I sheltered my good friend Waverly from some inclement weather last night and they told me that during a goth phase that they had gone to Whitby in the UK, (for Dracula reasons, natch) and about how one of the favourite local souvenirs is the Whitby Glass Lucky Duck. LOOK AT THESE.
I simply must go there one day and get one. Please let this silly blog do what Bram Stoker never did and go to the places I write about.
Lucy’s mom apparently shot down her daughter’s request to sleep in the same room, so Lucy writes a diary on August 25th about how she feels like shit and needs to do her best to look pretty for Arthur’s visit or whatever. She does recall waking to some scratching at the window and falling back asleep, and now her face is “ghastly pale,” not a rose to be seen.
I guess I can’t give Mina too hard a time about leaving her wife to look after her husband, since her wife has some other people to take care of her and Jonathan is alone, sick, and crazy in a foreign country without any money. But it does unfortunately look like she’s abandoned one for the other.
Our next entry for today, August 30th, is a letter from Lucy to Mina, apparently in reply to the letter Mina sent on August 24th. She sends her well-wishes to Mina and Jonathan and wishes they were in London, being reinvigorated by the strong air like she herself is.
Lucy says “I have an appetite like a cormorant, am full of life, and sleep well.” I didn’t know that cormorants ate more than other birds. We have cormorants in Nova Scotia and I have specific memories of seeing them perched on dock poles over the ocean in Pictou County, where my family is from. I only got to drive by and see their black bodies and red heads. When I looked them up later, I was disappointed that they’re kinda ugly. (I think they were double-crested cormorants, but we also have great cormorants.)
Anyway, Lucy reassures that there’s no more sleepwalking. But:
Arthur says I am getting fat.
And I say I’ll push him down a flight of stairs.
By the way, Arthur is here! And they’re up to all kinds of adventures and arguing over who loves who more. He calls, and so she signs off as “your loving Lucy.” In a post-postscript, she adds that the wedding will be September 28th. So now we have a new date to count down to. Will Lucy make it to her wedding day?
Okay so I told you I’d tell you about my pigeons last time so here we go.
In May or June the weather was nice enough for me to start hanging around in my backyard and I watched a pigeon for a few days as it pulled old pine needles from the gutter of the house and flew it to the other side of the house, where my office faces out. So one of these mornings when I moved from my garden to the office, I spotted the pigeon was bringing those needles to a little metal thing in the alley that my office window looks down. This is the year I discovered r/stupiddovenests so I was curious about what sort of abomination they might have built.
I couldn’t see the nest myself but I mentioned it to my friend Elliott who lived next door just before he was moving. He pulled out the screen of his bathroom window and stuck his head out to see THIS:
Apparently baby pigeons are very pink/yellow when they’re a few days old, so at first I wondered if we were actually looking at pigeons. I took this photo on July 15th. Here’s a bit of montage of their growing up:
July 20:
July 23
July 29:
After these, Elliott moved and we couldn’t spy on them from above anymore, but I could still see them from the alley behind my office. I took this video on my instagram of them learning to fly:
View this post on Instagram
I posted that August 16th, and the birds are gone now. :,) off to live their grownup dove lives. I hope the parents come back and use the nest again next year.