Journal of a Sabbatical

July 15, 2001

east providence theme park

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
domestic goose (3)
Canada goose (63)
mute swan (16)
ring billed gull (40)
mallard (8)
double crested cormorant (2)
herring gull (4)
house sparrow (6)
starling (2)
snowy egret (4)
common tern (3)
rock dove (4)
mourning dove (4)
northern mockingbird (1)
redwinged blackbird (3)
song sparrow (1)
osprey (1)
American goldfinch (1)
green heron (1)
American robin (1)
Narragansett Terrace
monk parakeet (4+)
house sparrow

Today's Reading: A Conscious Stillness by Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale

The Lists

2001 Book List

2001 Plum Island Bird List

Plum Island Life List

Watchemoket Cove Bird List

Browsing the Brown Bookstore this morning we came across a book about the history of striped fabric, which referred to stripes as the devil's fabric as it's associated with evil - apparently that's why prisoners used to wear stripes - so naturally I blurt out "That explains the Yankees! It's those pinstripes!" Discovery of Yankee pinstripes as the root of evil seemed appropriate as we were meeting Miriam Nadel for lunch. Which we did. Despite the renovations happening at Cafe Paragon, we were able to get a table and proceeded to have a very nice lunch and good conversation. Since independent witnesses have now seen us in the same place, albeit not a particularly exotic place, I think we can safely say we are not the same person.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the East Providence theme park as Nancy calls it. We visited all four major attractions of East Providence: the cove, the carousel, Dari-Bee, and the parrots. OK, so there's a fifth, the bike path, which we didn't visit... but we visited the cove twice. It's not that I wasn't satisfied with having an osprey fly directly over my head at naked eye identification range on the first visit. It's just that on the way back from riding the carousel and visiting the parrots, I saw a green heron perched in tree when we passed the cove. I pulled over and we both got good looks at it.

All the birds were cooperative today. The parrots were actually visible and boisterous going in and out of their nests and a house sparrow was feeding its young in a nest within the parrot nest. Note, I have no idea why the common name for these parrots is "monk parakeet" when they're not parakeets, but then again the American robin is a thrush and the house sparrow is a finch so confusing names are the norm. Anyway, we enjoyed them.

My external hard disk crashed the other day and unfortunately one of the applications that remained zapped when I fixed it is Anarchie, so who knows when I'll upload this. I tried to download the latest version, which is called Interarchy but it kept aborting halfway through the download. Grrr.

[July 22: This just in I reinstalled Fetch, which I used to use before Anarchie, so can resume slowly uploading journal entries. Stay tuned for more.]