Guess what I saw!

Yes, a pheasant! On cty. rd. 1000 e, on the way home from work Thursday night . Not a very bright bird, he was near-oblivious as he almost walked into our path and followed that by almost getting clobbered by the guy coming the other way. I was a bit on the slow side, as my mind did a cartoon double take. "That's a pheasant. HEY, THAT'S A PHEASANT!" followed by "Omigod, Laurie did you see that?" about the time he was walking in front of the next car. Also, a few days back on Wallen I spotted a black squirrel. Scrappy in the meantime, not so lucky. Coming home from a walk last night, he decided to peek in a neighbor's window. You'd think he was going to look at the cat sitting in the window not a foot away; but no, he was evidently casing the joint and paid no mind to the cat, who got up and went to touch noses through the glass with him. By the time the cat had taken the 3 steps necessary, though, Scrappy had apparently satisfied himself with the lay of their living room and moved on.

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The KHL final four began yesterday with a familiar story for Lokomotiv. My boy Vasicek ties the game with 2:45 left to send it into OT. Some 8 minutes later, one of his teammates decided to prevent a goal by knocking the net loose, and Alexi Tsvetkov scored on the ensuing penalty shot to give MVD a 3-2 win in game one. Game two today also went into OT, with Alexander Gallimov tying the match at 1-1 late in the 3rd. But this time, it was Konstantin Rudenko for Lokomotiv with 28 seconds left in the 1st OT for a 2-1 win and a tied series.
In the meanwhile, the match in the east was a back and forth affair, with Ak Bars jumping out 2-0 early only to have Salavat Yulaev come right back to tie; then Dmitri Kazionov got the second of his 2 goals to put Ak Bars back on top. Again the top team in the KHL tied it up at 3-3, but Alexander Ridulov scored inside the last 9 minutes to give Ak Bars the 4-3 lead and eventually the win. But with 18 seconds to go, Ak Bars' Patrick Thoreson gave a check "to the head and neck" and received a game misconduct. That will mean he will miss the next game at least, and Kazan can ill-afford to lose the Swede, who put up 2 assists in the game.