You thought I’d forgotten all about Macro Monday, didn’t you? I bet you hoped I had! Tee hee.

Well, here I am back again with Puzzle No. 23, and just look at it! Pretty, huh? Now this isn’t part of an object, this is the whole thing, although to be fair, there is another bit that belongs with it. I suppose what I mean is, I haven’t cropped a part of the picture so you only see a slice of something. When I took the photo, that’s what I saw through the viewfinder.

It’s something .. mmm … well, it was inside the house, and mostly, it’s found inside houses, but it does go out and about. Although … when it comes back, something is usually missing. Well, isn’t that always the way? Actually, I took this one to America with me, and all of it came back.

What else can I tell you? Well, some people use it, and some don’t. Some people never do this with it, if they do use it. Certainly, if they do take it out, it very seldom all comes back.

There. Clear as mud!

As usual, I’ll pop back Tuesday evening (UK time) with the solution, in the form of a picture link added to the bottom of this post, and as usual, I probably won’t answer comments till then, so I don’t give it away to latecomers.

Good luck! It doesn’t look too difficult to me, but what do I know?

Well, it seems I do know things sometimes, after all! And the answer is here.

Quite a few of you guessed .. if not absolutely correctly, at least close enough for me to say you’re right! So who’s right? Well, that would be Jama, Sistertex, Don’t Bug Me and Sheri, with Carletta, Roan, Granny Grimble, Colleen, and Lisa’sChaos being so close I’m gonna give it to them as well. In fact anyone who said anything about any kind of gel or small pot/lid can give themselves a pat on the back! Well done all of you!

See you next week?

Now, what on earth has caused Sid to look so interested, and why is he behind a barrier?

Well, I’ll tell you. OH was outside mowing the grass and halfway through he came in.

OH: ‘There’s a suicidal pigeon out there!’

Me: ‘There is?”

OH: ‘Yes! It’s just walking around on the patio. It didn’t even fly away when I got to within about a foot of it with the lawnmower!’

Me: ‘Really?’

And I got up to see. I already had my suspicions, and it turned out that I was right. Our little visitor was a very tired and hungry racing pigeon.

I put out some grain and an old dog dish with water in it, and the poor thing was soon pecking happily around my feet.

Sid isn’t really what you’d call a ‘prey-driven’ dog, but there’s no point in pushing your luck, is there? So OH propped one of Sid’s beds in the doorway so he wouldn’t let curiosity get the better of him, and in fact he was as good as gold. Later, when we ate lunch outside at the patio table, Sid curled up at our feet and the pigeon came back down to potter about picking up the odd seed from between the slabs. He watched it potter, and when it wandered out of sight he got up and turned around to look at it, but I told him no, and he lay right back down again.

I expect the pigeon will sleep on the garage roof, pop in for breakfast tomorrow morning, and then make its way home. It won’t win this race, but maybe next time, huh?

So, if you ever see a very tame pigeon with a couple of rings on its legs with numbers on them (and it’s not injured or in danger from predators) just give it some food and water, and it’ll rest up and then be on its way. If it’s injured or in an unsafe place, and if you can catch it*, jot down the colours of the rings and the numbers/letters, and let the Royal Pigeon Racing Association know. There’s a ‘Report a stray’ button on the home page. Most pigeon fanciers care deeply about their birds and are always very happy to know what’s happened to a lost bird. That’s if you’re in the UK, of course, but I’m willing to bet the US and other countries have their own Racing Pigeon Association too, which you’ll probably find in a Google search.

* You can pop it in a cardboard box and put something on top to keep the flaps shut, or if you have one, a cat carrier.

My Blogfriend Baino of Baino’s Banter has this thing going most weeks called the Friday Fuckwit. I hope she doesn’t mind me borrowing her theme. This week she has a Friday Barkwit, which is most entertaining, so when you’ve finished here, pop on over and and have a read!

Anyway, I hope I’m not too late to join in this week with a Friday Fuckwit of my own. There it is, up there.

We live in a village with a fairly busy main road. It shouldn’t be as busy as it is, since they’ve put in a bypass and installed ‘traffic calming’, but it is. In fact there are some idiots about who think it’s rather jolly fun to race through the ‘traffic calming’ bollards and see if they can beat the car coming in the opposite direction, or simply use them as some kind of road of death slalom. I know there’s no traffic in the picture, but trust me, it can get hairy. Luckily, we have been provided with footpaths on each side of the road with nice wide grass verges, so we don’t actually take our lives in our hands when we take Sid for a walk of an evening.

Or do we?

See that Jeep up there? Or rather, those two Jeeps? I’ve lightened the picture a bit so you can. Yep, one is nicely parked on the verge, but the other is right slap bang over the middle of the footpath. Gee, thanks, people.

I don’t often discuss my personal ailments on this blog, but I have fibromyalgia, one damaged shoulder and one knee waiting for surgery (one shoulder has been done already), and my ankle ligaments have given way more often than I care to remember, dumping me unceremoniously on the ground at such times in a haze of blue air (which comes from all the swearing, for those who don’t know the expression ‘to turn the air blue’) so the last thing I need, particularly at dusk, is to have to squeeze between two cars on sloping and uneven grass, or worse yet, tippy-toe my way along the kerb, while trying to make sure neither Sid nor I fall into the road. And look! All that empty grass behind the cars!

Behind me as I took this picture was a BMW, also parked on the footpath, but across it, not along it, and part-way inside the owner’s drive, so it was a little easier to get past. That one’s always there. Every. Single. Night.

And I can just hear both of those drivers (if they should even think about it at all) saying to themselves: ‘It’s OK, nobody minds!’.

Well, guess what, guys? Some of us do!

Not everyone finds insects beautiful, I know. But I do, and anyway, for Friday Finding Beauty, I like to make things difficult for myself, so I don’t usually post pictures of beautiful things, but little stories of beautiful events, or, in this case, little slices of life that show beauty in some way.

You see, what happened was this. May is the month for cockchafers (in fact, one of their other names is ‘May Bug’) and this year was a particularly good one for them. I did a post about the first one that flew into the house, but then as one after another turned up in the lounge, it became a little old hat. More than that, it became very sad, since we could hear them buzzing and clattering about the house in distress, but we couldn’t always find them to release them and they’d turn up dead a couple of days later.

So my heart sank a little when OH called me to say that another one had flown in and was making a racket in the conservatory, but I quickly located him on the windowsill underneath our big standard lamp.

(Multiple image)

This one had managed to flip himself onto his back, which is often a death sentence for these big, bumbling, clumsy beetles, since they can seldom right themselves on a hard shiny surface, but for him, it was a lifesaver. It meant that I could easily pick him up and take him to the door, where …

He walked up to the tip of my fingers, spread his wings and took off into the night.

Isn’t freedom beautiful?

Look for more Friday Finding Beauty at Claudia’s blog, Dipity Road.