Death in the Family

Just to let some people know, late Tuesday night my grandfather passed away. He died painlessly in a coma from a long hard struggle with stage 4 throat cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation. He is going to be greatly missed by me and everyone in the family. I will be leaving for home on Friday to celebrate his life with the family. While I am deeply saddened, I am glad that he is no longer suffering any longer. I am deeply thankful that I grew up so close to my grandparents and had the opportunity to get to know them well and see them often. Not everyone has that opportunity and I feel blessed that my grandfather was able to give me so many great memories that I'll cherish for the rest of my life.

Papa, God bless you, thank you, and rest in peace.

I Have a Pet Pigeon?

This morning when I left for work, I noticed a strange sight to my left as I locked the door: an adult Rock Pigeon sitting on the ledge of my screened in porch not more than 2 feet from me. I got up close to it to see if it would fly away and it was obviously intent on staying as it didn't budge as it kept it's eye on me. I thought this was a little strange, but didn't put another thought on it until I came home this evening.

The bird is still here, and it definitely has no intention of leaving. This made me wonder what the heck this bird is doing here. So I began my investigation online. After a while, I think I've figured out what it's doing. It is preparing to nest, though there is no nest yet. The lack of a nest kind of makes me suspicious and I decide to see if this is an adult pigeon or a nearly mature juvenile by looking at its eye color. As I'm checking the eye color, I find something even more curious...it has a leg band. After about 5 minutes of making sure I don't scare it off, I finally am able to make out the entire arm band. The band reads: AU 2007 41903, with the letter 'A' underneath the 2007. I then look up pigeon leg bands and am brought to the site interBUG Homing Pigeon. I learn what the band means and how to read it to learn that the "AU" means that the bird is registered to the American Racing Pigeon Union. After digging around a bit, I finally find the place to report that I found a registered pigeon. After all, someone may own this bird and may want it back, and I certainly don't want a mountain of bird poop on my ledge. So the bird has now been reported. Time will see if I am contacted about the bird, but I'm pretty confident it's going to be here for at least a month if someone doesn't come to pick it up.

So, maybe tomorrow I'll snap a picture and post that as well.