West Virginia wonderings: Random Page....questions, rants, photos and one very loud bird

It's been raining kittens and puppies today. Notice I didn't say cats and dogs? Well, it's not been raining real hard, just a steady, medium hard rain, so it's only rates at the "kittens and puppies" level. Which brings me to my first set of "Teri's Questions that are Just Dying for an Answer".

Why do we say it's raining "cats and dogs" when it rains hard? Has any of us actually witnessed cats and dogs falling from the sky? Wouldn't it at least make the 6 o'clock news if cats and dogs began falling from the sky to splatter on the asphalt? (sorry for the graphic mental image, but let's face it, if animals began falling from the sky it WOULD make a real mess.)

You know the old saying about opening an umbrella in the house being bad luck? Did that start because someone actually opened an umbrella in the house and then began having horrible luck, or was it something as simple as opening the umbrella and then trying to get out of the door that was the bad luck?

Why is it that birds always seem to take a bath in mud-puddles WHILE it's still raining? Is it that they figure "We're already wet, so we might as well be clean" or is it just some type of weird bird behavior that we, as mere humans, will never understand?

Okay now, so much for the first set of questions.....on to the rant! LOL (for those of you who haven't read this blog before, this is where I bitch about things that I have no control over. The only good thing about it is that if I bitch about it I feel that I have a small amount of control....and I, being an oldest child and a type-A personality, NEED that sense of control!)

I'm sick of rain!! (pretty much a sad little rant isn't it?) Actually, I 'm sick of mud....I can put up with the rain, it's not that bad, actually it makes everything seem fresher and cleaner......but the MUD???? The mud just defeats the whole entire idea of Mother Nature washing the hills and valleys with fresh clean water. Usually when you wash something with "fresh, clean water" you don't turn around and dip it in muddy gunk. But that is what happens during this time of year.

It's the month of May. We almost always have rain in May....I mean, this is West Virginia and that equates rain 3 months out of 12, so I don't really mind the rain. It's the fact that the rain turns the usually non-threatening West Virginia dirt into horrifying, skin staining, clothes ruining, shoe sucking red and yellow West Virginia slime. ( the red or yellow part depends on what part of West Virginia you are in at the time)

This horrific sludge that we jokingly refer to as mud has been responsible for some of the worse personal disasters known to woman-kind. Here are a few examples:

West Virginia mud can and will suck the heel off of a $90 pair of stilettos at the very first opportunity! Not only will the mud suck the heel off of ONE of the shoes, yes, it's always only one shoe, it will encase your entire foot in a mixture of cold slime and rough, sharp edged gravel and sand, easily ruining your $20 nylons!

West Virginia mud can and will embed itself into your skin. If you're really unlucky, you will slip and fall or even wreck your four-wheeler and slide along the ground for 5 feet, and be permanently tattooed with a large, reddish-brown swatch of good old West Virginia mud. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the fact that the slime will also carry with it minute pieces of stone, sand and grit that will take years to work out of your body.

West Virginia mud can and will turn your bouncy, fun loving white dog into a mere shadow of itself. He will be permanently stained the color of baby crap and no amount of scrubbing and bathing will ever make his white coat sparkle and shine again. All of the other dogs in the neighborhood will laugh and point at him, make jokes at his expense and never chose him for the neighborhood doggie games. He will become an insecure, quivering, self-loathing excuse of a pet.

Okay, enough of that! LOL

I have a couple of photos to share today. Someone told me where a Hawk was nesting, so I have been taking photos of the Hawk and it's nest. Below are several photos of Momma Hawk sitting on her nest, trying to keep her eggs warm in the wonderful 40 degree weather we've been having lately.