We went for a hike this morning and saw these lovely Sandhill cranes:
We also saw a little dragonfly that was the most gorgeous metallic blue:
We spotted a couple of soft-shell turtles as well as a gopher tortoise and numerous wading birds. Plus the usual complement of cardinals, jays, mockingbirds, etc.
I hope you’re finding beauty in your corner of the world when you can. I’ve made a deliberate effort to look for it as an antidote to the ugliness in the current culture, and I swear it helps!
Open thread!
Mike J
A few weeks ago I saw some migrating sandhills on the other side of the mountains. We only get ’em for a week or two per year.
Really ought to go back and color correct those pics/
p.a.
Damselfly. Resting dragonflies hold wings perpendicular to body. #pedantsrus
Frosty Fred
Technically that’s a damsel fly, but good picture.
Achrachno
I’m going for a long walk in a few minutes. Won’t see any of that stuff, but maybe I’ll see a canyon towhee or a raven.
schrodingers_cat
Beauty, wisdom and knowledge are to be cherished, always.
Yarrow
I think the sun will be out by this afternoon and I plan to work in the garden. A lot of things are blooming and it’s keeping me busy.
PsiFighter37
I’ve gotten a lot more into hiking the past few years. It wasn’t high up on my list, but I think the more stressful work has gotten (correlated with being promoted/given more authority), the more I have appreciated the ability to put myself in a complete different natural habitat and enjoy the scenery. I’m spending a week this summer hiking in the Italian Alps and cannot wait to be in the middle of the mountains. 3.5 months to go…
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike J:
Wow!!
SiubhanDuinne
Lovely photos, Betty! Your photography has improved enormously, and we are the beneficiaries.
raven
Well that’s a wrap for fishing. Six hours at the bridge in 20mph winds and zipola fish. All-in-all it was a good trip but now we have to clean up, pack and head out in the morning.
Here’s a decent shot of a crane down at the boats.
Iowa Old Lady
Lovely pics. I needed those.
The Iowa legislature is part time, and they recently ended their session. We’ve lived here for 20 years, and this is the first time the whole legislature and the governor were all Republican. Somehow, I hadn’t realized how bad this year was going to be.
They expanded gun rights, defunded Planned Parenthood, banned abortion after 20 weeks, limited the rights of public employees to unionize and bargain, banned cities and counties from enacting a minimum wage higher than the state’s $7.25/hous, enacted voter ID, shortened the time for early voting, and made it impossible to vote straight party ticket. That’s off the top of my head. There’s probably more.
They realized they couldn’t cut taxes because revenues are down this year and they had to cut funding to education in mid-year. But they have a tax cut plan ready to go as soon as the economy picks up. They also have a plan ready to take dollars from public education and give it to private schools and home schoolers.
It all makes me sick.
amk
Never seen a blue dragonfly. Green ones, yes. Grey ones, yes.
Baud
Every time I look in the mirror.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Healthy sense of self, you has it.
amk
@Baud: It must be rose tinted.
Yarrow
Perhaps we could all use a little of this practice:
trollhattan
@Iowa Old Lady:
Ugh. Wait’ll next session when they deed everybody’s yard over to Monsanto and Cargill.
Patricia Kayden
@Iowa Old Lady: Sad that Iowan voters went all in for Republicans after twice going for President Obama. Oh well. That seems to be how things are going. Even in our blue state of Maryland, we have a Republican governor. Sigh.
Keith P.
Last year around this time, I was on the phone having a job interview staring at my backyard when a big crane landed out of nowhere in my spa (I quit chlorinating it and converted it to a frog pond…this year I added goldfish) The thing would land in my yard and stalk the pond for an hour or so before disappearing. It did this for about 2 weeks before disappearing. It even went up in one of my trees and hung out for a bit there once.
I’m hoping it returns this year, especially since I have a minnow explosion going on there right now
Yarrow
Florida news:
TKinNC
@Iowa Old Lady: déjà vu all over again. THAT’s exactly what they’ve done here in NC since 2012. If I didn’t know better (hah!) I’d suspect that some groups of smart ALECs was guiding them all to do the same things.
Kristine
Sandhills abound in the state park up here. I can hear them cluck and clatter as I walk my dog in the morning.
I like checking out the wildflowers. The spring ephemerals–trout lilies, springbeauties–are winding down. Looking forward to seeing what’s next.
Iowa Old Lady
@TKinNC: The one thing IA didn’t do that NC did was limit LGBTQ rights. Maybe they learned a lesson.
Elmo
@Yarrow:
Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes…because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.
John Muir
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: Excellent news. She’s not the worst Republican in congress, but pretty much anyone affiliated with the GOP is by definition scum these days.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Couple of REALLY funny notes about FyreFest (the train wreck I can’t stop watching).
1. Pablo Escobar’s unreachable private island, my ass. It was held on Great Exuma, at a point on a vacant property about 300 yards from Sandals Emerald Bay. That property used to be a Four Seasons, and may be among the smallest of all of the Sandals Resorts. Nobody was going to die of thirst or starvation, just suffer some discomfort.
2. I’ve stayed at that Sandals, and flown in via commercial airline (Elle magazine was full of shit on the “reachable only by private plane” pre-flop statement). The airport is TINY and can barely service the needs of existing pax, much less a horde of mixed economy millennials.
3. A heavy temporary influx of people to a music festival could not be fed, watered or adequately cared for by existing sources. You’d need to ship in everything in advance, which clearly hadn’t happened due to lack of payment.
4. When the history of our time is scratched into rocks, let it be said that any surviving social media “influencers” were lined up against a wall and stoned to death for uselessness.
?BillinGlendaleCA
No hiking for me for a few days, got blisters on both feet from yesterday’s trek. ?
Yarrow
@Betty Cracker: Republicans are traitors in my book. They all vote with their party, putting party before country. This should be a pickup for Dems given the voting record in the district. I hope FL Dems can find someone good to run. Every seat in Democratic hands that we can get is essential!
Iowa Old Lady
Betty, I’m like doing jigsaws and that top picture would make a beautiful one.
Also I’m working on a short story in which the MC refers to the president as The Shitgibbon. She also calls on her friend, Betty, to participate with her in a ceremony meant to hex an Etsy account. Shout out!
Yarrow
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Fyre Festival has been the best thing to watch in ages. I immersed myself in it yesterday for a few hours. Pure joy. Dumbass rich kids getting suckered into handing over thousands of dollars to live in tents on the sand and not have enough food or water. Beautiful.
I especially loved Ja Rule’s statement: “I truly apologize as THIS IS NOT MY FAULT.” Passing the buck isn’t just for politicians.
otmar
Spawn #2 had her first field Hockey league games today. She was super nervous, but came back with a feeling of achievement.
Good day.
MomSense
If by some miracle I do manage to get a job in Mass and move, the one thing I will miss desperately is the access to woods and ocean.
Just about every day I walk out the door and into the woods where I can access miles of trails. Today I drove 5 minutes and walked a trail that loops through the woods and then down to a salt marsh.
germy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/fyre-festival-exumas-bahamas-disaster.html
Moral: Never let “a guy from Marketing” make any serious decisions.
Splitting Image
@Iowa Old Lady:
“… all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks [especially black women] get hurt worse than whites.” – Lee Atwater.
Clearly the Democrats need to reach out to the white working class suffering from economic anxiety.
Keith P.
@germy:
http://www.nydailynews.com/…-article-1.3120177
Jay C
@germy:
Well, Fyre’s marketing guy was part right, anyway: this festival HAS turned out to be a “legend” – entirely the wrong, negative kind, but a legend, anyway…..
Major Major Major Major
Wow, those crane pictures are amazing! Almost unreal.
TriassicSands
Breaking News: Donald Trump is a complete idiot who has no idea what he’s doing.
I just watched the clips of Face The Nation’s John Dickerson trying to interview Trump. It turns out you can’t really interview a complete idiot. He doesn’t answer any of your questions and displays such appalling ignorance it’s a wonder Dickerson didn’t just sit there and laugh at him.
Trump makes it clear he has no idea what is in Trumpcare. Obamacare is dead is his answer to most questions about health care. For all those people worried about pre-existing condition coverage, you can relax. Trump guarantees the protection is guaranteed. Guaranteed! You can take that to the bank…along with all the other promises Trump has made and kept. (Raucous laughter.)
Is Medicare safe? Trump would prefer that Congress not change it. But he guaranteed that he wouldn’t change Medicare. Hey, if he said that then he won’t touch Medicare…except for “waste, fraud, and abuse.” You know, the stuff that can only be dealt with by privatizing Medicare.
germy
@Keith P.:
Mr Stagger Lee
My workplace is blessed with a wetland, where ducks and geese swim around, and occasionally hear the frogs croaking. One day I had a Blue Heron, swoop and capture a frog, calmly swallowing up the frog. I got to say I like Blue Herons.
Iowa Old Lady
@Splitting Image: I heard the R leader reading that list of “accomplishments” off and talking about great the session was and how proud he was of everything they accomplished.
Betty Cracker
@Iowa Old Lady: Ha! That’s so cool! ?
debbie
@Yarrow:
Especially in spring, I do that as much as possible, short of being accused of trespassing in neighborhood yards.
Also, my last car was silver, and a surprising number of dragonflies mistook me for a pond.
HeidiMom
@raven: I think that’s a great blue heron. Just as good. Great photo.
Keith P.
@germy: I’m starting to think that we could crowdsource a modern-day Confederacy of Dunces just by cutting and pasting lines from all the various Fyre Festival articles from this weekend.
debbie
@MomSense:
Could you commute from NH? I lived between Dover and Durham, and Boston, ocean, and mountains were all reachable.
Betty Cracker
@TriassicSands: I can’t bear to watch the interview — cannot abide Trump’s horrible voice or the sight of that smug, ugly mug — but what you describe comes across in the transcript. Trump is a blithering, whiny idiot who doesn’t have the foggiest goddamned notion what’s in that bill.
When I think back on when PBO had a healthcare summit and answered “gotcha” questions from Republican assholes like Ryan, engaging in detailed policy discussions, citing studies and providing data, and in coherent sentences — well, it makes me want to weep for my stupid country. Time for another walk?
Another Scott
@PsiFighter37: The Alps are wonderful. J and I spent a week+ in Switzerland in July 2015. There was a record-breaking heat wave at the time. It was weird and disconcerting. :-/
Be prepared for weird weather, and have a great time!
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@TriassicSands:
I watched only a small part, and had to turn it off before I started screaming. But the bit I did see was telling (not surprising at all, just telling). Dickerson asked him what he had learned about the presidency in the first 100 days that had caused him to change or adapt. Two things: the dishonest media lies all the time, and Democrats are obstructionist.
TriassicSands
@Betty Cracker:
Even small doses of Trump require rehab of some sort.
I weep for the world.
Nature helps — have a good walk.
raven
@HeidiMom: oh
Another Scott
@Iowa Old Lady: That’s horrible. :-(
If it’s any consolation, remember that things like that go in cycles, and the cycles seem to be shorter as time goes on. Their control is brittle (one of the benefits of our checks-and-balances system) – you “just” have to replace on part of the government to stop them in their tracks.
Here’s hoping non-RWNJ people there wake up and show up at county party meetings and figure out a way to make the cycle flip quicker.
Hang in there, and don’t get discouraged!
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
@debbie:
I have a place to stay in Mass so I think it makes more sense to just be there. I’ll have to find new things to explore.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: didn’t the R’s come out of that meeting complaining that it was a meaningless publicity stunt posing for the cameras and that uppity professor Obama, with his ‘command’ of ‘facts’, was sssooooo mmmeeeeeaaaannn? I seem to remember Cantor whining.
TriassicSands
@SiubhanDuinne:
I was surprised he didn’t say he’d learned that his was the largest inaugural crowd ever, which followed his monumentally massive Electoral College win.
He’s just appalling. Dickerson pointed out that Trump was already calling the media dishonest during his campaign, but Trump just doubles down. It’s important that we all know that Trump calls the program “De-face the Nation.” Oh, Donnie, you’re such a wit!
The other thing he has learned is that the federal government is a bureaucracy and the rules of the Senate and House cause things to move slowly. Of course, Trump should be embarrassed to admit that as something he had “learned” since becoming president. All it does is emphasize what an ignorant clown he is and always has been.
GregB
@MomSense:
Mass has plenty to explore. When you need new places come to NH.
Mnemosyne
@germy:
To be fair, he was right — they’re legends now.
Splitting Image
@Iowa Old Lady:
And that’s the thing. If they really stood for the principles they say they do, they wouldn’t be proud of anything on that list. If a higher minimum wage were really a bad policy, the free market would make that clear pretty quickly without any intervention by the state government. On any issue other than abortion, a Republican will sceram at you that government regulations won’t change human behaviour. Prohibition failed miserably. So why do they think banning abortion will stop women from getting them? Their bans will just drive abortions underground.
I honestly think Trump supporters are months if not weeks away from admitting that the whole “pro-life” movement is just a way to increase the number of women killed in back-alley abortions, and if banning safe abortions doesn’t kill enough women quickly enough, they’ll start grabbing pregnant women on the street and shooting them themselves.
sharl
It is gratifying to see continuing blow-back aimed at the NYT for their decision to hire Bret Stephens for their op-ed space. Last night I saw twitter activity from some pretty well established NYT reporters – i.e., not their op-ed writers – questioning why so many people are cancelling their subscriptions, when the NYT has such a stellar team of science/environmental reporters.
In response, it was pointed out to them that the op-ed page often has a far larger impact on public opinion (and thus politics) than the output from the reporting side. I assume advertisers know this, which leaves NYT’s business management with the decision of how to balance their subscriber income stream with their advertiser income stream, the latter no doubt including folks like the Koch Brothers and other such wealthy fans of climate change denial.
I don’t know what got the NYT reporters all spun up to publicly complain: was it just the sight of large numbers of relatively prominent professional-class people announcing subscription cancellations, or have they heard through the NYT internal grapevine that this campaign is showing up on their bottom line? Whatever the case, I’m darkly gratified that the NYT is feeling some well deserved pain for this decision.
A couple tweets from among many (btw, Prof. Tufekci is – or at least was – an occasional contributor to the NYT’s op-ed page):
Mnemosyne
@Splitting Image:
In Texas, the maternal mortality and infant mortality rates have soared since they defunded Planned Parenthood. and what did the Texas legislature spend their time on in the last session?
Bathroom bills and sanctuary cities. No shit.
germy
@sharl: The hire gives ammo to the deniers. They can point to the stupid Bret editorials to pad their bogus research.
Keith P.
Speaking of birds, I left my back door open, and a bird flew in. Now, it’s stuck up in a window up in my vaulted ceiling, 15 feet up. Thing will not give up on that window, and I can’t scare if off. I’m open to suggestions that don’t involve me getting out the big ladder.
?BillinGlendaleCA
View from Inspiration Point, yesterday. Do you feel inspired yet?
Mnemosyne
@Keith P.:
Putting birdseed near the door or a different (open) window and then leaving the room?
Felonius Monk
@sharl: I guess the NYTimes motto is now: All the Bullshit That We Can Print.
germy
A Ghost to Most
@Elmo:
Thank you for this. Mountain passes (the gnarlier the better) clear away the bullshit.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@A Ghost to Most: Sure, unless you’re the unfortunate that gets killed.
sharl
@germy:
Ain’t that the truth! And there are STILL plenty of those denial groups out there who patrol social media, doing that very thing. A while ago I encountered “Friends of Science” in the climate researcher Michael Mann’s twitter feed, rebutting Mann’s recent Congressional testimony. That nym “Friends of Science” just rubbed me the wrong way, so I did some checking – not a straightforward thing, since even minimally competent front groups like this know how to flood the zone in Google search results – and sure enough, FoS is a front group largely funded by corporate petroleum extraction critters based in Alberta Canada. They did the twitter equivalent of stammering and stuttering when this was pointed out, but they dug in and kept repeating the same bullshit, not just to me, but to actual climate experts who showed up later in the discussion. Unfortunately, persistence is one their more prominent features; but since they are getting paid to do that, I suppose their income security relies on persistent lying.
Pisses me off, it does…
A Ghost to Most
When the big drop comes, I will figure I’m due. My wife, who will probably be with me, will not likely be so sanguine.
jl
@sharl: yeah. Sad development. In the link one of the NY Times’ reporters pleaded that
‘ “The New York Times newsroom and the New York Times opinion section are totally separate things!” he shouted into the void ‘
I can understand why someone would say that to defend their paper’s reporting. But, really, no, they are not totally separate.By regularly publishing Stephens’ opinions on their opinion page, the NYT is endorsing the value of his regular opinion. His opinion really doesn’t have enough value to be a regular contributor. At best, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. I think that is a charitable interpretation of his opinion on climate change. If his opinion is reliable, why does it question and contradict the science so often? The NYT;s management brass needs to be able to answer that question. They can’t.
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: cool, thanks! Maybe a little.
Patricia Kayden
@germy: LOL!! The whole thing is hilarious. I just can’t stop laughing. I’m happy no one was seriously hurt. Perhaps a lesson will be learned by the blissfully rich and they will actually do some research before parting with their money so quickly. But since the planners are going full steam ahead with fyrefestival 2018, maybe not.
Thoughtful David
@TriassicSands: I saw someone a couple of days ago (Josh Marshall?) who had a whole list of these Trump “who knew it was so hard” statements about various topics. He was pointing out that Trump doesn’t realize that every time he says one of these things it makes him look stupid to any non-Trumpanzee.
jl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks for the pic of inspiration point. I need to get down there for Spring. I’ve seen amazing pics of the wild flower blooms out in the boondocks from down there.
As for the Muir quote, I think the point was that the Democrats need to make a big effort to get these seats, even if we lose a number of them. Winning just a few of the open seats will keep the less extreme, and somewhat more sane, House GOPers from joining with the nutcases to do maximum damage.
Keith P.
@Mnemosyne: I got an extend paint stick and spooked it down, but it went into my atrium and up into the skylight. Finally got it down from there, where it’s under my dining room table catching its breath. It wouldn’t go out the open front door, so in a few minutes (if my cat doesn’t show up) I’m gonna try to spook it back out the back door.
BTW This is the 4th bird that’s gotten stuck in the house.
Patricia Kayden
@Splitting Image: Are there that many Blacks in Iowa to really get hurt by these draconian policies though? I doubt it. It will be the precious White Working Class who will get screwed. I wish the MSM would report on that.
Patricia Kayden
@Keith P.: LOL!! Distract. Distract. Distract. She’s a pro. I’ll give her that.
P.S. We need a movie about this whole fiasco. Preferably a mockumentary like “This is Spinal Tap”. Ja Rule could star in it for authenticity.
Lizzy L
Lovely photos, folks. I am so grateful for trees and flowers and oceans and gardens. Admiring my neighbors’ gardens helps keep me sane in this hard time.
A Ghost to Most
@jl:
Sure, why not. Climb on.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: I got some wildflower pics, I’ll send the bulk of the pics from my hike to Alain for the “On the Road” posts. Being that I got 2 blisters on one foot and one on the other yesterday, my planned recon of the meltdown site may be delayed a week.
jl
@Thoughtful David: Marshall is asking for contributions for press quotes of all the obvious things about actually running an organization like the US executive branch and leading his party that Trump didn’t know. Anyone who has a link should contribute.
I see Trump just promised again that the new new new revised revise revised GOP health care disaster will ensure everyone with pre-existing conditions will keep their coverage. That will come in handy, since it gives the Democrats and the media a chance to press the GOP on how that will work with their proposed state high risk pools and state exemptions from benefit standards. Trump’s new repeat of his lie is a gift for attempts to keep a sane policy.
Another Scott
@Keith P.: I recall that Betty had some (flying) bird in her chicken coop. If I recall correctly, she managed to get it out using a broom on a long handle or something similar, while keeping the doorway out clear.
Ya, here’s the thread – long-handled fishing net.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Splitting Image
@Mnemosyne:
Indiana, too. That idiot Pence shut down Planned Parenthood and caused an HIV epidemic. When these guys look at this and still want to go national, you have to assume that the results they’re getting are the results they want. Pro-life my ass.
jl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Blisters! Blisters? We’re talking about blisters?
No wonder you had a negative reaction to the Muir quote.
PaulWartenberg
Going to my nephews 16th birthday this afternoon he’s already got a car, I hope he likes the fuzzy dice I got him
Alain the site fixer
@Another Scott: I found all your comments in Spam and Trash folder. I released them all. Not sure what’s going on, but I think that once something got triggered, subsequent comments auto-trashed.
I’ll investigate further but probably not today.
Thoughtful David
@jl: I’m pretty sure there aren’t very many people who open the editorial section of the NYT and say “Oh, hey, this isn’t really part of the newspaper! What’s it doing here? I’m going to ignore it!” Or vice versa with the science section. The NYT is one, single thing–a unit. If they publish climate-change denial and at the same time an article on climate change, they are indeed saying that their policy is those things are the same.
Raven
@Keith P.: we paid $800 for our really nice screen door,
Keith P.
@Another Scott: Long-handled stick is definitely the way to go. for some reason, this bird is not heading to any of the exits. Maybe one of the other birds chased it inside…I have catfood outside, and the (fat) birds get extremely protective over it. They were dive-bombing some poor three-legged cat that showed up this afternoon looking for food, so I wound up throwing a couple of handfuls out there, which probably exacerbated the bird problem.
Another Scott
@Alain the site fixer: Thanks, but that makes me look even more deranged than usual!! ;-) (Reminds me of my first post on USENET. I didn’t appreciate there was a delay between hitting “Post” and seeing it actually show up in a thread. I think I reposted that first message about 30 times before I figured it out. ;-)
There was a FYWP word or few in there somewhere. I managed to trick it and got it working here by putting spaces in potentially problematic words. If I find the time, I’ll see if I can figure out which one(s) it was.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@Keith P.: Close all blinds to all other windows. Close any doors you can to keep the bird in one area. Open the door or window you want it to go out. Maybe blow a fan up at it or use something longer like a long broom handle to wave around near it to get it to move. It probably thinks it can somehow get out that window if the window doesn’t have blinds. You want to discourage it from that location.
If you have a pool you could use a long handled net to see if you can catch it.
zhena gogolia
@Thoughtful David:
I love how their useless “Public Editor” accused liberal readers of digging through Stephens’s past writings for evidence of climate-change denial, as if this were an illegitimate activity. And then he makes his very first column a climate-change screed.
Another Scott
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: You’ll enjoy this, then..
:-)
(via Attackerman’s Twitter feed.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Splitting Image
@Patricia Kayden:
Given Iowa’s demographics, they’ll definitely hurt more poor whites than blacks, but that Atwater quote comes to mind whenever I read a list of Republican “accomplishments”. The common factor of every single thing they do is that someone they don’t like will take it in the teeth.
I think the main thing that has changed since Atwater’s day is that Republicans have outsourced the writing of legislation to organizations like ALEC, so that many different states are now passing identical bills regardless of whether the states have similar problems or not. So it barely makes any difference anymore to the Republicans whether the state’s underclass is black, white, or hispanic.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Just south of Inspiration Point is Muir Peak.
Keith P.
@Raven: Back door stays open for the cat. She gets really energetic on spring days, so she wants to run inside and then back out at will. I’ve even got the window to my office open, so she’s running outside the back door and then jumping up on my office window ledge to come back in. So much of my life revolves around keeping that cat happy.
NeenerNeener
@Yarrow: This makes me nervous. If she’s not worried about re-election then she can vote Yes on TrumpDon’tCare.
Jeanne
@germy: Switch Tom and Daisy for Jared and Ivanka. That’s where we are now.
germy
@Jeanne: yup.
J R in WV
@Keith P.:
Sounds like you should google up a big old butterfly-net kind of device maybe?
We had a bat flying orbits in a room I was doing drywall in. No furniture but a tall piano in the middle of the room, windows open, lights on in the evening. Cat on top of piano, watching bat go round and round.
Then cat reached up with both front feet and grabbed the bat in flight – great coordination there!! Then after just a couple of seconds he let the bat go, bat resumes circular orbits. Cat catches bat, let it go.
Third time cat catches bat, I catch cat and grab bat, and throw bat out the window. Amazing coordination of cat catching and me grabbing… I was younger then, and spry.
Get a tool for catching things in flight.
Seth Owen
@MomSense: Massachusetts has plenty of woods and ocean. It’s the Bay State, after all. It may be a little more crowded than some other places but there are a lot of places to go. My SIL goes out hiking and camping locally all the time,
(I don’t, because I got my fill of ‘roughing it’ in the Army).
Betsy
@MomSense: wow! What state is that in?
Betsy
I went birding two mornings in a row this weekend. Great minds think alike, I guess.
Got up at the crack of dawn, which is so unlike me. Had my stuff ready to grab and go, down to the iced coffee sitting in the fridge. Was rewarded with at least two life birds.
(Actually, my friend says, great minds think differently. )
TriassicSands
@Thoughtful David:
But, no matter how many times he says those things it doesn’t make the slightest difference to his supporters. What is truly scary is not how stupid Trump is — he’s one person — but how many truly stupid people there are in the US today.
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: That’s a funny story, you need to make a comic strip out of that.
The Fast Kate Middleton
@TKinNC: Iowa nativ here – the Koch Bros have indeed established a beachhead here. After the Senate gutted collective bargaining for public employees, the only person invited to witness the governor signing the bill was an ALEC lobbyist. BTW – one of my favorite Republican Neanderthals is a guy named Mark Chelmgren, AKA Senator Sizzle. He claimed to have a degree in astrophysics from Sizzler Steakhouse university. He also suggested that hiring at our three Regents’ institutions should hire faculty based on their political affiliation.
Betty Cracker
@NeenerNeener: Possible, but I don’t think she will.
@Betsy: What did’ja see!?!
Keith P.
The bird went back up to the ceiling window, but I flushed it back down. Now, it’s sitting on the television…6 feet from the wide-open door. Either it’s still trying to catch its breath or it just doesn’t want to go to the backyard. I dunno.
The Fast Kate Middleton
@Iowa Old Lady: Yeah, I saw that – he and Branstad both. It mad me throw up in my mouth. I’ve never been more motivated to do everything I can to get rid of these fuckers – which only increases my frustration with my current health issues. I can barely march a block, FFS.
germy
@Keith P.: Possibly you’ve got a new pet? Put out some food and water and give the bird a name.
jl
@Thoughtful David: They do in effect assert those to incompatible things when the op-ed is by a regular contributor. Either their news is usually wrong, or they think someone who regularly disagrees with the news they publish deserves a regular spot on their op-ed page.
Mnemosyne
I have somehow managed to lose a pretty large wire shelf somewhere in our apartment. And our apartment ain’t that big.
ingressus sum
RE: Damsel Fly
Dad called them “Snake Doctors” (I know not why); I was in my late 20s/early 30s before I learned from city folk that they were Damsel Flies.
mainmata
@Mike J: Yeah, I thought the same thing. Often makes a big difference w/o falsifying the original.
J.
Gorgeous photos!
mainmata
@Seth Owen: Even in the long, long settled “North Shore” there is plenty of ecological nooks to explore. I know, my childhood.
No One You Know
Dragonflies are a joy. The little metallic blues are the first in spring. Somewhere I have a picture of one on a rock that looks like he’s dropping his dentures at me.
Summer’s here when the Meadowhawks arrive, and I think of the haiku:
The dragonfly,
dressed in red,
off to the festival.
Issa, I think.
Singing Truth to Power
I should have gone for a nice hike, but it was mid-40s and raining here, so instead, I spent half the morning sorting cassette tapes. Yeah, I know how far behind that technology is. (You may go ahead and sneer.) Threw some, took some to St. Vincent, kept some. So with the savings from not spending money on new music technology, I ordered a rechargeable SunJoe mower. I’m blaming the cassette-sorting and mower-buying on my embarking on a low-carb regime. Or maybe Trump.
Donna K
@amk:
That’s because it’s a damselfly.
Betsy
@Betty Cracker: It was a great day. Grasshopper sparrow, blue grosbeak, bobolink, indigo bunting, blue-gray gnatcatcher, summer tanagers, black-throated Blue Warbler, great blue heron, Meadowlark and then the usual complement of cardinals, chickadees Carolina wrens, etc.
Why does voice on my mobile phone put Capitals in random places?