Searching for Sunshine

The first day of classes is always a rough day for me at work. More than 100 phone calls and tons of questions about logging on in the computer lab and printing... I put 6 reams of paper in the printers in the first 4 hours.

I got off work at 1 and it wasn't raining so I decided to stop by Bethany pond for a walk and to see if there were any new birds. I only saw the regulars so I headed towards home and stopped at Commonwealth park on my way there.

Double Crested Cormorant - Phalacrocorax auritus

These birds are reasonably common and easy to spot sitting up in telephone poles or old trees. Sometimes you see them splashing around in the water.

Commonwealth Lake

Not much sun here either, but at least it wasn't raining.

I saw the usual widgeons, male and female mallards, and canadian geese. Lots of birds just walking around in the soggy grass pecking and finding stuff to eat in the mud.

There was a large flock of gulls too. According to whatbird.com there are several terms for a group of gulls, including flotilla, gullery, screech, and squabble.

Western Gull - Larus occidentalis

Click here to see the whole bird.

Although the Western Gulls are quite common, I was a little surprised to large flocks of them at Commonwealth. On previous visits, I had seen only Ring-billed Gulls.

When you look closely, the Western gull has a red spot on the lower part of his bill, a yellow eyelid and dark eyes.

The Ring-billed gull has a black band on his bill, red eyelids, and yellow eyes.

American Coot - Fulica americana

This is another common bird I've pictured in previous posts.

Here you can clearly see his red eyes, dark red frontal shield on his forehead and the black band on his beak.

Apparently the collectives for coots are codgery, commotion, fleet, shoal, and swarm.

If you liked those, check the Repository of Collective Nouns for more.

Pied-Billed Grebe - Podilymbus podiceps

These are also common birds, but trying to take a picture of one is like trying to take a picture of the loch ness monster.

They're small, dark and fast and they hide in the vegetation or dive down into the water almost as soon as you've spotted them.

I've never seen more than two or thee grebes at a time, but the collective for these birds is "a water dance of grebes". That sounds like it would be very cool to see.

Darts at Max's

Sami had a gift certificate to Max's Brew Pub and he decided we should take Aaron our to dinner to thank him for feeding our fish and watering our plants while we were gone.

We ordered a beer sampler, they had some pretty interesting flavors. The raspberry stout was surprisingly good, and so was the chocolate stout.

The food was pretty good, but they didn't have the Gourmet Mac-N-Cheese that was on special, and they wouldn't take Sami's gift certificate. Apparently the deal ended in November.

Just as we were getting ready to leave, we noticed the dartboard. I know I'm bad at darts, so I made a rule that if bounced off and fell on the floor we could have a second (or third) try. That helped a lot. We had fun playing cricket and I didn't lose by such a wide margin. Maybe I should buy Sami a dartboard for the home theater room for his birthday.

Oh, and Max's definitely wins the award for worst lighting ever. At least our table was near the window surrounded by cheery christmas lights.

Lights Out

The wind during the past day or two has been incredible.

Around 6:30 PM, the power went out. I wasn't concerned, just lit a few candles and it looked so nice I started taking pictures.

For some reason it didn't occur to me to call the electric company and tell them our power was out. Luckily someone else must have.

Cyclamen

Sami came home around 8 and started to worry. He was afraid of being cold at night and searched everywhere for the inverter so he could power the pellet stove from the car battery.

He didn't find the inverter, but the power came back around 8:45 PM just when we were leaving the house.

Aaron's friend Veronica had a bunch of free tickets to Harvey's comedy club, so we saw a hypnotist make a group of volunteers do really stupid things. It was pretty funny, but not as good as the one we saw at University Towers.

Missing Geocache!

While we were in NC for the holidays, I received an email from some Portland geocachers. They had solved the puzzle to our first cache hide, Kielikurssi, but couldn't find the cache and told us it looked like the area had flooded in recent rains.

I stopped by the cache site to check on it and found the lower portion of the path completely underwater. It's very likely our cache has floated away, but we won't know until things dry up a bit. As I returned to the car, I saw this cool mushroom.

Happy New Year!

Sami and I did a bad job of planning for New Year's Eve. It wasn't until around 8 PM that we started thinking... "Hey, what should we do tonight?"

Unfortunately most of my friends from high school weren't in town for the holidays and we didn't have a lot of options. We asked Matt what he was doing and if he had any fireworks. He said yes, and brought some out that he had bought in South Carolina on sale after the 4th of July.

About 20 minutes before midnight, I got my camera and tripod set up and ready to take pictures. Then I went to get Matt. Although his light was on, he was totally asleep in his bed. About 5 minutes before 12, I ran downstairs and found Sami still in the shower. So we didn't start shooting the fireworks off until around 12:15. Unfortunately some of them had gotten damp or something so only about half of them still worked. Next year, we really have to plan better.