Let’s Cheer Each Other Up

It’s sunny outside here. It’s the lovely SeattleTammy’s birthday, and the French are celebrating Bastille Day. Just about a damn perfect day. Well, except for that Middle East situation.

The Four Most Overpaid White House Staffers is something that is making me smile at the moment. I am quite stunned that y’all missed this one… Or, is it just that it is way too easy a target to make fun of.

Yesterday, walking on the UCB campus, I looked up to see a hawk, flying with a dove (ok, a pigeon) in it’s talons. The pigeon struggled free and fell from the sky, spinning like a WW-I Sopwith Camel, gales of feathers in its wake, and plopped at my feet with a loud, well, “plop.” Amazingly, it picked itself up, walked it off, and scuttled to the safety of a shrub.

True story.

Let’s hope the obvious metaphor holds up.

–monad

It seems that South Park is once again free to make fun of Scientology.

…and in related news, the movie-going public finally seems to realize that the whole Mission Impossible premise with its “Impossible Missions Force” is really quite silly.

Thanks, Mo! That was helpful.

My kid lied to me about something, but he felt really bad and fessed up. And it looks like my beans are going to come back from where the deer ate them down to the ground. And my new coffee machine makes really great coffee.

Had some wonderful scallops and shrimp in a lemon mustard sauce for dinner tonight. And the Tigers are 31 games above .500. That’s not just good news, it’s a miracle.

Shorebird migration is in full swing. Passerines will be on their way soon (oh you lucky east/gulf coast people!) and soon after that, the raptor migration hits its stride (finds its thermal). Every day my neighborhood robins, juncos and towhees wake me with a song. The mockingbird takes its time, but really comes through when he feels like it.

Oh, and Yosemite is less than 200 miles if I get really depressed and need emergency therapy.

Dee–32! Carlos Guillen, walk off HR bottom of the 9th.

I wouldn’t quite consider it good news, but I swear I heard a Bush puppe…spokesperson straightfacedly complain that the US media was only focus(s?)ing on the rise in violence in Iraq’s 3 most populated provinces. So 3 cheers for the underreported tranquillity in the unpopulated areas of Iraq!

i showered this morning, and all of my hair did not fall out. this means i am not cursed.

and a mitch hedburg paraphrase: i figured out a roundabout way of finding out if i have aids. i called my friend and said “hey do you know anyone with aids?” and he said ‘no’.

ohhright.

T

Sorry we’ll miss you, hedera. Though I’m not sure what charms Lake Chelan has that I don’t. .

The ants are gone from my house and I get to go to San Francisco at the beginning of next month. The ants are gone from my house! Hooray!

Vive la France!

White ibises are wandering around the nearby pasture, along with a contingent of sandhill cranes (loudest birds I’ve ever heard - love the racket) and one whooper. Rescued our resident gopher tortoise (we just call ‘em gophers) from a hogwire fence in which he’d managed to wedge him(her?)self. Have eschewed news for a couple of days, except for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, so my sanity is still basically intact. Spent a few moments pretending Bush and Cheney are merely figments of my imagination, and that people with a clue are actually in charge of our gummint.

I’m with Cooper on the lawsuit - drip, drip, drip.

Cooper, all you need to do to enjoy Yosemite is get away from the immediate area of the Village, Yosemite Falls and Curry Village. The high country is most perfect of all. The burn area in early June may be one of the most delightful hikes you’ll take in your life, and yet I’ve never encountered more than 6 people an hour on that trail.

I have three simple rules for enjoying travel that work exceptionally well for allowing you to enjoy an uncrowded experience. As long as the spot meets the following criteria, you are pretty much guaranteed that you will find few people there, and most of those will be locals or non-tourist travellers:

1) More than 100 meters from the nearest parking area.

2) More than 100 meters from the nearest shopping (”shopping” vs. local stores - i.e., recreational buying, not the stuff of daily life).

3) Anyplace that can only be accessed by walking uphill.

In addition, before 9 am, you pretty much have the world to yourself. I’m a morning person, so this works great for me. I’m sure a night person could suggest the equivalent evening cutoff time.

“retrograde”, that is.

Ginny, alternately, when the Rapture doesn’t happen, maybe some of them will be prepared to think rationally rather than waiting for pie in the sky.

Naaah. Scratch that. I’ll go with your scenario; it’s more likely.

While Brazil has become self-sufficient energy-wise using, among other things, sugar cane ethanol, it is unlikely the U.S. can repeat.

But on the plus side, I’m seeing Widespread Panic tonight.

Forsooth! You know not of what (which?) you speak, ginny! Anchovies are not of the Devil, they are just misunderstood. Like so many other great things in life, they are an acquired taste (beer, wine, kim-chee . . .). Frozen pizza- now that’s of the devil.

Send those anchovies over here, please! But not the big, boney ones, just the little ones.

The farmers’ markets are open here in the sweltering northeast corner.

There hasn’t been any flooding in Connecticut all week.

Some butterflies showed up today at my butterfly bush. I was starting to get worried about them.

I’m not broke yet. (But my second job, which was only temp to begin with, is ending, so I need to find either another supplemental job or, preferably, a full-time job–but not in a cube farm–that can pay the bills.)

A lonely girl in New Orleans received a magazine in the mail for the first time in 11 months!!!! Mail today–trash pickup next week–who knows? Also-I made delicious curry chicken salad.

p.s. As I was watching the monarchs–or something that looks a lot like a monarch–feed at the butterfly bush today, along came a female hummingbird! I knew they were around here, but this was only my second sighting in 20+ years in this house.

I am happy with just about everything in my immediate life vicinity–love my dog, my friends, my mum, my neighborhood, my work (not always my job, but no real complaints), I have one more year of being officially young (29), reading a great novel written by an author with lots more so I don’t even feel bad finishing it, the fans are working surprisingly well in the apartment, found a pair of jeans that fits for $1.99! (and I am a “little person” so this is not an easy feat any price), the whole Tiger miracle, I have no real enemies or conflicts at the moment I can think of. Which is (among a million other reasons) why the state of the world is so frustrating. Everything is going right and I can’t even enjoy it because I’m so upset/angry/sad about politics so much of the time. Just you wait: there’ll be a liberal president, world peace, and global cooperation the second I develop a painful hip disorder and my rent goes up.

Dale, such is life. I just got back from a dinner with my wife’s Sunday School class. We’re all in our fifties and all we talked about on our end of the table were bad knees, breast cancer and heart catheters. Oh yeah, and ungrateful kids.

I do have one complaint on this positive thoughts, good karma Saturday - why don’t koozies fit both beer cans and bottles? I keep lifting by the bottle neck and losing the koozie. What’s with this anyway? Aren’t we an advanced civilization, at least technically? Surely we can figure this one out.

Mo, chicken salad and raisins? No man, white grapes - cut in half. Sorry about the glasses. With computer chip technology being so advanced, cheap, and minature these days, I’ve wanted the eyeglass frame cartel to start putting in little circuits that could programmed to bark like your favorite childhood dog when you clapped your hands or whistled. At least you could find your glasses if they were in within earshot. You could download the “bark” from the internet - like ringtones. This same website could download a barcode with your home address that could be printed out on a sticker & affixed to your frames. Then if you leave the glasses in a restaurant or hotel room, they could be scanned, boxed, and shipped back to you by UPS or FedEx, collect, of course, but you’d have them back in a day or so and definitely cheaper than another pair of glasses.

I want to know how Sharon knew it was a female hummingbird. I’ve never been able to tell them apart.

OK, siobhan, but the ones in my back yard - none of them appears to have a gorget at first glance, and then the angle shifts and the color blinds you, and then the angle shifts again and it’s all gray-green again. Hummingbirds are so hard to see because not only are they the size of a reasonable leaf, they are also the color of a reasonable leaf.

Actually, because they all look so identical, I don’t really know if we have one or a pair, although I think it’s a pair because we occasionally see them both dive-bombing at the same time. One could be chasing the other, though; they’re very territorial.

There is something essentially male, though, in the way one of them sits on top of the Japanese maple, or on the power wire to the garage, and peers around in a lordly way at his domain. (That would be our back yard.)

i went on a great hike today up in the mountains and enjoyed nature and I saw a snake too. also i must say i am glad about the barbaro news.

Mo,

A gopher tortoise is a tortoise, but we only add the tortoise to prevent confusion. ‘Mongst us locals they are just gophers. As a young child, I was confused the first time I saw the word gopher underneath the picture of a creature with fur instead of a shell. Gophers are plain dusty brownish, unassuming omni-vegetarians who are at one with Florida sand and the diamondbacks who share their holes.

Back from the beach, and the good news is the house didn’t burn down while I was gone. The cats, however, are quite miffed and can’t decide whether to ignore me or stick to my legs like refrigerator magnets.

One last beach note: Last night we had the best thunderstorm I’ve seen there in many years. We watched it build from about 5:30. over the sound and all the way down to Wilmington. Amazing lightning — we turned all the lights off and watched from the comfort of our living room. Then, after the storm had gone out to sea. the lightning would flash in purple streaks back. Pretty exciting stuff.

And, after we went out to say goodbye to the ocean this morning and I was complaining that this was the second year we hadn’t seen any dolphins, there they were — two of them. easily visible from the shore since there wasn’t a speck of wind and the water was like glass. I guess the storm brought them in.

Two weeks just isn’t enough…

Thanks for the link Siobhan. Hedera, put up a “hummer” feeder on the eave just outside a window. You get to see them up close.We usually have 2-5 through the summer, but last fall we had dozens for several weeks. The good news is Little League is finally over, eventhough that means we won’t be going to Williamsport. Maybe now I can get back to the coast and get salty before school starts.

Kevin (our 55kg lab retriever, kinda like a cross between a kitten and a big fluffy bulldozer) is back with us for a while! The vet tells us he had a massive fluid buildup, but with a daily diet of diuretics and heart management medication, we could have him for a few more months. With a bit of luck, he might make it to 6! So I’ve spent the last few days watching the Big Yeller Dog pissing like a trooper a dozen times a day. The most fun was trying to take a urine sample to help with the diagnosis - Kevin has an incredibly shy bladder normally, so I had to sneak up on him as he wandered around the garden looking for a good plant to pee on, with a little sample jar (a clean pickle jar). In the rain. Must have looked like a pervert…

Oh, and I made it to 43. I keep saying the digits are wrong and I’m actually a dyslexic 34.

And (best of all), Bush isn’t my president! Woo-hoo!

Ann, so glad the bosses saw fit to get you to Denmark, even if for a brief time. (And Tammy says hi and thanks to everyone for their good wishes!). I hope to have a couple of pieces of good news to report later this week; just waiting for confirmations.

And Pete, I see your smirk when you say Bush isn’t your President! Lucky stiff.

I tell you, the women here find ways to go to all these fascinating places - Ann to Denmark (top of my list, right after Provence - oh, dee, I’m so glad you’re back from your second adventure in 2 months). Becca - well, you win the prize. Guys, what are we doing wrong here. Nose to the grindstone. Push product out the door - day in & day out. Where do we go for fun and adventure? To Target, on the weekend, to get our cat food on sale. Hardly seem fair.

dee, listen if you really want to get those cats steamed, how about introducing a couple of really cute gray furry kittens. I have been saving two just for you.

Pete IVDL, Happy Birthday, pal. 43, that’s great and Kevin’s up on all fours again. Terrific news! And the part about your neighbors wondering about you, admit it: it’s not the first time, is it?

SeattleDan, now you’ve got me curious.

Ann, if you’re away from city lights at that cottage of yours, go outside one night and look at the sky. It’s amazing what you miss living in civilization.

hmmmmmmmmm……… happy things, huh? Mo, for you, anything.

I taught my 8 yr old about random acts of kindness today. We helped a lady and her German wirehaired pointer whose car (the lady’s, not the dog’s) had broken down in the beastly 98-degree heat.

I let my 2 Terrierists finish eating the nest of squealing pink baby things they’d dug up. This didn’t make *me* happy; however, after determining that most of the damage had already been done, I went far enough away to not hear anything and left the Terrierists to their meal tartar. They were ecstatically happy.

I went for a walk in the soft summer rain.

The horrid neighbor’s house sold yesterday. That created an entire neighborhood of joyful residents.

The 3rd season of Invader Zim is popping up on NickToons. I love GIR.

Katie, aka wisemommy

Katie-
yes they eat other critters- yesterday Bubba was tossin around a big rat. for.a.long.time.

Tony tells the story of Chalupa’s awesomeness:
He got off the Metro bus and rounded the sidewalk, looking at the house, Chalupa on top of the roof, ran down the slope, leaped into mid-air, snatched a House sparrow and landed right in front of him with a ya… whatt’ya want look in her eye and a bird in her mouth.

Our cats are hunters. we need them to protect the house - even if that comes from them peeing on the azalea to deter the rodentia.

Special Extra Bonus Tonight:
the ever-so-jaded 17 year-old son was awed to hear that Mo Rocca actually said Happy B to me (his mother for gawdsake) he might even read these comments!

Mo- thanks for impressing the ungrateful youth.

I will be starting a new job next week. Yay for me! While I will miss working at home, I think it will be good to be doing somesing noo.

And now, without further ado the “Top Ten Teasons Why Working From Home Rules”:

10) My dress code consists of: underwear or no underwear.
9) Ability to download (legally) and watch my favorite trashy t.v. shows off iTunes.
8) I’m finally around to flirt with UPS guy.
7) Shower breaks.
6) Afternoon siestas.
5) I’m saving at least $50 a week by avoiding runs to the local coffee house
4) Sleeping until 8:30, then getting up and going to the gym
3) Everything is work safe!
2) Have I mentioned the hot UPS guy?

…and the number one reason working from home rules:

1) I can wear breathe right nasal strips without shame or fear of scorn

My 24 year old brother has decided to be Annie for Halloween! And people say that young people today don’t plan for the future.

Amy, sheesh, I’m supposed to follow that?

Spent the weekend in Michigan to video tape and photograph the wedding of my nephew. A great kid who will be entering Stanford grad school in engineering this fall. His wife, a really cute and sweet red head, will be doing the same. I got to spend several days with my children and now 6 grandchildren at Holland MI enjoying the dunes and glorious beaches of Lake Michigan and wondering what happened to the city I was born in and how did it become so cool?

I’m sure that we can all be thankful that Suzie is pregnant. How can the world not be better with another Felber in it?

Cooper,
It was only last summer that on my daily trip to the pond, that I fed the fish, took of my clothes and dove in. Came out, toweled off, and put my cloths back on and looked for my glasses. Couldn’t find them. I must have knocked them off when I picked up my towel, or kicked them in when I jumped in. I then spent the next 2 hours padding around the dock with my feet to find the damn things. I drove back to the cabin using brail and found a goofy pair of old glasses. The next day I got my mask (with prescription lenses) and snorkel, and scoured the area around the dock until I was convinced that it wasn’t there. Then I had to deal with the impossible. I had dived in with my glasses still on. Knowing that couldn’t have happened, but what the hell, I started to check the area about 15 feet from the dock, and sure enough, there they were.
God dammed dog. I have no idea how she could have done that but it sure couldn’t have been me.

(I’ve made very sure that she hasn’t been able to do that again by being very careful to know where the glasses are EVERY time I go in now).

Hey, be nice to crows. West Nile is killing them in huge numbers. Corvids are cool and they need a little help right now.

Katie- when last we spoke-
nest of squealing pink baby things….

skunks??? aw jeebus.

and Amy… my sympathies.

This feel good thread took a turn for the worse.

we’ve had fluctuations in birds also, we miss our family of Scrub Jays, our neighbor Jackie said he was in their territory also, but he hasn’t seen them this year.

Hedera, numbers of crows and ravens have been increasing in the urban parts of the bay area for a while now, and have really boomed in the past 10-15 years. I’ve heard various explanations, but the one most frequently put forward is that they are somewhat wary creatures, so when we humans first started expanding our range in this area, the corvids moved away. Now that we’ve been here for 100 years, they’ve figured out how to co-exist with us and have moved back in to exploit the resources we provide (e.g., dumpsters, fast food parking lots, outdoor bowls of dog food).

We have yet to get really slammed with West Nile, the way they have on the east coast and in parts of the midwest. If it does hit us hard, their numbers will probably return to what you remember. (Crow numbers on Christmas Counts dropped by 98% in some eastern locations.)

House finch numbers can fluctuate wildly based on normal cycles, change in neighborhood food sources (the lady up the street with three birdfeeders moved out), or addition of a few new outdoor cats in the area.

Landis, well… size. But, here are a few other field marks to use:

In flight, ravens show a wedge shaped tail, whereas crows have a shorter, fan-shaped tail. Ravens have a much larger bill - it looks to be almost the length of their heads. They often have a shaggy appearance, especially around the legs.

Both species have a variety of calls, but ravens have many more vocalizations. Crows most familiar is the “caw caw caw”; ravens occasionally caw (especially young ones) but more often speak with deeper voices - “gawp, gawp”.

Habitat is also a clue - crows favor open spaces and are more common in agricultural settings. Ravens like open spaces, too, but are found in a wider variety of habitats - deep woods, mountains, beaches, snowy areas. (Ravens are single species recorded on the Christmas Count in Nome, Alaska in many years.)

Googling “crows and ravens” can get you some odd results since a lot of people are into metaphysical aspects of the birds, but Cornell Lab of Ornithology has some good info on corvids including ID and audio.

(And any book by Bernd Heinrich is a good read)

A friend of mine bands birds and showed me the number of each species banded per year. As I recall about 12 crows were banded that year (I don’t remember the exact number but it was very low compared to the others). His words were “Peoples hearts aren’t into crows”.

He also pointed out that if people were birds, few would be smart enough to be crows.

We’re buried here deep into the blog, but I will say here now, because we are so,so,so happy, bless us O great Lobster, and we reserve the right to reannounce it, but a certain Adam Felber will be signing copies of his first novel (Schroedinger’s Ball, Random House paperback) at Jackson Street Books on Saturday September 23rd at 7:00 pm in Seattle, Washington. Hope you can make it, and reserve your copies now!

Ravens say “gawp”? I thought they cried “Nevermore!”

Actually, ravens can learn to mimic human words, and a bird who lived in a wildlife rehab center near here did learn to say “Nevermore”.

Now, going all nerdy again: In the case of “nevermore”, it is mimicry in a more traditional sense - they say it without understanding the meaning of the word, and repeat it because it’s fun; maybe it’s fun to say, or maybe it’s fun to watch the reaction of people hearing it say the word. But they can also say words in context. I have a friend who lives at the edge of open space here, and she puts out food for her local pair of ravens, so they’re pretty comfortable around her. She always greets them with “hello” and was quite surprised a few years ago when the female answered back one day. (She really thought she was tripping.) Eventually the male began saying it too, though his was usually clipped to just “lo”. They say it to her whether or not she’s got food, and anywhere around her home, not just at the feeding spot. They just say it once, when they first see her - in other words, it’s used as a greeting, not just a sound that they like. They will also greet her other familiy members, but not as consistently.

I suspect they actually understand more of our speech (and other animals’ as well) from the context of activities, but they don’t have the vocal capacity to say more.

So they are actually two different species. Somebody once told me that some crows get big enough to be called ravens and I just kept thinking that that can’t be right. There’s got to be a difference between them. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled.

Though if I saw a bird the size of hedera’s parking lot lurker I’d hope to hell that there wasn’t a whole murder (or is that an ‘unkindness’) of them around, or I’d be having some serious flashbacks to The Birds (having grown up near the coast where it was filmed).

So now, what’s a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?

Hopefully your condition had neither H5 nor N1 in the name…

Dammit, why is there such an imbalance of cool events in favor of the Left Coast?

Or Neal Stephenson?

OK. WHO mentioned “the Raven” ?!! You should be shot.

20-some years ago in High School freshman English class, we had to memmorize poetry every week. Most of the guys picked Christina Rosetti for her brevity -

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor You;
but when the leaves hang trembling,
the wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither You nor I;
but when the tress bow down their heads,
the wind is passing by.

Gag.

After about the 12th rendition, our teacher (who was quite crabby to begin with, and who did not know as much as she thought she did; a failing I took great delight in correcting whenever the opportunity presented itself…. hmmmm wonder why she didn’t like me?) made it known that NEXT Friday, we all had to have a poem that was at LEAST 10 lines long.

I memorized Poe’s The Raven. All of it. For spite. It is still stuck up there in my mind to this day. ANY mention of that poem gets the damn thing playing in my head like a broken record.

Here is the only bit of nonsense that will dislodge it from my brain:

A girl once went to the fair to hire herself for servant. At last a funny-looking old gentleman engaged her, and took her home to his house. When she got there, he told her that he had something to teach her, for that in his house he had his own names for things.

He said to her: ‘What will you call me?’

‘Master or mister, or whatever you please, sir,’ says she.

He said: ‘You must call me “master of all masters”. And what would you call this?’ pointing to his bed.

‘Bed or couch, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘No, that’s my “barnacle”. And what do you call these?’ said he, pointing to his pantaloons.

‘Breeches or trousers, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘You must call them “squibs and crackers”. And what would you call her?’ pointing to the cat.

‘Cat or kit, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘You must call her “white-faced simminy”.

And this now,’ showing the fire, ‘what would you call this?’

‘Fire or flame, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘You must call it ‘hot cockalorum”, and what this?’ he went on, pointing to the water.

‘Water or wet, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘No, “pondalorum” is its name. And what do you call all this?’ asked he as he pointed to the house.

‘House or cottage, or whatever you please, sir.’

‘You must call it “high topper mountain”.’

That very night the servant woke her master up in a fright and said: ‘Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum’

. . . That’s all.

Katie

Murray, that’s what I was wondering, too. I kept thinking “if I’m having such a cool time, why don’t I know it?”

Katie, I want to know: did you read that somewhere, or did you make it up yourself? That is the weirdest story I’ve heard in quite some time!

Katie, those dogs are clearly world class. I knew terriers were tough, but this is astounding. Reminds me of the cat we inherited from our neighbors when I was a kid. Raised on table scraps, weighed 16 pounds, and when he walked down the sidewalk the dogs would cross the street. And the birds would dive-bomb him.

These guys are Rat Terrier/Jack Russell Terrier mixes. Oreo, 15 months old and 8 pounds soaking wet, looks just like the old RCA dog nipper. (He was starved for his first 5 weeks and stunted.) What he lacks in size he makes up for in speed, agility, and cunning. Nutter, 9 months old and 20 pounds is a stocky, squat puppy with an amazing overbite. Reminds me of the bulldog in the old Warner Brothers cartoon. He is definitely not the sharpest crayon in the box, but what he lacks in brainpower he makes up for in sheer de