She's back!

A familiar visitor has returned. If you've been around here for a while, you will recognize her right away. I'll get to that in a few minutes.

Slowly (very slowly) but surely, our weather has been improving. We got into the 50s on Friday, and it might get as warm as 70 by Sunday. Not exactly shorts weather yet, though. I want shorts weather.

And we are seeing more critters. One morning last week, we saw this familiar visitor ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-Rabbit-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

He looked at us (watching from the kitchen window) for a moment or two and then resumed his breakfast ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-Rabbiteat-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

I have been getting a few questions from long-time readers about the robins, whose progeny have been documented here in the past. Are they back? Have they returned to their apartments under the front porch?

About two weeks ago, we saw the start of a nest, but later in the day everything was on the porch. No action after that until Thursday, when I saw this ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-Nest522-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

But later that day, all the weeds and grasses were on the porch again. Oh well!

There is no stopping an idea whose time as come, though. Later in the day, we saw more work had been done. And then we saw ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-UndConst-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

She flew off a second later across the highway, and I lost track of her. But a minute or so later ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-Onwing-5-08.jpg[/IMG]
... here she was coming back with more stuff for her new nest.

By Friday morning, when I left for work, more work had been done ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-Onnest-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

And by noon Friday, Ms. Robin was getting comfortable in her nest. Lots of stuff is hanging down, but it looks like this nest is going to be around for a while ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-OnnestB-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

In a few days, we will get out the chair and mirror and see whether anything is happening inside.

****
The tough part of being a music fan is when you're out on the road, going somewhere. You want to take your music along, but it hasn't always been easy.

When I first started driving, eight-track decks were all the rage. I resisted the urge and finally got a cassette deck. My reasoning was simple: You can record cassettes. You can't record eight-track tapes. (Not to mention the fadeout and "ka-chunk" you heard when the music went from one track to the other.)

Then, in the mid '80s, CDs started coming out. Much higher fidelity. Much better sound. But my car was older, money was tight, and I had to improvise. I wound up getting a Walkman-like CD player with a wire that leads to a thing that fits in the cassette deck. Plug the plug into the cigarette lighter, and your music will play through the car's speakers.

That was cool. It got cooler after I learned how to burn CDs and could transfer music to CD-Rs that would play on the Walkman. Sometimes when I went on trips, I had two cases of CDs under the front seat, maybe 24 in each case. So that's up to 48 CDs making the trip with me. And by this time, I had another car, and, what do you know, it had a CD player in the dash.

But Murphy's Law of electronic devices is that there will always be something bigger and better. I first learned about iPods a few years ago from my older son--he showed how he downloaded podcasts and could take them with him. So that's something else new. Podcasts. About every topic imaginable. And some unimaginable. And you can take it all along with you in an iPod.

I finally had to get one for myself. It stored 30 gigs of stuff, and I thought I was set for life, especially after I got a dohickey that lets you play the iPod through the car's speakers. Cigarette lighters will never die--not as long as they power useful gadgets like that.

The 30 gigs that set me up for life didn't last that long with all the CDs I have collected over the years. Too much music from too many genres. Too many podcasts about too many topics. The wide open spaces on my iPod were filling up rapidly. Only one thing to do: get a bigger one.

I did just that recently. This one will store 80 gigs, and that's a lot of CDs and podcasts. All in this little gizmo that I can stick into a shirt pocket. I also invested in a new case--this time a brown leather case. It looks pretty sharp, don't you think? Plus, you can get a mini-glimpse of my high quality music library ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Rob523-ipod-5-08.jpg[/IMG]

So now I think I'm in good shape for music for quite a while. I hope I am, anyway. (You don't think I should have gotten that 160 gig model, do you?)