CrabAppleLane Sunday, George Washington, etc

George Washington's birthday today. Happy Birthday, Mr President.

I offer one from the CrabAppleLane front yard this glorious Sunday afternoon. It's a gorgeous day for picture taking, bike riding, walking, whatever. I plan to do some and/or all of that. More productive undertakings will have to be postponed.

CrabAppleLane Pileated Woodpecker - February 22, 2009 Shot this through our living room window. The window, itself, is fairly clean but it happens to be the nearest one to the wood pellet stove so there is some wood smoke between us that I couldn't quite clear up. Wish I could have gone outside to take this but these magnificent birds are very skittish and this is the closest I've ever been with a camera. Confirmed as soon as I opened the door. It flew off. I'm not sure you can appreciate the size of this bird from this image but I think this one is larger than a crow (The Cornell Lab link says "nearly as large as a crow". I think this one was larger.). Very colorful. I think he/she is scrounging for worms in our Chinese Tallow tree because I can't imagine what else might be there.

Quote of the Day

We need leaders to help us through our crises, not provide us with crude evaluations of our character. And we don't need sermons from liberal virtuecrats, anymore than from conservative virtuecrats.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "I've been aching to paint something just for me, from my head, for a while. It feels so good to do that! It's a bit of a dragonfly-butterfly-leaf creature, hence the name, Drabulea."