Winter Wonderland

What a treat it was to wake up to almost a full half-inch of snow this morning! We of course had heard all about the impending "Winter Storm" all day on the radio and TV yesterday . . "Atlanta is getting snow right now, stay tuned to hear about school closings blah blah blah blah . . " I know nobody wants to hear the worn out old "When I was a kid" line on a day when they're stuck in the house with no place to take their school age kids . . but seriously, cancelling school for this? These My Little Ponies don't mind hanging out in the snow, so why can't the school kids suck it up and drag their butts to class? Teenagers, that's why. The school system sent home a letter yesterday trying to head off all of the typical snow-day questions posed by understandably annoyed parents who now have to figure out what to do with the kids while they go to work. The letter said that their "biggest concern was the high-school students who drive themselves to school and the possibility of a weather-related accident" and the subsequent lawsuits they'd surely face if they forced kids to come to school in such treachery. Let me tell you, as someone who vividly remembers the attitude I had as a teen driver, that's probably the only valid argument I've ever heard for why everything shuts down for a half inch of snow in the South.

A good example of why this reasoning works for me is a family trip we took one winter from our home in Dallas to the Queen Wilhelmina State Park in the Ouachita Mountain range in Arkansas. We piled in to my Honda Civic with summer tires and bad windshield wipers and drove to the top of this mountain through blinding snow and ice. When we got there it was so cold that all the resort's outdoor activities had been cancelled. So Jaime's boyfriend (separate story all together) and I decided to make our own activities in the parking lot. We fired up the car and went out to the mostly empty parking lot and proceeded to speed down the hill and yank the emergency brake handle up as we cranked the wheel, sending the 1900-pound car into uncontrollable spins. If memory serves, we had the windows open, the heat on full blast, and Metallica's Nothing Else Matters cranked to 11 on the radio. It never once crossed our minds that we should approach the icy roads with anything short of reckless abandon. So yeah, I think it's OK to cancel school today for freezing rain and snow.

Changing gears a little bit, this winter storm has proven to be great for our backyard bird activity. I expected a busy morning at the feeders and filled them all up last night after dinner. When it started getting light outside I noticed the tray feeder had filled up with snow, so I braved the freezing rain and went down to clear it out. I spread some millet on the ground below the tree and on the patio, hoping to bring some of the action closer to the house. Then I took a tip I'd read in a gardening book and put some stale bread pieces in an extra suet feeder as an additional offering for any new visitors the snow might flush out of the woods. Well it has all paid huge dividends, as Avery and I have been glued to the binoculars for at least an hour now. We got more than our usual compliment of Goldfinches and Mourning Doves, and the Cardinals that have now become daily visitors have brought friends. For the first time we had two females at the same time, where until today I'd only seen one. The wayward Yellow-rumped Warbler has been back this morning as well, dining on the suet and some of the millet on the ground. We were also visited by a White-throated Sparrow and my latest addition to the Big Year list, a Dark-Eyed Junco. Including the Eastern Towhee I spotted at the Nature Trail yesterday, that brings my total so far to almost 40. We're gonna skip the gym this morning and just hang out by the windows waiting to see if the nasty weather brings us any more backyard surprises. I might also spend a little time working on the recipe list, taking some of your suggestions to heart and getting them organized and rated for difficulty. Enjoy your day, we certainly will be enjoying ours!

Reversal of Fortune

Mere minutes after posting this morning about my relatively quiet birding weekend Lily and I headed out the door to the gym. In the car I asked her if she wanted to go on a nature walk afterwards, to which she responded "No thank you Daddy." I have a hard time imposing my will on her when she's been so polite, so I came up with another idea. About the time I'd formulated my plan we were passing by the Coddle Creek Reservoir and I spotted an old friend. A Belted Kingfisher, the one I'd seen nearly every day in precisely the same spot before this month, appeared perched on a power line overlooking a shallow corner of the lake. I refer to him as an old friend because these birds' appearance gives them a bit of an inherent personality. To me, they are the "Kramer" of the bird kingdom. You remember Kramer, from Seinfeld, don't you? It's Michael Richards' character that was not only the most bizarre looking but also the most peculiar in terms of behavior that had ever been dreamed up. He had that hair that looked like a cross between Don King and Richard Simmons. And every time he opened his mouth to speak you expected something outrageous to come out. That's what the Kingfisher reminds me of. It's got that big spiky tuft of feathers on top of its head, an unusually large and heavy bill, and broad distinct stripes across the chest and neck. When it's looking for fish in the water it will routinely hover above the surface, neck and head bent down in the pike position, and make this unmistakable chittering noise before it twists around and plunges in after its prey. It's so bizarre, but at the same time so deliberate and effective, it's no wonder the Kingfisher is one of my favorite birds.

Also added to my Big Year list today was a bird I can now add to my Life List, having never seen it before. As I mentioned a few days ago, I received a Life List Diary as a part of a birthday gift last week. I dutifully sat and filled out as many species as I'd documented recently, going back as far as last August when I spent the majority of our vacation to upstate New York on crutches and looking for birds off of the front porch. Today was not a day I'd expected to add to it. We had stopped at the dollar store for some miscellany and were headed home when I chose, on a bit of a whim, to drive around the back of the building instead of straight for the exit. Behind this strip mall is a wooded wetland where a local birding guru had written recently was a great place to see certain species. In the summer I had visited to find numerous swallows, Red-winged Blackbirds, and myriad other birds flitting about. I'd been back this winter but to a very quiet place, with only White-throated Sparrows to be found. Today as we came around the end of the building I spotted two big white spots atop a tall tree and I knew immediately I was seeing something new. I hustled out of the car to get the binoculars out of the trunk and when I got the birds in focus I was shocked at the striking contrast. Not only was the bottom half of its back a brilliant white, but its head was completely red. The black patch on their back was like a neatly worn tuxedo jacket, setting off the two bright spots and creating a beautiful Red-headed Woodpecker. I watched as the two flew from tree to tree and then took off across the parking lot to the woods near the highway. I was thrilled that the day had those two birds in store for me. My mission this week will be to get back to the nature trail in the neighborhood and try to re-find the bird that eluded me on our last visit. I'll keep you posted.

Unexpected Visitor

No, this isn't a continuation of my rant about being able to spy on my blog visitors, as I'm sure you're happy to hear. Rather it's my promised weekly birding update, although a disappointing week it turned out to be. We made a trip down to Crowder's Mountain State Park yesterday in a vain attempt to catch some exercise and some winter bird activity in one fell swoop, but the colder than expected air and a crankier than expected toddler made it more of a race to get back to the car than a leisurely walk in the woods. I'm pretty sure we saw a small flock of Dark-eyed Juncos flitting about in the trees near the small lake, but with Lily wailing at full voice they did not stick around for long. My observation was against a brightly lit but cloudy sky, making it difficult not only to take photographs but also to stare for extended periods through binoculars. I decided not to add the Junco to my list, because I wanted to be absolutely sure. That location is most assuredly better suited to birding during migratory periods anyway, so we'll make another trip down there in March or April to see what there is to be seen.

On a positive note, I captured some shots of an unexpected visitor at the feeders this weekend, one that I've never heard of even being a feeder bird. It seems as though now that I've positively identified the Yellow-rumped Warbler on my Big Year list, they're making themselves visible to me more and more often. The one I ID'ed earlier this month at the nature trail was the first one I'd ever seen, and since then I'd seen two or three more in the same location and quite a few on the Mallard Creek Greenway when we went there last week. Then yesterday as I was watching the throngs of American Goldfinches devour their lunch of thistle seed from my feeders I spotted a flash of yellow on the ground below them. It was gone before I could retrieve the binoculars, but a half hour later she had returned and this time was nosing about in the sunflower seeds I'm offering in the tray feeder. She posed on the feeder just long enough for me to grab the camera and capture her visit for posterity, before first taking off to the top of the willow tree and then leaving out of sight. I don't know if warblers are common feeder birds, but it was a treat to see this curious female visit on an otherwise disappointing birding day. Later, to end the day on another positive note, the female Northern Cardinal that has been a daily visitor to the feeder spent at least ten minutes just perched atop the willow as I prepared dinner next to the window. I am certain she sensed my disappointment with the morning's hike and bestowed her presence outside that window as a token gesture. It was certainly appreciated.

A Spy Like Me

About three weeks ago I stumbled upon one of the coolest things I've ever discovered since being introduced to the Internet over 12 years ago. I felt a bit discouraged by the lack of comments and poll votes I'd gotten in response to a lot of my posts, and I wondered if there was a way for me to find out if anyone other than my wife, mom, and sisters was reading my stuff. So I poked around Blogger.com and did a Google search and found a site called Statcounter.com . A lot of what it advertised was over my head, but it promised to be able to track the number of hits my page was getting, and that was really all I was interested in. So I added the element to the bottom of the blog that reads "Number of visits since 12/22/07" and let 'er rip. At first it was counting a visit every time I opened the page, so I had to dis-count the first week's numbers, but when I found the feature that allowed me to disclude my own IP address the numbers started to mean something. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was reaching a lot more people than I suspected. But somehow it was still enigmatic to me, because I really want to know who they are! I know my mom and my wife both tell folks about the site and that some of them read it occasionally. And The Born Again Birdwatcher added me to his "Blogs I Read" list, so I get a little traffic from that. But the wheels were constantly turning, wondering who exactly I was reaching.

Then the other day I was poking around on the Statcounter site and found some stuff that truly blew me away. I was looking for a way to try to spy on my readers and I came upon the "Recent Visitor Activity" tool. Eureka! I had found in this tool more information than I thought could possibly be available on an obscure little blog like mine. And I hadn't paid a dime for it (I am, after all, still one of the three cheapest human beings alive). This tool not only tells me what city and country my visitors are coming from, but what page they linked to me from, how long they stayed, how many times they've visited, and what they typed in to Google to find my page. It's unbelievable. The usual suspects were there . . my sister at work, Mandi at work, and John at Born Again Birdwatcher. I expected to see those. But Tokyo, Japan? Brooklyn, NY? Summerville, GA? England? Toronto? Who are you people?

The Google searches were interesting too. Some were obviously searching for my page, as they typed "Mandi, Corey, Lily, and North Carolina" into the search engine. Others found me by searching for "pull-ups" or "recipes for dads". Imagine the horror someone must have experienced if they searched for pull-ups and found the "Poop Is Comical" post. They've probably never been back. I also found out that Avery's teacher has visited the page . . twice. I guess that shows that adding the link to my email signature is producing visits. Although I can't imagine she'll ever visit again after seeing the "Internet Porn" post from a couple days ago.

So I guess what I'm saying is that you may as well go ahead and start leaving comments and saying "Hello" when you visit, because your anonymity has been compromised! I know where you live, when you're online reading my posts, how often you come back, and even what color your underwear is. Wait . . I think my imagination might have started to wander a little bit there. Check out Statcounter.com if you've got a page that you want to get more info about, you'll be amazed by what kind of cool stuff you find there.

Feedback on Recipes

I'd like to hear how some of you think I should go about re-organizing the recipe page. One change I'm committed to that I'll be making gradually is that I'll change the format of the pages from MS Word over to HTML, so they can be read and printed right in the browser without having to download them and open Word. This has the added benefit of them taking up a lot less space on the server.

This week we added 5 new recipes to the collection, a couple that were absolute home runs and a few others that were good change-ups. For my birthday Mandi made me the Crunchy Shrimp with Toasted Couscous and Ginger-Orange Sauce , which was phenomenal. It was a little prep-intensive, but the flavors exploded and it was a very nice birthday treat. The Sausage and Bean Casserole and Chicken-Ham Lasagna were both better than expected, and the kids even housed the lasagna. Thai-Style Ground Beef came with the promise of being kid-friendly, but we didn't bet the house on that one and it was a smart decision. It was spicier than expected and would have been wholly pushed away by both of our girls. It was, however, a nice change from the norm and an easy one to throw together. Last night's dinner was in the "Superfast" section of Cooking Light (December 2005), and when you do fast often you expect less. Not so in this case, the Chicken with Sherry-Soy Reduction Sauce was really easy and super tasty. We served it with baked sweet potatoes and steamed sugar-snap peas. The combination of flavors was phenomenal, with just the right balance of sweet and tart. One word of caution is that if you choose to cut these recipes down to reduce leftovers, be careful not to cut the sauce ingredients down too small. Had I cut the sherry-soy reduction ingredients there would not have been enough to work with, and dinner may have been disappointing. Instead I just cooked two chicken breasts and the entire amount of sauce, which was perfect drizzled over the sweet potato instead of butter.

Please leave me comments as to how you think I should re-organize the recipe page to make it easier to read . . should I separate the dishes by type of cuisine, by meat type, or some other way? Also, for those of you counting calories (or perhaps Points ), check the "Properties" of these recipes for calorie, fat, protein, and fiber information. Thanks, and enjoy.

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.

Territorial Budding Magician

While I already recounted the positive parts of my 32nd birthday, the rest of it is really too funny to ignore. After all, what day that starts at 5:40 a.m. with Lily yelling "Open my door Daddy!" isn't destined to be great?

Around 6:30 I took Lily upstairs to get her dressed, as well as to wake Avery up and get her motivated. When the turning on of the lights and pleasant "Good morning" failed to produce the desired result, I resorted to a gentle but convincing squeeze of the rib cage in the general vicinity of a kidney. Surprisingly, this tickle elicited a laugh and not the fuzzy-minded irritation I expected and would not have blamed Avery for. The problem was, Lily keyed on that laughter as an invitation to some play time and attempted to get the next shot at her sitting-duck sister. And that's when the roof caved in. Avery unexpectedly got very angry and shoved Lily out of the way, instantly producing wailing and tears that would curdle your blood. As Mandi and I tried to diffuse the situation by calmly talking to the girls, Avery instead ratcheted up her aggression and started ordering Lily out of her room altogether. This has been an ongoing theme for a while, with multiple confrontations taking place on the subject of Ave's inordinate protectiveness of her "stuff". Well as she blatantly defied everything Mandi said to her, I decided that it was about time I did something about it. Our threats of punishment and consequences in the past had obviously not been effective, so today I was going to take action. I stormed downstairs and out to the garage. I returned to her room less than a minute later with a screwdriver and hammer in hand and went directly for the hinges on the door. The way I see it, if it ain't there you can't slam it. I don't believe a seven year-old has much of an expectation of privacy in the first place, unless she's getting dressed. And she can do that in the bathroom. So the easy solution was to just remove the door. Plus, it's my birthday, and I can do whatever I want.

Nice thought, right? Yeah, not so much. Mandi made me stop before I'd even had a chance to pull one pin out of the hinges. We compromised on a two-day punishment period where Ave's not allowed to close her door unless she's getting dressed. I suppose I can live with that, although I think at this point it's going to take more than that to teach her the lesson. Why do I think that? Later in the afternoon Ave was out in the garage getting some supplies for a cardboard stage she was making for her Hannah Montana doll. She at some point stopped to paint the words "I Love You Lily" on the piece of paper Lil was painting on the day before on their craft table. As Lily wandered out through the door that was left open, Ave's sister radar started going off and she immediately turned around and started doing a maneuver I can only describe as boxing out the craft table. Lily was oblivious, of course, as she was heading for her new bike. But that didn't matter to Ave. Just like it didn't matter that it isn't her craft table and it wasn't even originally her paper she was protecting. Obviously the punishment enacted eight hours ago was really having an impact. I predict we'll revisit this issue in the near future.

In an unrelated story, one of the first things Avery does when she comes home from school is show me her latest library book. Friday she came home with a book about the Wright brothers, which she enjoyed. Monday she scampered across the living room with a big grin on her face and another new book in hand, this one a thirty year-old collection of "magic tricks". I chuckled as she told me how she now wanted to be a magician when she grew up. As it stands she's the worst liar ever put on this planet . . you can see untruths on her face from a mile away. I don't know if that will translate well into a career in sleight of hand, but I wasn't going to dash her hopes at this early stage. Later, as I put Lily into the bathtub Ave came into the bathroom showing off her first attempt at a trick. She had a spoon sticking out of her fist and a dime poking out from where thumb and index finger meet. She was convinced that it looked like she'd bent the spoon (which incidentally has a blue handle) and fully expected me to be amazed. I tried, but my failure was apparent in the sheepish look on her face. She then explained the "trick" and wandered back to her book. Then as Mandi and I sat down to my birthday dinner, Ave came in with a plastic cup filled to the rim with water and asked for help with the "Make the water stay in the upside down cup" trick. Of course, she'd spilled half of it on the floor in the process of bringing it from the sink to the table, so the prospect of a good result was really slim. She grudgingly agreed to wait until another day to try that trick, and we were left to finish our dinner in relative peace. As they go, yesterday would have been a day worthy of turning into an episode of that sitcom we always say our life would make. The way I look at it, at least there were a lot of positives to balance out the insanity.