Wildlife

There's a corner by the back way out of my apartment complex that seems to attract interesting birds: a family of quails; a pair of phainopepla; a cardinal early this spring. This morning, I noticed out of the corner of my eye something big and brown on the edge of a puddle, and looked more closely. Not a pigeon or a mourning dove. Not a female grackle or a curve-billed thresher or a cactus wren. No, a red-tailed hawk, which took off and flapped slowly out of sight between the buildings and the oleander hedge. It 's the time of year for them, after all; I've seen them in earlier years, perched on the pylons in the dry riverbed. One New Year's Eve, coming home earlier than usual from work, I saw one on the roof of the block opposite, among the air-conditioning hardware. I think this is the closest I've ever been, though -- it can't have been more than a dozen feet away.

Reading: The Heaven Tree Trilogy

I'm about 150 pages into The Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargetter aka Ellis Peters, which I picked up on impulse in a Boston used bookstore in 2001, recognizing the name but not having read anything else by the author.

I'm not sure I want to finish, and it takes a lot to make me say that. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood. It's not badly written, exactly, but it seems overwrought and dripping with the sort of sentimentality I associate with D. K. Broster, who was writing a generation or two earlier; it's as if the author is far too much in love with all the characters, even the villain, who gets an introduction that made me wonder at first if this was Richard the Lionheart in disguise. No, just a jaded nobleman from the Welsh Borders. The hero is not only a genius-level architect and sculptor, he's burning with righteous indignation over the injustices of his society -- a thirteenth-century abolitionist. His drippy mother would be more at home in the early twentieth century. And on top of all that, I'm a little uncomfortable with the depiction of the relationship between the teen hero and his ten-year-old future wife. I flipped through to the end last night to see what's going to happen, and it seems to be one of those plots driven by noble stupidity on both sides; honour as tragic flaw.

Icon-making

I have too many CD-ROMS. Backups. Scratch CD-RWs from the days before I started taking a PC to work every day. Freebies picked up at big astronomy meetings. Disks containing files I wanted to take along on trips. Photo CDs from various vendors. Driver disks and software. Some of them in their original jewel cases, some in non-original ones, or the original ones belonging to something else, some in envelopes, some in folders. What I can't find is the driver disk for my extremely poor excuse for a digital camera. Fortunately, Old Laptop is right there, with the software installed, so here it is: an icon for book-related posts.

Now to see if I can go back and change the picture on my last entry ...