I spent some of yesterday discovering that bees are much harder to photograph than birds. And also that there aren't a lot of great resources for identifying bees. Eli got me A Field Guide in Colour to Bees and Wasps but as that "u" in "colour" might alert the astute Imaginary Reader (surely "astute" is redundant there), it's not a North American ( Read more... )

Those who know me will know that it's rare for me to declare a day to be excellent but this has been a truly excellent day. I think it started when I looked out the window to see Eli sitting in the sunshine reading a book and having a cup of coffee. It just looked like vacation and that's sort of the sort of day it has been. I joined him, naturally ( Read more... )

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"Blustery" does not begin to describe the weather though, of course, I have to rush to say that it's nothing like the weather that kept the Mountaineers' publicist trapped in Boston for four days last week. But you could hear the wind yesterday (and, to a lesser extent, today) and large tree limbs and whole trees have been strewn about West Seattle ( Read more... )

Oh, I title this "customary" but possibly "cursory" would be more accurate. I didn't keep a list of my reading this year so the list to follow is probably both incomplete and inaccurate, but it's the best I can offer. On the bird front, I intend to list the birds that I think were new to me this year but it's possible that a few I have, in fact, ( Read more... )

Alexfandra stopped by elijah_brown's office to say, among other things, that I haven't been posting lately. Which is true. What he told her was true, too: busy, stressed out about work things, also busy. But still. So I recycle this happy story from yesterday:

As I was settling my purchases into the basket on my bike, parked outside the West Seattle library this ( Read more... )

It was four years ago today that I first got the keys to the house and elijah_brown and I met here, me with a bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle sparkling and a bag of Doritos and him with youthful enthusiasm. Some hours later I'd ripped out all the carpets and he'd gotten the windows to open. I'm not sure if that was the night that the mystery of the sconces was ( Read more... )

Somehow I feel that plumbing is traditional on Memorial Day. I may be mistaken about that but certainly it felt inevitable when I noticed the bathroom sink not draining around noon today. Eli assumed it would be relatively simple since he'd solved the mystery of the cleanout last time the sink had backed up. Alas, the cleanout turned out to be ( Read more... )

We *said* we were going to the arboretum but it turned out that we both wanted to start with Foster Island. It was a pretty exciting walk, what with significant patches of the path being quite waterlogged. We also discovered that the path can end at the Montlake Cut so we ate our sandwiches where we could watch the antics of the Cormorant Trees ( Read more... )

It's *not* that I'm competitive. Rather, alexfandra's post of garden photos inspired me to copy her, as did the number of white-crowned sparrow photos I've taken in the last few days, all in the comfort of my own backyard. I've got some bird-related questions, too: Are white-crowned sparrows a bit more, well, substantial and round this year than previous ( Read more... )