This past week I went to see a birds of prey presentation by Jonathan Wood of The Raptor Project.

Compared to the last couple of raptor presentations I've been to (both at Hawk Mountain), this one was much more of a retail bird *show*, rather than just a nature talk. Jonathan was not shy about setting up good photo ops and making everything up close & personal for the audience.

And the "personal" side didn't end there. Jonathan seems to bring equal parts naturalist, comedian, preacher, and political activist. Not your average science show & tell. In any case, he's very enthusiastic and has some amazing birds.

The Raptor Project is sponsored by Nikon, so when Jonathan saw my Canon camera, he came over and said "Here, let me show you something," and he led the Harris Hawk to fly right up to me, glide past my shoulder, and land behind me. I wasn't quite ready, so the bird flew right by before I had the shot set up.

"What's the matter, didn't get the shot? If you had a Nikon, you would have had the picture. OK, I'll give you and your Canon a second try."

Then he sent the bird up & back again, and this time I got it.

Many, many thanks to Jennifer, who told me about this event. I had a lot of fun, and got tons and tons of pictures at this 2-hour event. It was also a good learning experience with our new camera, trying to catch glimpses of fast-moving birds in low light indoors at night.

My favorite photo from that whole night was a shot of a white Gyrfalcon from Iceland, with a bald eagle in the background.

Now for next time, I just have to catch this same show outdoors, in daylight. :)

Last Monday was a holiday, so naturally I went down to Conowingo Dam to take pictures of bald eagles. It was my first day out with a new camera, so I was pretty excited to go.

It was a fairly quiet day, with only about a dozen eagles around, but there were some bursts of activity. Right when I was driving into the parking lot, I saw two eagles fighting over a fish in mid-air directly over the driveway. I knew it would all be over by the time I got the camera out, so I just sat there and enjoyed it while it was happening.

Later in the day, the main focus of attention was a nearby tree where two adult eagles were just standing around on adjacent branches. All of a sudden, one of them hopped over to where the other one was, and there was some squawking. Looks like another fight, but then, oh, no, that's not a fight. That's something else.

So there it is, my first ever photo of bald eagles mating in the wild.

I got some other pictures too, but that one was definitely the highlight of the day.

It's Saturday night, Valentine's Day. It's lightly snowing outside. I'm in my Neon, in the parking lot behind Cascata Caffe. This being perhaps the busiest night of the year for restaurants, the lot is packed, so I'm parked way back in a dark corner near the trash dumpsters. The Chicken Parmigiana is on the floor of the front seat, getting cold. It's about 8:30pm, and I've been trying for nearly an hour to get the car to start.

The remote starter is a tricky thing. It's a great convenience when I need to give the engine a little lead time to warm up before I get to the car, and also when I want to pop into a store for just a brief moment without cranking the starter an extra time, and without leaving keys in the car. But every once in a while, it adds an element of mystery where I really don't need any. Case in point, why won't the car start? Not with the key, not with the remote, not with various incantations that might activate or deactivate the remote, etc.

Kathy had gone off in a different direction to pick up dessert while I was out picking up dinner, so I call her, and she arrives, bringing the instruction manual for the remote starter. I try everything I can think of, but still no luck. No start.

I don't think it's the battery, but I've got jumper cables, so I try jump-starting from Kathy's car. Still no luck.

Just as I'm about to call a tow truck (which could entail sitting out here for another hour or two), Kathy prevails upon me to leave the car parked here overnight and sort it out in the morning. One problem: the car is not in a real parking spot, and it's blocking the trash. As we have already established that the car is not starting, this means we're talking about pushing the car. And I know that my 5-months-pregnant wife isn't going to be out pushing a car, but the alternative still leaves her at the steering wheel, which has no power steering when the engine is off. And I mentioned that it's starting to snow, right?

Commence 10 minutes or so of this sequence: set the emergency brake, set the steering wheel to the right direction, go around to the end of the car, have Kathy release the brake, push for a few steps, tell Kathy when to yank the emergency brake again, go turn the steering wheel again...

Fortunately, the car is on relatively level ground, so the pushing isn't too bad in either direction. Eventually, we get into the proper parking spot that has opened up right next to where I started.

So we're done for the night. It's looking bleak for the morning, but we've got to get past that. Kathy puts the car in park. She pulls at the ignition key, but it doesn't come out right away. "Oh well, it can't do any harm to give it one last try," she mumbles, as she gives the key a twist.

Crank. Vroom.

"Sonofa...", I mutter.

That was it. Car's fine after that.

I have a theory about how this happened. I think the gear shift (which has been a bit dodgy before) was just on the edge of park, and when the car thinks it's out of park, the starter won't crank at all. Not with the key, not with the remote, etc. But there's no visual display to explain that. I think the pushing of the car was only important in that it gave us a reason to shift out of park and then back into park, so this time the car really knew it was in park.

Or, to put it another way... I tried everything I could think of for over an hour, and the car wouldn't start; Kathy gave it one twist and it worked. I always knew she was made of magic.

Happy Valentine's Day.

I just finished listening to President Obama's inaugural address.

I'm not home, so I didn't watch it on TV (not yet, anyway, but I do have it recording at home). I thought I could watch it on streaming video over the Internet, so I didn't bother to bring a portable radio or anything to work.

But then the streaming video wasn't working. I'm not sure if it was overloaded at my end, overloaded on the server end, or something else, but the video stream kept cutting out over & over until it just wouldn't start up at all.

My old cell phone used to have an FM radio tuner built in, but my current one doesn't. The only radio I had nearby was the car stereo, but I wanted to stay at my desk, rather than sit out in the car for a half-hour in the middle of the work day.

The minutes were ticking by, and there wasn't time to go out and *buy* a radio (although I did ever-so-briefly consider it).

Eventually, I solved the problem.

I called from my desk phone to my cell phone and left it connected. I went outside & turned the car on (just to the Accessory position, not running the engine) and tuned the radio to NPR. I set the cell phone on speakerphone, and laid it on the front seat. I left the key in the ignition but locked the car doors with the remote control. I went back to my desk and put on my phone headset, and listened to the whole speech over the phone, with sound quality that I can only compare to a tinny old Depression-era radio.

At least I didn't have to miss the moment.

Yesterday Kathy, Bruce (who's visiting from London), and I had a day of exploring different images of America.

In the morning we went to Wilmington, Delaware, to see Barack Obama. The President-elect was on his way to Washington DC for his inauguration, so we stood out in the cold for a few hours to catch a glimpse of him on one of his train stops. We got there about an hour and a half before the announced start time for the event, and we had a much better view than I had expected. We were way up front in the crowd, but it was hard for me to tell from there quite how many people had piled in behind us.

A little boy standing next to us couldn't see any of the activity, so Bruce picked him up to give him a better view. The boy said he still didn't see Obama, but Bruce figures it was just because he thought all the people on stage were just boring adults.

After the Obama event, since we were already in Delaware, we drove another half-hour down to Maryland to watch some bald eagles at Conowingo Dam. It was cloudy and gray and cold, but it was my first successful attempt to drag other witnesses to Conowingo, so I was happy about that. We didn't stick around very long, but we got to see 4 good flyovers in the few minutes we were there (including 2 soaring low over the car as we drove over the dam - love that panoramic sunroof!).

After all those images of hope and majesty, we needed to achieve some balance, so (joined by Jose) we finished off the day by watching the downfall of a president in the movie "Frost/Nixon".

All in all, a very enjoyable day in America.

I've recently dug up a copy of my old web site from a decade ago, back before they were called blogs. I'll be adding some of those entries here, marked with the original dates of when I wrote them, but that means they won't show up on my front page. I'll use this update list to point out each time I add a new oldie.

Here's what I have so far:

* Juggled at the Inaugural Parade (1997-01-20)

I've often heard church-going friends of mine say that they were reluctant to put any overtly religious symbol (e.g., Jesus Fish) on their car, because it would add all this extra pressure to be a kind & courteous driver, to best represent their group.

I have felt similar pressure about our Obama yard sign. Elsewhere in our town, there are plenty of campaign signs (about 3-1 Obama over McCain), but on our quarter-mile stretch of road, ours is the only presidential sign at all. And our local polling place is in a building directly across the street from our house.

Thus it was that at 8:30 last night (3 hours past dark), I was still out in the yard, raking leaves, until the whole yard looked presentable. Have to display the sign with pride.

So if Obama wins Pennsylvania by a couple hundred votes, and it all traces back to 100% Obama votes in my little precinct, you'll know who's responsible.

You're welcome.

It's October 28. It's snowing. Something ain't right.

Speaking of people who recently resumed their blogs, it looks like Kim is back too. Cool...

Kathy has a new special blog all about the current presidential campaign. You can find it at http://obama.kathichelle.com/. So far she's covered war, religion, abortion, health care... you know, just some little stuff.

Check it out.