Sunday, April 13, 2008

The Cockpit


There's yours truly sitting at his new workstation supposedly "working." My son came into town and was pushing Tecate beer on me, as you can see. I think I had just successfully joined together a 100 megabyte database and was pretty happy about it, anyway.

The front door is still open except when it gets hot and Lori wants to cool the house down ... people call and can't believe all the squawking birds in the background. Those are Everett's red-wing blackbirds from Block Island and I've never seen them here so late in April. Must be all that global cooling you're having up yonder in the Northeast.

After tons of bad news things are looking up. The taxes are sent, a great punishment this year. Due to lack of funds we had to put off our trip to the Bahamas but those beautiful out islands will always be there. The kids are doing much better after some bad luck, and both have new jobs. Even my work is doing better, whew!

A few rare migratory birds came through such as the yellow warbler and indigo bunting, although not the loads of orchard orioles like last year.

A rarity was the first siting of a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle nest of over 100 eggs, all saved for incubation now, just in time for the Island's 35th birthday. The turtle was tagged as indicating its age was 35 years old too, a true coincidence. In fact, we're off to raise the sea turtle flag down by the visitors center.

Things are getting good now. I love this time of year before Memorial Day.

4 comments:

Everett said...

Oh those nasty grackles, purple and boat tail, have arrived here by the thousandss as well as some of my wayward RWBB's!
We had an Orchard Oriole build a nest in one of our Spruce trees last summer. It was the first sighting of them here in many years. They hatch and fledged 4 little ones. We put a marker in the yard about 30 yards and asked folks not to past that mark so as to not disturb the birds. At times there were 8-10 birders, like me, sitting in their lawn chairs hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare visitors!
Err, we are keeping the doors shut most of the time cause it is still kind of snappy up here!

Everett said...

Forget all those left off letters and mis-spelled words in the above comment. My fingers go faster than my brain!

Sam said...

Whew, thought you really were getting snappy there!

Gosh I remember April on the Block though ... taking that old ferry from Galilee freezing our Nantucket Sleigh Bells off! It was a relief just to get on dry land and out of the wind.

But year, I remember we went with some birders one year. Us kids were horrible. "Look, a ruby-titted thrasher over THERE!" About 30 cameras and binos would zoom over and then we started getting dirty looks.

And don't worry about the schpelling!
-sam

Everett said...

Lots of the Hairy Breasted Nut Scratchers will be showing up soon. My 12 year old going on 40 granddaughter says to say hi! You know her the Zsa Zsa gabor one!