It is a beautiful spring day.  The apple trees are blossoming.  The
tulips have pushed their dirty faces up through the warm soil to bloom,
the daffodils nod their heavy yellow faces in the breeze.  A lone
bumblebee bumbles her way from flower to flower, a deep orange pellet
of pollen tucked snugly beneath two of her six shiny arms and into her
two collection baskets, one on either side.  Science may record that
bumblebees lack the requisite lift-ratio to fly, but she never read that
report.  Off she goes on her morning's collection.  The nectar always
tastes best with a hint of dawn's sweetest dew to it.
 
The ladies have had a b**** of a morning.  First, they had to charge a
six volt battery, and face it, it weight fifteen times what they do.  A
wheelbarrow was involved.  Tractors don't work on twelve, it's a six volt
system so you can't just jump the buggers.  Then, there was the matter of
the nest.  Yes, the nest.  Made of last years dried grass and this years
mud, worked in a robin's beak and lovingly slathered and woven into the
nest.  But c'mon, Mama Robin...did you HAVE to wind it around the pyrex
fuel glass like that?  The one slung beneath the tractor's spine like
it's heart?  The fuel glass...well, it's the easiest way to see if there
is water in the fuel, and then siphon it off through the stop-cock.
 
Not only was the fuel sight buried, there were two beautiful EGGS in that
nest.  Switch and Lily so wanted to eat those little eggs, warmed in the
sun, and smelling so savory to two certain weasels, but no, they dragged
the nest and it's precious cargo to the nearby lilac tree with the
greatest of care while Mama Robin hopped up and down on the phone wire
until the whole thing was bouncing up and down like Galloping Gertie.
(For the youngest among you, Galloping Gertie was the Washington state's
Tacoma-Narrows Bridge.  It was a badly designed suspension bridge.  One
day in the 40's the wind took it, lifted it like a kite, and twisted it
to pieces that fell hundreds of feet into the cold water below.  It was
really bad ju-ju.  But I digress...)
 
Anyway, Mama Robin was mad.  Damn mad.
 
But the eggs are safe, even though there are a few fang holes around the
edge of the nest.  Mama Robin is sitting in it even now, puffed up to her
maximum size, looking like she wants some Excederin.
 
Finally, finally.  The cold starter motor begins to spin.  Farts and
blatts of blue smoke begin to issue forth from the not so quiet exhaust.
The bumblebee makes an abrupt u-turn, and heads for home, and her honey
pots.  Mama Robin begins to glare even more poisonously, if such a thing
is possible.
 
Lily strenuously slips the green and yellow 1966 John Deere tractor into
reverse gear, the clutch is stiff beneath her soft paws.  And as the
tractor begins to back from the driveway and the righteous bucket of
poisonous newsgroup destruction lifts along it's hydraulic frame rails,
Switch the Kit is heard to utter a whooping war cry, just one word that
has come to mean so much to the FML over the weekend.  Just one,
yodeling, "Ya-Hoooooo!"
 
Alexandra in Massachusetts
Thinking deep thoughts about Roy Cohn, and a certain Senator from
Minnesota.
[Posted in FML issue 4138]