American kestrels

Since I did some time on the couch this week, I had the pleasure of picking up our Matthew Mullenix’s American Kestrels in Modern Falconry. I didn’t put it down until I had read it from cover to cover – it’s simply that great a read for kestrel fans like me. The fact that it’s …

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Catching Fire

A review in the NY Times of this new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, made it zoom right to the top of my “to buy” list. The author, Richard Wrangham, is an anthropologist at Harvard, and takes an evolutionary approach to the advantages of cooked food. Some enticing quotes: Apes began to …

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Bio shorts

Komodo dragons (and their recently- extrict giant Australian relatives) may actually be venomous. Carl Zimmer directs us to not just one but two galleries of zombie- creating parasites.

Writers & Debt

An excellent Read- The- Whole- Thing piece by Megan McArdle in the Atlantic: Sample: “…writers are, as a class, extraordinarily at risk. They spend their twenties, and often their thirties, living paycheck to paycheck. They are extremely well educated, and all that education is not only expensive, but builds expensive habits. You end up with …

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Hybrid review

A scathing but side- splitting car review from Jeremy Clarkson, the guy who brought us car shoots earlier: “It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more… “The Honda’s petrol …

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Joys of Home Ownership

While we were in California for our daughter’s wedding – actually during the reception – the young lady who was house-sitting for us called to tell us that sewage was flowing out of the shower drain in our basement bathroom. She called a plumber us and we found there was a blockage in the line …

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Spring Shift at the Feeder

Though much delayed by our cool wet spring, in the last week or so we’ve had a number of our seasonal visitors finally making their appearance. The winter residents like the chickadees and juncos have moved back to the mountains, while this male black-headed grosbeak showed up on Sunday. He was accompanied by this female. …

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A Fisherman

I suppose the Memorial Day holiday made me think of it, but I wanted to put up one of my favorite pictures of my grandfather, Travis Reid. Quite a while ago, I posted a picture of him as a young man, and what I said about him in that post still stands. As near as …

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Cuddle

I went down this morning with a flu bug, so was negligent in getting all my chores done. I swear this happened because I drove to town and went to the grocery store, which was packed full of people on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. So husband Jim did the early check of the …

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Blue angel?

Jim and I sat down in our living room late this afternoon for a break from the lambing ground and chores, leaving the front door standing wide open so the dogs could wander in and out at will. As we relaxed and talked, a male bluebird came in and sat atop the door, looking around …

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