strypey

We had some severe storms come through our area this week, and had tornado sirens going off both in the morning and evening. Luckily the first set of storms had a mild tornado farther south of us. The second set had a potential formation going over us but luckily nothing actually came together and we only got a bit of hail.

( Read more... )

batiferrite posting in

common_nature

But at least the lilacs and violets are happy!

There was also a double rainbow a while ago. :3

I've also been preparing to start a garden for the first time, pretty excited about it! I've got some fence container-things set up in my backyard, filled with fresh potting soil and some seeds ready. I've been talking to a coworker about it; apparently, tomatoes, cucumbers, and green beans are good starter plants that basically grow themselves. I also have a pack of red strawberry popcorn that I bought on a whim a year or so ago that I'm hoping will still be viable.

Current Mood: excited

steorra posting in

common_nature

Today I made two short trips to a local stream and saw quite a few different kind of birds, partly with the help of binoculars:

Great blue heron wading in the stream
Hawk (red-tailed?)
Green-winged teals
Black-capped chickadees
American robins
A reddish finch (house finch?)
A hummingbird too far away to identify and too quick for me to binocular
A little yellow-and-black bird, probably a goldfinch but it was gone before I got a good look at it.
A tiny bird that I suspect was a golden-crowned kinglet because I think I saw a splash of yellow on its crown but again I didn't get a good look before it was gone.
Some brown sparrow-y birds that I couldn't identify
Plus the city birds I see all the time without going anywhere: pigeons, crows, starlings, gulls (glaucous-winged?)

I also saw some red admiral butterflies and I think I caught a glimpse of a scampering mouse-sized mammal but it got into cover too quickly for me to really see (probably just a mouse).

yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

Looked out at the sky the other night and the moon was not that bright. Despite what appears in the photo below, we could see the entire ball of the Moon. It was just that the slice was brighter.

What was also very noticeable was Venus. After a number of attempts I was finally able to get a non wavery shot of it in close-up.

( Read more... )

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

We have seen grebes many times but very often they are solo or there may be two. It was unusual to see a group swimming together, which this one did for some time.

( Read more... )

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Reading

Post Storm Sunset

it's been storming a lot recently...

Today's birds

Oh Venus

Search maintenance

Grebes in the Rain

Profile

February 2026

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags