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Snow at Nancy's house: about an inch. Snow at my house when I got home tonight: about 4 inches. Driving conditions on Saturday heading south: fine until I got around Wrentham on I495, where cars were spinning off the road, several accidents (none involving me), etc. Driving conditions on Sunday night coming home: OK for the first half hour, abysmal from just before Marlboro to the Lowell Connector, then just annoying from there home. And the condo association apparently hadn't plowed the parking lot this morning. My car is parked at an angle on an odd-shaped snow formation in the general vicinity of my parking space. But other than that, we had a great weekend.
Saturday night we saw The Apostle at the Avon. Robert Duvall is brilliant. I wanted to jump up and accept Jesus as my personal savior. The tension in the scene at the end was unbearable. I loved this movie. It's the first movie I've seen that didn't portray the evangelical preacher as either as a total buffoon or as totally corrupt. Sonny is a complex character - deeply flawed but with definite redeeming qualities. I left the theater wanting more - wanting to know what happened to the church after Sonny (aka E.F.), wanting to get to know the people in the church. I kinda felt like I was eavesdropping on people's real lives.
I was dreaming I was at a revival meeting hearing about the Holy Ghost when the wind shook the windows so bad I woke up. Boy was I confused. The storm was howling outside, the ice blowing against the windows making a funny pinging sound and the windows rattling to beat the band. I couldn't quite reconcile that with being at a tent revival in the rural south. It took me a few minutes to realize I was in Rhode Island and that was a snowstorm and not the Holy Ghost rattling the windows.
In the morning, after all that window rattling, I was sure there would be a lot of snow on the ground but there was only about an inch or so. It was still snowing a little and sort of cold but after brunch at Rue de l'Espoir we decided to go to the cove anyway.
At the cove:
250+ ring billed gulls
36 starlings
16 mute swans
16 mallards
14 American widgeons
4 Canada geese (including Igor)
3 common Goldeneye
2 red breasted mergansers
2 domestic geese
At the cove, one of the cygnets - they're almost adults at this point but still have some of the gray/brown feathers mixed in - went after Nancy, charging her and hissing. I guess it thought she had bread and it wanted to claim all of it for itself. That's not that unusual. The swans are very aggressive. But then an unusual thing happened. One of the domestic geese heard the hissing and rushed over to defend Nancy! The goose got between Nancy and the swan and made aggressive neck thrusting and wing flapping displays and then chased the swan away. A goose chasing a swan? What's wrong with this picture?
At the Turner Reservoir in East Providence:
28 American coots
31 mallards
14 great cormorants
8 common mergansers
3 great black back gulls
3 Canada geese
2 mute swans
2 American crows
1 house sparrow
1 blue jay
The great cormorants were a surprise. I had seen two of them at the reservoir in February - the first great cormorants I'd ever seen, mostly around here we have double-crested cormorants. So when I saw two great cormorants on a rock in the reservoir today I thought maybe they were the same ones and that was all there were. Wrong. There were 14 of them. Some were drying off on the big rocks further out and some were diving after fish. I watched one catch several really big fish. The fish thrashed and wiggled and tried to get away but the cormorant still managed to manipulate the fish in its beak so it was the right way around to be swallowed. I could see the cormorant's throat bulge when it swallowed the fish. No I couldn't tell what kind of fish it was.
So, except for the slippery ride home and the 4+ inches of unplowed snow up here, it was a pretty nice day.
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