Headache

 Yeah, I have one. My two fans know that it's not unusual for me, though. Still, I wish I'd have slept better last night. It would make the drive home this afternoon a bit more pleasant if I wasn't fighting my own head.

I also have a headache at work (well, I have many headaches at work. Let's just focus on the one at the moment, ok?), which is what today's not-entirely-pointless photos are about. Don't worry, though. I'll try to keep this post pointless enough that the blog won't turn into a pumpkin. Erm... for those new to the program, that's what'll happen should this blog ever actually come to a point. Pumpkin time, boys and girls; pumpkin time.

Anyway.

What you're seeing above is a Red-necked Grebe sitting on her nest. At this point in the photo-taking process I'd ticked her off a bit, so you can see that she's raised the "horn" feathers towards the back of her head as a warning or sign of alarm. If you hadn't realised that you should click on the photo thumbnails to see the bigger versions (and if you hadn't by this time I'm kind of losing hope for you), then I'll tell you point-blank to click on the picture to see the details.

Anyway. Again.

The blur you see on the right side of the picture is the handrail of the stairs to the upper section of one of our viewing decks at work, and therein lies the headache.

The silly bird has built right next to a heavily-used deck, and she's done it right in the middle of our busiest programming season. Normally we use the thing as a major outdoor classroom (that's what it was designed for), but with a nest right beside the deck and in an area where the bird sees -- and gets scared by -- everyone who comes around the corner, we can't use the deck AT ALL.

That in itself is a pain, but here's the kicker:

The eggs are probably already dead.

You see, normally Red-necked Grebes build an anchored, floating nest (see that Cornell link above for more details). These birds, however, built in extremely shallow water so they just made a mud pile instead of a raft. The problem is, the nest is on a spring-fed oxbow lake, and every bit of rain we get raises the water level pretty substantially.



We had a lot of rain this week. That nest is drowning.

You can see the original nest circumference from this overhead shot. Now, after the rain, she's sitting on the very tip of her mud pile. The eggs? Likely wet and cold. Instinct is telling her to stay, but we're expecting even more rain this week and I don't know at what point she'll finally give up.

It's an exercise in futility, but while she's still sitting on the nest we have to keep our programs away from her.

Kind of sucks for all of us, really.

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As I type this there's a small crocodile plugged into the USB port on the computer. It's my new flash drive (generally known as nerdstick on this blog, which is our informal term at work); or one of my new flash drives, at least.

I was a pretty early adopter of flash drives, all things considered. My father bought me my first one as a birthday gift a lot of years ago. How many years? Well, let's just say that it's a 1G drive and it cost him about $80 or so. They were a novelty back then. All that storage in such a small space? Amazing. It became a very handy thing for me, especially because I didn't have a computer at home (still don't. And yet I survive). Before the flash drive I'd been e-mailing things to my own web mail so that I could access them at work or here at my dad's place, and this was back when e-mail attachments couldn't be very big. The flash drive was a life saver.

A couple of years later the drives had become a little cheaper, and I received a second flash drive from my brother and sister-in-law with baby pictures of my first nephew on it. Believe it or not, that's the drive I'd been using since then. It has a lot of miles on it, but increasingly less storage because there were more and more things that I needed to stay on there for long periods of time. It was my only storage, so a lot of the things that most of you just leave on your computer and don't think about had to be on my nerdstick and travel with me instead.

And then I got the new camera, with its bigger pictures. The fraction of the 1G on the old stick that was left for pointlessness just wasn't going to cut it. So? New drive time for me, and yesterday I finally got around to making a quick trip to an electronics store and getting a bigger drive.

Well, two bigger drives because they were on sale. The crocodile because it was funny, and a more normal "adult" drive in case I get tired of carrying around a crocodile. Each is 8G.

I paid less than $20. That includes the flashlight keychain I threw in because my old one died a couple of weeks ago.

16G for less that $20 is a far cry from that $80 my dad laid out for 1G, don't you think? Makes me wonder how hard I'll be shaking my head at the fact that I blew $20 on just 16G a few years from now. Of course, by then we'll probably just be storing everything directly in our fingers or something.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me.

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My re-injured wrist (which I hadn't had a chance to mention this week since I've hardly had a chance to post) is telling me that this is enough typing. Just wait until it finds out that I'm intending to try a quick doodle after I post this. It'll be sooo pissed.

Not sure what time my coming work week will allow for blogging, but if nothing else I do have some new photos now (on my crocodile) so there should be something to check in for.

Maybe.

I really shouldn't be promising anything at all, after this past couple of weeks.