Just another Monday

It's not a holiday in Canada and so it's just a regular Monday for us.

Yesterday Roo took the kids to the Reifel bird sanctuary for a long ramble. We have a new, absolutely wondrous, low-tech gadget: it's the Audubon bird call. You can see what it looks like here. It really works. Don't use it indoors. Not because the birds will come in (well, maybe that too) but because you can give yourself an instant headache. It's such a small thing but puts out a loud noise. However, it is glorious in a forest. I used it in a floodplain forest last week and had great success getting birds to talk back to me. Of course I suck at birding and can only identify a handful of birds, and of those, only herons by their call, and so I have no clue who I was talking to. But it was a great David Attenborough moment to be crouched in a bush and have a conversation with a 'yellow livered lesser bushtit' or whatever it was.

And speaking of David Attenborough - we LOVE David. Roo installed a David Attenborough screensaver on our computer from the BBC's 50 Years of WildLife On Air. There is some great archival video on that site; some hilarious interviews with David, as well as clips of blunders etc. This spring we watched the 12 episodes of the Trials of Life, an episode per week. Last weekend, we had a DVD of the Blue Planet. For natural history, I can't recommend his programs enough. And once you've watched several hours, you can practice doing David impersonations whenever you're out & about.

While Roo and the kids were communing with sapsuckers et.al., I stayed home and finished reading Write Away. I am still digesting the ideas in this book but I think I'll give her methods a try. What I'm doing right now is certainly not working. Her method is well, methodical, and I know I'm a bit anal so it might just be the thing for me. What I really loved though were the excerpts from her "journal of a novel" which she put in the chapter headers. They are so reassuring.

Today we've got some chores, and our weekly trip to the library. I might try to do a bit of My World Science if I can get us all motivated again.....