Except that when we saw the Halloween-ish thing in a bone catalog (a magazine The Beneficiary gets related to HER old job) , we had to have it because we immediately knew what we were going to do with it.
First a bit of backstory:
Our grandkids (and now great-grandkid) come to our place and explore everything. This is due to the fact that The Beneficiary and I tend to be radically eclectic, and there are always new things to find on shelves, out in the yard, on the patio, or whatever. Motorcycles, tools, wood and nails to hammer together, skulls and lizards and snakes and bugs to chase, new sculptures, old sculptures, (and clay to make sculptures), jewels to find (literally -- The Beneficiary is teaching them to wash out sapphires from bags of gravel she gets), plants to plant, flowers turning up randomly, old toys, new toys, wheels, and rolling-stuff. Invariably at some point one or more of them will come running in with some mystery they've found.
For example, one of the granddaughters found a perfectly preserved crawdad exoskeleton out under the deck which she still keeps in her room. A couple of months ago, the youngest grandson scored a perfect, impossibly blue feather. (Their parents are perhaps less enthusiastic than they are about these finds, which they always being home with them).
It seems three or four of them were doing something on the porch and saw a bird land in the lawn and begin hunting bugs -- and about 3 seconds later a right fair-sized hawk power-dived it and took it home for lunch. They said it looked like the smaller bird exploded, leaving a spurt of blood and a pile of down and feathers. A perfect blue one of which the youngest now has in HIS room.
In short, they love coming to our place to explore the shelves and sheds and yard, as there's always something new or that they hadn't noticed before.
A favorite is the French drain that runs from front to back on the property which is responsible for moving water from places we don't want it out into the field behind us. The exit of the drain looks like this:
The grandkids spend some time at this occasional running pond (sometimes bone dry, but still) looking at the animal tracks (birds, raccoons, coyotes, lizards, frogs, cats, whoknowswhatelse), so we decided to give them something else to find. Do you see it? Here:
Yeah, it's a piranha skeleton. Plastic, but still damned realistic, especially half-buried in the mud as it it was trying to make its way upstream into the drain -- I wonder which of them will find it first? Or if they never do, who will, and what will they make of this weirdness?
Classify this one as "Just Amusing Myself".
How fun for them! You'll have to let us know what happens.
ReplyDeleteI will -- but it's one of those "slow burn" projects that may happen in a couple of days or six months or a year or never -- setting up something like that is the fun part, even if they never find it... Y'know, it's jolly jokers like me who planted all them dinosaur bones a thousand or so years ago. Who knew that it would take this long for all them dumb scientists to "discover" them and decide the world's billions of years old, instead it being made in 4004 BC. On a Tuesday. About tea-time. Which EVERYONE (except them smart-assed scientists) knows.
DeleteBest grandparents ever. I'm hoping to be the weird grampa but I'm not really that weird. (Well, I did wear garters and a miniskirt to a party last week, but that was a seasonal thing. I just have to remember to throw shit like that out within the next decade or so.) The other grampa and I had a great conversation at the baby shower dinner about the Fourier Transform so maybe we're just weird enough. Anyway, yeah, them evolutionists thinkin we're descended from monkeys. Now THAT'S some aspiration for ya.
ReplyDeleteAh, we're all that weird once we sort out what entertains grandkids. Because grandkids and great-grandkids are pretty weird in the first place, and that's not even considering the out-of-body experience one has once it really settles in that you're old enough to have any...
DeleteYeah, old enough, it's interesting. Well, not to you or anyone else, but I find it interesting that five to ten years ago I was trying to dog around amongst wimmin ten, twenty and more years younger than me, and thaks to the hot girlfriend having a little (only a little) bit of "success", and everyone in the community, we were all friends and there was no creepiness about it -- and now, even though we all got older and their percentage of my age is higher, they're all too young now. Of course, that whole playtime universe dissipated anyway. But it's a blast being with someone my own age again, just for the shared cultural references if nothing else. And hopefully soon I'll see and hold a real live actual baby-like descendant yet I do not expect it to make me feel "old". Just, I dunno, whatever I am already, only more so.
DeleteI do look forward to dancing with toddlers but that's a few years off.