Of Water and Worms

“A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.” - Bill Vaughn

It finally stopped raining just before dark yesterday. Thank HEAVENS. I hadn't been out at all over the weekend, but ventured out yesterday to go to the library. It was an adventure.

You see, from my house, there are two routes to get to the library (unless I want to go WAY around, which I almost thought I was going to have to do yesterday). One of those routes floods if there is high humidity, so they typically detour us around to the other one.

Yesterday, someone idiot hit-and-run truck driver tried to make the turn off a side road onto the alternate route, was too big and sheared a utility pole, causing it to fall and causing the road to close for pretty much the entire day. So we had to drive through the lake instead.

It's times like that I wish I was driving my 4Runner again -- I would have liked just a little more clearance. DD thought it was an adventure.

Hopefully now that the rain has stopped, things will settle down a bit. But I hope they catch the guy who hit the pole.

======================

DD had a science experiment assigned to her last fall: an invertebrate zoo. I told her we were NOT keeping an invertebrate zoo all winter ... they suggested spiders and other bugs that, while I don't hate them, I have little desire to keep as pets.

We compromised on earthworms. The problem was, of course, that our ground freezes here so if we kept worms, we'd have to keep them ALL winter. So, we prepared a huge glass jar, wrapped it with a dark towel (that could be lifted to see the worms and worm tracks) and studied up on how to keep the critters alive. And then, after every rainstorm in October, we gathered worms from the road.

The strangest occurrence happened when we used the last of our firewood in February. The bottom pieces had frozen to the driveway pavement and I had to hit them with the maul to loosen them -- and underneath one of them were a PILE of worms! I was so surprised to find them there, alive under the frozen wood. Thankfully we had a new house for them and added them to our jar.

Every couple of weeks when I made dog food, I minced up bits of vegetables to add to the jar for their food, and about every month or so, I microwaved an egg shell and crushed it (worms need calcium... who knew?). Every couple of months, I dumped out the dirt into a huge bowl and we sifted through it to count the worms.

All things considered, we did very well. We lost a few worms, but gained several babies (wow are they TINY). And now that the ground is thawing (and once it's not quite so muddy) we're going to put them out into our garden.

DD is sad. She wants to keep them inside forever.

What's the strangest thing you ever raised?

===================

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct. It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors. If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs. As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human. And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It's Its There Their They're Quiz

Actually, bad grammar drives me a little crazy...

=======================