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]