Baby ducks, puppies, & things lost in the lake.

During our latest trip to the lake cottage, I found a tiny baby duck trying to keep himself afloat right next to our boathouse. Of course, I couldn't leave him in that deep water, so I scooped him up in my hands. "Just what we need," said my husband, and of course, he's right. (The inn is full, as we keep saying to one another.)

But what do you do with a tiny baby duck? I brought him into the house and put him in a wooden birdcage. I tried to make him a soft little nest with some old dish towels. Poor little duck didn't need the towels and the birdcage, he needed his mama. I didn't have an eye-dropper to feed him, and neither did our next-door neighbor. I tried soaking a piece of bread in milk, but the duckling didn't want any part of that.

We happened to see two adult ducks in the water near our pier, so I put the baby back into the water and fed the adult ducks some bread pieces, hoping that they'd get close enough to the duckling and want to adopt it. Not a chance.... all they wanted was the bread. My husband got the fishing net out and scooped up the baby duck. Then we did what we thought was best... he walked over to the boat ramp and put the duckling into the shallow water there. At least he would have a better chance, not being in the deep water, and having the grass and reeds to hide in.

The next morning, I went out to our boat dock to check, and there was a tiny duckling, identical to the first one, only this second one was dead... smashed inbetween the wood planks of the dock, most likely by the waves from the rainstorm that passed through the night before. I seriously doubt this was the same duckling... no way could he have gotten from the boat ramp back to our dock. Hopefully, the first baby duck is swimming happily around in the high grass around the boat ramp. But I'm not going over there to check.

As for the puppies..... we had gone into town to do grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. On the way out, there was a young teenaged boy standing near the back of his pickup truck... and in the flatbed of the truck were eight puppies. Half of them were black labs, half were golden labs... not purebreds, but a wonderful mix. All of the puppies were happy and friendly and of course heart-breakingly cute. Both my husband and I found our favorites in the back of that truck, but as quickly as we did that, we quickly came to our senses and got away from that truck and got into our car and drove back to our cottage without looking back.

No way can we get another puppy. Our eleven-year-old dog Gracie would have a fit of jealousy, and besides, we couldn't even have gotten home with a puppy in the car, added to the three cat crates that we have now, plus Gracie taking up half of the back seat. No puppies. No baby ducks. No baby-anything. Jeez.... we're not even looking for baby animals and they always seem to find us.

Things lost in the lake......... that's where my husband's glasses are right now-- in the bottom of the lake, near our boathouse and pier, where they fell yesterday afternoon. He tried to get them out with the heavy magnets at the end of a rope, but that didn't work. (That method worked just fine when he dropped some tools down into the water last month.)

Our across-the-cove neighbor saw my husband with the bright yellow rope and the magnets and asked what he was doing. We explained about the glasses, and the neighbor offered to help with his own method. Within minutes, he was in his canoe and rowing across to our side of the wide cove, armed with a long bamboo pole with a rake attached to the end of it... attached with silver duct tape. (The universal fix-all.... duct tape.)

The neighbor quickly realized that our side of the cove was much deeper than his side of the cove, and he rowed his canoe back to his side to get another long-handled tool to add to the length of his eyeglass-rescue contraption. Back he came, with a snake-catching-fork attached (with duct tape) added to the rake and bamboo pole. He started to tell us some of his snake-catching stories, but his wife quickly told him not to entertain us with "snake tales" at that particular moment.

Try as they might, they just couldn't find the glasses... not with the magnets, not with the long snakefork/bamboo/rake pole. The neighbor told us that the bottom of the lake must be covered with people's glasses, which didn't exactly make my husband feel any better.

No Scrabble game that night, no cards, no dominoes. Although, had we played, I surely would have won at all three, given my husband's eyeglass-less condition. In the morning, I called our eye doctor's office back at home, and told them about the lost glasses and asked if they could fax or eMail his eye prescription up to an eye doctor at the lake. That normally could be done easily, except my husband's prescription can't be made up "in under an hour," as most prescriptions can. They'd need to send them out, most likely into Houston, and that could take some time. In the meanwhile, he wasn't able to see unless something was less than twelve inches in front of him.

Our eye doctor came through for us, however... she found an optometrist right in the lake area who could give my husband a set of contacts that closely matched his prescription. And they'd give them to him for free, being that it would be a "trial set," to be worn for just two weeks while a permanent set was being made. Perfect solution.... so I drove us into town and the "trial" contacts worked just fine until we got back into town to our own eye doctor's office.

One baby duck trying to stay afloat. Another baby duck smashed against the pier. Puppies in the back of a hot pickup truck. Eyeglasses at the bottom of the lake. Stuff just happens... even in Mayberry.