If you’re wondering why we’ve gone a while without a post, a few of us have posts brewing in the backroom, but, seeing that others are editing posts, we’re reluctant to hit publish for fear of big-footing. Yes, the co-bloggers I’m referring to all happen to be women — why do you ask?
Anyhoo, woodpeckers were in the bottle-brush tree again. There was a pair flitting all over the yard around 9 AM while I was having coffee on the veranda. Here’s one of them:
Here it is hanging out with a mockingbird pal:
This particular bird calls a lot, and when it does, it vibrates like a paint mixer:
Terrible things are happening in the world, but I’m pretending not to know about them for the afternoon. You?
ETA: Okay, the most Balloon Juice thing ever just happened: Anne Laurie and I both published posts at the exact same minute. Then we both took them down. I put mine up again, damn it, and up it stays! :-)
PaulWartenberg
Tony Robbins?
aimai
Just gorgeous set of pictures, Betty. Really very needed. I’m swamped and life feels difficult right now. These pictures hit the spot.
Mohagan
Great pictures! From Googling, it appears to be a red-bellied woodpecker. Thank you for the great post.
schrodingers_cat
What a pretty tree and what a pretty bird. We are still in winter, it was snowing on Friday.
Thoughtful David
Red-bellied Woodpecker. And yes, his belly will have a bit of red on it, if you can see it just right.
WaterGirl
Amazing color on the birds and the trees. I have never seen a bottle-brush tree before. Really cool.
Thanks for the respite, Betty.
SiubhanDuinne
Great pictures, Betty, and so funny about you and AL tripping all over yourselves to avoid stepping on each other.
I’m enjoying the Bolshoi’s wonderful Giselle this afternoon. Have seen this performance at least once before , if not twice — it’s an encore presentation from a live transmission of a few years ago — but it’s my favorite ballet and I never tire of it.
Intermission nearly over. I now return you to your regularly-scheduled woodpeckers.
Yarrow
Gorgeous. I loved Red-Bellied Woodpeckers. That’s the kind I see (and hear!) most often. A few years ago one was pecking at a neighbor’s gutter and just wouldn’t stop. It was kind of comical but I felt bad for the bird.
I really love bottlebrush trees. They are so gorgeous and your photos of them are wonderful.
lollipopguild
Thanks for the beautiful pictures and most of us here are capable of handling more than one post at a time.
different-church-lady
Fuck it, let’s just convert this to an all-woodpecker blog.
SiubhanDuinne
@PaulWartenberg:
Yeah, he turned out to be a right asshole, didn’t he?
zhena gogolia
@lollipopguild:
Yes, I don’t get why it’s such a big deal to have several posts at once. I like it better than having the same one stay up all day and get 600 comments.
These bird pictures are such a cheer-up!
WaterGirl
Betty, you have just described what I hate most about meetings by video conference.
All the visual clues that are helpful in person go out the window with video, and the repeated start-stop when multiple people start to speak at once, then both back off and try again at the same moment, just drives me batty.
With threads, however, I have never really understood the “you stepped on my thread” thing. While I admire the sense of politeness behind it, I am thrilled when there are multiple active BJ threads at the same time.
P.S. Betty, I am still crushing on your butter lamb for this year. So adorable. I finally closed her BJ tab yesterday, but I like her so much. :-)
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
Those pictures are gorgeous!
Now I have to go see who put up another post.
MobiusKlein
Nobody cares an hour later about bigfooting.
I can’t remember a time I looked at the timestamps for old posts to see who got there first.
SiubhanDuinne
@different-church-lady:
How much wood would a woodpecker peck if a woodpecker would peck wood?
Eljai
@PaulWartenberg: I saw Tony Robbins’ comments attacking the “MeToo” movement in Wonkette yesterday. Makes me think there’s more than a few harassment accusations coming soon. What an asshole.
@BettyCracker: Pretty birds!
debbie
Even if it wasn’t planned, the echoing of the same tone of red in the first photo from flower to bird to leave-thing at the very bottom is genius! Well done!
trollhattan
Sure enough one fine woodpecker! Our bottlebrush is just about to bloom and with the last storm finally passed through I’ll guess probably tomorrow. Never seen a flicker in it but there will be bees and hummingbirds aplenty. Neighbors have a beautiful and tiny hummingbird nest in their orange tree–wondrous bit of engineering.
Say “Isle of Dogs” last night and am still impressed the next day. Crazy mix of American and Japanese by an American-German team. Or, life as usual in 2018 (despite our ruling Luddite Party ™). See it.
Attended a celebration for a friend’s shiny new citizenship. It was a very positive and ultimately even hopeful evening, a nice break from the current usual horrorstorm. An accomplished vocalist, she even led us in an unironic Star Spangled Banner singalong (and praised us for staying on key).
schrodingers_cat
@Eljai: He has a always struck me as a phony.
MobiusKlein
@WaterGirl: Better to have the start/stop in a meeting than one guy* who filibusters and never gives a chance for folks to respond. Blarg
Mnemosyne
Last night I did something I haven’t done in a few years — I stayed up until 3 am reading a book. And the worst part is, it was a book I’ve read multiple times before.
Damn you, Lois McMaster Bujold!
/shakes fist
laura
Those pair of peckers hits the spot!
I was fortunate enough to be parked in front of a green field near my dad’s house a few weeks ago having a difficult conversation with hospice.
The field was thick with northern flickers-a bird I crush on as much as a magpie…
Just seeing such abundance in an otherwise wrenching day was the thing that was needed to make the unbearable bearable.
Thank you Betty Cracker.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
LMB is a great author. Her writing is both elegant in its use of words and still easily accessible. A skill I will never be able to rival.
J R in WV
That’s pretty funny, AL should put hers back up too, we’re all grownups on the Intertubes, we can has two or tree tabs open at once!!!
Great birds!!
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
She’s one of my longtime favorites. I usually read books on Kindle these days, but I bought myself a hardcover copy of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance because I really loved her tongue-in-cheek tribute to classic romance novels. Between that and A Civil Campaign, I suspect her of being a fan of Georgette Heyer, as all right-thinking romance fans are.
(Though Civil Campaign also has more than a touch of Wodehouse in it, particularly with the character of Enrique.)
ETA: Also, I like that she writes about a functioning future, not a lazy dystopia.
Betty Cracker
@laura: Northern flickers are amazing. I’ve only seen them in pictures. Sorry about the wrenching time.
@WaterGirl: I do a lot of conference calls, and that IS annoying. But it would be even more annoying to have to change out of PJs and brush one’s hair, so long live audio-only conference calls, I say!
raven
@J R in WV: Hey, I wrote you several times about a couple of books about the Sea of Cortez and either you were just a drive by and never read them or you’ve pied me like Kay! which is it?
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: I think bottlebrush are native to Australia. There was a lot of it planted in Southern California gardens when I was a kid. We had a big one at one house and both hummingbirds and orioles were attracted to it.
raven
@WaterGirl: I spent a decade building online courses and your complaint is the most common. On the other hand we reach people, a high percentage female, who would not be able to participate in higher education any other way. The same goes for the learning communities I manage. Georgia is huge and there is no way our participants could travel as frequently as necessary. Which should we do, online or nothing?
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
Which one? I loved her dynastic space empire series of Vorkosigian novels, not as fond of her later series, which I have only read one of IIRC. Will keep and re-read the history of Miles V aka Admiral… what was his nom de guerre? I forget now. But a great concept that she kept running forever and a day. Still could go on with it if she wasn’t a little bored with it.
Barney
From Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s ‘The Meaning of Liff’:
Droitwich (n.)
A street dance. The two partners approach from opposite directions and try politely to get out of each other’s way. They step to the left, step to the right, apologise, step to the left again, apologise again, bump into each other and repeat as often as unnecessary.
opiejeanne
@Yarrow: Pretty sure if that woodpecker was pecking away at something metal he knew what he was doing. It’s called drumming and they do it to attract the girls. We have a pileated that drums on our roof ridge and a little sapsucker who drums on the stop sign out front. I think the flicker drums on the signs too but I haven’t caught him at it yet.
FlyingToaster
We don’t have any woodpeckers closer than the river (granted, it’s only a couple of blocks, but they don’t like anything in my yard). We have 5 mated pairs of sparrows in the mini-vegetation, plus my neighbors have at least 15 more pairs between them. We’ll feed them until mid-April, or whenever it finally stops snowing. This past week there was a brown pigeon/dove sitting in my yard, which I’ve never seen before in this neighborhood.
One of the red-tailed hawks has taken to checking out my yard en route from the Watertown Dam to Gore Place, so these small birds need to get a damn sight more cautious. Later we’ll have cardinals and catbirds and starlings and the river will have finches and wrens and such.
Robins just appeared on my block yesterday, which after our blooming irises and crocuses is an actual sign of spring. We saw some tulips coming up over in Auburndale yesterday, so there’s a possibility of winter ending sometime soon. Or that we’ll get an unexpected foot of snow. One or the other.
Bess
The first picture is gorgeous. Try a version where you crop away some of the bottom and right side so that the pecker is not dead center. And by cropping away some of the less interesting vegetation the pecker and bottle brush bloom will become more dominant.
Also try sharpening the bird’s eye a bit. It needs just a bit of highlight.
FlyingToaster
@J R in WV: Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, aka Admiral Miles Naismith of the Dendari Mercenaries.
You might like the Sharing Knife series a lot more than the Chalion or Penric & Desdemona series.
ET
On my to brunch I heard a woodpecker going to town. It echoed over a 2 block radius at least. I usually I can never find it. Sigh.
Aleta
Those pictures knocked me over and set me right side up again. Thanks for the beauty.
Accidentally concurrent posts, and the adjacent ones that invite back-and-forth, are fun. The only time the bigfooting bothers me is when (it seems like–but who knows) a blogger thinks his post is so important that it must go up right away, and stay up, despite a woman’s post that has recently gone up. I guess it resembles too closely those real life meetings where self-importance (of men or women, but more frequently men) overrides the input of intelligent women. So this is only a gut feeling–there are so many unknowns in blog mechanics and intentions and comments that criticism is impossible to say for sure–often inaccurate.
Duane
The Scott Pruitt debacle is a perfect example of republican desire to hold power at any cost. This guy’s head should have rolled weeks ago. Instead dipshit dump defends the indefensible. What a show. It would be funny but it’ not.
opiejeanne
Betty, all of them are excellent but that first picture is just swoon-worthy. So beautiful, and you got the perfect dreamy/hazy background to show off this bird and the bottlebrush.
J R in WV
@raven:
Neither, surely something went wrong with my spam filter. I’ll go look!!
trollhattan
@opiejeanne:
Yup, Aussie import, I think part of the eucalyptus family. Ours was yuge when we moved in and then annihilated by the only hard freeze we’ve experienced, but resprouted from the stump and thrives today. They’re as messy as they are good at attracting critters.
Yarrow
@opiejeanne: Could be. It wasn’t metal, though; it was some form of plastic. We stood and watched him for quite awhile and he didn’t do anything but tap on it. Didn’t go anywhere else and no other woodpeckers seemed to be around. Seemed a bit confused and very intent on pecking the gutter. The people in the house must have been going nuts. I find that woodpeckers are shy. If they see I’m watching them they move around the tree to a more hidden side. I was kind of surprised this one didn’t.
Mnemosyne
@J R in WV:
I actually prefer the later books in the Vorkosigan Saga, starting with Memory. I know they probably don’t make any sense without reading the prior books, but I was never into the military stuff in the earlier books and prefer the new political direction with Miles as the Imperial Auditor.
Aleta
@FlyingToaster: The only woodpeckers I see in my yard are on the locusts — a somewhat quick growing kind with deep crevices in the bark. And lacy foliage up top that comes out late, so they always look like they died in the winter. A nice tree with long flowers, seems underappreciated up here. It must be a haven for the bugs the woodpeckers like.
My mother used to insist on keeping many of the dead trees on her farm and at her cabin (the ones she didn’t need for firewood). Her neighbors would offer to take them down, but she said they provided the insects that fed the earlier migrating birds. And wintering places for animals. 2nd year bear cubs even.
raven
@J R in WV:
Oh good!
The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
Betty Cracker
@Duane: If Pruitt weren’t so deadly effective at dismantling much-needed environmental protections, I’d want him to stay. He’s a walking “THIS ADMINISTRATION IS CORRUPT AS FUCK” billboard.
Aleta
@opiejeanne: That’s cool. I never knew that, though I’ve heard it.
Fair Economist
And 8 minutes after your repost – you get bigfooted. Isn’t there some sort of reservation system you frontpagers could use? Even something like a shared spreadsheet with hour slots.
Edit: holy smokes, you took those pics? I’d thought they were stock images from a professional photographers. Those are really good, especially for such a flighty subject.
raven
@J R in WV: The Unforgettable Sea of Cortez
Baja California’s Golden Age 1947-1977, The Life And Writings Of Ray Cannon
Tazj
Beautiful pictures as always, I’m still trying to get a decent picture of the cardinals that visit my backyard. It’s snowing again here now, but not sticking to the ground.
opiejeanne
@J R in WV: As to your question the other night about my delivering half of a pineapple upside-down cake, I delivered it to my niece and her husband to make them feel better about having a crappy neighbor across the street. They were delighted and mostly amused by the idiot neighbor.
I don’t know what I said in my post that made you think I’d take anything nice to the woman who blasted the Start Spangled Banner at my Mexican nephew-in-law.
opiejeanne
@Yarrow: Our sapsuckers are pretty brazen, don’t seem to mind us camping right under their tree except when I point a camera at them, which is when they move around to the other side of the tree. They really like our birches.
red-bellied sapsucker
raven
@Tazj: I have one that keeps landing on the azaleas out my front window and I just can’t get to my camera in time to get it!
opiejeanne
@Aleta: The pileated woodpeckers are the largest in the world, smaller by only an inch than the probably extinct Ivory-billed woodpeckers. This is a damned big bird and when it drums on the roof right over your bedroom at the crack of dawn it does get your attention.
They are so shy that I figure I’ll never get a photo of one unless I spend some serious cash on a really big lens for my camera. We hear them calling from the cottonwoods across the street when we sit in our garden and I play back their calls from the recordings on the Cornell Lab site. Sometimes they answer, and once one flew over us twice trying to figure out where the other bird was.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: As someone who also works from home, I say AMEN to that.
WaterGirl
@raven: Online!
Aleta
This is true here too. At first the online courses seemed sub-par to me, because the strength of interaction with the teacher in person would be lost. Then I spoke to women who were getting degrees though online coursework, though they lived on islands. (Library science, for example; and courses for EMTs– etc –) It would be a $25-$50 round trip ticket off each time, and on winter seas (because most work for tourists in the summer). Then an hour or more drive to a campus, and probably an overnight before you could catch the ferry home. For one day of classes.
I was late to understand, but finally got it. No way these women could afford to be a full time student, and also, many had home obligations and kids. The older ones had sick parent care and took care of grandchildren.
Broadband to the little libraries in rural areas also made all the difference, because at first broadband was not available to homes there. After closing hours, people who had a laptop would sit in their cars late at night in front of the library to do their classwork.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Mnemosyne:
You have checked out the dedication for ACC, right?
raven
@Aleta: Some, probably many, online courses are sub-par. I was fortunate enough to be part of a program that used a collaborative course development model where we had four or five content experts, a technical person and myself work for two semesters to build a course. The courses are all asynchronous so we had to design them so that there could be meaningful interaction throughout the term. The program now serves over 29,000 students and is growing. The other crucial component is that the teaching faculty is trained in online delivery, too many “schools” just let the instructors have at it.
germy
@opiejeanne:
What did the neighbor do?
J R in WV
@raven:
We got the Steinbeck before we took the trip, it’s really good, although the age tells a little bit, condescending to the locals, but given the age of the book, pre-WWII – I think they took their research trip in the late 1930s, I was able to ignore that and concentrate on the natural history of the book. There are two versions of the book, ours is the one titled “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” and is the one from 1951.
I haven’t ever seen the compilation of Ray Cannon’s reportage from Baja, from the web site it looks very interesting. The majority of the Baja peninsula is preserved as a park, and much of the bay itself is a marine preserve. I’m not sure if sport fishing is permitted in the marine preserves, perhaps they place limits on species rather than shutting down sport fishing completely. Thanks for the link, you being a big sport fisherman, I see how you would know about that one, it sounds famous as hell.
There are lots of sport fishing boats in the area around Land’s End, the southernmost point of Baja. We saw quite a few heading out as we rounded the stone archway just past dawn. There must be pretty productive water to support the hundreds of dolphin we saw around that southernmost point. It was my first time south of the Tropic of Cancer – unless Hawaii is further south of Land’s End of Baja.
We didn’t see many charter fishing boats up in the Bay – but we didn’t get very far north, as the whales – which were the big attraction for the cruise – don’t get very far north into the Bay. There were quite a few other boats with tourists like us, though. And little private sailboats touring the Bay, too.
The Baja is partly truly bleak desert, the most desert of the whole Sonoran Desert. But there’s wet places too, oasis in the desert, ranches in the mountains, like the mountain ranges in Arizona, the water in the air from the Pacific is wrung out of the air as it rises over the mountain range, it falls in the mountains, and flows under the sand and sediment along the edges of the peninsula. But they plant orchards and irrigate them using that underground water.
If they do it right they can make it last, but if the overdo it it becomes non-sustainable.
We loved the sea, but riding the bus through the desert from hotel to port to airport was no fun. Really bleak. The voyage, though short, far exceeded my expectations.
raven
@J R in WV: So cool! I’ve fished the mainland side several times since the 70’s and always love it. It is alarming to drive down there from Tucson and see the garbage thrown in the middle of the highway but, overall, it is stunning.
efgoldman
@FlyingToaster:
We have three sizes/kinds that come to our suet feeders, and occasionally a big sapsucker that feeds on the ground.
We rarely hear them, but we did last week
First robin of spring arrived last week, then disappeared when the snow came.
Aleta
@raven: That sounds amazing, that program.
That also was missing here in the beginning. When the state U got into it, they just asked teachers to tape their stand-up classes (and give all rights to the school, OR to the company that had sold the school a bill of goods). Many good teachers in the faculty did not agree.
I do know a faculty person who agreed, and it’s worked out well for her in semi-retirement. She can visit her kid who lives in another country, and still work. She can spend winters in a warm state and summers in her cabin in the woods. Also she has a condition that made online teaching easier than in-person, with the help of extra technology.
J R in WV
@opiejeanne:
We have a ton of Pileated woodpeckers around here, mature forest with trees dying off from age, the birds love those, and beech trees drop huge branches onto the forest floor, which draws every kind of woodpecker. A DNR guy told me that the woodpeckers are a good sign of an area that will support Turkeys well, and probably vice versa, we have plenty of both. They are majestic birds, the pileated woodpeckers are, swooping away and giving that ancient sounding shriek as they fly.
Nothing sounds more like a dinosaur loose in the woods than a pileated woodpecker.
FlyingToaster
@efgoldman: I just wanted to say, Princess Garnet is adorable!
Last weekend WarriorGirl’s godlessparents took her to Animé Boston, in costume as Monika from the Doki Doki Literature Club. She was part of a photoshoot, but without her name attached.
Unfortunately, I have agreed not to post any photos or videos of her. She is ‘way more cognizant of “What Can Go Wrong On The Internet” than I expected — though I did make her read COPPA’s executive summary — and says, “NO pix, NO videos except to family”. Which I’ve gotta respect.
Mnemosyne
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I think I did and was having a vague memory, not just a suspicion just now.
The thing that really gives CVP away as a romance is buying the new wardrobe.
Waratah
Beautiful photos Betty. I wish I could grow bottle brush here.
BillinGlendaleCA
I saw two woodpeckers on my hike last Tuesday, but I didn’t take my 50-200mm* zoom lens so I didn’t get any good pics. We used to have a bottlebrush out by the street, but it died and we’re just waiting on the city to cut it down. It used attract hummingbirds like crazy.
*Since I was hiking in a canyon, I didn’t think I’d need a long focal length lens.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
G’s master’s degree from San Jose State will be all online. They’ve been doing it that way for about a decade and really have it down. This past semester, he was a “peer mentor” (kind of like a TA) for the one-unit required class that walks you through all of the technical requirements (how to use Canvas, how to do a video conference through Google Meetups, etc).
They also offer in-person classes (commenter Darkrose is taking classes that way), but their online program is the biggest and most popular. They get people from all over the country and sometimes from around the world.
FlyingToaster
@raven: That was my field until about 11 years ago — creating computer courses. Mine were still delivered by DVD rather than online (because bandwidth for technical simulations was not there outside of intranets). A slew of back-o-the-college textbook work, plus corporate intranet work.
I always worked with the subject matter expert (university professor, textbook author, corporate trainer), an instructional designer, and a crew of programmers, graphic designers and audio engineers. My job was usually coding, running and documenting the alpha and beta test rounds, and vetting the disc masters.
The only online courses I worked on were, frankly, not great. But they were so bandwidth-constricted, that I wasn’t surprised. I sincerely hope that better is going on now, even if I’m unlikely to come back to the field.*
* Mom duty for the next 8 years
raven
@FlyingToaster: Right, when we started we did use ancillaries in courses and we designed them so they worked on dial-up. Things have progressed to the point that most people have greater access but the courses are all asynchronous and the only time the conferencing tools are used is for office hours.
SFBayAreaGal
No woodpeckers in my neck of the woods. We do get a mockingbird that comes through every year. That bird has an amazing repertoire of bird songs. The bird songs go from a hummingbird to a hawk, to a seagull. I love listening to the mockingbird songs.
raven
@Mnemosyne: Yea, I have a tendency to but more faith in public institutions than the proprietaries. California would be expected to be cutting edge and they are. We were fortunate to have folks with vision here who got us going and, as my former boss said, “this program is your legacy”. We’ve been out course development for nearly seven years but the program is going great guns. Quality Matters is a great program evaluating online courses and we are work with them.
Denali
Yesterday I saw two piliated woodpeckers in a tree outside the front door of a house where I was passing petitions for signatures for the Congressional race(I am not the candidate). Politics and bird watching go hand in hand.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
It probably doesn’t hurt that they’re in San Jose, aka the heart of Silicon Valley. And they’re certified (or whatever it’s called) by the American Library Association (ALA), one of only two schools in CA to be approved by them for an MLIS program.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: San Jose State was one of two Normal Schools(colleges to train teachers) set up by the state in the late 1800’s, the other being in Los Angeles on Normal Hill. After the LA Normal School moved to Hollywood in 1911 the site on Normal Hill became the LA Central Library. The Normal School in Hollywood didn’t last long, it was taken over by the University of California for it’s Southern Branch.
RSA
And? You left out the part about how this led to Cole somehow doing injury to himself.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I live in Normaltown.
raven
HOLE IN ONE for Charlie Hoffman on 16!
raven
@Mnemosyne: One must take advantage of every resource available!
J R in WV
@opiejeanne:
Wow, you can really tell they like those trees! Birch trees are next to sugar maples in sweetness of their sap, you can boil it down into a syrup like maple syrup, so that’s probably why they like it so much.
We have a sapsucker that goes right around the tree, it looks like a cable was used on the tree for some reason, scarring the bark. Rings the tree in several places, but doesn’t seem to harm them.
trollhattan
@SFBayAreaGal:
Many years ago we had a neighborhood mockingbird that did a very credible car alarm. Impressive, but….
Florida Frog
@Mnemosyne: which one? I love her too. She is very, very easy to re-read
MikeInOly
I love these photos so much!! The color palette is wonderful.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: There’s a Normal St. by where the old Normal School was, it’s now LA Community College. The Southern Branch of the University of California didn’t last too long either in name or the location in Hollywood. Within 10 years the campus moved west to Westwood and changed it’s name to the University of California at Los Angeles(currently University of California, Los Angeles) or UCLA.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Let’s go crash that party down
In Normaltown tonight
Then we’ll go skinny-dippin’
In the moonlight
We’re wild girls walkin’ down the street
Wild girls and boys going out for a big time
Better version with actual footage of the hood!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXy0XnzTQuc
Mnemosyne
@Florida Frog:
See above. ? It’s funny, but I’ve realized that LMB and a romance author named Mary Balogh who’s had a similarly long career have become less interested in whiz-bang action as they get older and more interested at looking closely at human relationships. I must be getting old, because I prefer that too, now.
(CVA has its share of action and that great heist plot, but it’s not all military-military-military like her early books.)
opiejeanne
@germy: My niece’s husband is Mexican-American, his family’s been in this country for several generations. They just closed on a 1926 house in Tacoma, WA. I jokingly told them the people in the house across the street were Republicans/Trump supporters, based on the stuff in their yard and the fact that it was raining and they had a flag hanging next to the porch.
So, nephew had some days off and was working on the place, getting ready to move in, and was talking to the nice neighbor next door about sharing the cost of a fence. A car pulled into the driveway across the street, a woman got out and stared at him for a few seconds, then went into the garage and came out with a boom box blasting the Star Spangled Banner, and glared at him the whole time it was playing.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
My niece has had her consciousness raised a lot since she started dating him a couple of years ago and she was more upset than he was. He treated it like a joke, but not a funny one.