A new threat to individual liberty.

Morning is always a little strange, for one thing it happens so early in the day.  And it comes so close to sleeping that people are not always wide awake, and things can take on a surrealistic edge.  Coffee can help, but only a little.  It is still our job to muscle through the weirdness and get to evening, which is the sanest part of the day.

Everything was going somewhat well, for a Monday morning, but as I was getting some water from the water cooler, up on the fourth floor, (home of the 4th floor people, by the way, talk about a little odd, but that is another tale) and noticed a white pigeon, or dove. Birds sometimes sit next to our windows, maybe it is for the warmth, maybe they like the smell of coffee (I make very good coffee), maybe they just are curious about what we are doing, normally they fly off, if you look at them too long,  But, this was am all white pigeon, or dove, and this one had a tag on his right leg, and kind of looked at me a little crossly, and I think he flipped me off, but I am not sure, they have no fingers.

Then I remembered reading about a plan during World War II to use bats to carry little incendiary devices to burn buildings down, I don't remember exactly which side was thinking about doing this, but it didn't work out very well.  They said bats were very difficult to aim, and that is probably true.  More likely though, they couldn't get the bats to pick up the small fire bombs, and nobody wanted to pick up the bats and tie on the apparatus, (who can blame them?) because bats are so creepy, almost little flying rats  And some people still think bats and vampires are related somehow (plus, I saw a movie one time where bats ate people, maybe they saw it too).  So, they just used planes to drop great big bombs, and that seemed to work pretty well, and the bats were happy about it, too.

Then it hit me, maybe this was no ordinary pigeon, or dove (though we are all grateful it was not a napalm armed bat, we voted on that during the morning meeting, and it was unanimous).  Maybe this was an NSA pigeon (or dove, is there really a difference?) spying on the water cooler discussions.  Sure, they are supposed to cut back on the electronic eavesdropping, but what about good, old fashioned, feet on the ground, or fourth floor window sill espionage.

"Would you mind repeating that?"

Really, looking back, there was a squirrel that seemed a little suspicious last night.  Hanging around while I was grilling dinner.  Maybe it was just my imagination, though.  You know how things never look quite right when you are tired.  Either way, I am going to exercise a little more caution around the Life Explained Guard Dog from now on.

"Could you please speak into the squeaky toy?"