There is a small flotilla of little birds swooping in and out of the feeder right now: two white-breasted nuthatches, one brown-headed one, a couple of chickadees, a sparrow, the female downy woodpecker (she doesn't have the red spot on the back of her head), and even a lone pine siskin. I haven't seen such action in a while. (Also a bird I couldn't identify from my bird book: small, pale brown, with strikingly patterned white-on-black wings; I didn't get a good look at the beak, but the closest the color came to was a female goldfinch.) The larger white-breasted nuthatch still scatters seed wildly as it eats. Not a tufted titmouse to be seen. I love their big eyes!

I can't believe it is "Santa Lucia" already; the last few months have gone by like the wind. Today is supposed to be the last of the unseasonable high temps, and we are hoping to get some rain out of it, but not as much as they hoped, as always: it's like someone has placed an invisible wall south of Chattanooga outside of which not much rain will penetrate. It was quite cloudy this morning, and James reported a brilliant rust-colored sunrise; the outdoor Christmas lights, set from dusk to dawn, didn't go out until almost 8 a.m. Now the sun is straggling out again. The warm front has been horrible, with temps in the high 70s, sultry and sullen (although I know the folks in the Midwest without power would gratefully trade! no one in their right mind likes ice storms).

XP is in-house, since I picked it up yesterday during lunch. I need to finish checking over my entire computer, gleaning passwords and making sure of activation numbers so I can have my own new hard drive installed. James bought a program that will transfer everything from the old hard drive to the new, which is fine for the stuff I have in storage, but I want a new format and install for everything else. I know it's a pain in the neck, but since the Win98 crash on Memorial Day, half of the programs do not work, or send odd messages when they boot up, and my virtual E: drive is clogged up with files that Windows doesn't see, but show up in defrag (I suspect they are backup files from the Win2000 load).

Labels: birds, computers, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:36:00 AM

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