Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   dipping kingfisher
Saturday, September 3 2022

location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

I knew I'd be experiencing a hangover today, though, surprisingly, it wasn't too bad. I ate some cold pasta with tofu, mushrooms & onions (no red sauce!) and clicked around on an old Chromebook, drinking coffee and solving what I could of today's New York Times Spelling Bee.

We'd had so much trouble with random beeps and false alarms from our cabin's smoke detectors that we'd removed all of them. Some weeks ago I'd tried installing a single Kidde-branded smoke detector near the kitchen, and siince then it has seemed to work much better than the one that had been there (which had gone off from even the lightest amount of cooking). So today I started re-deploying some of the smoke detectors I'd removed, particularly those that include carbon monoxide detectors. I figured they might still be useful in the bedroom, far from cooking fumes. And happily, this seemed to be the case.

At some point I walked down to the lake, doing a little work as I did so to improve the grade of the last new bit of trail to the dock. Ramona followed me down, and, since she loves it so much, I took her for a brief ride in the canoe. While we were out on the lake, a kingfisher came flying in from the east just above the choppy surface of the lake. He or she would then make a splash landing in the water, become airborne again, and make another dramatic splash. Since the water was so rough (and visiblity so broken and distorted), it was hard to imagine the bird was actually targeting fish, and this method of fishing is not the usual one for kingfishers to employ. They usually wait patiently for fish from a perch high above the water and then pick them off in targeted dives. Perhaps he or she was just playing. After crossing the lake, the kingfisher ended up on the little steel table on our dock, where he perched for while and then made another splash into the water. By the time Ramona and I had returned from our outing, the kingfisher was gone, though I did find a single disembodied pincher from a small crayfish on the dock. Could it be that the kingfisher had left this for me to find?
Meanwhile across the lake, I could hear the constant drone of what sounded like a woodchipper of the kind made famous in the movie Fargo. I think Pyotr is in the process of clearing his building envelope to construct a log cabin, so these sounds might've been associated with that.


Ramona riding in the canoe. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220903

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