is it spring yet?


First bloom of the year, on the new hellebore.

Since I’m now a parent and find myself saying dorky things like “Lead on, MacDuff!” and “it’s a doggie-dog world” on a regular basis, I am going to just come out with it: is this thing on? I think I may have hit a record length for blogging silence, at least for a blog that I still consider active. But yes, I do still consider it active and I do plan to return, dust in the corners, and charge ahead into spring. My biggest challenge remains a lack of anything in my life suitable for blogging. Or at least, nothing suitable for a garden/home/cooking blog; since I remain resolved to only refer to the sprout obliquely and without photos or specific amusing anecdotes, there isn’t much left. Yes, I could (and probably will) wax on about the conundrums of being an old-school feminist in an anti-feminist reclaiming-high-heels-for-the-masses era, but that’s only interesting for so long and hardly at all once it’s actually outside of my head. What I would prefer is to organize my actual life to allow for cooking, gardening, art, and home projects so that I will have more material to work with. We’re not quite there yet.

We are, however, making painfully slow but steady progress toward having space, time, and energy to make these things happen. The garden has the most potential since it’s outside and therefore exempt from being entirely covered with stacks of paper to be dealt with, which is the fate of all other available workspace inside the house. Last spring’s hard work is already paying off, as there are buds and sprouts and even blooms coming up all over in the new side garden. I finally have a hellebore, and it’s a lovely deep burgundy color; having bought it half off well after its bloom season, it could have been anything. One of these days, when there is money to spare for specific garden plants, I’d like to add a green-flowering one and a medicinally valuable one. (Because I’m a geek who likes unusual things, and green flowers are certainly that.) I remind myself that there is a whole backyard just waiting to be landscaped post-new-fence and there’s no need to cram every flowering plant I covet into one small patch. At any rate, the hellebore is flowering! The dicentra is also sending up shoots, which is reassuring since I feared I’d killed that one. I may yet have killed the second of the two; I’m not entirely sure as I am trying not to inspect the ground for shoots every single day (a watched pot and all that).

The shrubs seem to have all weathered the (unseasonably mild) winter well, as they all now have buds and new shoots. I did manage to get the second winterberry into the ground during one warm stretch, so that leaves just the spicebush, inkberry, and beautyberry in pots waiting to be planted. They are destined for the liriope-riddled side yard at the back of the house, near the stairs to the basement, just as soon as we remove all the liriope and the two sassafras saplings that we’re donating to the town park. That area is bounded by our neighbor’s fence, the rear addition, the sassafrass trees in the front and the holly tree in the back. So it’s the next reasonable place to garden, as it could use some cleaning up, pruning, and rearranging. It’s already a sheltered corner that the birds and squirrels love, and I think it will be lovely once the new shrubs are in place. It’s also visible from the two windows in the rear addition, and between the flowers, foliage, and autumn/winter berries it’s looking really fantastic in my imagination.

is it spring yet?

new camera


Test photo: our dining room Buddha.

By hoarding my personal money like one of my young cousins and pooling all of my birthday and Christmas cash, I was able to buy the new camera that I’ve been lusting after! (At least no one had to drive me to the mall to do so.) I’ve wanted a digital SLR for years, and finally took the plunge. After getting over a few new-toy hurdles (such as running out to the store since there was no memory card in the box, the adult equivalent of “batteries not included”), I took a series of test photos and proclaimed the camera to be “really nice” and to have “a much better flash than the old one.” To which my partner replied, I SHOULD HOPE SO. Did I mention it was pricey? Yes, but it’s so nice to have a real camera back in my hands: I had no idea how much I missed looking through a view finder. (And yes, I realize it’s odd to illustrate a post about rewarding your material cravings with a picture of a buddha, but what can I say? It’s pretty! And, the camera will feed my creativity, which is an important part of my core self and brings me happiness. Or something.)


Test photo: Ellie the elephant, part of our newly-accessorized living room.

In addition to the better flash system, the big improvement of the new automatic settings (for my purposes) of this camera over my little point-and-shoot one (which is and was a good solid little camera in a fully-metal body that served me well on an AIDS ride and numerous vacations; it’s not the camera’s fault that I deleted all the Maine photos before we got it home!) is the ability to take decent photos of small things up close and personal. Yes it’s dorky, but I can’t wait to be able to get better pictures of everything growing in the garden come spring. I don’t have any truly artsy photography plans at the moment, I just plan to take the same pictures I’ve been taking and have them turn out better. Food photos that don’t all look shiny (for example). Photos of the interior of our house without the colors all washed out. Pictures of the baby where he doesn’t look like a red-eyed demon. I’m confident that as I use the camera more, more shots will occur to me. I’m less confident that my brain will be alert enough anytime soon to go back to manual shooting with any degree of success, but there’s plenty of time for that.

new camera

spiffing things up around here

After many delays, I finally updated the version of WordPress I’m using to one that supports tags. In an effort to blend in more (hah!) I’ve been going back and finessing old entries to have fewer categories and more tags. In the meantime, things may look a little odd, for which I apologize.

Once the tagging situation is under control, I hope to have an updated list of what’s growing in the garden as well as a new and improved list of blogs of folks I know and reference sites I visit frequently (this latter more for my own convenience). Then I might just get around to cleaning up my birding lifelist and updating the home improvement chronicle.

Right after I finish this coffee and go to the pool.

spiffing things up around here

updated lifelist

I’ve updated my lifelist to reflect the sightings of the past month or so. I still need to find usable photos (e.g. those in the public domain or licensed for non-commercial use) and enter a bunch of latin names, but the list of birds itself is now complete.

Through doing this update I’ve realized that I’ve crossed the 200 bird mark! This number includes all birds sighted everywhere, i.e. the 27 birds I saw in Ireland (the Ring-Necked Pheasant is the only bird that appears in both places). It’s my goal to reach 200 birds in North America by the end of the year. I would say ‘no problem, I’ve been going gang-busters since the beginning of the year!’ except…. Except I’m trying to be realistic: it’s been the spring migration and that’s no way to gauge how the rest of the year will go. Nonetheless there are still whole categories of birds I’m completely weak on — owls spring readily to mind — and more that are common in the right habitat. I’ll be traveling north again toward the end of the summer, and with a little luck I’ll be able to pick up some more locals in other places.

Twenty-four (more) new birds before the end of the year seems daunting, but I remind myself that I’ve already seen fifty-two new birds this year. Fifty-two! I had no idea it was that many until I tallied them up just now. I’m kind of impressed with myself. So there you go.

updated lifelist

new life birds & repaired lifelist

This past week has been a full one: I’ve added a half dozen new birds to my lifelist, sighted in or near my town! Over the past few days I’ve spotted a Lousiana Waterthrush, Yellow-crowned Night Heron, and Yellow-rumped Warbler, in Wells Run, the creek that runs through University Park. A few weeks ago I also saw a Cedar Waxwing in the tree right outside my house (whose identification was helpfully confirmed by my neighbor).

This morning at the pond I saw a Yellow-billed Cuckoo (eat those caterpillars, my friend!), a dozen or so Chimney Swifts (I’d seen these before but never confirmed their identity), and a pair of Orchard Orioles. As this list testifies, I’m still really only an advanced beginner: with quite a few common birds out there yet to be spotted, I’m a far cry from jetting around the world chasing rarities. Which is good, because that gets expensive.

The pond also offered two very small ducklings poking around at the bank with their mother. While these are ‘new’ birds, they don’t make it onto the life tally. Sorry, very cute baby ducks. No sign yet of the goslings, but I’ll keep checking back. I wasn’t able to see the actual eggs, even with the binoculars, but I’m sure there must be some, as the goose has been sitting in exactly the same spot on each recent visit.

On a related note, I hadn’t realized that my lifelist coding was fubar. I apologize for that; it’s fixed now.

new life birds & repaired lifelist