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 ( Read more... )

Saw the first oriole today. They are among my favorite birds, both for their color and their beautiful song. Only the wood thrush sings more beautifully among the birds we have here, and he is a scarcity we hear perhaps once or twice a year. The weather may not feel like spring or summer, but seeing an oriole convinces me that the season is well ( Read more... )

Got into the 80s today. When I passed through downtown at lunchtime, the Chamber of Commerce sign seemed to have a couple of LEDs out, so it was indicating the temperature as 32F rather than 82F. Unless someone thought that was a good joke...

You would think that weather like that would keep people out of the library, but the computer users were as ( Read more... )

Yesterday when I went to get Tess from the pasture I noticed several birds making a sound I've been wondering about lately. Vaguely woodpeckerish, but a long sequence of repeated chirps or squawks that was almost machinegunlike in its regularity. I froze and started looking for the source.

Sure enough, they were woodpecker kin. Yellow-shafted ( Read more... )

OpenVMS has XDM. Linux has XDM. Surely they must be able to talk to one another. Surely ( Read more... )

So I've had a registered domain for altivo.org for quite a while now. At the time I registered it, there was q real cheap deal available, and it seemed worthwhile to grab the name lest someone else take it. I mapped a couple of things to it, though they've been lightly used. Tried to get e-mail to route through it, but didn't succeed, and I left it ( Read more... )

Coyote hunter in Wisconsin shoots wolf by mistake.

Neighbor: "OMG, wolves! They'll eat our children."

'Tivo: "Only if you keep cranking them out like fast food."

(Disclaimer: This interaction is purely fictional but I'm sorely tempted to just say it instead of biting my tongue.)

The darkest clouds I can remember seeing in a long time. At least, since last spring or something. It was too warm to snow, but otherwise looked like it would have. It rained instead, just after sunset, and pretty hard. Still dribbling now ( Read more... )

Amazing. The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, is a serious pest in North America (for those who didn't know about it.) It's a large, handsome looking beetle that is native to east Asia and Japan, where it has natural enemies that keep its population stable and controlled. Once introduced to America, though, it ran wild. Few native species care ( Read more... )

We have indigo buntings. That completes our usual summer bird list, since we saw a red headed woodpecker several times on Sunday. I saw one bunting a week ago, but now we have several males making themselves visible around the feeders. Click photo at right for more information about these tiny, intensely blue birds.
( Read more... )