August 30, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 11:30 am

Bird Species: song sparrow, mourning dove, house sparrow, northern cardinal, American robin, gray catbird, fish crow

Things I Thought About:

• Very early in my walk I hear, spot, and immediately lose a song sparrow, because I cannot cross the street in a timely fashion. It hadn’t occurred to me that when school started, weekend league play would have also started and the traffic on the school road at game time on Sunday would be as steady as on a weekday.
• Note to self: do not blindly step backwards into the road while taking a photo like I could do all summer.
• I am hailed by name by a woman I met very early this year. She remembered my name; I miraculously pull “Susan” for a “Susie” and remain respectable.

• She asks how I’m doing on my New Year’s resolution, if I'm still getting out there every day, and that she thought about whether I'd be able to keep up during the big snow and ice storm.
• The big snow and ice storm was the last week in January. She was very impressed when I said that there has been a post every day and only about ten of them weren’t taken by me that day. Two-thirds of the year down. I was pretty impressed with myself.
• While walking and thinking, I have had an epiphany about my early acting career that went nowhere. I shall look forward to a similar epiphany about my current career when I am 82 or so.
• Oh, nice, someone is setting up a party tent with rented folding chairs in the courtyard. My neighbors throw the best parties. When I get home after game night there will be children on the playground, teens gathered on the stoops and in stairwells, meat smells wafting from the grills, and tejano or dabke music playing. My home is on the outside of the complex, so sitting on the balcony is the perfect distance to enjoy but not be overwhelmed by party commotion.
• One of the bosses who recruited me this spring has sent me a very expensive bottle of whisky for the second time in six months, which kind of sums up how it's going for us, so that's my Sunday night wind-down sorted. Nothing like a good bourbon on the rocks to keep the scaries at bay.

BOTD: northern cardinal. When I was scrolling back through the blog to see when the snowstorm was, I was amused to revisit some of the entries early in the year where I was obsessed with figuring out why some of the cardinals around here were gray or white or pink, trying to determine if that was environmental or if they were just young or if they were leucistic. One thing I have taken onboard this year just from the process of looking around every day, is that cardinals look all kinds of ways, all sorts of colors, and it doesn't mean anything at all, usually. The bright solid crimson ones are the real himbos, is the only classification you need.

And I did keep it up during the big snow and ice storm, but I bitched about it heavily every single day.

It was pouring rain when I got home after game night and the party had dispersed. The whisky is good, though.