follow that qar!

Inside for the morning, we watched a kind neighbor snowthrow the mountain at the end of the driveway. That still left plenty for me. Nemo dropped an unprecedented single-storm snowfall, I'd say, at least for our 13 years here. Blowing and drifting make an estimate unwise, but I can't resist stating 25 inches.* I've seen taller piles once or twice, but this time we went from near-bare ground to waist-deep drifts overnight. It's hard to get shovel leverage with snow that high. 2+ days digging and there's still no route to the compost pile, or out the back door, for that matter. The weather station recorded only one gust above 30 mph, so no blizzard here, but it was nonetheless breezy. Sustained winds in the teens. 2/8 2118 29mph 44deg 2/8 2310 29 36 2/9 0249 28 37 2/9 0909 30 348 The weather station reported -3.1 temperature and -35 wind chill for 2pm on the 9th. Seems that has to be a glitch, but it was definitely cold and windy out there. Kept birds fed an...

Gift of tickets to Maine Red Claws versus Springfield Armor sent four of us to Portland, three for our third and one for her first time courtside. Good Saturday night crowd and tight game with the finish in our favor. Dajuan Summers , Micah Downs , and Shelvin Mack caught my home-team eye, while Christian Polk and Ben Uzoh were the Armor threats I most noticed. We recommend not sitting in the cheap corner seats.

Unwrapping a Hawaiian Sun box is a happy-making gift experience. I love those chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, regardless of the ultimate quality of the confection. Thanks for the present! These were from last Christmas. I was just looking back through holiday-letter-worthy photos from 2012 and remembered these crunchy candies. Yum. Only nine pieces in the package. Gotta savor those. One by one through February, some for myself and some to share. Make a nice after-dinner treat. What a shock, then, to have a BLECH! moment while crunching down on one of these little morsels one evening. Acrid. Ugh. Pitooee. What was that? A little closer attention to that final wrapper told part of the tale, but it took a magnifier to allow adequate inspection. After discovering this little beauty, that moment a few nights earlier made much more sense. A girl's dessert request was met by the box. Appreciative and content, she sat as the post-dinner conversation continued. Suddenly she p...

DNA analysis plucks the falcons from their position following hawks and eagles and plunks them down after the woodpeckers and just before the flycatchers and the rest of the perching birds. Disoriented birders guaranteed. This birdaz article from Rick Wright covers the falcon move and the rest of the 53rd supplement:

To maine-birds: Misty morning at the Wells Reserve gradually turned to drizzle over an hour-long walk. Sparrows seemed less skittish than usual, with dozens of white-throats, nearly as many songs, a few white-crowns, and a swamp. Yellow-rumped warblers were everywhere, often mixing with the sparrows in foraging flocks. Single redstart, black-throated blue warbler, blue-headed vireo, and creeper. Red-breasted nuthatches easily outnumbered white-breasted. Pair of rusty blackbirds beside the dike at the bottom of the beach trail. Osprey – I think it was only one – over the beach and marsh. Maybe a pintail, but by then the binoculars were just about useless. Both kinglets wrapped it up.

It was wishful thinking, after all. Beautiful morning held promise, but meeting eat meeting put an end to thoughts of bog photography. Better luck next time.