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| footprints in my back yard |
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One of the nice things about having snow on the ground is that I can look at what sort of critters wander through my back yard. The snow that fell Tuesday morning isn’t very deep, but it’s enough that I can see tracks from the squirrels, rabbits, cats, crows, and pigeons in it. The picture to the right was taken Wednesday about noon. That’s less than thirty hours of tracks in the snow, and there are only a few square feet of my backyard that don’t have some sort of tracks in them. Then again, I’ve been refilling the two bird-feeders daily, and in some cases, twice a day. With winter in full swing, I’m expecting I’ll go through fifty pounds of sunflower seeds, fifty pounds of cracked corn and twenty pounds of peanuts per month. It’s about a quarter of that in the summer. But all of the critters (including the neighbor’s cat) are looking well-fed.
Had a good evening yesterday. I went up to BW-3 in Har-Mar and played trivia for a while. Put two monthly high-scores up on the boards out of four games I played, and then Pete, Beth, and Mike showed up after their shopping and we yakked between bites of food. It wasn’t well planned, but rather the result of me calling around looking for someone to have dinner with, but it worked out to be just the kind of change-of-pace I didn’t know I needed. And I guess it fits in with my goal of being more social this holiday season. It also kept me up late enough that I slept until almost 7am this morning. Progress!
Tomorrow, the holiday begins. I think I’m ready, but dang! Tomorrow!
- NASA’s going to Smack a Comet with a probe to see what happens. Cool. If all goes as planned, it’ll happen on July 4th next year. [wired]
- Over in St. Paul, A big celebration will mark Capitol’s longevity with a todo on Sunday, January 2nd. There’s more at Our House 100. If I’m not completely wiped out at that point, I think it would be fun to head over there. [press-patch]
- Bill & Co. are shipping Texas Hold’em Tutor now. If you’re interested in hold’em (I’m not–it’s one of my least favorite games), it’s supposed to be pretty good at teaching you how to play low-stakes games. [bill]
- Finally, ten years after it happened, Ron gets to tell The Graphing Calculator Story. I wasn’t at Apple quite then, but a few years after, and I can see exactly how that sort of thing could have happened. [slashdot]
- The new ‘Go To’ card runs into a few speed bumps as the MTC tries to get it installed. When I complained earlier about the stored value cards not working on the trains, I didn’t know the reason was that they’ll be replaced by the new cards one of these days. [strib]
- After getting a few emails about it, I posted the Hammerschlagen (or Hammerschlager) Rules. Seems I have a civic duty, since I show up awfully darned high in google when you look for that game, and there didn’t seem to be rules posted anywhere on the net. Now there are.