Still in Florida. Last we had a rainy thunderstorm of the sort that never happens in southern California. All the heat and the green here is kind of amazing. The shore birds are nearly the same, although I saw a lot of  Solitary Sandpipers, which I haven't seen around Carlsbad. They must be migrating.

Friday Lester

And final bonus snow bunting:



February in North America, even in sunny (currently rainy) SoCal, is a good month for flipping out.

I am making macaroni and cheese this evening, but a kind of fancy one, with manchego and leeks.

Today, if I had an extra 200,000 Euros, I would buy this.

Lester Friday--er, Thursday

In cheesy, Photoshopped watercolor:


And bonus snow bunting!

There are several juvenile/fledgling coopers hawks (I think, but maybe red tailed?) in the trees outside my window. I only catch glimpses of them, but I can hear them. Raptors are usually quiet--that's one reason why they're so dangerous to other birds--so it's quite strange and wonderful, really, to be listening to morning hawk song.

Fluff and Fold

There's been a cooper's hawk hanging out in the acacia trees around our apartment. Yesterday, after chasing and being chased by one of the local raven gangs, it settled into a perch just outside the window by Mark's desk. Lester is a parrot, and a hawk is a hawk, but they're both birds, and they preen like, well, birds. The hawk sat on the branch and preened for a good fifteen minutes. After preening, it stood on one foot, relaxing, and fluffing her/his breast feathers. I've never seen such a fluffy hawk! The fluffing and folding didn't last long, though; in a few minutes, the hawk became narrow and focused, and flew off to another tree.

All birds are individual birds, and different species have different ways and concerns, but all birds take on a similar demeanor when they're preening and relaxing. It seems absurd to compare Lester to a hawk or the ruddy ducks that I see by the lagoon every morning, but they all preen in the same way, and they all get fluffy and one footed when relaxed.

road rode wrode

It is difficult to learn English in English class if you are never in English class. I don't care how much money your parents foolishly paid for you to come here.

However, today was a good day. I rode my bike to work this morning for the first time in weeks. I saw a red-tailed hawk in one of the acacia trees near our apartment, and three herons, and two feral parrots. I rarely see feral parrots around here, so I was very excited. They were smallish, green, and loud. Some kind of conure, probably.

I also now have my California drivers license. At last.

Lester's been in a pissy mood because he's going through his spring molt. Today I gave him a shower/steam bath, which helps take care of the pinfeathers, and he's in a noticeably better mood now.

We went bird watching

And then we took Lester to the park by the lagoon to read. There is a significant echo off a building just west of the little park--Lester was at first frightened and then excited by how the echo made his calls seem twice as loud and twice as long.

Reasons to have children

Today I enjoyed my bike ride home from teaching. There were about 30 white pelicans on the lagoon and many ducks of various sorts.

I am teaching a Public Speaking class for non-native speakers of English. I have to teach persuasive speeches, so that's what we were working on today. Students came up with potential topics, etc. One group chose "children" as a topic, with the argument that "everyone must have children." However, when it came to coming up with reasons why, they were stumped. Eventually they said "we must stop the declining birth rate" and "children take care of you when you are old."

One of my yoga teachers has been having us do hanumanasana a lot. I'm not even close to being able to do a split, but I'm much closer than I was. I like inverted hanumanasana at the wall.

It is laundry day again

When I first met Mark, he lived with two budgerigars: a white and blue one named Mr. Billings and a green and yellow one named Sir Bayle. Bayle was a bit older than Billings. He was very sweet but not so bright. Billings was a bit more crafty. Budgies in general are smart, crafty birds.

One afternoon, Bayle was singing happily. Billings was perched on one foot a few inches from him, pretending to be asleep. As Bayle sang, Billings crept up to him, moving a few millimeters closer and then resuming his fake sleeping stance. Finally, when he was close enough to Bayle (who was still singing and quite oblivious), he kicked him! Bayle was surprised of course, and the two of them had a good play-fight.

Mark and I stopped getting budgies because we couldn't find anyone who had healthy birds. A budgie should live to be 7-10 years old, or even older. But because they are a small and inexpensive bird, they are over bred. But I love budgies! They are so cheerful and so tricky! Budgies like to party. I also think that Lester would enjoy the company--not in his own cage, of course, but in a separate cage next to his.

I complain about the end of summer. I talk about birds, death, fish and feng shui.

1. It's the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year. Mark might be blogging about this right now, only in a detailed way that is full of insight.

2. I hate being supervised. What I don't like about teaching online classes that supervisors just drop in whenever they want to make sure that you are responding and "facilitating" the class in the correct bureaucratic way. It reminds me of how most cubicle and office workspaces I've ever had have been designed to make it easy for people to look over my shoulder--back to the door, always.

3. One of the unidentifiable white ducks/swans at Buena Vista lagoon died--the one with the beak abnormality. They weren't Snow Geese or Ross' Geese. I'd been calling them "Farm Ducks" because they were completely white and their tail feathers were vertical in that farm duck way. On Thursday the bird that I think was male--the one with a weird lump in its beak--looked sick and weak. S/he didn't even make any kind of alert call when I stopped to look at it as I usually do. On Friday s/he was dead, lying sideways in the water. The other flew away or died or was killed elsewhere. I believe they were escaped farm ducks, or else ducks dropped off there, like people drop off at people's houses kittens sometimes.

4. I saw an Osprey on Thursday. It dove into the water with the classic Osprey stance--feet and head first.

5. Here are some medieval fish. People used to think that fish were uncountable. That is why water and fish are good Feng Shui. "There's always more fish in the sea," etc. Of course, this is not true.

I agree with Obama, most people don't need an inscentive to get health care.

I wasn't hear to witness it (Mark was), but a jay attacked the finch nest, so the babies fledged a bit early, and one of them didn't make it. Mark did chase away the jay, but it followed them to the bushes. The finches did rally--which is why two of the nestlings did survive.

There are a few hawks in the area right now, but they seem mostly to be focused on the young crows and ravens. Everyone needs to eat, and the predators and scavengers need to get a break every so often.

I'm a bit amazed that there was a time in my life when I used words and phrases like "nuclear socialism" and "ops mounting dialogue."

I proofread, again, the first serial poem ("If this isn't an interview I don't know what to say") in my manuscript and am happy with it. The diction/vocabulary in this series is laced with wonky DC think tank language and references to the research into missile defense systems and US-China relations: "At least headhunters understand pain. If it doesn't blow up, I'm not going to write about it." I remember writing poems from staff meeting and briefing notes. I'm also noticing that these poems have lots of line breaks. Crazy line breaks. I haven't been able to really write anything with line breaks in months. This manuscript reminds me that I can do it.

We bought Rum today to make dark and stormys. It's supposedly going to be hot here next week (that means maybe in the 80) and that's a perfect time to have rum and ginger beer over ice on the balcony. They're too sweet for me to have more than one, and it's worth it to get super good ginger beer with a nice bite.

What else is everywhere like birds

A few days ago I decided that there are too many birds in poems.

I live with a bird.

There is yet another set of nesting finches in the roof of our balcony (the third set this spring).

There are little sparrows that peck at the window of my study.

Yesterday morning there was a blue jay hovering over my bicycle, more startled than territorial, fortunately.

Flocks of migrating pelicans fly over my head every time I go for a walk or run.

A someone I know is trying to leave the country. And, of course, many people are trying to come to this country.

I am not a vegetarian and San Diego is cold.

When you begin to notice birds, you notice that birds are everywhere. What else is everywhere?

sex
dust
mythology
wall-to-wall carpet
miscommunication
nostalgia
pollen
isolation

I am going to prepare lunch

I'm having trouble writing things. I wish that blogger wouldn't mess with my spacing. But that is not why I'm having trouble.

I've been consciously eating more fruit and vegetables this week. Fruit and vegetables with every meal and at least two fruit/vegetable snacks during the day.

Increasingly I'm writing in complete sentences. I want line breaks, so when I type up my drafts, I insert line breaks.

I think writing in my notebook is too slow and contemplative. If I try to write while sitting on my balcony, I usually end up writing about bird song and stuff. I love birds, but there are too many references to birds in post-avant writing. One must be careful about the use of animals in poems. I'm a sucker for lyric + birds, but sentimentalism makes me cringe because I am often sentimental about animals and baby animals. It's just a step from loving the cute fluffy bird to loving the cute fat baby and then the angelic mother baking a cake. Feeling sentimental about something is very close to thinking that it isn't important, or supposedly can't really be important in the real world.

I don't give extra credit

If you were me, where would you send work? I won't ask why you would send it there (if you were me), but you can tell me that if you want, too.

Tricky of me asking this question of you when you haven't seen the poems and objects in question, perhaps.

Lester is grumpy and molting, but still very handsome and brave.

There are now sparrows nesting in our balcony roof, so I get to fuss and worry about hatchlings and fledglings all over again. And there are also some ravens nesting in the tree outside the window of my study. And then I saw three hawks being chased by jays this afternoon as I was teaching TOEFL. I only have two students, so I took them outside. I saw the hawks and pointed to them and got excited and they got excited and we stood on the picnic table for a while watching them. They'd never seen hawks before, let alone smaller birds attacking hawks.

Also, Mark reported that three ravens chased a hawk out of the yard today.

I got up early because I was worried that the fledgling might still be on my bike and therefore I'd have to walk and take two buses to work instead of riding my bike. It had, in fact, slept on my bike all night. The bird watched me come out the door. When I closed the door, it ruffled it's feathers and flew alway--all the way across the yard to another building. By the time I came home, everyone had fledged.

One of the house finch chicks fledged about five minutes after I got home. S/he fluttered out of the next and landed on my bicycle rack, and has been there ever since. I didn't ride my bike to yoga because the chick was still sitting on the rack, and when I returned this evening from yoga, the chick was still there. It looks feathered, although there is a tuft of baby down on its head.

And also the cat in the tree is bothering the finches

And normally I like the cat, though he is needy and I think his owner is spacey and doesn't take care of him. The finches are feeding the baby finches who are nesting under our balcony awning, and I chased Finley the cat away several times, twice from our balcony and once from the tree. I was nervous enough last year when the baby finches fledged, and there wasn't even a frisky cat around. The Black Cat in the Green Grass is not a threat to the birds. He just purrs and smells flowers. Really.

And also also this: It is a good thing that people cannot be arrested for not breaking the law even if it seems they are likely to. This doesn't make me feel safe, more institutional safety wouldn't make me feel safe either. And then there's feeling safe and being safe. I think back to the students I've known personally or indirectly who did commit suicide or were violent. Often there were no particular warning signs in their creative work.