Day 19.095: Special Weather Statement

This morning, I opened up the weather app on my phone and saw there was a Special Weather Statement. My experience of looking at the was something like this:

Moderate severity, threat to life or property… 

Execute a pre-planned activity…within the next hour… Wait, perhaps I should read the block of text labeled description that I skipped over…

Oh…it’s a bit foggy and I should allow more stopping distance while driving. Noted. 

Perhaps I should have read that first. 

Day 19.094: Sunday birding

Our nature group met near the Ecology School and walked the Mary Merrill Trail on Sunday afternoon. We spent a good deal of our time talking about the wide variety of trees and other plants we saw, and trying to spot spring peepers that we heard but did not see. We saw some birds too - here are some of them.

Eastern phoebe

Common raven

Black-capped chickadee

Transatlantic harmony: an American robin and a European starling 

Wood duck

Wood ducks

Hooded mergansers

Eastern bluebird

Mallard

Eastern phoebe

Red-winged blackbird

Brown-headed cowbirds

Downy woodpecker

European starlings

Day 19.093: Sparrow cross-over

Our most commonly seen backyard sparrow in winter is the dark-eyed junco. In summer they are replaced by chipping sparrows. Both are often seen searching for food on the ground. At this time of year, there is a brief period of overlap when both can be seen. This weekend's Project FeederWatch count included two juncos and our first chipping sparrow of the year.

Spring is here - even if the weather doesn't seem completely convinced of that fact yet.

Day 19.092: Exile #2’s Sunday Column #549

Exile #2 writes...

It’s been a fun having E5N1 around for the weekend. We got to spend a little extra time with him today and finish up his birthday leftovers.

It was also nice to go back to the high school yesterday and see a few old friends. The show was the musical version of 9 to 5 and, as ever, it was performed to a very high standard. For once, however, they had decided not to edit at all for language or content. This meant the Dad behind us had quite a busy time of it answering his children’s questions, my favorite being “Dad, what is blackmail?” 

Day 19.091: Birthday (observed)

After lunch, I collected E5N1 from his college dorm to bring him to the high school for the Saturday matinee of the musical. Exile #2 and Exile #3 met us there. Afterward, we had takeout and birthday cake and did gifts etc. 

Day 19.090: Phoebe visits

We’ve seen this eastern phoebe almost every day since last weekend. It seems to be finding bugs - at times by hovering at the side of tree trunks, and at times going to the ground before returning to a perch to pump its tail.

Why does it pump its tail when it lands?

To make it easier for us to identify it!

Day 19.089: I didn’t really think this through

I captured this yesterday. 

It was remarkable because I’ve been trying to get my streak back to 128 for significantly more than 128 days and I finally succeeded in stringing that many hard-mode puzzles together again. Of course the screenshot doesn’t prove that I got to 128 twice but I did. As of today it’s 129. I still have a way to go to catch Exile #2 whose maximum streak is over 180.