2005 – Page 10 – Ted's Blog

First Hatching

On Saturday (or so) the first robin hatched (May 7). I saw the mother come back with some kind of worm or bug in her mouth. She didn’t seem sure what to do with it. When she left again I got out the ladder and climbed up to take a look and could see why. There was a tiny fuzzy blob in there that seemed barely able to keep breathing, let alone ingest a worm. Three of the eggs were still unhatched so I thought this one must have just come a little early or been the first egg laid.

On Monday (May 9) I took another look and the baby had gotten a lot bigger with an obvious bird shape and prominent beak. But the other eggs were still unhatched so those may not make it. Even if they do, their older sibling may just eat them or kick them out. So I don’t have my hopes up.

As I was up there I looked around to see if I could see the mother and I did see a robin on a branch not far away. I went back down, but she didn’t come back right away. A few minutes later I took another look and she was back standing on the edge of the nest. There was a beak sticking straight up from the nest to greet her.

Taken on May 15 a few days before flying away. The feathers are all in place. I don’t see how this bird could grow that fast because by the 19th the bird was gone. It could be that it was born earlier than I thought.

Letters!

Wow, look what happened when I went on Who Keeps Taking My Letters! Apparently some kid lost his frog and thought people visiting that site might know where it is.

Robin’s Nest

A robin built a nest outside my back door about a week ago. At first she wasn’t there much but then she started spending almost all of her time there.

While I was mowing the lawn I noticed she was gone. So I got the ladder out and I could barely make out the very tops of two beautiful blue eggs in the nest. Nests are amazing pieces of construction and there isn’t just pinestraw but a lot of mud in there holding it all together on top of a light fixture on the corner of the house near the drainpipe.

I wondered how many eggs she really had in there, but I couldn’t get my head under the eave and above the nest since there were only a couple of inches between the two. I needed a mirror. Fortunately Susan gave me a small and very expensive mirror that worked perfectly. 4 eggs!

Optical Illusions

Here are some neat animated optical illusions. You may not have all the plug-ins to run all of these, but you should be able to see most of them. The snake image on about the third page is really neat.

Of course these are ripe for parody by optical realities.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/index.html

New Computer

I decided to go on a 4-year cycle for replacing my home computer. I bought my first desktop computer (my first computer was a Powerbook 100 in 1991) in 1996. It was replaced in 2000. So I was due for a new computer last year, but I decided it was working pretty well and I could wait (I almost replaced it when Susan gave me the iPod because I didn’t want to pay retail for a Windows upgrade that I needed). But since June last year, I’ve been pricing computers at Dell. I wanted a DVD writer, support for two monitors, 80 gigabyte hard drive, and 512 MB of memory. I also wanted to get another 17-inch monitor, preferably a flat panel, though that wasn’t mandatory.

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