My old commercial hosting company, Hostnine, made some sort of change to their servers and all of my eBay sites suddenly stopped working. I tried working with their tech support but it was useless so I moved everything to Hostgator and I’m happy with the move.
I’ve also had a new personal domain for a while and I’ve finally decided to move this blog to the new address: http://richardmoose.net
Maybe I’ll have some sort of “grand opening” for the new place…. or not. Anyway, this will be my last post at this address until I decide what to do with this domain. I have a feeling it is going to be a brother to my other dog site.
We got tuned up for the show by watching Danielle’s videos. They’re very fun. It’s that smart funny thing. Very appealing.
I shot some video of us goofing around before leaving for the coffee house. It’s been torched.
Here’s the first video, when I was still suffering from the delusion that the videos were somehow about me. It wasn’t until I finished the second video that I recovered my senses and realized it was all about Danielle. As it should be. What an amazing talent. Her voice is magic.
Before the show, Danielle visited with her fans and sat with Chris and I and a couple of fans and chatted with us. She was just as down to Earth as you would expect.
It is one of life’s golden pleasures to be able to sit and listen to a really good musician play and sing live. Danielle made us feel like we were just hanging out in the living room. Her voice is pure and powerful and she uses it to break your heart and to make you laugh, but mostly you just feel good listening to her.
Then just a few weeks ago, I was watching the birds at the feeder and one of them flew over to the dish and took a couple of drinks and then flew off. It made me smile and feel good.
So all this time I have been keeping the dish full of water and from time to time I would notice that I would fill the dish one day and the next day it would be pretty much empty. I just assumed that I had spaced out and forgotten to fill it for a few days and the water had evaporated. Obviously, the birds weren’t drinking it dry in two days.
Then yesterday, I was once again looking out the window and I saw a bird come and take a couple of drinks and then do the most remarkable thing. He hopped into the dish and took a bath! He splashed around like crazy for a minute, throwing water everywhere and then took off. Suddenly the penny dropped and I knew where the missing water had be going. So all this time the birds have been drinking and bathing in the dish as I had hoped they would, but I finally got to see it.
Several weeks ago I planted lettuce and spinach in my garden. They both sprouted on schedule, but the lettuce soon fell victim to something that ate all of it in two nights. I smail and bug bait out so I had no idea what ate the lettuce. The spinach got chewed somewhat but it evidently wasn’t as appetizing to the pests, so it is doing well.
Then last week I planted lettuce again and as soon as it was barely sprouted, it got attacked, but I spotted the culprits and it was birds. They were pulling up the very young sprouts to get the seeds. However, some of the larger sprouts survived the birds and they were starting to grow nicely. Then tonight I spotted the real lettuce thief.
A rabbit!
Living in the middle of suburbia, it is easy to forget that there are still wild animals around and rabbits are not only shy but largely nocturnal, so it isn’t surprising that you don’t see them very often.
I think the rabbit is cool and I’m willing to do without the lettuce. Hell, I think I’ll stop at the store tomorrow on the way home from work and buy some rabbit food and leave it out for him. His hiding place is under the shed, so I’ll leave some near there and see if he eats it.
Ok I think I’m done with the hummingbird videos for a while. Here’s one where the sun is right to get the iridescence of the feathers. The males are smaller and have the neck tufts and there is a gravid female that comes in towards the end of the scene.
I grabbed a low patio table to get more height on the tripod and so I got this much closer scene. There are some very good examples of hummingbird calls in this one. At one point one of the birds calls so closely to the microphone, that she overloads it!
Hummingbirds seem fearless. They fly right up to you and check you out.
I don’t think it’s a lack of fear. I think it’s that they instinctively understand that we live at different frame rates. What are you going to do? GRAB him? We must seem glacial creatures to them.
So here’s a couple of minutes of unedited feeder action.
