Genetics, Bird Blogs, and Internet Porn

What a great title, eh? I have some funny snippets to share, none good enough to stand on its own but together they're worthy of sharing. In no particular order . . Lily and I went to Target today after the gym to get a prescription refilled. A major discussion point when we venture into retail establishments is whether she will ride in the cart or be allowed to walk. Today she chose initially to walk, but upon spying her favorite type of grocery cart (she's a connoisseur, I assure you) she changed her mind. 4 minutes later, after we dropped off the prescription and begrudgingly acknowledged our 25 minute wait time she changed it again and decided to walk. Her mission was clear: to walk me through the store and act as my tour guide.

Have you asked yourself yet which of the three parts of the title this story will fall in to? Rest assured, I'm getting there. The in between is quite humorous as well, so I'll narrate. We walked down the main aisle heading toward the back of the store, and as luck would have it someone got to each aisle-intersection just before us. Lily would dramatically stop short as she saw the oncoming shoppers and say "Yikes!", as she does when she sees a car in a parking lot coming toward us. Then she'd politely tell the passerby "You go first", elicit a grin and a "she's so cute" comment, and follow the rules of traffic by waiting her turn. We made the turn on to the back stretch and were heading to where the holiday decorations formerly were when, inexplicably except for a deeply rooted genetic predisposition, she made an abrupt right turn right into the shoe section! These were not Dora shoes . . in fact there may have been only one pair on the shelves that wasn't a plain black pair of adult-sized shoes. Nevertheless she stopped, looked at two or three different pair and said "We should get these Daddy." "Are they Mommy's size Daddy?" I choose to allow the mysteries of genetics to explain why a two-and-a-half year old girl is already a typical shoe-shopping woman, but the evidence does not lie. It's gonna be a long twelve years until she moves out and gets her own place . .

Switching gears a bit, it's been quite a week for me in my pursuit of birds and the life of an avid birder. I love having something to be passionate about, and everyone's been really supportive of me. I got a birthday gift this week of a membership to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, as well as a life journal to keep track of my Life List and a nice field bag to carry with me when I'm out birding. Mandi and I took the girls out to the Mallard Creek Greenway in Charlotte yesterday and I was able to add two more birds to the Big Year list, the Red-breasted Nuthatch and the Downy Woodpecker. As a funny aside, a group of gregarious European Starlings perched on a power line above the path at one point were whistling and making catcalls a construction worker would be proud of as Mandi walked by them. I agree with the birds . . she looks great. Anyway, I've grown fond of reading other blogs that are dedicated in whole or in part to birding. One such, The Born Again Bird Watcher , is a fellow stay-at-home dad who lives in Oregon. It was on his site that I discovered a phenomenon known as I and the Bird , a carnival of blog posts dedicated to birding that is put together every so often by different bloggers. To make a short story kind of long, I submitted my post from Monday about spending my birthday watching birds to be included in today's edition of I and the Bird, and I'm excited that they decided to include it. Take a minute to read through the post he put together for the carnival, it's really well done. I'm inching closer to world-wide fame, I can just tell.

As for the internet porn, I suppose it wasn't really porn we oversaw, but I couldn't help but mention it anyway. Tuesday after school I took the girls up to the local public library. Avery wanted to get some books to read and Lily thinks it's a playground. There are toy phones on a reading table in the kids' room there that she will play out some of the most elaborate and hysterical conversations you've ever heard from a two year-old on. Part of the agreement was that the girls had to quietly come with me back in to the non-fiction section while I looked for a few books I wanted to check out. They obliged, and on the way back to the front we were heading toward the public-use computers. While it was only in view for a second or two, my jaw almost hit the floor when I saw what the guy on the computer directly in our path was watching on the screen. There in plain view of myself and my kids was a YouTube video, with sound, of a girl in what I can barely describe as underwear doing a striptease-like dance for all the world. Did I mention that the guy had made the video full-screen size? I think I managed to mutter the words "Seriously dude?" as I hurried the girls past him and back out to the kids' area. Does anyone else out there think there should be a little more attention paid to what is going on in a public place like that? It's unbelievable the things you see when you just walk down the street in this world sometimes.