Monday, Monday

Getting killed at the office today, so this will be brief. We spent a goodly part of the weekend making stuff: banana-honey whole wheat bread, shrimp and corn chowder, salsa, yogurt, and mayonnaise. It was all delicious. It rained on my designated mowing day, so I’ll have to make it up for it this week. As promised, here’s the mayo recipe. It originally ran in the local paper

• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. minced garlic (recipe says fresh – we got ours from a jar)
• ¼ tsp. paprika
• ½ tsp. white pepper
• 1 tbs. chopped flat leaf parsley (we harvested from the herb patch)
• 2 whole eggs plus 2 egg yolks
• juice from one lemon
• 3 cups vegetable oil (we used canola)

Put everything but the oil into a food processor and fire it up. Slowly and steadily pour the oil in while the processor mixes and whips it up. You should be able to hear (and see) the mayo stiffen up. Stores up to 2 weeks in the fridge. It’s quite tasty, and you’ll find it to be much richer than the store-bought stuff.

Good ride on Sunday morning – more wildlife than you could shake a stick at, including a flock of turkeys and their young and several bluish birds that I think must have been indigo buntings. They seemed more metallic than bluebirds and had a bit of black mixed in. I came around a bend and startled a doe and her fawn, which sent them racing along the inside of a barbed-wire fence. They kept pace with me for a little while, then peeled off across the pasture. Magnificent to see.

Biking and wildlife

We live at the edge of our particular town, and our riding loops take us out into some nice, rural areas. Wildlife sightings are quite common. Last night Ezmerelda saw a fawn and its mother. I’d been keeping my eyes peeled for deer, but hadn’t spotted any so far. My last ride saw the usual assortment of birds and rabbits, though I did manage to surprise a garter snake that was laying on the shoulder by the roadside. I jerked the wheel to keep from running it over and it struck/leapt into the weeds at the same time. I also keep an eye out for birds: goldfinches, bluebirds, swifts, turkeys, red-winged blackbirds and a new one that I’ve yet to look up: medium sized, charcoal dark on top, pale underneath, with a thin light stripe across the end of the tail feathers.

Bikes, Books and Birds

Rode a little over 12 miles this evening. Not too bad at all, and I’m starting to get the hang (I think) if switching the front gears back and forth. The only soreness at the end of it all was the seat area, if you get my drift. I suspect I’ll get used to that. Lovely countryside – once you get out of the neighborhoods, you’re smack in the middle of farmland: hayfields, pasture and the like. Wonderful stuff, and I didn’t get hassled once by any drivers. Did spend a bit of time going over state law on the subject of bicycles, roads and whatnot.

The Tolkien wave continues apace: The Unfinished Tales for me, RoTK for the bigger kids at bedtime and the generalissima is reading The Silmarillion at my recommendation.

Things we like: the collection of bird feeders outside the kitchen window: four in total, containing hummingbird nectar, finch seed, standard songbird mix and suet. The grackles tore the suet apart in just a few days, so I’m in no hurry to refill it. Maybe when the weather starts to cool off. Our bird resources are as follows:

• Peterson’s Eastern Birds
• The Burgess Bird Book for Children
• The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds
• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website

A (very) few species specific links I’ve collected:

• Kestrels Across America
• Getting Started with Bluebirds, Eastern bluebird nest box, trails, and monitoring
• Eastern Screech Owl at OwlPages

My favorite species, in no particular order: the Red-Winged Blackbird, the Eastern Screech Owl, Red-Tailed Hawk and Red Shouldered Hawk. The first is just a sharp looking bird, especially when a whole group of them take flight at once. The remaining three have all treated us to some back-yard close encounters. In some cases, very close encounters. We managed to attract a Screech Owl right after hanging a nesting box. He hung around for weeks, softly purring in the back yard. Never did attract a mate, as best as we can tell – the squirrels moved into the box and we’d hoped for better luck this year. Then we moved to another state. In any case, he seemed quite un-perturbed by my stumbling around in the grass beneath him, shining flashlights and snapping pictures. He’d just sort of slowly look down, blink a few times, then go back to his hooting as if he couldn’t have cared less. It was awesome.

The new place

The landscape here is a little different from the place we just left – more flatness, though it’s broken up here and there by some nice, rolling hills. The wider spaces mean a bigger sky – something you really don’t take notice of until it’s there, if you get my meaning. The climate is not much different than what we left, though we did barely cross a timezone. This brought with it an interesting challenge – we lost an hour by moving west, but since we’re only just over the line, our sunlight hours haven’t changed a whole lot. Result: young children rising earlier than they ought because of the growing daylight.

Bleah.

For me, I think, the biggest change is in the trees. We left an area dominated by Loblolly pines and other evergreens. They were beautiful and evocative, though a bit messy (especially in the early spring, when they covered everything in thick yellow pollen). Our old lot was semi-wooded and our new one is on former pasture, though the development is old enough for most of the landscape trees to have attained a respectable size. There are great many Eastern Red Cedars around here, and I’m strongly tempted to find a place for a few of them in the yard. They look entirely too cool.

I was a little worried that fewer trees would mean fewer birds, but that was put to rest in the days after we moved in: we counted no less than 4 active nests in the yard (finches, grackles, mourning doves, and robins) and there are probably one or two more. A red-tailed hawk makes a semi-regular circuit through the area, sending all the starlings and grackles into a noisy hysteria. We have more goldfinches than I’ve ever seen, and we had a hummingbird at the feeder in the first of week of May – we wouldn’t have seen them until early-to-mid July at the old place. The surrounding areas, while growing, are still rural enough for me to have spotted deer, turkeys, skunks and groundhogs on the way to work in the mornings.

The dirt here is a different color, and it’s broken here and there by outcroppings of rock. I think they’re terribly nifty and they give our new wide views a nice bit of character.

The new house is in a neighborhood located in a smallish-sized city. Everything is nice and close, which is wonderful change. We have more rooms than we had before, and the area is teeming with other kids. We hear tell that there is a large concentration of homeschoolers in the vicinity, and indeed, the generalissima has already joined a new local CM group.

You may notice that I’ve been a bit circumspect as regards location. This is deliberate. I was an avid blogger some time ago under a nick very close to my real name. In fact, it was my real name. Since I want more of the family to participate, I’m being quite careful to guard our privacy. You will not see our real names here, nor will I reveal our location. Thanks for understanding.