Journal of a Sabbatical

May 18, 2001

randomness

Today's Reading: Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez
Pedro's strikeouts: 12

A reader who chanced upon my site while researching some Black Ships stuff answered my question about Loo-Choo. Loo-Choo is Okinawa. I kinda thought so but since the Taylor book didn't include a map, I wasn't sure. That's one question down.

I spent a lot of time going over my birding notebooks this week and entering the data into Bird Brain. In the course of doing that I noticed that I had inexplicably written "brown chat" when I meant stone chat in my bird list for the Tisza River. My notebook contained a perfect description of a stone chat and as far as I know there is no such thing as a "brown chat" so Kevin and Andrea may be right that although Andrea returned my brain sometime ago (though I don't remember her taking back the rubber pork chop) I must not be using it. Anyway, when I went back to fix that in the extreme birding entry I decided I should also add a footnote to explain that sand martin is the European common name for bank swallow (good old Riparia riparia). This is why we have the scientific names, so I should clearly use them. Whatever they're called, they nest in loess embankments. Loess by the way is a fine-grained rich yellowish-brown dirt. I probably should've put a footnote or a link for that too. Maybe I'll go back and do it later.

So this morning Zsolt called with an update on the computer disaster that I failed to solve. Apparently the only solution was to wipe the disk and restore from the recovery CD, which I was hesitant to do. I still don't know what went wrong, and the PC consultant who looked at it says it may have been something I copied over from the old computer with Aloha Bob. That's a plausible theory, except that the problem didn't appear until much later and I had started and restarted the computer a jillion times. Oh well. Anyway, Zsolt asked how I was remembering our trip to the plain. I told him it was a highlight of my life, to which he responded: "Otis tarda or your exploration of the loess wall?" Duh. I meant Otis tarda. I mean my fall makes a better story but it wasn't exactly a highlight. A low light maybe.

The weather is extremely overcast today but it never actually manages to rain. I guess we're having a drought. Hard to imagine after the flood and the winter we had, but true enough.

The overcast is making me gloomy. I try not to let it affect my mood, but it almost seems out of my control. And oh I just so want to sleep for about a month...

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