Blessed by the Potato

A bird (which I think is either a grackle or a swallow) has set up a nest in my next door neighbour’s bathroom exhaust vent on the side of their house. It made for some interesting lazy bird watching as the bird flew right by my office window going on its feeding rounds. As the baby birds get bigger, you can hear them chirping as the bird brings food back on his/her rounds.

Unfortunately, not all has gone to plan, and one of the baby birds fell out of the nest and died. Unfortunately, it didn’t fall all the way out of the nest, and now this dead baby bird is hanging by its leg off the vent cover on my neighbour’s house. To add insult to injury, the baby birds are now getting big enough that it doesn’t look like mommy can fit in the vent tube with them all at the same time now, so instead of climbing in to feed them, she stands on the convenient perch made by the dead bird and just sticks her head in to feed the other birds. Sick.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the Vibe I rented in Victoria had a 120 V AC power port on the front dash, which I thought was a pretty neat feature. No more having to buy all kinds of car adapators for various electronic gizmos (phone chargers, laptops, ipods, etc): just use the regular wall-socket version while in the car!

Well, conference season is in full swing, and I’ve only got a few days back home here before I’m off again. I’d apologize for not keeping up my usual tri-weekly posting frequency during this madness, except that the site’s traffic and the number of people asking “Oh, do you have any pictures from Victoria?” indicate that no one is reading it any more.

My presentation in Victoria was not as good as it could have been: just as I was getting up on stage, the organizer told me I had to cut my talk down to 6 minutes (from the 9 it had been originally scheduled for) which put me into a bit of a panic. So things were rushed and I sounded nervous and it just wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked.

I don’t recall if I mentioned it in the other post or not, but Victoria is such a home to small cars that it even has half-sized parking spots for Smarts and Minis! The weather was fantastic for the whole week, very mild and partly sunny. For the end of the afternoon on the last day the clouds or haze that had been covering the Olympic mountains in Washington finally cleared, and I got this picture of the snow-capped peaks over the shoulder of the BC legislature.