Wow - what an exhausting week. Really busy at work, not going to bore you with the details of that, but one thought that keeps crossing my mind is that the effect of this economy is to take the same amount of work and give it to fewer people. Anyway, before I get dangerously close to talking about something important, time to get back to the inane.
First, was on a call at home in the evening and whilst pacing around, I looked out the window and saw what I thought was a male downy woodpecker doing what woodpecker's do - pecking wood. It was climbing up one of the pine trees merrily woodpeckering away.
On closer inspection, it seems that this is actually a red-breasted sapsucker. The photo above is a bit blurry as the light was fading, but at least I now have a photo of him.
Next was a quick visit to the hospital again. Yep - couldn't quite make it a quarter without popping back in for a visit. Not a recurring problem - this visit was for a new and exciting problem. I've heard a few people say that a boil on the bum is one of the most painful things you can have. I don't know whether or not that's the case as I seem to have got something like that on my inner thigh rather than my bum. Bloody painful though, but appears to be healing so I won't dwell on that.
Right, next to the little one - he's been poorly. Some kind of bug I think. The only real knock on effect to me is occasionally waking up in the night and having to say “Karen - I think you need to go see if William's OK again.”
Then there's the birding society that I joined to see if I could find where interesting birds are. Managed to get a tip on a tufted duck that we were able to get out and see this Saturday.
Now, the interesting challenge is trying to find a single bird in a huge lake with absolutely thousands of ducks on it. Thankfully, it was more or less the first bird I saw as I walked to the lake (I'd started walking down whilst Karen got William out of the car). I caught site of it just before it went out of view under the near bank. Karen's approach was more interesting and that was the process of elimination. All I could here as she approached was “is that it? No. Is that it? No. Is that it? No .... ” seemingly answering her own questions. My fallback approach, had we failed to find tufty, was to look for the other people with binoculars and camera's at the lake (rather than the local residents) and see where they were looking. If you are interested you can see more pictures of this and other birds from this
visit to Lake Merritt.
A busy week, but what has all this got to do with the title? Well, one of the birding messages came through with a link in it to someone's site. Being the nosey kind of person that I am I decided to go check it out. I was pretty impressed with some of the stuff that this guy's done and put together. See what you think
voicewhiz. If you're a Simpson's fan like myself, I'm sure you've made the connection to the title. (Either that or I'm just way off base again).
