Day 28, Year 7: The Bird War
Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Weather: Overcast and Rainy with Wind, High Temp in the Upper 50’s
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts

We spent our morning continuing our war with the birds. Putting up the strings of plastic flags last night worked. Yeah! So we won last night’s battle. There was no new poo on the deck this morning, only what was deposited from the time I cleaned yesterday morning until we put up the flags last night. So we know the flags work when it is windy. We’ll have to wait for a calm time to see if they work as a deterrent then. But still I had to hose down the canvas and the deck once again to clean off yesterday’s mess. Then Mark went up the mast to take down the wind speed indicator before the birds destroy it again as they did in South Africa. It is an expensive item to replace and we don’t want to have to do this again. After removing the indicator, Mark then installed the Bird-B-Gone spiky things to further deter our fine feathered friends. Unfortunately, we underestimated the number of these that we needed, so we purchased more today and will install those in the morning. We are making progress in our bird war and we have to thank Heather and Jed for encouraging us to actively pursue this issue before the plastic cover goes over Windbird tomorrow. Between the fluttering flags and the spiky things, I think we have a winning combination.

In addition to the bird war, we are also fighting the war to figure out Mark’s health issues. He received the results of more lab reports today that indicate that he definitely has some source of internal bleeding. If it is coming from the gastro-intestinal side of things he will find that out on Monday. But we are also trying to pursue the idea that the problem could be from some sort of parasite picked up in our third world travels. Mass General has a division that deals with this, but we don’t know how to get a referral. So one of tomorrow’s tasks will be figuring that out.

When Heather and Jed came home from work this evening, they brought home a repaired violin. This is a half-size violin that was first Heather’s and then Justin’s. Sam now claims it and he was so excited to get the repaired violin and new bow. Sam played and Jonah sang. The songs were Twinkle, Twinkle and the ABC Song, so we need to work on the repertoire, but still it was delightful to watch our budding musicians.

111206 Day 28 Cape Cod, USA–Sam Plays Violin