Birds and ballots

I noticed about a week ago that the little cardinal that flitted around my back yard and sang constantly all day long was absent. It took me a few days to notice his absence and I guess I just thought he was somewhere else for a few days. Then I nticed that there was a cat visiting my back yard; he would scamper away whenever he noticed me watching him. And finally, while mowing the lawn a few days ago, I found scattered blue jay feathers. I put it all together and cursed that damn cat.

I tolerate cats but am not a huge fan, mostly because I am allergic to them and they always like to rub up against me. But now I dislike them all and that orange-and-white cat in particular. I feel like a good friend was murdered. I don't know if the chipmunk has survived the carnage, haven't seen it around either, and the back yard is deathly silent these days.

Today I watched a young male cardinal checking out my back yard from a nearby tree and I hoped he was thinking of moving in. But he came with a companion, a much larger bird of another species (I am not sure what it is). I suspect the young cardinal is hanging out with the bigger bird for protection and I rather got the impression that the big bird was calling the shots. It will be up to him (or her) whether they move in or not. This new cardinal isn't a singer, or at least not today, but it would be nice if he moved in.

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Our provincial election was on Tuesday and I put in over 15 hours as "information officer". In fact, all I did was run around sanitizing after each voter. In my not-so-humble opinion our supervisor did a poor job of organizing our poll and as a result there were lengthy line-ups. There were no breaks, the voters showed up constantly and we had to keep our masks on whenever there was a voter on the premises. That meant no eating or drinking either. By the end of the day I was exhausted and in pain all over.

What makes it worse is that as "information officer" (the supervisor took over my job as information officer and relegated me to sanitizing) I was low man on the totem pole and my opinion did not count. The supervisor was not doing the job of information officer effectively and as a result too many people were waiting in line for half an hour only to be told that they either didn't have the right ID or they were at the wrong poll. He was supposed to catch those folks at the door and redirect them. So it wasted their time as well as the time of all the people lined up behind them. The tasks of registering and screening each voter fell to two people who processed things very slowly while two other people just handed out ballots and sat there doing nothing otherwise. They couldn't step in to help, the supervisor was too busy chatting with voters and doing my job, and I couldn't do anything about it except scurry around with the sanitizer.

After the poll closed we counted ballots and registration cards and the tabs ripped off the ballots. The numbers were all supposed to match up and of course they didn't. So we recounted and recounted and recounted until we finally got it all to match up. At least there was a clear winner. I spoke to one of the other candidates the next day and the scuttlebut is that the winner didn't even want to run but was cajoled into it. So now we have a reluctant MLA who wishes he had said no. The provincial election signs have all been switched to federal election signs and we have another month to go of election campaigning. Only the names of the candidates have changed. It seems the election issues are more or less the same, with similar promises being made.

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I went on a little road trip with a friend the day after the election and we discussed the election results. The Progressive Conservatives won by a landslide, apparently Nova Scotian voters are not happy with the Liberal party that was in power. They did a good job of handling the pandemic, but not much else. Anyway, the PCs focussed on a single issue, health care. My friend said she belonged to a Facebook group about saving provincial health care and after the election the group moderator said she was disbanding the group because the PCs were in power now and they were going to fix everything. We both guffawed. I bet that woman believes in Santa Claus too.

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Between my extreme annoyance at the poll work and losing my lovely singing cardinal to a crappy cat, I was more than ready for a hard paddle on the lake two days later. I visited the young eagle, who was crying plaintively that morning. She stopped when I paddled up to her tree but started in again when I left. Her head and shoulders appear a little greyer than before, I looked that up on the internet and it probably indicates her age as around two years. This is odd since juvenile bald eagles don't usually hang around the nest that long, they are usually off on their own by 6 months of age. Either premature aging or a very immature juvenile.