Two birds from this week. A robin, at work…
…and a hummingbird at home.
As for the post title? Here. The sound isn’t great, but I might well prefer this arrangement to the one Julie Andrews sang.
First Spring adventure
Last Sunday, Cane (the Dee-oh-gee) and I went out for a Sunday walk in the park for the first time since December. Why no outings since then? Well, we got back from Oahu just in time for the weather to shift into a much colder and snowier pattern; where the WNY winter until the end of December had been very mild, it pivoted hard in January to being snowy enough and cold enough for Buffalo to take this year’s title as Snowiest City In America. Oof. Plus, there’s the fact that Cane isn’t a spring chicken anymore. He’s 9-and-a-half as I write this, and while he’s still got tons of spunk and energy, he’s not as springy as he once was, so I have to be a bit careful about our adventures. I can’t just throw his leash on him and go for a four-hour hike someplace.
But still…he was thrilled to get out!
We went to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite haunt of ours in East Aurora. Even though we’re over a month into spring, in this part of the country we’re only just now starting to see the first hints of spring’s awakening. We’re getting there, though. Today is May 1. It can only get greener from here. (I’ll spare you my usual rant about Spring being WNY’s worst season.)
And if you’re wondering why Carla rarely gets featured in these walks, it’s mainly because she really doesn’t like riding in the car, for reasons we’ve never been able to figure. That sucks! She loves being in new places and being outside, but she is so miserable in the car that we always feel terrible about that part of things.
She is enjoying the greening of our yard, though. Witness:
As I’m writing this it’s a sunny Sunday morning, but there’s rain in the forecast in the next couple of hours. Sigh….
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Fog, by lamplight
The old stomping grounds…
…but from well before they were my stomping grounds!
This is a photo of downtown Olean, NY, from I assume 1954, since that’s when Sabrina came out. This is seventeen years before I was even born, and twenty-seven before I lived there. I saw this on a Facebook group for history and nostalgia of that town, and I really liked this photo for the datedness of it, as well as just a look of Olean when it was newer. When we moved there in 1981 the town still had some vibes of what it had once been (a decent-sized town that was the heart of a large rural region, with some manufacturing and a good population base). The decline was already underway, from a population that peaked around 25,000 around the time this photo was taken to under 14,000 today.
The theater there is one that I visited several times, before it eventually closed and was demolished. It was once a beautiful “movie palace” type of place, hence the name–but by the time we lived there it was run-down and only got worse, to the point where it was virtually impossible to actually enjoy a movie there (broken seats, popcorn from a coin-operated machine, terrible sound, a projector with a dim bulb). But still…Olean was once a place worth being. A place the trains ran to, instead of being a place the trains run through.
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And now, pets.
Starbirth, in progress
I saw this image on one of NASA’s Flickr streams and I had to share it. It’s a Hubble image of a star-forming region called the “Chameleon Cloud Complex”. Look how gorgeous this is!
Here’s some explanation:
The segment in this Hubble composite image, called Chamaeleon Cloud I (Cha I), reveals dusty-dark clouds where stars are forming, dazzling reflection nebulae glowing by the light of bright-blue young stars, and radiant knots called Herbig-Haro objects.
Herbig-Haro objects are bright clumps and arcs of interstellar gas shocked and energized by jets expelled from infant “protostars” in the process of forming. The white-orange cloud at the bottom of the image hosts one of these protostars at its center. Its brilliant white jets of hot gas are ejected in narrow torrents from the protostar’s poles, creating the Herbig-Haro object HH 909A.
More, including the full-resolution image, here.
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Winter mornings
And now, four animals.
C-c-cold
We’ve been in something of a Deep Freeze here in the 716 of late, with several days in the last couple of weeks bottoming out near zero, a similar number of days never getting much above ten degrees, and (I think) zero days in which we’ve gone above freezing. We’ve also had a good walloping of snow since January, as if to make up for a very mild December. That’s supposed to end this week with a brief warmup (we actually go into the 40s on Tuesday and Wednesday, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off before the next round possibly hits on Thursday or so), but…wow, it’s been cold.
Our house has a couple front-facing windows where we raise the blinds during the day and put them back down at night. Rosa (one of the two cats we adopted last year) loves looking out these windows, and she comes running each and every morning at blind-raising time. In warmer months she gets to sit on the window sill of the open window and watch the world go by, but in colder months she has to content herself with sitting atop the litter box’s roof and peering through the window.
The problem is that when we put the blinds down, moisture gets trapped there, where it condenses and eventually freezes. The result is that Rosa’s morning view looks like…this.
It’s hard being a cat, is all I’m saying.
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Two Doggos and a Cat
For lack of anything else to post today, here is Cane awaiting his breakfast:
Here’s a diptych of Carla sleeping:
Here’s Rosa, in a box:
And finally, here’s Remy being a dick to Rosa because she’s on the heat vent and he wants it:
So goes animal life in my household!