Nature Moments

A robin spent several minutes swooping over my back yard pond the other day. At first, it barely touched the surface, landed on the other side and ruffled itself to spread the water all over. After several passes, it ducked its head under for two or three passes. A robin! In my tiny pond, acting like, I don't know a skimmer or something. Fabulous.

Two trips to Midlothian in three days treated me to roadside mimosa trees, trumpet vine, and queen anne's lace a-plenty.

A very odd thing greeted me at the folks' place, today: two dead fish, at the end of the driveway. At first, I set up a Somebody Else's Problem Field, and resolved to ignore them. But a sense of duty got the best of me. They were 4 to 6 inches long, white bellied, with lightly spotted tops. They did not seem to have torn mouths, suggesting hooks, nor did they have marks suggesting that a mammal snatched them from a catch or a market trip. Using the plastic-bag-as-glove trick, I picked them up. They seemed desiccated, not slimey at all; when I thought I saw creepy crawlies, though, I closed my eyes and knotted the bag.

"Tech Notes"
apologies to CB for upsetting his world with change here at CCD. I never adored the old design, and while this isn't what I'd dream up for myself, a fresh design template from the fine folks of Blogger did solve the problem of the misplaced Comments function. It took a while to figure out the code. I guess it's html; I guess I learned something when I figured out that "h2" is a subheading code. I needed to learn that to put all my extras back in. When I chose a new template, Blogger popped up a warning window: You know you'll lose your personalizations, right? And I clicked Sure, somehow forgetting how much personalizing I had done.

In related news, visit Steven Cohen at Library Stuff. He's got a few words on blogs as tools for library promotion, and thoughts on blog promotion. He links to a story that reminded me of an item I read in American Libraries about an NYU student who lived in the library.

On the muzac at Ukrop's: "Safety Dance"