(no subject)

As I was buying tiny loaf pans at the grocery store this afternoon--somehow making banana bread always sends me running to the store for that One Missing Thing halfway through--I found a series of brochure-style laminated guides in the checkout lane, a recent addition to the usual stock of chapter books about Texas/tabloids and diet magazines/recipe books/cheap DVDs/candy found in such a place. There were guides to Snakes, Freshwater Fish, Dragonflies, Wildflowers, and Birds of Central Texas. Most of which I don't see very often, but for the last two, and I'm not particularly concerned as to what the wildflowers are called.

But I know just enough birders--if mostly by acquaintance--to look at the Birds of Central Texas guide, with its cheery yellow-headed bird on the front*, and feel that vague thrill of "Oo, a hobby I could dabble in!"

I dabble in a lot of hobbies. I'm currently resisting weaving, mostly by reminding myself of my stalled crochet project and all that sock yarn I haven't even started on and how my attempt to teach myself the harmonica and ukelele didn't pan out at all.

But, well. Birding. It's not like I'm going to looking for birds, but I see a lot of them around here, so why not learn how to identify the ones I do see? I can tell a pigeon from a grackle from a cardinal easily enough, and I've seen a few blue jays around now and again, but after that my identification turns into "...some sort of hawk-thing?" and "Huh, I wonder if that's a really big hen or a really small turkey that got out of someone's yard" and "A sparrow! Probably!"

Anyway. Couldn't hurt, could it?

--

* The guide inside tells me it's a Golden-Cheeked Warbler, found in the juniper-oak woodland of Hill Country during spring and summer. So now I know.

(no subject)

I have often thought this poem was one of the more boring ones, as the poems of Catullus go; his happy love poems just aren't as interesting as his bitter/angry/vicious/satirical/epic poems, at least in my estimation. But there's still some nice imagery involved, and it's rather satisfying to get through an entire poem with only one word needing looking up. (I have fudged the grammar rather terribly in a few places, and shuffled words further from the literal to satisfy my own sense of elegance in poetry, but by and large it's accurate.)


( Catullus 5, nothing NSFW involved )