So in just over two weeks, I'm going to be on the east coast for a week. I'll be flying into DC the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, attending my cousin's wedding in Maryland the next day, and will be flying out of Boston a week later. I think about now would be time to start finalizing the itinerary of that week.

Tentative plan is to bus or train from DC to NYC, and spend a few days chilling with pmb, goteam and Iggy Pop the cat. I'd also love to see anyone else who is around (175560 will you be in town? pants_of_doom, when are you likely to be moving?). After that, I will be heading on to Boston, also via bus or train. The guest house I was originally planning to stay at seems to have gone a little AWOL from the internets, so I need to figure out a new plan of someplace to stay. Anyone heard anything about the hostels in downtown Boston, and/or recommend a decent (but inexpensive) hotel? I would like to see as many of you as I can who are local to the area while I'm there, so pretty please let me know what you're up for. I am thinking of doing some general invite thing Friday or Saturday evening - maybe dinner at a restaurant that's low-key enough for large groups, potentially with children - do any of you have suggestions for locations? (Also, coldtortuga, are you and Jen (and Elida?) still game for going to the island you'd mentioned that is good for birding?)

I feel really disorganized about this trip and I'm kind of panicking a little over that.

I've gone to a bunch of fringe festival shows in the last week. As such, here is my top 5 so far:

(5) An Inconvenient Squirrel. It's a kids' play, but it's easily one of the best pieces of entertainment aimed at children that I've seen in a very long time. Adult men in squirrel costumes depicting the quest of one squirrel to find a name while his sidekick, Socially Awkward Squirrel, tags along with him. During their quest they run into other hilariously named squirrels. I went with my sister, b-i-l, and nieces (aged 4 and 7). Both the children and the adults enjoyed it immensely. It has performances left on Saturday and on Sunday.

(4) This Play is Trash. "One man's trash is another man's one act play" sums it up pretty nicely. Four vignettes about trash, homelessness, break-ups, wastefullness, and thankless corporate jobs. Trash is used as both a metaphor and a physical object, and the play is poignant and humorous. It has performances left on Saturday and Sunday.

(3) The Nosdrahcir Sisters. I cannot say enough about this show, though that is partly because I'm not sure what to say at all. It's like watching the surreal wanderings of where imagination goes when you think no one is watching. Both actresses are flawless in their physical characterizations, and the show managed to be silly and touching in kind of an over the top way, yet still managed to work really well. If you follow the link to the blurb above, watch the second youTube video preview. Neither video really does the show justice, but the second one scratches the surface. It has one more showing, on Sunday at 2:30, and I'm seriously considering going to see this one again.

(2) Shakespeare's Land of the Dead. Shakespeare and Zombiiiiiies. I was worried I was just getting sucked in by a gimmick, but I went to see it anyways. The script was really well written and there are plenty of in jokes for Shakespeare lovers to get into. And there's the added bonus of wondering - will Shakespeare get zombified? Will Burbage get zombified? Will Francis Bacon get zombified? Will Queen Elizabeth get zombified? Go see this show to find out. But you might want to go with an advance ticket purchase for it - there's only one show left, on Sunday, and I think there's a strong chance it will sell out.

(1) Boom. A one man show about a bomb maker who makes bombs to alter - rather than destroy - an environment or aesthetic. I was annoyed at first at his abrupt transitions between a variety of seemingly unconnected characters, but the annoyance didn't last long. He pulled it off with fantastic physical acting and a group of characters that had come into cohesion by the end of the play. I absolutely loved the ending. Also, I want a paint bomb that will paint my house for me. One more show, Saturday at 1 PM.

Tomorrow I am tentatively planning to go see The Gypsy and the General and Dance of the Whiskey Fairy. I may also go see Roofies in the Mochaccino. On Sunday I'm tentatively planning to see HafenGeist and may go see the Nosdrahcir Sisters a second time. If you are interested in coming along to any of these, and don't have a fringe button, I have ended up with two* and would be happy to lend one out.

So those who have been going to the fringe, what has been your top 5 so far?

*I have been keeping my button on my purse, for the express reason that if I leave it on my shirt I risk leaving it at home. But, it managed to fall off at home, and I thought it was lost for good so I had to get another one. And then, of course, I found the first one as soon as I got home.

Days like today I really miss the 35W bridge. I leave for the bay area Wednesday afternoon, and have a long list of things at home and at work I need to do before I go. Not the least of which was to take the birds over to rgeorge's house for TLC and food while I'm away, which I did earlier this evening. Before the bridge collapsed, it was pretty much a straight shot on the freeway to get to his house. Now to get there (or anywhere in Northeast), I have to divert around on 280. I am glad the 280 is there*, it would be more of a pain to have to take city streets more of the way; but it still makes what used to be a really quick trip annoyingly long, particularly when my mind is on all the packing and cleaning and checking train schedules I need to do. At least MNDoT has been predicting that it will be done in September, which is three months early. (Not that I really trust anything MNDoT says, given how much they ended up changing around the scheduled demolition of the 46th St bridge.)

* Someone told me that a week or so before the collapse they had been having a conversation about what a random little stretch of freeway it was, and were wondering how many people actually used it. And then when the bridge collapsed, it became an interstate freeway overnight.

So, today's geohashing xkcd meet-up (for the SW Minneapolis coordinates) is on the Washington Avenue bridge*. Those of you in that area around 4 PM should go, because I can't, and I'm curious whether anyone else will actually show up.

Update: Er, I guess the 4 PM thing is only for Saturdays, so I might swing by there after work (5:30 or 6ish).

*This is a double decker bridge over the Mississippi where the upper level is designated as a pedestrian bridge.

I took the morning off of work to go on a guided Audubon walk in the Roberts sanctuary. I wasn't sure it would actually be worth it, but we spotted 15 species of warblers! The downside is that the walk took longer than I was expecting, but it's such a gorgeous day I decided to just take the whole day off. So after lunch, I'll probably go back out for more of a hike.

( Bird list )

I have been meaning to post about this year's Mayday parade since Sunday, but haven't even gotten my pictures off my camera yet. We've had lovely weather two of the last three days, so I have been outside in the evenings working in my yard and on my garden. Today I cleared away the grass from an area that's about 1.5' x 5', and is right up against the side of my house with full sun, southern exposure. The area I grew tomatoes and herbs in last summer is also on that side of the house, and I worked on widening it a little bit too. I am planning to plant 4-5 tomato plants and basil in that area. In addition to the area I cleared today, I am planning to clear around the corner to the back of my house (west facing, but it still gets a good dose of southern sun). Now I just need to decide what to plant in the area I'm clearing. Possibilities include lettuce, beans, snap peas and sugar snaps. I am planning to plant peppers in planters and put them in the part of the driveway that I do not use.

Working on my yard, I find myself thinking about where else I could pull out grass and expand my garden. I have been thinking about planting some raspberry bushes either against the garage or against one of the fencelines, but I know that they can get out of control pretty easily. Still, raspberries = tasty, and grass is not. I would also like to plant some winter squash or sugar pumpkins. Also chard, and beets. I probably need to focus on expanding my garden just a little bit at a time, rather than taking on too much at once though.

My original plan for this afternoon was to go get tea with ferrousoxide and to go to 433's birthday party. Tea didn't happen because the place we want to go was pretty booked up when ferrousoxide tried to make reservations, and the birthday party didn't happen because rain was strongly predicted so 433 cancelled it. But evidently the storm ran it's course overnight, because today has been sunny and gorgeous. So with an unexpectedly free afternoon, I struck out to do some birding in the Roberts sanctuary, which is right by Lake Harriet.

I forgot my camera, which I would end up kicking myself for. I figured that most of what I would see would be warblers, and they are really hard to photograph. Not only are they tiny, they are constantly in motion. It's hard enough to get them in the frame of view of my binoculars before they are off, let alone get a picture of them. But I ended up seeing two great-horned owls and a cooper's hawk, all of which I would have had a clear and beautiful camera angle on. Oh well.

( The long version.. )

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I kept hearing what sounded like a helicopter outside. It was going on for long enough that I started to wonder what was going on, exactly. I pulled up a few local news sites to see if there was anything on there that would explain it, to no avail. I woke up sometime around 4 or 5 AM, and I could still hear the helicopter sound. Only then, it suddenly dawned on me that what I was hearing was actually probably the sound of a jackhammer, or other piece of construction equipment. They are demolishing the 46th street bridge over I-35W, which is (was?) about 6 or 7 blocks away from my house.

In other local bridge news, they announced on Thursday that they would be permanently closing the Lowry street bridge - one of the bridges over the Mississippi - effective Friday at 10 AM because it had been declared unsafe. All of the local news outlets seemed to be playing it up from the angle of "if you want to drive across the bridge one last time, you'd better go do it right away!" Right. Because when a bridge over the Mississippi River is declared unsafe, driving across it is exactly what I want to do. I think I've only ever actually driven across that bridge twice. It has a steel grid deck, which means you can see through the bottom of it, which always made it kind of scary to drive on.

By way of triath and The Art of the Prank, here is 20 things to do with matzah.

I spent about 2 hours walking the trails at Hyland Park this evening looking for the great horned owl nest, to no avail. I e-mailed the guy who found it to see if he'd be willing to tell me what trail it is visible from. I did see an owl fly overhead, but I didn't get a good enough look at it to tell whether it was one of the great-horned owls. I also heard a pair of barred owls calling to each other, spotted the flock of wild turkeys that live there, and saw a pileated woodpecker in the woods.

Full (as best I can remember it) bird list for the past 3 days after the cut:
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I spent a significant portion of this weekend outside, which has been wonderful. Yesterday, it wasn't really ideal weather - snow flurries and wind. But I was antsy to get outside, so I just dressed for it and did about a 3-4 mile hike along the creek and part of Lake Nokomis. I hadn't gone out specifically to bird, but I can't not look for birds when I'm out walking. The first birds of interest were a couple of red-breasted mergansers on the lake. The second bird of interest was a little brown bird I spotted near where I get off the trail to head back to my house. It was teeny, so I momentarily thought 'wren?'. Then his little red crest shot up out of the top of his head, and I realized he was a male ruby-crowned kinglet.


Today I had a volunteer shift at the parrot sanctuary in the morning, but it was gorgeous out. We managed to finish up our shift a little bit early, so after hanging out with my birds for a bit I went out to hike and bird in a couple of places in the south metro. As I was driving past Diamond Lake, on my way to I-35W, I noticed a lot of birds on the lake and an older couple with a spotting scope set up with a tripod. I decided to stop and take a look myself. Most people in the birding community are really friendly and happy to share their finds with other birders. It doesn't hurt that I'm way younger than most other birders, and it probably also doesn't hurt that I'm female. In any case, the couple with the spotting scope were super nice and trained their scope on all the different types of birds on the lake so I could get a better look at them. There were common loons, more red-breasted mergansers, hooded mergansers, common mergansers, and a bufflehead.

After looking at that lake, I headed over to the wildlife refuge near the airport to go see if there was any activity around an eagle's nest that is there. I spotted one immature eagle (I'm guessing s/he's about 1 year old) near the nest. Other than the nest, the coolest birds I spotted there were a pair of blue-winged teals. This is not an uncommon bird, and yet this was the first time I'd spotted and positively ID'd one. Also, when I was walking back along the trail, a lady stopped me and asked if I knew whether 'the huge thing in the trees' was an eagle nest. When I replied in the affirmative, she told her son (who looked about 10 or 11). It took him a little while to spot it, but it elicited a really enthusiastic "oh, wow!" from the kid. Believe it or not, I actually hated being dragged all over the place to look for birds when I was a kid. My siblings and I had a running joke about our parents always wanting to go look at 'pretty little bays' when we were on vacation, and to us all of the pretty little bays looked pretty much alike. So I was happy to be able to inject a little bit of excitement into the kid's outing with his parents. After that hike, I headed over to Hyland Lake Park Reserve, an area that I hiked and birded in a lot last summer and fall. Most of the birds on the largest lake were too far away for me to id, even with binoculars. But I know I did see some hooded mergansers, wood ducks, and mallard ducks. At one of the lakes, I spotted an old geezer with a spotting scope, and asked him if he'd picked up anything interesting in it. When he turned around, I realized it was a camera with a long lens, rather than a scope. He proceeded to talk my ear off about the duck he was looking at (a mallard, so not anything all that interesting to me), and wanted to tell me about his 57 pairs of binoculars. So sometimes it is a drawback that birders are super friendly. The only other things I saw of note were an egret and some brown creepers. There was word of there being a great-horned owl nest at this reserve - with a fuzzy little owlet on it even! But I was unable to locate it. It is supposed to be another gorgeous day tomorrow, so I may go look for it again after work tomrrow.

This is a pretty cool story about the rehabilitation of a bald eagle that was shot through the beak. To quote from it:

The shot blew away most of his upper beak, leaving just the tip, which remained attached to his skull by a thin piece of cartilage. Some veterinarians suggest that Campbell put Brian down but Campbell persevered, and slowly the bird started to recover.

A dentist ended up making a prosthetic to attach to the remaining part of the beak. Click on the link to see pictures of the beak injury and the bird with its headgear.

I haven't specifically gone birding much so far this spring, but in the last week I've seen way more than the average number of interesting birds from my car. When we were driving to Madison last weekend, I saw a pair of sandhill cranes land next a wetlands area - my first siting of these birds this year. I also saw a northern harrier skimming across a field, and I saw a ton of red tailed hawks hanging out in trees and on fences. As we were getting back into town on Sunday, I saw a blue heron fly over, which was another first-of-the-year (though it's probably one of the most common wading birds to spot in the Twin Cities during the summer).

On Wednesday, when I was driving to work, I had what was probably one of my weirdest sitings ever. Just north of the 35th/36th street entrance to I35W, I saw a wild turkey fly over the freeway. I know that turkeys are huge birds, but seeing one in flight really underlines just how big they are. Wild turkeys are pretty common in the suburban and/or wooded areas of the TC's, but I posted this siting to the birding listserv I'm on, since I have never seen a wild turkey in that densely populated an area of the metro before. I got a message back from a woman who lives near 41st and Bryant (which is fairly near that freeway entrance), who had seen a turkey over there a few days before. So, those of you in South Minneapolis, keep your eyes open for a roaming wild turkey. I've heard they can be pretty aggressive this time of year, so be extra wary about leaving young children unattended. :)

About a week ago, a little pond a block away from my house finally completely opened up from it's frozen state. Almost immediately, I started seeing birds on it as I was driving past, but couldn't really identify them from my car whilst going past. So, I grabbed my binoculars when I got into my house and went back out to go look. There were about 5 pairs of wood ducks, and two pairs of lesser scaup.

Finally, I haven't actually made it over there to see them, but eyelid has reported to me that there is a pair of barred owls that have been hanging out near her parents' house. I think it's really cool that friends of mine will call me when they see an interesting bird, because I often get to see things I wouldn't have just stumbled across on my own.

I don't know how to knit, but I had to share this with those of you who do. From a post by parasitegirl, The Popeye and Friends Knitting Book.

Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announce Project Virgle.





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This coming weekend, I'm heading to Madison with soundingsea, ironchefjoe and dopp.myopenid.com for Odd Con. I'm looking forward to hanging out with them for the weekend, meeting George R. R. Martin, and (hopefully) hanging out with wrenb and Drew. It's kind of weird that I'm going to my hometown, and hanging out with people I met thousands of miles away when I was in college. But most of the people I'm still in touch with that I knew from Madison have also left.

I do wonder whether I'll run into any Westies, or any Beeliners, at the con. Any Madison people want to make a guess at odds? Not that I would expect very many people to remember me - I left over a decade ago and have only been back briefly here and there. Still, I almost always run into someone I knew from wayback when I'm in Madison, and they almost always remember me (usually better than I remember them).

Even though I rarely order anything out of them, I love getting food porn catalogues. My favorite, by far, is the Zingerman's catalogue. They're a deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My brother and sister-in-law live near there, and a couple years ago my mom suggested I get them a gift certificate to Zingerman's for their birthdays (which are a day apart). I've been on their mailing list ever since.

Today I received their Mother's Day catalogue. Amongst the artisan cheeses, the specialty olive oils, and the chocolate dipped figs was something really weird. Mo's Bacon Chocolate bar. Ew. Somehow I think my mother would be less than thrilled to get such an item. And yet, it seems like I must know someone for whom this would be a perfect gag gift.

naomikritzer sent this to me.

The ten plagues, as illustrated by peeps:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17025280@N00/sets/72157600038845249/detail/

Based on this recent post by Birdchick, it would appear that I volunteer at the wrong Twin Cities based bird rescue. (The owl is cute and all, but keeep reading..)