Toad in the Hole

Vegetable Frisbee

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Sometimes

Ya just gotta go around the block, park illegally, and take the picture.

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Snowpocalypse: My Fault

I sent a birthday card and a present, separately, to my sister Julie in Pennsylvania early last Tuesday via first-class mail, easily certain to get there by Saturday. Unless of course there was something like a paralyzing humungo blizzard all over the East.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and I sure as hell won’t do that again.

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A Mind Is a Terrible Thing

I was awakened at five-something this morning by a voice calling my name, just once. “Ronnie,” said the voice that could have been any of my younger sisters’ at a certain very young age. Clear, calm, declarative.  Woke me right up out of a sound sleep and I wasn’t in the middle of a dream, or at least didn’t remember one. I lay awake staring into the dark for a few minutes, unalarmed, and then fell asleep again; we didn’t get up for real till sometime well after eight.

I was talking to my sister Julie this PM, and she asked what the date was when I’d gone to Florida two years ago, the first week of our sister Jeanne’s long and lost fight against dying. I looked at the February 2007 archives; I’d left for there at some ungodly hour on the morning of February 10.

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The Lark in the Morning

The meadowlark at coffeebreak, anyway.

We went up to the Delta Saturday, desperate for a break from the rain and the city. The weather was glorious, sunny with blue sky dotted decorator-style in fluffy little cumuli. Hills green, flats muddy.

We saw:

wild (whistling) swans

lotsa ducks: shovelers, gadwall, green-winged and cinnamon teal, mallards of course, wigeon, pintails, a very out-of-place common merganser in a muddy crappy roadside drainage ditch

geese: mostly white-fronts, good number of snows, and one blue-phase snow in a skein of regular white ones overhead, and huge masses of otherwise-unidentified geese that filled the sky going in all directions as we approached the Wossname Memorial Bridge on the way home

sandhill cranes: good numbers hanging around the Woodbridge Road sanctuary and a massive flyup of them from there, the fields beyond the dikes and beyond those and coming in from all directions overhead and making a tremendous din of bugling that brought tears to my eyes

stilts, avocets, yellowlegses, dowitchers, ISTR a few peep, coots, kingfishers, blackbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, good old robins and white-crowned sparrows and such passerines, and of course meadowlarks

lotsa redtailed hawks, harriers, some kestrels, an accipiter or two, and a prairie falcon who was kind enough to wheel overhead for a minute, showing off her fieldmarks in decent light

a coyote.

Some kind soul has had a portapotty placed at the Woodbridge sanctuary, too, and it was clean and well-maintained. Some equally kind soul had planted paperwhite narcissus just upwind of it, and they were blooming. The Martha Stewart of the Delta!

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