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Just grumping (skippable)
Jun. 24th, 2009 09:41 pmIt's Wednesday. It's exceedingly hot for so early in the year. The air conditioning at work is flaky and randomly variable. Boo.
This morning the nest of swallows in the barn disgorged about five immature hatchlings. I think it was the heat. They are big enough to have feathers, but can't fly yet. That means they sort of crowd each other in the nest until they are hanging over the edges. I suspect the heat forced them to move farther apart to avoid overheating and some fell to the floor. Cats would have gotten them before too long, so Gary moved them all into the blackberry brambles outside the barn door. Since the parent birds were divebombing him as he did this, we assume they know where their excess offspring went and will feed them there until they fledge. Assuming the cats don't find them all.
Commiserated with the boss about television. She lives closer to Rockford than I do, and ends up with even fewer choices than I have because Chicago is beyond reach for her antenna. However, further analysis suggests that if I can point my antenna at bearing 256° I should get four fairly good signals. Counting their subchannels that will include ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, MyTV, and Accuweather. No PBS or TBN, alas, though there's a sliver of a chance that TBN will come in. The nearest TBN station is about 5 degrees away from that bearing. Obstacle is that my creaky rotator won't go to that bearing. We can probably reorient either the antenna or the rotator itself so as to hit that point and give up another useless direction, though.
This morning the nest of swallows in the barn disgorged about five immature hatchlings. I think it was the heat. They are big enough to have feathers, but can't fly yet. That means they sort of crowd each other in the nest until they are hanging over the edges. I suspect the heat forced them to move farther apart to avoid overheating and some fell to the floor. Cats would have gotten them before too long, so Gary moved them all into the blackberry brambles outside the barn door. Since the parent birds were divebombing him as he did this, we assume they know where their excess offspring went and will feed them there until they fledge. Assuming the cats don't find them all.
Commiserated with the boss about television. She lives closer to Rockford than I do, and ends up with even fewer choices than I have because Chicago is beyond reach for her antenna. However, further analysis suggests that if I can point my antenna at bearing 256° I should get four fairly good signals. Counting their subchannels that will include ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, MyTV, and Accuweather. No PBS or TBN, alas, though there's a sliver of a chance that TBN will come in. The nearest TBN station is about 5 degrees away from that bearing. Obstacle is that my creaky rotator won't go to that bearing. We can probably reorient either the antenna or the rotator itself so as to hit that point and give up another useless direction, though.
