Bunny in the Backyard

I took this, through a living-room window, in late May when there was a bunny on the ground looking for something worth eating among what the birds had dropped from the hanging feeders. I haven't seen him (or her, or them -- I don't mean to impose gender roles or identity on the rabbit) since, so there must not have been enough on the ground to warrant a return trip.

Dog Songs

I may not be a dog person, as I wrote back in July in musing about the dogs I had growing up, but I do like to hear people sing about their dogs.

In something I wrote for Instagram a couple of months ago as a commentary on a Peanuts cartoon, I referred to Grandpa Jones and "The Banjo Am the Instrument." Ever since then I've been listening, nearly but not quite completely exclusively, to a Spotify playlist of songs by Grandpa Jones. Among my favorites are those about dogs.

The dogs in these songs have names like Towser, Rattler, and Old Blue (maybe more of a description than a name, or a name that came from a description; who knows?), they all are dearly loved, and they are all used in hunting (mostly of racoons and opossums). I didn't even know there was a tradition in country music, or folk music, or wherever it came from, of songs celebrating dogs, but there seems to be, and Grandpa Jones carried on the tradition, singing about "good old Towser," and "Old Blue, you rascal you," and the rest.

So, while I myself don't have a dog and am not remotely interested in hunting, I love to hear Grandpa Jones sing about both.

Soothing Catharsis

Tonight I went to Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church to see a performance of the Atlanta Schola Cantorum; it was the first of their concerts I've been to in a while, but probably the 15th or 20th time I've seen them. It was a wonderful performance. Here are some of the pictures I took:

A "soothing catharsis to the troubles of life in the world today" indeed!

Fly Like an Eagle

Without meaning to, my friend Kevin Eames – sadly now the late Kevin Eames – nearly ruined a couple of good songs for me.

I remembered one of them recently, when J. and I were on our way home from somewhere, listening to a playlist of a bunch of old rock songs on shuffle, and the song randomly picked by MediaMonkey (one of the apps I use) was "Fly Like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band. It was the first time I'd heard it in a long time. I'd forgotten how hokey and pseudo-profound – but also embarrassingly sincere and actually kind of meaningful – it is, including as it does the following lines:

Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution

I can't hear this song without thinking about something Kevin said to me at least twenty-five years ago. He told me once that when he was a kid and heard this song, he thought "house the people" was an inquiry into the well-being of "the people" – not "house the people," but "how's the people?", as in (as Kevin said at the time, in a faux-Jersey accent) "How's them people? How they doin'?" (Neither of us said anything, in any accent whatsoever, about how the next line, "Livin' in the street," is a depressing reference to the homeless problem.)

I don't know if what he said was true or not; I don't know if Kevin ever actually misinterpreted the song in this way, or if he was just being silly. But I'll tell you this: Whenever I hear or think about "Fly Like an Eagle," which admittedly is not often, I can't help but hear "how's the people?" in the lyrics.

Kevin told me another time, even before he had nearly ruined "Fly Like an Eagle" for me, that when he was teaching history at a small private Christian school, the school had a Christmas store they called Santa's Secret Workshop, and that one day he heard one of his students sing "Santa's Secret Workshop" to the tune of that great guitar riff that starts off Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" – and that he surprised the student by saying, "Hey, that's Jethro Tull, isn't it?"

And now, whenever I hear Aqualung – again, admittedly not often – I hear a deep voice intoning "Santa's Secret Workshop" in the same melody as Martin Barre's repeated six-note guitar riff at the opening of the song. (And yes, in case you're counting it out on your fingers as I did, "Santa's secret workshop" and "Sitting on a park bench" – the opening line of the song, sung by Ian Anderson to the same melody – do have the same number of syllables.)

I'm sure Kevin's children know that he could be really funny – Kevin told me once that Hilary told him he was "sillier than the other dads," which I have no trouble believing he was. But do they also know, I wonder, that Kevin had friends who prized his sense of humor, were perhaps even changed by it, and who really, really miss it?

I miss Kevin. I'd give anything to hear one of his corny stories again.

Garage Door Opener Pulley

Over the weekend, one of the extension springs on our garage door opener broke. I decided to replace it myself rather than pay a bunch of money for somebody else to do it; while I was getting ready for the repair, I took a bunch of reference pictures in case I needed them along the way. I ended up not needing any of them; it was a fairly easy and straightforward job which I finished in only about an hour. (I might have done it in fifteen minutes if I hadn't kept dropping things or forgetting where I put something, and also having to go back inside to wam up my hands--I did this last Saturday night, when it was very cold!)

Anyway, I really like this picture, even if I didn't need it to get the garage door working again.

Sunday Morning Stars

I went out to the back deck this morning at 6:30 to sit outside and drink some coffee, looked up, and there were stars!

International Space Station Sightings

For the past four nights, the girls and I have gone outside around dusk to look up and watch for the International Space Station. We've seen it every night.

It's very high up, about 250 miles, so you can't count the cells in its photovoltaic arrays or read the markings on its fuselage or exchange friendly waves with the crew. It looks like a bright star – a lot like Venus – except that it moves fairly rapidly across the sky. In fact, it's moving at 17,500 miles per hour (it orbits the Earth about once every ninety minutes), so if it's visible in the sky above your house for four minutes, then by the time it disappears it has traveled nearly 1,200 miles. Of course, since it's so high up it doesn't look like it's going that fast, only about as fast as an airplane appears to be moving when you see it overhead. (The space station doesn't have visible blinking lights or red lights like an airplane flying in the night sky does, however, so if you think you're seeing the ISS but it's blinking, what you're actually seeing is probably an airplane that's really high up.)

Of course, you can't just go out randomly at night and look up and expect to see the ISS, you need to refer to the following Web site to know when you can see it:

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/index.cfm

You may have to zoom out on the map to find the location closest to you where "sighting opportunities" are charted, and interpreting the Max Height and Appears / Disappears information is a bit of a challenge; we've found that if you're vigilant about searching the sky around the time when it's supposed to become visible, you can find it within a minute or so.

Charging Along

Yesterday Anna forgot to plug in her Leaf (for the first time ever), so today we swapped cars... but I don't think that I can make it home on the remaining charge. So here I am at Walgreens, charging the car, eating a Mounds bar, drinking Dr Pepper, and blogging about it.

First Eggnog of the Season

For me, at least, the holiday season has begun.

(Yes, I know it's still technically summer. I'm okay with drinking eggnog when it's still technically summer, though I do appreciate the fact that all Kroger had was the autumnal-seeming Pumpkin Eggnog.)

Miscellaneous Recent Pictures

Here, in no particular order (except mostly chronological, actually), are some pictures I've taken with my cell phone recently, starting with these lizards (either Chinese water dragons or bearded lizards; I don't remember which) at PetSmart:

A rock I saw at Vines Gardens:

Me, at Vines Gardens:

The girls painting at Granny and Pa's house, on the day we went to celebrate Granny's birthday:

Jessica, a little lost in the maze at Vines Gardens:

Me and Jessica at Vines Gardens, with a painted rock in the tree behinds us:

A tree that blew over in our neighborhood during the storm last Monday (September 11th):

I can't really represent this in a picture, but today, Thursday, September 14th, is the first day the girls have gone to school this week. The hurricane that wrecked large parts of Florida over the weekend and blew through Georgia as a tropical storm on Monday did enough damage in our area, including lots of power outages, to cause Gwinnett County schools to be closed for three days. Anna is home today again, since Rockdale County schools are still closed.

Our house and yard suffered no damage during the storm, and our electricity only blinked out for a few seconds at a time three or four times on Monday.

Rainbow!

This afternoon, after another of the hard but quickly-passing rainstorms we've had so many of in the past few days, there was a rainbow over our neighborhood! (Or over Loganville, anyway. Anna saw it from the Walmart parking lot.) Elyse was very excited to see it:

It may be a little hard to tell in this picture, but for a while it was a double rainbow:

Christmas in June

I like it when, at certain craft stores, Christmas starts in June:

But they also have plenty of Thanksgiving stuff out too:

(Also lots of Fourth of July stuff, but that's not surprising since it's only about three weeks away.)

Petco

This week Elyse is taking a craft class at JoAnn in Snellville, which happens to be right next door to the Petco. We arrived a little early this morning, so we went into Petco to look at the animals before the craft class:

(The ferrets are asleep and not dead, I promise.)

2016 Family Reunion

Today Elyse and Jessica and I went to my aunt JoAnne's house for our annual family reunion. (Anna stayed home to rest because she's had a tiring and stressful couple of weeks.) There were about forty-five people there, all of them related to us in one way or another, and also one dog, which Jessica and Elyse had a good time playing with, until he got wound up and almost knocked Elyse down. ("Daddy, I just like little dogs. I don't like big dogs," she said to me as we were leaving.) There were also a couple of other little girls that they had a good time playing with, though Elyse was disappointed she didn't get to be the #1 Secret Agent.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Anna's New Car

After nearly fifteen years with her 1998 Nissan Altima--a darn good car, she was--yesterday Anna and I went to CarMax in Roswell, and she bought a new (albeit used) car: A 2012 Nissan Leaf:

So far, we love it, though it has been less than twenty-four hours since we drove it off the lot. It does have a range of only about eighty miles, though, so it won't be our family vacation car. When it comes time for me to get a new car in a couple of years, a Leaf won't even be an option for me.

(In case you're wondering, you don't actually bring the giant yellow bow home with you. It's just for a photo opportunity, then they take it off the car and put it back in a locker somewhere. I was rather relieved by that fact.)

Feeding the Crows

The crows I feed in our backyard are very cautious.

I threw out half a bag of old Tostitos for them about ten minutes ago. One of the crows has been perched on top of a pine tree just on the other side of our fence, gazing down at the Tostitos and scanning the area, for about five minutes now, but hasn't yet descended into the yard to eat. I haven't even heard him caw out to his family that he's found food.

I think the problem might be that it's rainy and sort of dark outside, and since we have our kitchen light on, he can see through the sliding glass doors to the table and watch me and Jessica and Elyse as we drink our chocolate milk (and coffee, in my case) and eat our muffins and plan (I'm sure he believes) his capture.

Or maybe he thinks if he waits long enough, I'll throw out some salsa or queso to go with the Tostitos.

Post 400: Ten Years

This is the four-hundredth post I've created for the Planet Burdett blog. It has actually be a little over ten years since I started blogging, but it was ten years ago today--August 5, 2006--that Anna and I revealed to the world that we were going to have a baby!

We didn't know yet whether it would be a boy or a girl--in fact, quite a few people were convinced it would be a boy--or anything about the challenges to come (the placenta previa condition, the trips to the ER, the early delivery via C-section and Jessica's first six days of life spent in the NICU), but we were so excited to become parents. (Scared, too--but mostly excited).

All the cliches about how fast it goes by are true. But I am so grateful I get to go through it with my beautiful wife and wonderful kids. I am truly blessed.

2006 Ingleside JOY Club Luau Pictures

* * *

I took pictures back in 2006 for the Ingleside JOY Club (Just Older Youth) Luau, which was at my parents' Lawrenceville house, and published these forty-five images on the old version of Planet Burdett. I added them to the current version of the site on November 18, 2017.