Day’s End and Evening Birdsong
After dinner, I walked out to the back woods to listen to the birds as they prepared for the night.
Family walk down gravel road. Encountered dead copperhead snake.
Family walk down gravel road. Encountered dead copperhead snake.
Family movie night was Hugo. Great cast, sweet story, homage to early cinema.
On the back porch with the NYTimes, McCann’s Apeirogon, coffee. A mourning dove cooing behind me, hawks screeching far above, crows and blue jays talking, too. Power saws and nail guns and lawn mowers.
After dinner, I walked out to the back woods to listen to the birds as they prepared for the night.
Yes, The English Game made me cry. I am proud to be a lifelong football player and fan.
It’s that time of year that I start calling the Levering Orchard hotline to find out when opening (and only) day for sour cherry picking will be. Looks to be mid-June this year.
I’ve had this Peace Corps patch for 20 years. It fits perfectly in the new Field Notes Vignette notebook.
Feels like I may be halfway through this work-from-home experience, so I’ve moved my desk back into the library, put the Olympia SM2 next to the MacBook Pro, and set up the podcast recording equipment next to the Cleveland photos on the back wall.
Saturday. Slept in. Went to Carrboro Farmers Market, returned home to put plants into garden—cantaloupe, habanero, Thai basil, nasturtium, roselle. Inside, moved my desk from the bedroom back into library.
Cherries are ripening on the old tree in the front yard. Blue jays and red-headed woodpecker have visited and snacked. New cherry trees in back yard will need a few years to catch up.
Pull tab.
Just out of the oven. #dutchovenbread per Michael Ruhlman recipe.
Cleaned chicken coop. We’re down to 5 hens. Had to kill one yesterday after neighbor dogs attacked. Was distressing incident that punctured weekend tranquility. Another hen is injured and we’re watching her. Feathers litter yard. Birdnests will be downy this summer.
Hot sunny day in Chapel Hill. Out in the garden and yard planting and tending. Fragrant, ripe meyer lemon fell from tree as I moved it outside for summer. Peonies & irises & jasmine, bluebirds & dragon flies.
Thank you Jason Kottke for posting link to this amazing mashup of songs from 1984. I was 14 that year. This music makes me feel full-body nostalgia for that time.
Microcast from my home studio, i.e., a desk at the foot of the bed where I’ve been working for the last month (communications for the Duke Department of Medicine). I’m testing the Zoom Livetrak L-8 sound board with a Rode Podmic into a MacBook Pro and Hindenburg Journalist.
Spent the afternoon in the woods clearing a trail to our campsite. Now just boiling water on the BioLite homestove and drinking a Fullsteam Paycheck Pilsner.
To mark the arrival of the Mark One Apollo Edition pen, a Kickstarter from Studio Neat, I made an Old Fashioned using the Neat Ice Kit.
Wildlife photographer Peter Beard has “died where he lived: in nature.” The NYTimes has a long obituary about Beard’s art and life.
A good friend of mine in Cleveland had two large Beard prints, of elephants, hanging in his apartment. Whenever I visited him, I used to lean in until the rest of the jumbled apartment receded from my peripheral vision and I could almost feel the earth shake as the elephants marched past the camera.
Just lost another hen to a hawk. It was the buffed lace Polish that looks cool but can’t see well. Bummed.
A cooler morning still wet from rain in the night. I went for a run on a nearby trail. Now settled into my chair at my desk in my bedroom, coffee in hand. The Zoom LiveTrak L-8 is on my desk, begging to be used, so maybe a microcast later.
Was on a few Zoom meetings for work today, now in Google hangouts for cocktail mixology with Chapel Hill’s Gary Crunkleton, later will tune into YouTube for live music feom Josh Ritter.
All five of us gathered in the kitchen to make brunch - crepes with mushrooms and goat cheese or bananas and Nutella, bacon and eggs, fruit - and sat, ate, talked about faith traditions and actions for good. Now we’re watching Andrea Bocelli sing live from Duomo di Milano.
Needed a break from the laptop so I came outside to sit on a log, read the New Yorker, boil water on the BioLite CampStove, and watch the sun set down the lane.
Erin and Malia stopped by the farm store and now we have four chicks chirping in the living room. The seven hens outside continue to give us eggs for breakfast. Got our second double-yoke egg this week.