Random ramblings and a vintage video

Rough week of work this week. There were a couple of days that I was so tired I felt like even eating was too much effort. All the rain we had has wrecked everything, and now it'll be a month or so of cleaning up before the routes are in decent shape again, and probably several months before they're back at their peaks. Unless we get more heavy rains, which will wreck everything again. Also, there has been a fire ant explosion out in the Foster Road/FM 78 area which has made things out there much worse than usual. It was nice to have a whole week of good weather for a change.

We set up a bird feeder and bird bath this week so my son can get some bird-watching done for a Cub Scout elective. I think I might go get a thistle feeder and perhaps even some suet to increase the variety. So far we've seen the usual: cardinals, scads of chipping sparrows, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice (titmouses?). Have not seen any American goldfinches yet but I'm still hoping. Several years past I had several makeshift feeders set up, some of them a good distance from the house for the more shy birds, and saw an indigo bunting one time. Also saw some other bluish kind of bird eating a suet block I had up back then, not sure what it was though, maybe a white-breasted nuthatch. I'm hoping if we put up a thistle feeder we might bring in some lesser goldfinches. We will also probably put up a hummingbird feeder this weekend. So far the feeders we have out are strategically placed so that we can stealthily watch from a window and get really good close-ups using binoculars or my old monocular that I bought several years ago for reading gas & electric meters on my old job.

We have a lot of surplus five-gallon buckets. I turn them upside-down at various places and pour some feed on the upturned bottom. The birds don't care and swarm on them like crazy.

Here's a vintage video for everyone who remembers how cool it used to be to watch MTV.