August 3, 2026

Where: Eakin Community Park at Tobin Road

When: 6:15 pm

Bird Species: house sparrow, red-eyed vireo, blue-gray gnatcatcher, northern cardinal, American crow. eastern bluebird. Heard but Not Seen: Carolina wren, northern flicker, American goldfinch times a billion.

Things I Thought About:

• Typewriters. Today I was rooting around in boxes of old documents and was awed by the mountains of legal documents and formal letters and articles of incorporation and payroll checks that were all composed on a typewriters.
• My dad had a brown manual typewriter, and he also had an IBM Selectric, the one with the ball. I loved typewriters. When you finished a row a bell would ring to tell you to start the next row. A bell! Such an elegant machine. I get why Tom Hanks is a big weirdo about them.
• "Return" lasted a long time after carriage returns before "Enter" took over, huh?
• Oh, holy wow, that's a red-eyed vireo! In striking distance!

• The best part of a manual typewriter, for a five- or six-year-old, was hitting as many keys as you can, as hard as you can, all in a row, so all the metal keys would get jammed up into each other and have to be unlatched and untangled one by one. Small children today will never know the joy of getting in trouble for such a specific, mechanical piece of misbehavior.
• You can't fuck things up like you used to. You can't break a $80 plastic vacuum from Big Lots the way you could break a Kirby upright with a bag, that cost like 400 dollars in today's money and weighed, conservatively, 53 pounds.
• That vacuum had an attachment that would buff a penny clean, which I saw exactly one time, when the salesman showed it to us. We broke it immediately.
• Sometimes I think I'm not actually ten thousand years old, and then I remember things like "my mom bought a vacuum from a door-to-door salesman in 1977." It was blue fabric and solid metal and it lasted until after my sister graduated from college.

BOTD: Eastern bluebirds. For a few years now, I have known the permanent residents of Huntley and of my neighborhood, but it's only this year, with the advent of BOTD blog that I am learning to recognize the permanent residents of other locales. Bluebirds live here, and so do goldfinches, although God forbid they allow themselves to be birdwatched by me more than once in a blue moon. Goldfinches are on my shitlist this week.

Any time I come here, I can expect to see a couple of bluebirds on the playing field, or in the trees line that separates the ball field from the neighborhood around them. Today I saw some in both places, because as has been noted, it's Family Month here on the blog. There were two adults and two juveniles, including this very sweet and gawky young gentleman in the trees.