Snails, Geese and other Adventures

Today the doorbell rang and there was Violet's best friend, Red, with a sandwich baggie of snails. Apparently Violet and Red had made arrangements for Violet to adopt some of the baby snails that were growing in Red's fish tank. I think Red bought them on purpose and they had babies. I told them they had to wait for Mr. Incredible to put them in Violet's tank.

When Mr. I got off the phone they put 3 snails in the big tank, and one in Violet's tank with her 2 goldfish, Peanut and Almond. I didn't want to take responsibility. When I was the girls' age we had a infestation of snails in our fish tank. We couldn't get rid of the buggers. When these 4 innocent looking little snails do the same thing, I want no part of it.

The girls didn't believe me when I told them the snails grew to 5 feet tall and ate our cat. Geesh, preteens these days, can't put anything past them.

We saw the geese on our walk tonight. Violet was bouncing around. She hadn't gotten outside enough. So the three of us put on our shoes, grabbed our umbrellas and went to walk through the subdivision. It has rained on and off all day, so we zig zagged a lot in case it started up again, like it is now complete with thunder and lightning.

I'm back, had to run off to close the windows for about the zillionith time today. I'm also now on battery power.

Anyway, there's a pond at the back of our subdivision (like every other subdivision in America), and when we went past it we had to walk in the street. There were 8 adult geese and countless goslings, mostly teenagers. They had taken over the sidewalk and grass near the pond. They were hissing up a storm at us and another family that was out walking. They did not like us. Mr. I. said they were especially hissing at my tie dye colored shirt, but I think they were equal opportunity hissers.

In other news.

We had an e-mail from our Girl Scout council just before Memorial Day. (I don't think I've gotten around to blogging about this, if I did sorry, skip to the end of the post and read backward till you get to the end of this.) We are changing to Little Brownie Bakers for our cookie sale next year. Most of the legacy councils were with ABC, like us, but they opted to go with Little Brownie.

I'm not so upset that we are changing. In fact, I'm kind of excited to try their cookies. Change can be good. I'm game to try it. But I am upset that the e-mail said the decision was made by a "volunteer-staff team". I am on the product sales committee from our legacy council and wasn't asked to participate. Neither were any of my fellow committee members (the e-mails began flying shortly after the e-mail blast went out). Our queries to council about who the volunteers on the "team" were and why we weren't able to participate have gone unanswered. One of my committee friends has been a GS volunteer for over 40 years and has been on the volunteer product sales committee since it was formed. Heck, she was a volunteer when most of us (including council staff) were Brownies making our first s'mores. She's not a happy camper.

It was a real slap in the face not just to have been left of our the decision process but to have found out such major news via an e-mail blast to all parents and volunteers in the new mega-council. If it had just been a staff decision, we would have been disappointed, but to specifically say volunteers were involved is just a slap in the face.

Chalk up another one to mega-councils sticking it to the volunteers. The sad part is that it isn't surprising and I'm sure no one reading this who is involved in Girl Scouting anywhere is shocked. Screwing volunteers has become the new normal.

Guess there isn't any other news, so if you skipped ahead, you just saved yourself some time. The current rain storm seems to have already passed so I'm back to reopen windows. At least I am getting my exercise in!