Monday Meanderings - 4.22.2013

Not ashamed to admit that we put the blanket back on the bed this past week. The weather has been wacky; the other day the heat came on in the early morning and the A/C kicked in that afternoon. Go figure. Altogether, it has been great weather for coffee on the patio.

Which is where I have been observing a little bit of drama, nature-wise. It is no surprise that the squirrels start barking whenever the neighbor's cats stroll into the yard; that's a pretty normal adversarial relationship. The jays don't care for the cats, either, and they really got noisy when the (very) occasional owl took up residence at the owl motel. Understandable. But what I can't figure out is what the doves have done to upset a little woodpecker!

The doves are sort of the cows of the bird world in our back yard. They are big, slow, and I'm convinced not too bright. By and large they just graze under the feeders, content to gather up the seed that gets scattered. Occasionally (and this is the not-too-bright part) they try to fly up to the feeders and cut out the middlemen, but they are too big to gain any kind of foothold, and their weight closes off the openings, besides. So by and large they graze in the grass, and then sit on a limb and chew their cuds, ignored by all the other birds. Until the woodpecker moved into the neighborhood, intent on running all the doves out.

They don't seem to have a problem with the redbirds, or the jays, or the finches, but then those birds don't hang around; they feed a few seconds and then fly off. Is there a nearby nest? Could be - I can't find it, though. It's an interesting little drama.

Barb and I sometimes stop by a little burger joint, and the other day we took a table next to a couple of aging hippies (takes one to know one), and soon realized they were having a heated argument - - about the children of Israel wandering 40 years in the wilderness! We weren't getting all the conversation, but it seems that one of them was dubious about the logistics of that many people on the move for that long, while the other one seemed to be taking the "them's the facts, jack" approach. When the conversation turned to Sodom and Gomorrah, we finished up and left.

Came across something interesting the other day. This bill is for 3 1/2 days, plus some extras.

 This bill is for half a day - outpatient. No extras.