January 28, 2026

Where: around my condo complex

When: 10:20 am

Bird Species: house sparrow, northern mockingbird, tufted titmouse, Carolina wren, northern cardinal, song sparrow, blue jay

Things I Thought About:

• Furious with myself for logging into Facebook for the first time this year, only intending to wish someone a happy birthday, and within seven minutes I was dropping “the 10th Amendment” in a reply. I must not, and I know better. The birthdays are how they GET you, she said, like a dumbass. Everyone should start their own niche blog instead.
• See, now I need a bird break. I would love to be able to feature a bird that I haven’t before, but given it’s the middle of the morning and I need to be in a meeting in 40 minutes, the pool of possibilities is limited to birds I can see from the nicely cleared sidewalks in my complex.

• Oh, there’s a titmouse, I haven’t featured him yet, but he’s so far away you can’t see his tuft. Another day, I think. I haven’t seen any robins since the snow started Saturday. I thought they loved winter weather.
• I rented a unit in this complex for five years before I bought mine, and every time I walk past the rental I think of the $100K that went to a landlord instead of to a mortgage and I want to walk into the frozen river and die.
• Honestly, this is a pattern and a problem for me, the tendency to wait around until I'm just really super sure about something, which one can never be, and then I’ve missed a window, or I can only beat myself up for not making a move sooner. 
• Huh. I’ve been talking about female cardinals a lot, and I’d love to feature her, but can I be very real for a second? I’ve seen prettier. 

• The onsite property manager tells me the reason our complex cleared so much sooner and nicer than the other complexes along this road is that one of the owners of an accessible unit has to be able to get in and out and travel daily for dialysis. I'm kind of surprised he doesn't do that at home, although I suppose you'd still need to clear the sidewalks for home health aides.
• Towards the end of my mom’s illness, we were part of a system where our home address was registered with the EMC and the local fire station. Supposedly, in the event of a power outage, crews would prioritize our neighborhood, since there was “palliative and/or life-sustaining medical equipment in use” there. If the crews could not come out within a certain time frame, firemen would come and take her to the hospital, with their emergency back-up generators, so we could plug in in their hallways. I don’t think I ever knew what that certain time frame was meant to be? It was all arranged through our PALS & CALS group. To this day I get light-headed with gratitude that this was never tested. Our power did not so much as flicker for a 14-month stretch. 
• It just now occurs to me to wonder if we ever got removed from that list; I never went back to the group after. What if the firemen came for the college students who moved in when their parents bought the house? It's very romantic, for an undergraduate to meet a fireman in the dark.
• I don’t think our property manager should have told me that about the dialysis, actually, that seems like not my business, but it’s good to have clean dry sidewalks, anyway.
• I am so confounded by the camera settings that aren't fully manual, but also aren't the auto-everything knob, that I will be shocked if I get one decent photo of those two blue jays eating acorns up there. Hawthorns? Some capless nut. I do not know the names of trees.

BOTD: the blue jay. For want of a less on-the-nose turn of phrase, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that photo. I didn't make a single edit, only cropped it. It's one of the best bird pics I've ever taken.

I wish I could guess which settings I used. I never should have read my camera manual. I took 71 photos of those jays and I'm only keeping 8. Only one photo had both jays in it, and it was the pits.

I have been noticing lately how a jay will hold a nut or a berry tight against a limb and then hammer it with their beak. That technique looks dope. Mourning doves will swallow a nut that size whole.