Are birds freaky? Probably not as freaky as y'all are going to think I am after reading this post.

Knock. Knock.  Is anyone here on a Saturday?

I know I said on the Pie facebook page that I wouldn't post every single day and yet here I am.  Posting every single day so far.  Because apparently I have diarrhea of the mouth.  Or fingers.  Whatever.

Let's talk about outdoors, nature, and yard work.  Again?  I am sure you are asking.  And to that I say, "YES."  Even though I told you how much I hate yard work, Ima talk about it some more.  And yes Ima use some of June Gardens' words.  Not because I'm copying her but because after reading her for so long they have become a natural part of my vocabulary and I can't really help myself.  So Ima stampede to ding dang places from time to time, I may heart my own self sometimes, and Ima definitely post photos from the June Gardens School of Photography.  My dad was a professional photographer for 40 years.  I apparently was not interested in those genes on the day those were floating around in the womb.  I'm sure that's how it works.  Who is shocked that I didn't do well in any of my biology classes?

So, yard work.  How I hate thee.  Still.  But do you know what I hate even more?  Wasting a bunch of money.  And I've spent a small fortune buying yard tools and implements, a mower, hoses, and flowers.  My word the flowers.  I've probably spent over $1,000 in the past 2 or 3 months on all of the carp and paying my landscaper co-worker/friend by the hour to help me clean up and beautify my front yard.  JUST MY FRONT YARD.  And it's teeny tiny.  We have not even started on the back yard yet.  And we will not until next year.  Because I'm broke.

But anyway, this is why I was outside at 7:15 am on a Saturday to water all of the blasted flowers we've planted.  We planted over 50 flowers two weekends ago (oh the fun I had that day) and I don't want them to die so I have been watering a lot.  It's supposed to be in the mid 90's today here in Atlanta and as little as I know about gardening, I know you're supposed to water early morning or in the evening and not in the middle of the day.

So I got up early and went out to water.  I'm sort of a large chested person so bras?  Not really an option.  But I thought, "who in the heck is going to be up at 7:15 on a Saturday?" and went outside with no bra.  Do you know who is up in my 'hood?  A whole lot of people.  A whole lot of people who have seen my girls all out of a bra.  Sorry neighbors.  I do live in the 'hood.  Well, I prefer to say it's transitional, but really it's still more 'hood than transitioned.  I live about 3 blocks from a shopping area with a Kroger, Target, Lowe's, Best Buy, Ross, Bed Bath & Beyond, Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, and tons of restaurants, shoe stores, and the nail salon.  You know the one.  The one I had my pedi in that landed me in the ER with an arm broken in 4 places.  Anyway, a lot of people walk to that shopping center at all hours (I am not one of them because I'm too lazy).  Including 7:00 a.m. on Saturdays apparently.  Because I bet 25+ people walked by and saw me and my braless self outside watering.  And I know they saw me because most of them said hello.  My neighbors.  Very friendly to braless women.

So I watered the shasta daisies, 876 day lilies, hydrangeas, asters, butterfly bushes, gerber daisies, gladiolas, irises, petunias, lavendar, rosemary, basil, dahlias, cone flowers, begonias, bleeding hearts, creeping jenny (my favorite plant name ever - it sounds so sinister), begonias, vinca, lantana, roses, and blanket flowers (which are all ones I've bought), and a whole bunch of other stuff I don't even know the names of.  My landscaper friend brought about 30 cuttings from her own yard and planted them so next year when everything is coming up and someone says to me, "that's a gorgeous flower!  What is it?"  I may answer, "I have no idea on God's green earth what it is, " or perhaps make something up and say, "oh that?  Why that's a tuliasterdrangea."  But I should be able to tell you the names of all those things I paid for.

Also, I have a maple tree right in front of my bay window and my cat, Bailey, loves to sit in the window.  I noticed there were about 40 spider webs in the tree, so I grabbed a big stick to pull them out because I'm assuming it's not good to have spider webs engulfing a tree.  So I started waving the stick around in the tree and Bailey?  She freaked the heck out.  Apparently after twelve and a half years of me rescuing her from a sewer pipe, taking her in, caring for her, feeding her, cleaning her poop pit regularly, loving her like mad, spoiling her rotten, wiping up endless hairballs from the floor, and never once hitting her?  She thought I was trying to whack her to death with a stick through a window.  She started hissing at me, then cowering, jumping around, and finally took off running.  And I stood in my front yard with no bra on, a garden hose in one hand, whacking a tree with a giant stick in the other hand, and laughing my fool head off.  My neighbors probably have a mental hospital on stand by for me.

I am an artist/creative type and I like to have art outside too.  I have a giant metal star and haven't hung it yet because I want to repaint it and also because I currently can't even move my shoulder enough to floss my teeth, much less lift my hand over my head to hang stuff on a wall.  But before I repaint it, I needed to clean it a little because it hung outside at my former apartment and was looking a bit, um, filthy.

I washed it and left it on the driveway to dry a bit and then remembered I just bought a hose reel when I bought that effin' smelly compost that is still in my car.  So I went inside to get the garage door opener, walked back to the garage and got the hose reel out, tried to get all of the stickers off of it so I could stick it in the ground.  And really?  There should be a law that manufacturers should only use tags that you can cut off because I spent 20 minutes peeling all of the itsy bitsy pieces of sticky paper that wouldn't come off easily.  Hate.  Add that to my list of hated things. Stickers on stuff I buy.

I finally got the sticky stuff off, walked back up the driveway to the front of the house and discovered that a bird had shat upon my freshly washed star.  The hell?

I looked around for the guilty bird.  Guess what?  I have a lot of birds in my yard.  I started to cuss out the closest bird but then thought, "what if that's not the guilty bird, Beverly?  They are tiny and probably can't hold much self esteem inside them because of their tinyness.  You may ruin an innocent bird's self esteem.  And then you'd be known by the neighborhood birds as SEK.  Self Esteem Killer."

So I rewashed the bird carp off my star.  Stupid nature.

Then I realized my flip flops were soaking wet and slippery so I walked around very, very slowly so that I don't have to go to the ER for a second time and say, "flip flops broke another bone for me."

But while all of this nonsense was going on of neighbors who are fans of large chested braless women, watering 900 plants, sticky paper not coming off my hose reel, my cat acting like a complete idiot and birds defecating on my yard art, I observed something else.

I think it's possible that robins might have sister wives.  Birds may be freaky y'all.

I had a couple of robins build a nest in a tree in my yard a few months ago, they had babies, and they finally took off.  For the past couple of weeks, I've noticed a couple of robins going in and out of the tree a lot.

This morning as I was watering, I saw the robins flying in and out, so I went up under the tree and looked up to see babies being fed.  And then the momma almost took my head off and scared the mess out of me.

But they are using the same nest that babies were born in before.  So I sat on my front porch when I finished watering and started pondering things.

Would a robin couple re-use another robin couple's nest?  That seems kind of gross. I guess birds don't really worry about germs, right?  But it seems gross to me as a human.

Or maybe it's the same baby daddy and that first momma bird is sitting close by saying, "that bastard.  He knocked me up, left me with all of these babies, and then went and knocked up someone else and also?  THAT BITCH STOLE MY NEST."

Or maybe both of the mommas get along and they are in a sister wife situation.

Or can the same robin have babies twice within a few months?

Y'all, what is going on?  Why are all of these baby robins being born in the same nest?  I know I could google it, but if the police ever have to confiscate my laptop and do a forensic test and I'm on the news for something, I don't want them to say, "we did find that she was searching google for 'do birds have sister wives?'" because that would make me sound crazy.

Again, shocking I did so well in biology back in the day......

Here is my front porch where I ponder whether robins have sister wives.  It seems like the kind of porch to sit on without your bra and ponder things like that, right?  Also, my mom took this picture when she was here a couple of weeks ago visiting from Texas which is why it's fairly clear and you can tell it's a porch and not a bedroom which might be an issue had I taken the picture.