I love this word so much.
It signifies strength, fortitude, courage and it means you can step off the metaphorical mountain and freefall into the water and easily – very easily – swim to the shore.
Inviolable.
If I had had a daughter I would have called her Viola!
I have just made a difficult decision. I am not going to get the emu chicks after all.
Why? Because after Son came home from milking the cows for our neighbours this morning, he took our three adult emus for a walk and eventually came inside angrily because one had gotten away and it took him ages to get it back with the others into the yard. (Also, I hadn’t told him about the emu chicks).
So, I got my priorities straightened out. Son gets his spinal brace off on Friday and we can do all the things we haven’t been able to do over the last few months, like arrange driving lessons, arrange his driver’s licence, fix up the old car for him – and lots of other things in response to his request the other day that “we spend more time together, Mum, having fun!” How lucky am I to have a teenager who wants my company!
The emu chicks can wait until next year; this year I will concentrate on Son and Anthony and not get any more birds (well maybe just a few hens).
I feel rather relieved!
(Son’s wrath is something to behold, so I don’t want that – hehe!)
Our three (now adult) emus – ‘the Emerys’ – are very tame, however their natural curiosity and wanderlust means that we keep them in a big yard of their own. Many blogposts ago, I described how we lost them for a few days because they wandered onto an adjacent farm. So now, when we let them out of their yard, we don’t let them out of our sight.
It’s not an unusual request for me to ask Son to take the Emerys for a walk. He does so rather reluctantly but he is much better than I am at herding them back into their yard after they have eaten all the roses.
In about three weeks I will get my emu chicks. I have decided to get two and this time I am getting them newly hatched so that the imprinting thing will happen and they won’t wander off as our three adult emus like to do. Here are some photos from the internet:
Instead of calling the new ones ‘Emery’ I am going to give them different names. Any ideas?
Here are two of the Emerys we lost to that rotten fox:
And (yes I know I’ve put this picture up before), my very first Emery, also killed by that fox.
In Western Australia we have big signs wherever roadworks are being done in case people go the wrong way. This can be useful, but it can also be a bit confusing.
It’s a little bit like that with blogging because you get really curious to go down a certain blog path, you like what you are reading/seeing, but you are also uncertain of where exactly you are and sometimes the historical context of where you are, in that person’s blog, takes quite a bit of time, quite a bit of deciphering.
With my own blog, Wings and things, it’s obviously the same experience for new readers or followers because, of course, the latest post is always the most recent and, unless people have time to go back, they might not ‘get it’ that there are two different-but-same stories running parallel. The Love story is about the past but everything else is about the present.
As many of you already know, my husband has chronic Parkinson’s disease and terminal prostate cancer and is now in a nursing lodge close by. Our 18-year-old son recently had major spinal surgery. And me – I love birds!
I can’t keep up with the many blogs I am interested in, no matter how hard I try, but one thing I like to do is to go back and read the very beginnings of those blogs which is what I hope people will do with mine. It’s not that there is a wrong or a right way necessarily, but going back can be fantastic!
Oh yeah, and if you go back, you will find that I don’t usually do 4 posts in the day. I cheated today with the pics – hehe!
For those of you who don’t know the emu back-story, here it is in brief. We got our first little emu as a chick and he bonded with the other babies – ducks, geese and turkeys, and with me. I named him Emery. I bought him from a hobby farmer who said all of Emery’s brothers and sisters had been bought and he was lonely.
I subsequently bought a couple more emu chicks from another hobby farmer, so we had three little Emerys. But, as they were, like all of the other birds, free-ranging, I lost all three to a fox in one afternoon, when they wandered off into a back paddock. It’s difficult to describe the horror I felt at the time.
Fast forward a bit: I then found a proper emu farmer who was willing to bring me six adolescent emus and, yes, I named them all ‘Emery’. It took me awhile to tame them, and we have lost three – one on arrival, one to digestive problems and another to paralysis (again, all of this was horrifying for me), but the remaining three are wonderfully happy and settled.
Several of my previous posts include various emu stories and other pictures, but the exciting news now is that, because the proper emu farmer ‘owes’ me a chick, I will soon be getting another baby Emery and this time I will be much more careful.
Emery 1: Is Julie okay?
Emery 2: Shut up, Emery 1, and eat your dinner – I’ve saved you the crusts
Emery 3: Those funny little chicks out there yesterday were rather cute weren’t they!
Emery 2: (munching) Well they’re gone now aren’t they?
Emery 1: Oh, poor Julie
Emery 2: They were just guinnea fowl – get over it!
Emery 3: You really are callous aren’t you and you’re the female of this group!
Emery 2: I am not a female!
Emery 1: Actually, I think Emery 3 might be right, Emery 2 – you could be a female
Emery 2: Hell, I hope not!
Angelina: Where’s Julie?
Bubble: I’m not sure. I think she’s out there somewhere looking for those chicks.
Angelina: I hope she finds them! I’ve been looking for them too, you know, just out of curiosity.
Brad: I hate to say this, Angie, but I think a fox might have taken them.
Angelina: If so, I think we better gather around the back door and make sure Julie is okay.
Brad: Good idea – let’s go – let’s cheer her up!
Due to the interest shown in doudou’s bird sculptures I herewith copy/paste a more direct link to her site http://doudoubirds.com/
I have never met doudou in person, so have only gotten to know her via the blogosphere but, ever since she made these emus for me, I have followed her work and her blog. Sorry, doudou, if you didn’t want the attention!
I think you can see from the pictures of my very first emu (Emery, who got killed by a fox, which devastated all of us), that doudou’s sculptures do a pretty good job of replicating the real thing.
Yesterday I accidentally flooded a corner of the emu yard. I’d left the hose running in one of their troughs and gone off searching for Tapper (the duck who keeps disappearing and returning from nowhere). When I came back, this is what I found!
The Emerys were in a state of absolute bliss!
jmgoyder 