What I watched: I watched birds build a nest in our front door wreath and hatch babies. We’d gone with a classic fir, cinnamon, and dried orange wreath for the holidays. After the holidays, it still looked good and seemed non-secular to me, so we kept it up. Apparently mama birdie thought it was perfect place to nest. So it shall remain on the door, looking quite left-over, until the baby bird leaves the nest.
What I read: We talked about the police procedural genre and historical novels last week. This series is the best of both worlds, and there are 23 of them! Victoria Thompson’s Gaslight Mystery Series. They are set in turn-of-century NYC, and the exquisite detail over location, social mores, etc., it really is an immersive experience. If you live in or travel to NYC, you will recognize the book names as actual locations (Astor Place, Gramercy Park, Lenox Hill) – and reading about how they were in 1900 is fun. For example, Harlem is inconvenient to get to and considered the suburbs, if not the country.
What I listened to: I listened to Tōth, Juliette. His latest album, from last year, is called Practice Magic and Seek Professional Help When Necessary. I think that is good advice for all of us.
Beautiful door and wreath!
Are the birds robins?
Robins have a knack for building nests in weird places around my house.
Robins kept trying to build a nest on top of an outdoor barn-style light fixture. The materials kept sliding off. Poor birdies, they gave up just when I was contemplating making a little platform for them.
Thank you! The doves and robins tend to build in a niche where the porch roof meets the support. They reuse the same nest. We think that this was house wrens. There were four babies in that nest.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/House_Wren/id
Cool! I love wrens. They’re so chatty! Carolina wrens visit my backyard every year.
What I’ve been reading: Jim Wright is a career Navy intelligence officer and essayist with some incredible takes on the current political scene, He can also be found on Facebook under the Stonekettle Station moniker:
http://www.stonekettle.com/
What’s in the CD player: Bloodred Hourglass, “Godsend.” Some of Finland’s finest melodic death metal.
My father was a career navy man, went in at 17 and retired at 40. I think that he would have appreciated Jim Wright. I appreciated this ending quote from the linked essay “If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen.”
That’s pretty much his tag line for everything. But by “be a better citizen” he means do something more than just bitch loudly and “debate” on social media.
At the very least vote, yes? I am of the “if you don’t vote you don’t get to bitch” school of thought. We volunteer in local politics (never for the winning candidate in our red county) and also give time to some local nonprofits. Community engagement is big in the crowd of artsy do-gooders we hang with.
Vote. Call politicians at every level and demand they do better. Get active in your party and demand better nominees. That kind of thing.
watching…uhhhh… well im watching the pasta get all puffy and big… making pasta salad today…its hot (well…its actually 23c…but already hot for me…summer is going to kill me)
reading…uhhh… still nothing… i read in bed…and my bedroom is an oven…so im just not going there… summer is going to kill me
listening *picks one of many*
You’re going to have a summer? I’m jealous. It’s snowing right now.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/gqtkwqlgkptatvj6eugq.png
i dont know if that will show as a pic…but thats our weather for the last week orso
Very nice – we had a freeze warning last night.
here too. i got things sprouting so i had to cover everybody up so they didn’t get nipped!
Be careful, that pasta salad sounds like a great Food You Can Eat post! Just take photos while you cook and of the finished dish. Would love to have you take part!!!
eh…its too late to take a pic of the as im cooking as the pasta is already in the fridge…but ill take one when its done
tbh..all i do is bring the pasta to a boil then take it off the heat so i can ignore it in peace as it fluffs up in the still hot water…
eventually when i get round to it i drain it and leave it in a colander till it stops dripping…then it goes in the fridge.. so it can be as cold as the rest of the salad (as the idea is…cold food coz its hot)
add various salad bits a couple sliced tomatos and cucumber and a small jar of pesto for flavour (90gr)
and today it will be served with a bowl of grated gran moravia cheese that i found in the bargain bin
uhh.. well i found a block of the cheese….i still have to grate it
oooh…and also served with french stick and proper butter
coz yum (really that shit could be a meal on its own)
welp i still cant figure out how to post pics here
so here
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ewohcb2xippf3ddiizmt.jpg
and here
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/hitzxp8b9g3b6aiwqt1t.jpg
is how it turned out
That looks great!
thank you 🙂
Yummy! Thank you for sharing!
That is awesome Ellicoo! I have three bluebird houses around my yard. Every year I get a bluebird family and this year I also got a Brown Headed Nuthatch. It’s so exciting to watch the process – it’s cool that you got to actually see the babies – mine are usually in the houses until they are gone.
We go gently in out of the door – shhhhh, babies sleeping.
We watched this last night which was pretty good. It was fun to revisit the characters. There’s been a tweet going around asking “what wardrobe from a fictional show would you want” and I’m going to have to go with Miss Fisher. The costumes are to die for.
the original:
We both (Keitel and me) love Miss Fisher. I have read all the books. In them, her romance is with the tong leader and she is friends with his wife. The clothes are to die for.
At 2 CDT you can watch Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt do an online concert:
https://www.facebook.com/carrieelkinfanpage/live
I wrote about them in a DUAN a while ago.
Those are your friends, yes? Very cool.
…obviously I wouldn’t want to suggest that there might be any means to go around location-specific-content using vpns or anything…but for those who it plays for this has some plays streaming from the National Theatre in the UK…there’s a whole season so the one that’s “on” should shift as time goes by?
https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home
Ooooh, brilliant! Thank you for that link!
I’ve got bird houses in the back yard as well. Sadley, I also have dogs, so sometimes things are tragic back there, but we keep trying. I would love to have robins nesting, but so far I’ve got chickadees in one house (yay!), and grackles in the second house, and no one ever uses the third one, which is too small for robins anyway. I need to figure out a way to get those grackles out of house number two, but I can figure out no way to do that, so there they stay. I’ve also got a male cardinal that spends a while every morning trying to get in the back door. I wish he’d build a house on the deck and raise some babies!