Big Ass Bird!!

I was wandering around in the woods behind the house a few days ago when, all of a sudden, this very large creature rose from the ground. It was a big ass Owl. He landed on a branch and stared right at me. He looked pissed. So I ran into the house and got my trusty digital camera. I took 3 pictures of the sucker, but only one was unblurry enough to make out the owl. It's times like this when I think I need a camera with a good zoom lens, maybe one of those expensive SLR digitals. Anyhow, here he is.



It's hard to tell from the picture how big this guy is but I would estimate him to be about 14-18 inches tall, or maybe bigger, sitting up on that branch. Anyhow, I tried to get closer and he flew away.

I think he lives back in woods behind the house. Often, if I'm outside at night, I can hear a pretty loud hooting not far from the house, just into the woods. He's helping the cats rid the area of rodents. He's a good neighbor and I like him, even if he don't like me.

I'm gonna go look in Wikipedia and see if I can find out more about him.

Bye for now.

OK, I'm back. Wikipedia was not very helpful in figuring out what kind of owl it was so I went downstairs and got out our Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds. It's a Barred Owl. If you search Barred Owl in Wikipedia, you get better information. There's even an audio clip of the barred owl. However, the audio doesn't sound like the sound that I hear in the woods at night. Maybe it's something different, like Sasquatch, maybe.

OK, bye for good this time.

OK, I'm back again. The idea of having Sasquatch in the back yard got me a bit concerned so I did a bit more digging. I looked up "owl sounds" in Google and found, can you believe this, all the damn owl sounds you could ever imagine. There were 4 different ones for the Barred owl. The first two sounded like the one from Wikipedia, but the third, the "hoo-wah" sound, was like the sound I hear in the woods at night. So it is my friend, the barred owl and not sasquatch after all.

Now I can sleep soundly. Bye, and I'm serious this time.

A Simple Test of Google's Picture Thing

I recently signed up for the Google Picassa picture thing that lets you put pictures on the web so that other people can see them. I'm sure Google is doing this so that they can plaster ads next to your pictures and rake in more revenue. I tend to like the stuff Google does because they tend to make it simple to use and they have the motto "Don't be evil". So I have, for better or worse, decided to trust them with a lot of stuff.

I'm now going to test the utility of their photo warehousing for putting things in a blog. I have a picture of some of my sand art. I'm no longer a sand castle builder, there are way too many people out there that do it better than me. I am now a sand artist. OK here goes...

Crap! It doesn't work. Now I'll have to post it the old-fashion way since you're all excited about seeing my sand art. OK here goes again...



Crap! It came in sideways. How did that happen? Let's try again. OK here goes again...

Crap! It came in sideways again. I won' bother to show it to you again. OK, one more try.


There, I finally got it right. It appears that if you rotate a photo and save it, what you really save is the photo in the original orientation and an instruction to rotate it. When you open it again, some document will read the instruction and some will ignore it. Apparently, all the programs I use read the instruction and Google Upload does not. So I had to actually display the picture with the correct orientation and do a screen capture to get what I wanted. I bet the image quality suffered but I'm not going to do anymore work here to find out.

So what started out as a simple blog to test something, turned into a lot more work. But, who cares? I'm on vacation. You got to see some really nice sand art and I killed an hour.

So that's it for today.

Merry Christmas.

My Morning Walk

I haven't written in this old blog in a while so I figured it's about time to try again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my morning walks. I started a new job back in April at a little company in downtown Durham. Here's a picture of the building. This has nothing to do with my story of my walk but I like to post pictures.



Anyhow, when I started working there, it became obvious that this crowd was a bit more into physical activity than some groups I've been associated with. My boss runs marathons, one guy rides his bike to work on occasion. Lots of people run. So I decided that I needed to get some exercise. I hate to run. I never liked it even when I ran track in high school. But I like a good walk. But walking doesn't give you enough of a workout in a short enough time. So I figured maybe a good hill or two might do the trick. I've been doing this since sometime in June of this year.

So here's my morning routine. The damn alarm clock goes off at 6:15 AM. I still hate to get up in the morning but now I do it pretty quickly anyhow. There's nobody to talk to so it doesn't matter if I'm grumpy. I sit up and put on the underwear and socks lying on the floor from the night before. I stand up and put on some shorts or new exercise pants that my wife recently bought me, depending on the weather. Then I put on a t-shirt followed by a fleece shirt if it's cool. Finally, I put on some old tennis shoes and make my way down stairs. Oh yeah, somewhere in the first few minutes I manage to pee. Anyhow, once downstairs I usually feed the cats and, if it's cold, put on a jacket and cap and head out the door. This is usually around 6:22 AM.

Here's an aerial photo of my walk. My guess is that its about 1.4 miles long.



We live on a decent hill so I get to start out on a pretty steep downhill. That's good since I'm rarely awake enough to climb up a hill. I just stumble along for the first few hundred feet. This time of year the sun hasn't come up yet and it's still pretty dark. I like that except it can be a little scary at times. This morning as I was passing the woods on the way down the first hill, a loud snort followed by a lot of rustling in the woods startled me a bit. I quickly realized it was probably deer. The deer get up early. Yesterday, as I was leaving the house, five of the suckers were peacefully munching on the neighbor's shrubberies. I smiled, waved and went on my way. Anyhow, I venture down the hill till I get to North Lakeshore Drive and walk along it for a short piece and then head up the big hill. When I first started walking, this hill would have me seriously puffing by the time I got to the top. It's gotten a bit easier but I still warm up a bit going up the hill and still look longingly at the peak on the way up. Then it's a short downhill followed by long gentle incline and then another little drop and I'm about half-way through.

So now I hit the second heart-smart hill. It's not quite as long as the first but I know it's there. At the peak, I take a long slow downhill back down to the lake and a flat walk back to my street. My street is nice and steep so that gets my heart going once more before I get back to the house around 6:45 AM. In the meantime, the sun's come up and the coffee has brewed and I get to kick back with a poptart and some coffee and surf the net for the days news for a half hour before I'm off to the shower, shave and out the door to work.

I don't walk on weekends.

So that's it for now.

Sometime soon I plan to talk about razors. I recently got a promo razor in the mail that has 6 blades. That should be worth a story.