So the weekend is here. It was supposed to stay dry for a week. Guess what the forecast is now: "Periods of chances of thunderstorms through Thursday."

On the windowsill over my desk at work there are a lot of plush toys. And a potted cyclamen in a ceramic container shaped like a lion, you know, one of those recumbent statues like on the steps of the New York Public Library? Anyway, the current plant is a cyclamen with crimson blooms when it flowers. Gary got it for me for Valentine's Day. It quit blooming and no one remembered to water it for a week while I was on vacation in May. It all shriveled up, but recovered. Turns out that cyclamens are supposed to do that to "recuperate" and now that it's getting water regularly it has doubled in size and is full of new flower buds. The first one opened on Tuesday. It's very bright red. And then I started seeing hummingbirds. They apparently see the red flower through the windowglass and decide it looks yummy. Only they can't get to it of course. None of them have crashed into the glass, fortunately. They fly up to it in their precise little way and stop. Then they hover there for a second looking disappointed and buzz away. Fortunately we have a feeder with sugar water in it within 15 feet or so, and they've drained that in two days.

More tech support issues with a different product. This has been ongoing for a week now, just like the last time they insisted that I "upgrade" their stuff. Then they wonder why I say "No" when they want me to upgrade.

I put some samples of my woven projects up on weavolution.com. The site is only about half-baked at the moment, and has some large bugs. The purple onions piece has been "faved" a couple of times already, though.

Tags: birds, weather, weaving, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: blah

It's Wednesday. It's exceedingly hot for so early in the year. The air conditioning at work is flaky and randomly variable. Boo.

This morning the nest of swallows in the barn disgorged about five immature hatchlings. I think it was the heat. They are big enough to have feathers, but can't fly yet. That means they sort of crowd each other in the nest until they are hanging over the edges. I suspect the heat forced them to move farther apart to avoid overheating and some fell to the floor. Cats would have gotten them before too long, so Gary moved them all into the blackberry brambles outside the barn door. Since the parent birds were divebombing him as he did this, we assume they know where their excess offspring went and will feed them there until they fledge. Assuming the cats don't find them all.

Commiserated with the boss about television. She lives closer to Rockford than I do, and ends up with even fewer choices than I have because Chicago is beyond reach for her antenna. However, further analysis suggests that if I can point my antenna at bearing 256° I should get four fairly good signals. Counting their subchannels that will include ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, MyTV, and Accuweather. No PBS or TBN, alas, though there's a sliver of a chance that TBN will come in. The nearest TBN station is about 5 degrees away from that bearing. Obstacle is that my creaky rotator won't go to that bearing. We can probably reorient either the antenna or the rotator itself so as to hit that point and give up another useless direction, though.

Tags: birds, farm, weather, wildlife
Current Location: Sweltering oak grove
Mood: grumpy

Picked the first snow peas today. In a couple of weeks we'll have too many, but right now they are lovely. Had some raw in the salad with dinner.

Picked the last asparagus too. Last week's rain brought out a flush of new sprouts. Now we need to leave it alone so it can grow full sized stems and build its strength for next year.

Made a pie with peaches (canned) and rhubarb (fresh from the garden.) Haven't tried it yet, but I expect it to be yummy.

While we were still sitting at the dining table after dinner, we heard an strange bird call like a laugh outdoors. It sounded several times. I thought "pileated woodpecker" but also "can't be." But I went and checked the recorded sound right away and it just possibly could be. We'll be listening again now, with more care.

Nice weather for a change. Tess got to play outside, as did the sheep. Gary had an outdoor performance with his friends up in Wisconsin, so it was conveniently good.

We've both been noticing a tendency of the GPS units to have trouble locking onto satellites this week. Also, our digital cell phones are acting odd. I'd say it was solar storms except we don't seem to have any at the moment. Not even a sunspot or two. Puzzling.

Tags: birds, gardening, weather
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: satisfied

I promised last week to try to get better photos of the woodpecker, and here's one from May 16. I don't think we've seen any redheads since then, though now we are seeing an occasional indigo bunting.

Also a male Baltimore oriole here.

Tags: birds, farm, photos
Mood: sore

The sky, anyway. It didn't rain. A miracle. The animals all got to go outdoors.

We went to Sam's evil empire to buy groceries. Gary fixed the lawn tractor and did some mowing to make sure it worked. I weeded the strawberries and removed flower buds. I was going to bake a rhubarb pie, but didn't get that far. Tomorrow.

We made burgers out of ground turkey on the grill tonight, with spinach salad from the garden and baked beans. I avoided doing laundry, but will have to do it tomorrow or else.

Still shoveling paper out of my study/workroom. Should find the floor soon.

Saw that red-headed woodpecker two or three more times, snapped more photos but haven't offloaded from the camera yet. If they are any better I'll post some.

Now off to bed.

Tags: birds, farm
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: tired

Gary snapped this today. We've been trying for several years to get a decent photo of a red headed woodpecker. This is only mediocre but good enough to prove that we do have these rather hard to find birds around. Generally we see one only about this time of year. They prefer large dead trees for nesting, and we have several now so perhaps they'll stick around longer.

Tags: birds, farm, wildlife
Mood: pleased

Spent the entire day, from 7 am to 7:45 pm, counting birds. We saw parts of McHenry County that I didn't even know existed, and bird species I'd never seen (or in some cases, heard of) before. We had a special permission to enter conservation district land that is normally closed to the public, which gave me a chance to see some beautiful settings that were utterly unfamiliar to me.

The species list was pretty impressive. The focus in the spring count here is warblers, since they are always migrating through at this time of year. They don't come to feeders, and you have to go out in the field to see and count them. We saw a bunch of them, including yellow warbler, yellow rumped warbler, palm warbler, blue winged warbler, black and white warbler, blackburnian warbler, black throated green warbler, black throated blue warbler, chestnut sided warbler, and magnolia warbler. Other bird species counted included hooded merganser, Canada goose, rough-winged swallow, Cooper's hawk, red tailed hawk, cedar waxwing, scarlet tanager, great crested flycatcher, gnatcatcher, redstart, ruby throated hummingbird, and many more common species. Heard but not seen: wood thrush, oriole, common yellowthroat, ovenbird, and kingfisher.

Non-avian wildlife we observed included two beavers, a painted turtle, a snapping turtle, lots of toads and frogs including a huge bullfrog who stared at us as hard as we were staring at the birds.

My feet hurt, my back is sore, and tomorrow I'm going to be very stiff. It was still fun.

Tags: birds, wildlife
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: sore

And it was good. About normal for the first day of a vacation break. It takes a while for the truth to sink in, and then to realize that you have a whole lot of things you want to accomplish before going back to work. But today I did little that was important. I read a book. I fed the animals and petted the horses a bit, but didn't groom them or really play with them. I went to the bank and deposited my paycheck from yesterday, and went to the grocery but didn't buy much. More about that another time I think.

I looked at flowers. We still have daffodils, though some are through blooming. Gary has planted hundreds of them all color variations and some early, some late. There are scylla and hyacinths blooming too, and the native dark purple trillium flowers are just starting to open. The four apple trees that are still alive (lost another over the winter) are all in bud just waiting to burst open. The buds are brilliant crimson, but the flowers will be pale pink or white when they open. They will smell wonderful and as soon as their petals are falling the wild cherry will add its own snowfall to the breeze. Lilacs (also on their way) and apple blossoms are the most beautiful flower scents of all, in my opinion. The pear tree is covered with big buds too, but those are snowy white. Peas and strawberries are starting to really grow in the garden, and I need to get more stuff going out there, but not today. There was no egg from the one remaining duck hen we have, but she's been giving us one almost every second day, which is good for such an elderly bird.

I watched rose-breasted grosbeaks and listened to them sing. Brilliantly orange orioles added to the bird music as well. Only the swallow, the bluebird, the hummingbird, and the indigo bunting are lacking to make up our full spring complement of bird life. I also saw the second butterfly of the year. The first was a lonely mourning cloak way back at the end of March. I think he or she somehow hatched too early. But today I saw a red admiral sunning itself in just the spot where I always find them, on the ground between the two barns. It must have been newly emerged, because its wings were perfect and its red and yellow markings were brilliant in the sunlight.

On a slightly different tangent, Argos writes about the color blue here.

Tags: birds, farm, gardening, wildlife
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: satisfied

I was sitting at the circulation check-in desk this evening and talking about the database that I'm recoding. I wanted something from my desktop machine, which was 40 feet away, logged out, and monitor turned off. So I logged into my machine remotely using xdm. That brings up the entire GUI/Desktop and you can switch between it and the local machine with ALT+Fkeys. It seems that made an unexpected impression. I don't think much about it any more, I just do it if it's convenient.

"No, you can't do that with Windows unless you have a bunch of extra commercial software installed at both ends."

"Yes, I can do it from any Linux machine in the building."

"Yes, Linux is free. Yes, you could install Linux and switch between it and Windows on the same machine. No, you don't need antivirus software with Linux..." And so forth.

Suddenly there was some actual interest in Linux from folks who have been using it daily without realizing how very different from Windows it actually can be. That's because the machines they use were set up to look as much like Windows as possible so they wouldn't panic and freak out.

In other news, we sighted a wood duck (female) this morning in an oak tree near the house. Wood ducks are one of a very few species of ducks that actually nest in trees. They build in cavities as much as 30 or 40 feet above the ground. When the ducklings leave the nest, they aren't able to fly yet. They just fall to the ground and head for the water. I've never seen this happen, and probably won't see it here because there are no suitable hollows in our trees as far as I know, but it was nice spotting and hearing the duck anyway. Wood ducks are very handsome too, resembling a colored painting of a waterbird in some northwest native American styles.

Gary has been looking for crochet cotton in finer, lace makers' sizes. At one time you could buy that at any dime store. He was having a lot of difficulty finding any at all. I got on the web and found it is still available in all sizes and many colors, but only by mail order. At least we can still get it.

Tags: birds, geekery, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: happy

But this time it marks just three more days to vacation. Nine whole days off that are, unfortunately, going to fly by with all the stuff I need to do. At least the weather was nicer today, though I think the thunderstorms are due back tomorrow. We have water running across the pastures again thanks to the Brit neighbor who cut down all his trees and then overgrazed the treeless area so it won't absorb water any more.

Orioles, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and cowbirds. Multiples of each today. Time to start listening for the wood thrush I usually hear in May. Our friend Susan reports that she is hearing a whippoorwill at her house, but she has a lot more land than we do. If you've never heard the distinctive sound (which makes me homesick for Michigan) there's a sample on the referenced page.

Cleaned databases at work, purging a lot of expired records. Also cleared up some longstanding bugs in the Alpha configuration there, with the result that I now get a full graphical desktop on my Linux system, even though the DS10 itself has no VMS-compatible graphics card.

I find it amusing that the swine flu panic has sent pork futures lower even though humans don't catch flu from eating pork or even from exposure to pigs. Just shows how irrational the supposed "free" market actually is. Not only that, but Jewish and Muslim complaints about the term "swine" flu being offensive to them are just over the top. Get over it, folks. The virus contains an element of DNA from a flu virus endemic to swine populations. That's the way it is, no matter what you think about pigs. It probably also contains DNA from chicken viruses if that makes you feel any more Kosher about it.

Tags: birds, weather
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: amused