Nice legs… For a human…

It’s 5pm and the “guests” are here…

I’m in stealth mode right now as I’m feeling a bit under the weather and I really don’t want to deal with them all; so I took a nap for an hour or so with the help of some big Sony ‘whole ear’ headphones and four years of Naval Training which taught me that I could sleep quite nicely on top of a running steam turbine.

I feel like some kind of anthropologist studying a tribe of apes from a blind somewhere… They don’t know I’m here so they’re acting ‘normal’ and that is giving me a lot of insight into the activities of the middle-american ape in its natural environment.

There are 17 of them, 8 adults and 9 children, consisting of three family groups interlinked by a common parental unit. The remaining two adults are rogue males who appear to be attached to one another.

So far the topics of discussion amongst the adults for the last 3 hours have ranged from “what was the best episode of ‘American Idol’” to “what was the best episode of ‘Friends’”… These are serious TV watchers; reflected by their first half hour here of finding all of the TVs and making sure we got local channels. The young appear to be incapable of sustained communication and usually resort to assorted whoops and screeches.

That and these creatures in general are *loud*; really, really loud. I would assume it’s from spending 6-8 years talking over the volumes of their young which, according to my sound pressure meter, have peaked at an ear-shattering 94dB through a wooden door… Just a few points shy of a running jet engine. And of course the young generate all of this noise while rampaging through the nesting area in something akin to a 7.5 Richter earthquake. Just about anything sends the young into spasms of screeching. For example, one seems to have touched another wrongly and this has elicited about an hour of uncontrolled flopping and screaming.

As I don’t want them to know I’m here, I have my door locked. This has prompted each of them to try the door knob at least twice and two of the adult males have tried the main house keys on it in hopes that it would open. It didn’t, and this prompted them to bang on the door handle repeatedly for a while, then go around on the deck and try the sliding glass door a few times.

Right now they are engaged in a dinner ritual. Preceding the feasting three of the adult males sought out the local Wal-Mart hunting ground which was seen on the way to this nesting area. There were a few minutes of elevated hooting and hollering as the adult females attempted to instruct the adult males on how to get to their preferred hunting ground, which seemed to aggravate the males by insinuation that they couldn’t handle it.

It sounds as if the communal dinner ritual has about ended. There have been murmurings of “Super Bowl” from the males over the last hour. I will assume this means the nesting area will become quite a disaster area come Sunday. I should probably make plans to not be here…

That’s all for this missive from the outback of humanity. I’ll continue my observations and post my findings in the morning.