Friday, August 18, 2023

I talk about birds and the WEATHER

Daily Diary, Day 1083: I am continuing to make slow progress on my plotting. I now have a date for when the prologue is going to happen, and a general idea of when the climax of the book is going to occur, now I just need to fill in the middle bits (smile)

I did get in a walk yesterday after dinner, but didn't this morning because I spent over an hour cleaning the upstairs. I also got very little out of an hour I spent on a zoom meeting that was about how to use the new Notes function on stubstack. This is supposed to be like twitter (no sorry, it's now X) but a kindler gentler twitter. My lack of interest could be the fact that I stopped using twitter in about 2011, so it was hard for me to get excited about Notes (at least the name makes some sense.) However, this was me trying to stay up to date.

I also wrote a couple of emails, and have a scheduled phone call with my daughter after lunch. But otherwise, nothing else to get in the way of my plotting.

The big excitement, however, is the fact that the effects of Hurricane Hilliary are supposed to hit San Diego starting Saturday night (well, it is supposed to be only a tropical storm by then- but a Tropical Storm watch for the county has been issued, first time ever--and last tropical storm to actually make landfall in the region was 1939.) Main effect on us is probably going to be wind and heavy rainfall, but hey, definitely going to be WEATHER.

I don't think anything significant is supposed to happen until tomorrow night, but I will definitely keep you all posted because again WEATHER!

Oh, update on birds. A bunch of house finches are starting to show red on their breasts, so I did some googling and found that finches molt once a year between July and October, and what I am seeing is juvenile males who look like females until their first loss of feathers. In my research I also learned that that young females prefer to mate with the brightest red males, but if these males turn out to be lazy fathers (don't help feed the babies) they will chose in their next mating males that aren't as red!

I also had... oops! had to take a quick break to help Leeza chase the squirrel away. Never a dull moment. Anyway, as I was saying, while googling, I tried to find out how common it was for sparrow's to not have tail feathers because there has been this small song sparrow coming recently to the feeder with no tail! I was pleased to learn that this was probably a baby that hadn't grown its tail feathers yet, not unusual. He or she didn't have any trouble flying or hanging on to a branch, but is was nice to know that this wouldn't last.

And before I go, I thought I better take a photo of my yellow rose bush for you this morning, since I suspect that if we really do get 60 mile a hour winds tomorrow, none of these particular blooms will survive. (Can you tell I am excited about the fact we are going to have WEATHER!) Now I'm worried about the effects of the wind on the birds.