From the Horse's Mouth

There's a marshy sort of strip of land between the road that runs by my apartment complex and some townhouses. At a guess, it's a bit over 100 meters wide. There's a street that crosses over it with a little bridge in the middle.

Yesterday, when coming home from work, I happened to glance over and saw a dozen or so vultures perched here and there on the railing that runs alongside the bridge. I guess a group of them had decided it was a good place for a rest. There was also one vulture slowly circling and descending as if coming in for a landing. I couldn't tell whether they were black vultures or turkey vultures. I see a lot of the latter around here. With the bushes and tall grass and such along the side of the road, I couldn't get a very good look at them as I drove past.

It's always kind of neat to see wildlife in suburbia. It's easy to forget that there are non-domesticated critters living around us.

Yesterday I noticed a grey military plane parked over at the airport. Curious as to what country it belonged to, I got the little pair of binoculars out of my desk and had a look. At first I thought it was from France but later saw it was from New Zealand.

While I was looking at it, some motion caught my eye. There was a very large bird flying about not too far off the ground over the grassy areay next to the nearest runway. Usually, the largest birds I see over there are vultures, but they're smaller and generally only hang out over there to catch thermals for altitude. Although I couldn't get a good look, the markings were also very non-vulture. The head looked light colored and the tail was white with a brown band at its end.

Then I remembered that there's a mated pair of bald eagles who build a nest and raise kids every year north of the airport. I thought maybe what I'd seen was a young'ish eagle. A quick web search resulted in a site that had examples of bald eagle plumage from fledgling to adult and, yup, the picture of a 2.5 year old bird looked a lot like the one I'd seen.

There are a couple webcams pointed at that nest year round, so I went to the website and saw that they post notes and pictures about the goings-on there. Earlier this week, there were a couple pictures of a subadult eagle that came to the nest and poked around a little before leaving. I'm guessing that's the same bird I saw.

I saw the eagle further down along the runway a little later. I couldn't get the camera out in time to try for a picture of her. For the rest of the day, I looked outside often in hopes of spotting her and maybe getting a picture, but had no luck.

Still, it was pretty cool to see a half-grown eagle. I just hope she doesn't hang around the airport any more, even it if means I won't see her again.

Every morning, not long after sunrise, these guys perch on the power lines outside the office.

When I moved from LJ to Dreamwidth, I figured I'd make an effort to post more often. Looks like I kind of failed at that. Not that much of note has been going on recently. Very little seems to change in my life.

I planted impatiens in the flower boxes on the patio again this year. They're growing well, though they don't seem to be blooming as much as the ones I've had in the past. I wonder if that's due to the weather. They might not be happy with all the clouds and rain we've been getting. The rain doesn't hit them where they are, but I've hardly needed to water them at all. Hopefully, they'll decide to flower more enthusiastically over the summer.

The World's Most Impressive Mocking Bird hasn't returned this year. With the road being built by the complex, a ton of trees are gone. Maybe he found a new home. There are plenty of sparrows and robins still around and chatting away, but I kind of miss the mocking bird being out there going through his rather large rerpetoire.

I did 'discover' a new bird a couple weeks ago. Now and then I'd hear a particular call that sounded like a Morse Code letter V. That intrigued me, so I searched online and learned there's such a bird as a song sparrow. I knew there were different kinds of sparrows, but I just assumed they all just chirped. I never knew that there were some who had a bunch of different songs. I dunno if they're common around here. All I've ever seen are the typical tough little brown Engilsh sparrows.

You know, the eclipse coverage today would be way cooler if, right at the peak, they had someone say "Totality" in that Mortal Kombat voice.

Today I returned to the office after having been on vacation since last Wednesday. It turns out that, back on Saturday, there was some sort of power issue at the building which knocked its HVAC system offline and it's still not been fixed.

When I arrived at about 6:30 this morning, it was 88F. It's gone up a bit since then and is just shy of 90F in here now...with 90% humidity.

I hate to think what it'll be like by the time afternoon rolls around.

I still have my livejournal account. It's got a while before the paid account runs out and it reverts to the lower free level. I don't post there directly any more, but I do log in so that I can check my friends list and comment on other folks' posts.

This morning there's an obnoxious box over the middle of the screen when one logs in. It's about the new terms of service for LJ accounts. If you don't choose to accept it, you're only given the option to log off. That's more than a little annoying. I figure I'll wait a bit to see if any articles regarding the changes show up in the next few days. I'm not going to accept it without knowing what's been changed in the terms and I'm not gonna try to dig through it myself this morning.

One interesting thing is that the notice says that the Russian language version of the ToS is the binding one, not the English language version. That makes me even more leery of it.

It looks as if Livejournal is having issues with its login servers this morning. I can still read non-friends-locked stuff there, of course, but can't log in to reply to anything. I guess it's a good thing I created the Dreamwidth account, since I can still try to be social even if I don't know as many people here.

Nothing creative. Just teting to see how things work. Like many others, I've created an account here as part of the Great Livejournal Migration.

I've been very lax in posting here, which is a bad thing. I really need to try to think of/find topics upon which to post an entry now and then.

For now, though, all I can offer is a picture of Tonka the pony wearing my niece's hat yesterday: