Essential Equipment

I finally acquired a vital piece of equipment for my workshop this morning at a local yard sale.

Father's Day

Recital

The girls are taking a mixture of voice/piano lessons, and there was an end-of-season recital yesterday. Emma sang "Homeward Bound" (not the Simon and Garfunkel one).

Unfortunately Meredith was not feeling well, or else we'd have her "Danny Boy" up here as well.

Dinner conversation

Tonight's dinner conversation included rules for different variations of dodgeball.

And now, an episode of Wild Kingdom...

I saw a hawk drop out of a tree and kill a mouse/mole on my way to work today. He then flew past me at the next set of lights and landed on the building where he and the wife are raising some chicks eyasses. (Yes, I'm assuming it's the male doing the hunting; yes, that's sexist).

The tree:
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The nest:
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The nest (not present in the above imagery) is on a small ledge just above and to the left of the 185. Every morning I see photographers out there taking pictures and I believe there is a webcam pointing at the nest from a few feet away. While not a live feed, this is a YouTube video about them, and contains footage from the camera:

Here's the Wikipedia article about them.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet...

A day in Boston with friends

The day started out with dim sum at China Pearl, we escaped the cloudburst in Fanuiel Hall, and are now enjoy gelato at Gelateria in the North End. Life is good.

Butt-dialing

Over the weekend, my buddy Greg was over to hang out and imbibe beverages. At one point, he took his son to the local skate park and unbeknownst to me, he gave his son his cellphone in case he needed to call.

While he was there, he accidentally butt-dialed me about 15 times in 30 minutes.

I had no idea what was going on, and thought Greg needed to speak with me urgently, so I kept answering, only to hear vague garbly noises. I kept shouting into the phone, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU; CALL BACK WHEN YOU HAVE A BETTER SIGNAL OR TEXT ME WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY!"  Twice I ignored the calls and let them go to voicemail.  During all this, I asked Fiona if I should be worried about him calling so often, so she was aware of the numerous calls.

Finally I got fed up and drove down to the skate park to see what was going on. Neither of them were there, as they passed me on the way and I didn't see them.  While I was down there, Greg called me.

"Dude, where are you?"

"I'm down at the skate park. Where the hell are you?"

"I'm back at your house; we passed you on the way back.  Fee told me about the calls.  Mitchell must have been butt-dialing you."

"Grrr."

I hung up and drove back and we all had a good laugh.

The next day I got around to checking my voicemail (GoogleVoice-powered) transcriptions and found these two "messages" transcribed from the random rustling from inside Mitchell's pocket as he was skateboarding. Each message was about three minutes long.

Message #1:  "Hey bye ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Hey owner or voice, bye. Thanks, hey poo. Ha. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, peace, bye hi hello hello hello hello hello Institute hey alright. Later I don't remember there are a little while."

Message #2:  "Bye hey, hey hey. Hello bye hello. Hello. Bye bye hey hello for is scenario. Ohh, hey bye. I hey. What are us okay bye bye hey hello hey."

The wonders of technology.