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Category Archives: Dilettantism

Photography, writing and other related pursuits.

Neighborhood bird watching list

I know I’ll continue my habit of writing lists on bits of paper, but I thought it’d be useful to maintain an online list of the birds I’ve seen in our neighborhood. I’ve limited this to visitors to our yards and the nearby park. “Birders, are ye?” Well, I prefer the term bird watching, mainly […]

Worst writing boo-boo’s boobooes typos

Eegad, once again I sent off an email with a word missing, making my message sound ambiguous. As well as just plain sloppy. The compulsive ferret in my brain pushes me to send yet another email with the corrections. And so it goes, even with published webpages such as blog posts. Lorelle’s encouraging Blogging Challenge […]

Birds in Winter (and a squirrel)

In autumn and winter the birds arrive from the north to keep us company. This typically means a lot of White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows around the yard, but my flagship migrator is the Yellow-rumped Warbler. Or, as Simon and I call them, Yellow-butts. For their 2007 arrival, I first noticed them on the (easily remembered) […]

Dragging my feet

This site is about my hobbies. I’ve posted a lot on food, a little about software, and even a teensy bit about gardening and plants. But I haven’t written up much about another big interest of mine: stories. Novels, comic books, animation, and occasionally television and movies. I just love consuming tales and histories! I’ve […]

Chickadees in the garden

While picking peas, I’ve been subject to vocal commentary by various avians. Anna’s Hummingbird: Scritchy scritchy complain scritchy… BzzzzzzPINGk! Black Phoebe: Pfee pfee. (Wag tail.) Pfee. Western Scrub-jay: (Insert loud, rasping squawk of choice.) …And: Chichichi chichi chichi hyeenhyeenh! Hyeenh hyeenh! (Repeat.) Chestnut-backed Chickadees have become our neighbors. Chestnut-backed chickadee during a bath: “Hey! I […]

Irises are icumen in

It’s iris time! Maroon PCH iris.

Apricot fruitlets sighted

Cute apricot fruitlets have been sighted, about three weeks after the peak of blossoming. The additional foliage has caused an increase in approval ratings from neighborhood birds, including the resident Chestnut-backed Chickadees and Scrub-jays. 😀 There are a few more apricot images in the plant album.

Apricot blossoms!

One of the biggest attractions of our garden is the old apricot tree in the backyard. Our neighborhood used to be part of one the (formerly) many apricot orchards in the Santa Clara Valley. This thirty-plus (forty-plus?) year old tree is one the few sad, beautiful reminders of that era.

Early-ish travel photos

I had uploaded these travel pictures some time ago, but only now remembered to “announce” them. The trip to the Philippines in early 1997 marked my first overseas venture. I used my then-falling apart, now-defunct Ricoh SLR camera. I originally digitized the pictures with a flatbed scanner (thanks, Jed!), but I’d like to redo it […]

Photos of the garden pond

Finally uploaded photographs documenting the pond Simon installed in the backyard. The process started in early 2003, and took well over a year for plants to become established. We need to replace some of the plants (the Japanese maple couldn’t tolerate the heat), but we now have lovely gold fines gravel for the bench area […]