It was so cold in England today…
…we had blue tits.
On our fat balls.
I’ve been crumbling up bread ends and meat scraps and leaving them out for weeks now, but for all I know I’ve been fattening rats (last Summer, Uncle B took a picture of an especially fine specimen waddling off with a crust; that’s when he quit leaving food out).
Today, though, bits of Britain were colder than bits of the Antarctic and the boids turned up in hoids.
I totally don’t know from birds. I love watching them, but I’m at a “ZOMG, look at that precious fat one with the beak!” level of expertise. So I got out the binoculars and the Field Guide to British Birds and I counted
■ One thrush
■ One robin
■ Two pairs of moorhens (maybe one pair of moorhens and a pair of coots)
■ A lovely pair of chaffinches
■ Half a dozen blackbirds (a different species than ours; the British kind really do have that sweet, meandering song like in the old Beatles tune)
And that’s before the rooks came home from work and scared everyone off.
Oh, and Uncle B swears he saw blue tits on the seed feeder, but he sees tits everywhere. I’m worried about that boy.
January 6, 2009 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 36
oh. how nice.
Oh shit. My stuff’s here.
Uncle B and I were standing on the shingle watching an indigo snowsquall tear through a red sunset over the English Channel when the movers called.
(NO I didn’t have my goddamn camera. He popped off a couple of shots with a pocket camera; I’ll fish it out of the back of the car tomorrow and see what he got).
The movers want to know what part of it I’d like them to deliver to the house and what part to put into storage right away. Honest to crap, that’s like buying a 30-ton load of horse manure and deciding which shit you’d like now and which shit to save for later.
Oh, and Jill will obviously have to be burned.
January 5, 2009 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 24
I suppose the green ones carry lime disease
Ho ho. Lime joke.
January 3, 2009 — 10:11 am
Comments: 35
Other British brands that will never, ever make it in the States
January 2, 2009 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 8
Pencils!
The Sanford Corporation (a Newell Rubbermaid Company) is the world’s largest manufacturer of writing instruments, mostly by way of corporate om-nom-nomination of familiar brands: uni-ball, Sharpie, PaperMate, Waterman, Parker, Prismacolor, Eberhard faber, Turquoise, Col-erase, Empire-Berol and more…more than you ever dreamed.
Doug of the Pencil Pages toured the Sanford pencil factory in Lewisburg, Tennessee in 2004 — in June, when a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of pencil — and brought back this excellent photo essay.
Because having nothing to say for myself doesn’t even slow me down.
January 1, 2009 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 12