problem was, we didn't have any hamburger buns. So Hubbie went down to the corner convenience store and got a package of them. On his way home, he stopped at a roadside market and picked up a quart of strawberries and a bunch of tomatoes. Because the berries were $4 a quart today, he only bought one, though I would have liked to have had more.



I checked on the eagle nest this afternoon, and learned that the close-up camera lens has been, to quote the website's notice, "completely "fowled" by the eaglet." In other words, the baby pooped all over it. So the only remaining view is from high above. From that view, it looks like it's business as usual in the nest, with the mother still patiently keeping vigil, and the baby mostly napping in the shade, and from time-to-time, grooming himself. It appears to be pretty breezy there, because the mother's feathers are ruffling, and I can see treetops gently swaying.



At one point, the male returned to the nest (at least, I presumed it was the male...I can't tell the difference) and relieved the female, who gracefully took flight down over the treetops toward the water. I guess the two share babysitting responsibilities, though I suspect the female gets the lion's share of the duty. Within minutes, the female returned, fish in beak, and began immediately tearing it apart and feeding it to the baby. In the meantime, the male, babysitting duty apparently done, flew away to who knows where to do who knows what.



Later, I did more research on bald eagles and learned that, as I suspected, the female does 90% of the nest duty, but early on the male brings back more food. As the eaglet grows, the female becomes more responsible for "bringing home the bacon," though both are pretty busy at it, since the baby's appetite becomes voracious as he grows (sort of like teenagers, who seem to have hollow legs).



This afternoon, I noticed the eaglet is now able to walk around the nest without falling on his face, though he is still a bit wobbly. He has really grown, too, getting closer to the size of his mother.



Tonight, I discovered that thanks to cable changes today, all the programs I recorded on my DVR have vanished. Later, we got a phone call from the cable company advising us that this would happen. So I went to work figuring out how to record by the new method. I find that while I can click "record" at any show I want, I can't find a menu for conveniently programming future listings. Before, I could program the DVR for a week's worth of shows through a simple menu. Now, I can't see how it can be done except through scanning forward to the desired day and time, which is very time consuming. This is progress?