Screaming contest and a day full of pears

Imagine this. I go to open up the gate to move from my back yard to my front yard and as I unlatch it I see a small spider scurry across the locking pin by my hand. "Oh, a spider." I think, "I hope he's eating those nasty OH MY HEAVENS!!! WHAT THE HECK IS THAT!!!!!" As the gate swings open a black something falls right past my hand headed for my feet. I jump back and scream like a little girl - not a sexist remark. My little girl can really holler - and jump back a good ten feet. Tigger, who was in the back yard with me, sees me take the gold medal for standing long jump while emitting 100 decibels of high pitched surprise reacts the way he always does in those situations. By emitting 120 decibels of high pitched, pure, unadulterated terror while covering his ears. The something in question is itself emitting about 90 decibels of ultra-high pitched annoyance because this something was a bat. We had some long, violent storms move through on Friday night and I figure that the flying mouse crawled up into our gate for shelter. When I opened the gate is knocked him loose and he ended up on my lawn. My first thought on seeing that it's a bat was, "Oh, a bat. That's good." But it was followed closely by "Bats carry decease and I need to make sure Tigger doesn't have a chance to touch it." So I hollered at Tigger to get back. I needed have worried because he was so spooked that he had locked up. Hands on his ears, elbows out, mouth open, voice somewhere between the volume of the space shuttle launch and a 1 ton bomb, body quivering as he tried to will sight and sounds to cease. I got him in the house and he was able to calm down. In the end I got the bat on the end of the shovel and put it in a box. I figured that I would put the box somewhere out of the way so the neighbor's cats couldn't get at it. But I guess it heard me muttering about the cats because as I was looking for a suitable place it jumped up and flew off. When I went back inside and told the kids that the bat had flown off they told me that they had named him Jerry and Tigger informed me that Jerry was "Really freaky!!"

The rest of the day was spend canning pears. We put up 17 quarts of pears off of our tree. I'm worried that they may not have all been ripe, but we can still use them in smoothies and other cooked dishes and they should be fine. We're trying to decide what to do with our peaches because the tree is almost breaking in half with all the fruit on it. The fruit is bigger this year than last year and we are really excited. Brigham City is known for it's peaches and even has a holiday for it. After have very, very minimal success with our garden we're excited to have fruit.