Wildlife in Amongst Life

Three doctor's appointments, two rounds of antibiotics, and several months later, my toenail is coming off. An appointment is set for Monday, at a time when I would usually be asleep. I am alternately interested and intrigued and grossed out.

My dad and I are starting chemistry labs this week. They are "left-overs" from the school year. I don't think I'll be blowing anything up, but you might want to keep your distance, just in case.

My art and photography classes both end this week. Yesterday was my last photography class, and Thursday is the end of drawing trees.I feel like I learned a fair amount in my photography class, but it will be good to have them both be over, just because it will open my schedule up quite a bit.

My schedule does need to be opened up, because even the small activities I've been doing seem like too much. My energy has been lower, the headaches persist, and I've just all around been feeling worse. It doesn't help that I have had really bad luck finding good movies. I want comedies, and hopefully something that rates above two stars. Netflix is not very helpful-it seems to think I love depressing dramas.

Our yard has been a hot-spot for wildlife. I have seen a bear (I think it's the same one) twice in the past week. It really has been quite contrary when I pull out my camera. Hiding behind bushes and moving faster than my camera and eyes can. Despite this, I want to post some pictures, just because it's cool. We had a bear in our yard!

There has also been a doe and her two fawns hanging around. The first few times I was too slow getting the camera, and so by the time I was all set up, they were too far away. And then the light was weird (still was, in these pictures), and the shutter speed was way too slow. But then they stuck around for a while, and let me get close and have everything all set up. I don't think these pictures do their cuteness justice, but they'll just have to suffice.

Getting Close....

Early Tuesday morning, my dad flies to Namibia to teach a month-long course. We have been spending lots of time together. Yesterday I helped him pack (by which I mean I watched and made the occasional comment while he ran around the house gathering everything up and making all the important decisions). We played a game, walked outside, and he made the smart decision to skip the horrible awful movie that my mom and I suffered through (Sixteen Candles).

My last day with my tutor is Monday. I am very excited for school to be over, and am looking forward to a summer with no homework. I will still have to do several chemistry labs, but I am choosing to forget about that at the moment. Unfortunately, I will still have to take two chemistry (noticing a trend here?) tests after Monday, so I won't be done. Almostdone is not the same thing as done.

We finally made a decision and bought a camera last week, and so I have been spending lots of time outside playing with the settings and learning my way around the features. It is very fancy (at least for me), but in this case fancy equals good pictures. I feel like I have learned the basics, so I now need to read the manual and learn more details.

My dad is going to take the camera with him, so I will be stuck with the old one for the next month.

Which is sort of too bad because I am going to take a photography class beginning in June. From what I understand, it is a pretty basic class for point and shoot cameras. I hope I will learn about lighting and composition and some more advanced concepts as well. I think I have pretty much mastered "turn your camera on".

I will also be taking a class focused on tress. Painting and drawing and writing. I have never been particularly excited about still-life drawings, but the class description caught my attention. I hope it will be fun and different. You may be seeing a lot of drawings of trees.

My mom's back went out on her for no apparent reason on Friday, so she has been lying on the couch and making funny groaning noises for most of the weekend. I don't know what else to do besides offering chocolate and waiting.

Thursday afternoon we found a bird on our back steps that had clearly flown into our big windows. This is a pretty common occurrence, despite the "hawk" stickers meant to dissuade any birds from flying into the windows. The birds are usually okay after a while, but sometimes their necks are broken and they don't make it. (I have created a sad little bird graveyard. We have a serious problem of grave robbers. No suspects. At least it's not Smokey.)

This bird was shaking and shivering and just looking very sad and small. I put on some gloves and held it for a while, and then left it to recover on its own. A few hours later it was looking even smaller and shakier, and so I convinced my mom to let me bring it inside overnight.

I put it in a cardboard box with a towel and a small saucer of sugar water. Smokey was very intrigued by the bird smell and the closed door. Friday morning, before my mom and I left to run some errands, we were able to release the bird into our backyard. It still looked very small, but wasn't shaking and seemed pretty much recovered. Yay for happy endings!

We figured out it was a female pine ciskin.

Bird Rescue

We had something exciting happen yesterday; a hawk with a broken wing was in our backyard. It's unclear exactly what happened, but it was under our plum trees for about an hour before the rescue people got here. Two volunteers from the Department of Wildlife came by to get it. They took it to a bird rescue center where they will eventually release it back into the wild. 

The birds and squirrels in our yard were going nuts. They sat above it and were making a huge racket. 

Here are some pictures I took. We couldn't get very close; every time we opened the door or went outside it moved further away.

 

Smokey was fascinated:

 

And then the rescue people came: