5/14-another rare bird visitor! Cedar Waxwings!
A snappy dresser indeed with a yellow-edged tail, red central highlights on his wings, slicked back crest and Egyptian-style eyeliner that extends like a mask.
I don't see them around here-they breed in Southern Canada and winter in the Southern US, Central America, Northern South America. I remember them from elementary school-there were evergreens with berries around the building and Waxwings love berries. Perhaps another long-distance traveller, Mr. Grosbeak who breeds and winters in the same area, left a good review about the Diner on the Avian Trip Advisor and the Waxwings thought they would check it out.
The picture windows: I grew up with them and when C and I first saw our ranch house with the extension featuring a vaulted ceiling, fireplace, deck slider and picture windows (as well as the pool-double-bonus), we were sold. I had originally wished for a place again in the country but with C's health issues, we thought we should stay closer to town. I have been pleasantly surprised with all the many things I have witnessed in the wild in our backyard, mainly by happenstance. Imagine what I have missed.
In the front beds, the alliums are blooming alongside the iris:
Tomi's liliac blooming in its first season-nicely timed as the big lilacs are fading.
In the mulch around the pool, colonies of Spring Field Cap mushrooms have popped up:
Deck yoga with the scent of the nearby lily of the valley. The hedge are new Rose of Sharon that I will plant along our property line with Benny, replacing the dead Japanese Willows.
It's whirlygig season!
5/15-16-Storms and Tornado!
The NWS has confirmed that a F-1 tornado touched down in Lansing around 12.30 am. It was part of a huge system that hammered the central and northern US for several days. It brought high winds, major hail, heavy rains and twisters. We were quite lucky-not much rain (darn it!), some wind gusts and a lot of thunder and lightning. Thankfully, this was nothing near the destruction we received in the late August storm of 2023.
I had been following for days this system as there was a lot of concern from forecasters about the potential of widespread damage this line of storms might cause. When thunder woke me, I got up to follow the radar. These days, we are lucky enough to have professional weather analysts conducting live streaming during such events. My fav is Ryan Hall who hails from Eastern Ky. I watched in real time as the storms came through including the radar indicated (rotation) and confirmed (debris shown) tornadoes that were spinning up. The anxiety was akin to watching a slow missile attack arcing towards your neighborhood. Hall could zoom in to street level including businesses and towns nearby: Potterville, Delta GM Plant, Erickson Station (I thought, there goes the power, but it stayed on), Meijer Warehouse Complex, LCC West, GM Grand River Plant, MSU. Yikes! It was about 3-4 miles away! In the morning when I took C into work via 496, we could see snapped utility poles along the highway. Man, we were lucky!
What was curious about the path is that since we have lived here (15 years) another tornado had taken a similar path and crossed by the Meijer complex off Creyts Rd and hit an auto parts business.
Weird "blursed" pictures:
Marketing Madness: Coca Cola's "Share a Coke" program with personalized bottles:
.jpg)
C, who has been on a Coke Zero kick, brought home a bottle with "Emma" on it. Now, I have never seen one and was astonished to read that the program had started in Australia in 2011! It successfully increased sales so of course it came to the US. By 2015, over 1000 names were part of the scheme and had successfully reversed a 10 year decline in sales.
According to Coke, the primary goal is to increase brand engagement and encourage social interaction by making the product more personal and shareable. (eye roll) "Oh, I'm so special, my Coke has my name on it". Now, I've never cared for the personalization of stuff-for me, this is just silly. (to the extent that I loathed wearing name tags when I worked in retail. I was known to wear tags with no name (an oblique reference to the Spaghetti Westerns) which got me in trouble. My response was, to the chagrin of mgt, that I know what my name is and have known this for many, many years. Some people have no sense of humor.)
Perhaps the reason I had not seen this before is because I usually bought 2 liter bottles rather than the 8 paks of smaller containers.
꩜
FUBARland-after days of major storms hammering the center of the country (more today), with at least 28 dead and millions of dollars of damage, our dear leader spent his weekend posting AI videos depicting himself rocking out including Journey's Don't Stop Believin'. Now, he had earlier denigrated Bruce Springsteen because of what The Boss had said about Roach during a concert. I guess our Narcissist in chief showed him how its done! What is very strange is that Roach didn't make the following connection when he posted the vid: this Journey song was the backing soundtrack in the last scene of the Sopranos where, it is thought, Tony gets whacked in the Diner. But then again, Roach doesn't think things through, he just sees or hears something and runs with it.
Meanwhile, China's bossman Xi dispensed some fortune cookie wisdom for Roach at an economic forum: "bullying...leads to self-isolation".
Meanwhile, we're hearing more and more from major players in the Biden administration revealing how out of it Biden was when he was president. C'mon Joe, as Dirty Harry said "a man needs to know his own limitations".
꩜
From the film Bullitt, A Song for Cathy by Lalo Schifrin and played by Meridian West group:
No comments:
Post a Comment