A Warm Winter's Day

Wow, what a day. Stopped at Hansen Dam on the way to work, and literally the first bird I saw was the Pine Warbler. 

Last two times I stopped & looked for this bird, I spun my wheels to no avail.  Now I know the secret: get there at 08:00 a.m.

Then Joe called, and told me that he's only just leaving Baldwin Park, now.  Oh, man!  We're never gonna start work, at this rate.  This is terrible! I'm stuck in Sylmar, with nothing to do for another hour, while waiting for Joe to show up.  Oh, wait: let me run over to Veteran's Park and try again for the Red-naped Sapsucker.

So, of course, I re-found this bird that hangs out on the frisbee golf course: I realize the photo quality is horrible, but would like comments on Yellow-bellied vs Red-naped Sapsucker.

Steven Colbert is God

Anybody who doubts that Steven Colbert is the funniest man on TV should click here, and watch the segment on vodka-soaked tampons.

Let's Go Kill Some Indians :-)

So, today is Thanksgiving.  You know: the holiday in which we remember the Pilgrims who would have starved to death had it not been for those nice Indians who brought turkey, pumpkin, squash etc., and all the nice white people sat side-by-side with all the nice brown people, and we all lived happily ever after.

Not according to my college anthropology professor.

In lecture he said that the first Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Cotton Mather--or one of those Puritan religious fanatics--to thank God for their heroic victory over the local Indian tribe, who weren't getting with the program.  Apparently, they convinced the Indians to gather inside a Puritan's house, and set it on fire, trapping the Indian men, women, and children inside.

So...while we sit around obsessing over those Muslim fanatics, just keep in mind that it wasn't that long ago that our ancestors did crazy shit like that, too.

Odds are, though, that when Abraham Lincoln and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Thanksgiving a national holiday (FDR moved the date that Lincoln had set) they didn't know about the mass execution.  By then history--which after all, is written by the victors--had blurred events.  As a matter of fact, you won't find a lot about this on the internet. You certainly won't hear people discussing this--or even what happened to the indiginous people of this continent, in general--while sitting around the dining room table, tonight.

Food for thought.

4 Eagles and a Woodpecker

Saturday morning 19 November 2011

We were getting the kids ready for their last soccer games of the season.  My wife's sister, "N", called, and said, "My boyfriend canceled. He can't go with me to The Eagles concert!"

The wife said, "I can't go. Gotta organize the soccer team's award dinner." Next think I knew, I was on the way to Vegas with N.

Some comments:

(1) I have never seen The Eagles in concert.  Let me put it this way: those guys are in such good shape, and have such strong voices, that they don't need microphones. They're all 18 years older than me, and could run circles around me, without working up a sweat.  Glenn Frey looks like he could throw me over his shoulder, and carry me up and down the stairs.

(2) They put on quite a show.  Hats off to their audio-visual team.

(3) Hats off to the trumpet player. His three minute solo at the beginning of "Hotel California" brought the house down.

(4) Wow! I just saw The Eagles play "Hotel California", live!  I never thought that would happen.

(5) Joe Walsh is one serious, kick-ass guitar player.

(6) The majority of the audience members were AARP members, or at least eligible to join.  Three guys and their wives sat in front of us, and they were all Texas firemen nearing retirement age.  They, too, would be able to carry me up and down the stairs.  One of them was wering a Doxa 1000T Divingstar, and I made his day i.e. evening when I recognized the watch. It looked like this one owned by JSTWAZ:

Actually, the part that tickled him pink was the fact that I was not interested in his brother-in-law's Rolex Submariner.

But I digress.

The point is that the band and the audience were all over 50, and having a blast.  It made me feel good.  I just turned 45, and the idea of turning 50 in five years has had me in a panic.

Sunday morning 20 November 2011

After the obligatory Las Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet we hit the road.  I talked the sister-in-law into stopping in Zyzzx, where the Lewis' Woodpecker was ridiculously cooperative.  I actually got the bird for a visiting elderly lady.  It was a life bird for her.

 The rain started in Barstow, and grew worse and worse with each mile of asphalt that carried us out of the Mojave Desert, and toward the big city.  It's nice to be home in a warm house.  While I'm sitting here, somewhere out there on the 210 Freeway the Upland Fire guys are getting soaded while using the Jaws of Life on the lead car of that 4 car wreck we crawled past in the downpour. I hope the Upland boys get their chance to go to Vegas, too, soon.

You Don't Have To Be Smart When You're Beautiful

Murrieta: a Starbucks on Highway 79.  We are on the way home from our first Boy Scout camping trip, and stop at a shopping center after spending 70 minutes on a rough dirt road that should have never been driven in our Celica. We need to go out and buy an SUV.

We need a shower, and have not brushed our teeth. It was 37 degrees F at 02:00 a.m., while we slept in our tents in the high mountain pine forest. I am seriously ready for a doppio con panna. 

A voice squeeks behind me, in line, "Excuse me. What time is it?"

I turn, and am stunned by a smokin' hot girl in her twenties with long, black hair, high heels, and a mini skirt that calls attention to her gorgeous legs.  Instead of telling her what time it is, I swing my arm to the left and upside down, so that she can see my watch as if she was looking at a watch on her own wrist.

She stares at my watch, a Seiko SKX 781: the famous "Seiko Orange Monster" professional dive watch.
I have no plans to dive down to 200 meters below the surface, but if that ever happens, I'm wearing the right watch.

She stares at the watch.
She squints.
She leans closer.
Her eyes bulge.
She then straightens up, and huffs indignantly, "I can't read it! I can't see what time it is!"
I realized right away what her problem was: she has never studied a dive watch with a rotating bezel that helps you keep track of time.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure her dad wears a Rolex Submariner, but she has never really looked at it.

She shrieks, "The numbers are all weird!"
Ah...the rotating bezel is still set to when we started our death-defying 10 mile drive on the dirt road, because we wanted to measure how long it will take us to get to the pavement.  She doesn't realize that if all she wants is to know what time it is, all she needs to do is stare at the dial, and ignore the bezel (the rotating outer ring).  Nice guy that I am, I rotated the bezel back to zero minutes, and presented the watch to her a second time, assuming that if the watch looks like this, Princess will now be able to tell what time it is.

Princess turns away from me, and turns on her force field. I no longer exist.  She stares past me at the girl at the cash register, squints at some clock that may or may not really exist (I didn't see any clocks or time displays anywhere), and exclaims, "It's 1:15!" and stomps out of Starbucks.

That's a Fine Kettle of Hawks, That Is!

Sunday morning, Claremont, Oak Park Cemetery.  So far, this has been a dismal fall migration. Very few passerine migrants, not a single Swainsons Hawk.  Got to the cemetery, and the place was full of Audubon's Warblers, White-crowned Sparrows, and 6 Black-throated Gray Warblers. Even got my First-of-Fall Ruby-crowned Kinglet: proof that autumn is upon us. At 09:15 a.m., an unusually shaped hawk flew behind the eucalypti at the north end of the cemetery, so I ran around to the open, undeveloped part of the cemetery. Cool! Eighteen Swainson's Hawks on their way to Argentina!

.

Well...at first there were 18 of them, but more and more rose up from the trees in the neighborhood north of the cemetery, and eventully I had over 70 Swainson's Hawks!  The kettle circled overhead for an hour, but I didn't have my car (I had walked the Basset Hound to the cemetery from my house) and I feared that if I ran home for my 35 mm SLR, the flock would be gone, so I called a bunch of local Claremont birders. No one was home except or Rick, who has an ankle injury, and can't walk. Dang it! I took the picture, above, by holding my Android Droid X cell phone up to the left lens of my Swarowski 10 X 42 Habicht (how appropriate!) binoculars.
I took the picture, below, by pointing the cell phone at theat part of the sky had had most of the 70 hawks in one area.  My apologies for the low image quality:

Each one of the black dots in the blue sky is a Swainson's Hawk.

THE INTERNET THINKS I’M GAY

Dear Internet,
 I’m not gay.


Seriously.


I swear, I only like women. Women with drivers licenses, who can legally drink.

 So why does The Internet think I’m gay? Well, I like to check my emails on The Cloud. I don’t use email software like Eudora that stores your emails on your hard drive. I just let Hotmail and Verizon keep all of my emails up in the cloud. That way, I can access everything, and not worry about it. Whenever I check my emails on The Cloud, Verizon’s email web page has a bunch of annoying advertisements along both sides of the computer screen. More often than not these ads have a bunch of photos of natural and unnatural blondes, with the following text in 48 font:



“UPLAND WOMEN LOOKING FOR PARTNERS”



First of all, why do the idiots at Google and Verizon think I want to run around with women from Upland? If I was going to cheat on my wife, I would want somebody in Claremont. I mean, come on: On paper I have 3 jobs (I turned in my resignation at the ER, last week, and won’t know if I’ll be able to fit in any more shifts at the VA until I get up and running at my new full-time job). I have a wife, 2 kids, a dog who needs to be walked twice a day, and a Zebra Finch who won’t stop bleating every time I walk around in the living room. Between a boys’ soccer team, a girls’ soccer team, Girl Scout meetings, Boy Scout meetings, a never-ending sink full of dirty dishes, a kitchen trash can that fills up as soon as I empty it, and a never-ending supply of dog poop out on our patio, the only way that I could pull off cheating on my wife would be if there was a very lonely, patient, horny Claremont woman who willingly lets me into her house at the drop of a hat.



Other than that, ain’t gonna happen.



Oh, and if I cheated on her, it would devastate my wife.



Maybe I should have started with that.



Anyways, after years of Verizon failing to tempt me with surgically enhanced smiling blondes who are showing a lot of cleavage while smiling seductively into camera, they decided that if I’m not interested in 25 year olds with awesome boobs, clearly I must be gay.


So now every time I check my emails I get photos of tall, good-looking, dark-haired guys with perfect teeth and bulging pecs winking at me.



“SINGLE MEN IN UPLAND ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!”



Great.