Big Birds and Small

One of the good things this time of year is that the Blue Angels always do tons of practising between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I am told that they are training the new guys. It is amazing to me that the BA pilots only fly for one year. Only one guy has flown two years. They are zoooooooming up and down the beach and sometimes make turns right over my place. They do smoke trails, and other maneuvers. Usually two at a time is what I see. There is obviously some other kinds of training going on, higher up, since I have experienced several rounds of sonic booooooms. One recent one was the strongest ever. My ten foot glass doors popped and bowed like I have never seem. They even continued to rattle in aftershock for a mili-second or two.

We have been having very mild, delightful weather. Some days are slightly overcast, or foggy, but if it is close to 70 degrees, that is still a great winter day. For a while we had 70 degree days and cold nights, but now it is basically the same temp day and night for a week or more.

Last night I got another email from the UK alerting me to someone putting my scrapbook graphics on CD's and DVD's and selling them. I am told she has Disney images on them too, so I am in good company...but if she has Disney images on them she is REALLY playing with fire. I have contacted her and she emailed back expressing her 'surprise'....she is asking me to hold off on filing the copyright infringement violation forms w/ ebay while she 'checked her disks for my images' . I have the forms printed, ready to fax to ebay UK. I offer to send a scrapbooking idea book to any alert reader who spots my images on collections and CD's for sale or download and lets me know. I am told she even included pages of mine that say www.ScrapbookScrapbook.com on them plain as day.

We just added a new set w/ snow (but not Xmas) related images. This has been long requested by site visitors in snow-y regions.

Heather spent a whole afternoon here at the Lagoon House re-doing all my computer connections. Before hand I had told her that it took me 3 hours to hook it all up after a hurricane evacuation, but she thought that was maybe longer than it should take, but after the afternoon of re-do we were both laughing at how long it really does take to reassemble the spaghetti tangle of wires. Now I can move one inkjet over to the office on Hardwood and both my computers are sharing one here. They are both sharing an Internet connection and I can manually switch them over from cable to DSL or back as needed. We tried to use an auto switching router from Hawking, but we never got it to work right. First the sent me a dead one that wouldn't power up at all, then we found that the local cable co uses some protocol that is usually sued by DSL so the router never could recognize things correctly. Heather is gonna try to sell it on ebay as it is perfectly good for someone else.

My osprey has not been hanging around much. I have not seen him in a long time. I see ospreys in general flying out over the lagoon or overhead, but not perched in the usual trees by me. Yesterday the yard was full of colorful tiny little finch looking birds. Before that I had a day of bluebirds all over the place. Then I have what seems like days of no birds at all. They hang in groups of several types usually. There is almost always a woodpecker or two in the group. My birdwatcher friend, Keith, says they are called 'mixed foraging flocks' and each type of bird has a function, like some are scouts and watchdogs, and some are there simply to entertain the others.

If you never heard back from that "Russian Bride" you wrote to in 1999, here's why: Russian Post has started delivering 4.5 tons of letters and parcels that were sent from the United States in 1999. The state-owned postal service said the delay was not its fault -- a shipping container with the mail inside had languished at a port in Finland for years.


The Memphis Botanic Garden came out and picked up all of Daddy's orchids this week. It was very good timing that their new Orchid House got completed in time to receive what is left of Daddy's collection. Daddy is just no longer able to take care of them and the move to the Village of Germantown will take place soon. But, is is a sad thing too, as it is the end of an era for sure. Daddy was an orchid breeder who hob-nobbed with all the authoritative folks in the world of orchids world-wide for many years. He had crosses registered w/ the American Orchid Society and the Royal Horticulture Society. Once my first cousin, Allison, who flies with Northwest was on an international flight and got into a conversation with a chap who told her he was coming to this country to meet a world famous orchid grower, a Dr. Pridgen. She blew his mind when she told him that was her uncle, her dad's brother. The man didn't believe her so she got out her driver's license to show him her maiden (now middle) name on it.