This is the view out my office window.
There's lots of bird action out there: doves, cardinals, common grackles (with their creepy eyes), Carolina wrens, Carolina chickadees, mockingbirds, and even blue jays.
(Here's a great birding site http://www.allaboutbirds.org)
My parents were big bird watchers. There they'd sit on the screened in porch, smoking and waiting for the male painted bunting, an elusive and painfully shy creature, to show his lovely painted self, consulting the bird books in the meantime.
My father, a naturalist in a former life, always got a big kick out of the mostly grown young cardinals peeping and fluffing their feathers trying to get their parents to feed them.
They also watched the Weather Channel constantly. "Don't know why, they never go anywhere", my brother once drolly observed.
Perhaps because of the WC, they both were [overly?] concerned with rainfall and would check the rain gauge everyday. Okay, so what...right?
Well, they went one (or five) step further and wrote down the amount on a special calendar (smaller than a regular calendar so it fit inside the cabinet door. Keep it secret! Keep it safe!), and tallied up the monthly and yearly rainfall.
Need to know how much rainfall north Florida had in 1995? Compared with 1994? Why yes, we have those calendars with the totals! If they had known about spreadsheets, they would have had one - with charts.
My parents were weird and you know it.
It's a good thing they didn't live in the Northwest. How depressing those records of rainfall would have been for them.
ReplyDeleteI always thought it was nice when my parents did something(usually it was dancing with those two) to entertain themselves. It meant they weren't watching me.