Friday, July 11, 2014

Friday Night Sights

(1) As I was about to drive out of the parking lot after work this evening, I saw a strange, rather large bird in the grass to the left of my car.  Is that a grebe?  What?  That doesn't make sense.  It looks like an immature something.  A chicken?  It 3/4-walked, 1/4-flew in front of my car to the grassy area on the other side...where a momma turkey and about half a dozen poults were hanging out.  Wild turkeys in the grass at my workplace?  I haven't seen that...well, OK, I saw that regularly enough at my last pre-grad school job, but still, it was awesome and strange.  And it taught me that I need to figure out how to take better pictures with my phone. 

(How do I mistake a young turkey for a young pied-billed grebe, even for a moment?  Well, they're not crazy dissimilar, I guess -- look at the photos and see what I mean? -- but mostly I've just been super tired today.  Tired enough that when I got in the elevator after work, I held my hand over the up button for several seconds before realizing OK I want to go down right? Right.  Note that I have not gone up from the third floor for literally months and never at the end of the day.)

(2) There is a major sporting event being held in Snow City on Tuesday, at the sports arena only a few blocks from our apartment.  Yesterday evening, crossing the bridge near home, there was one of those electronic road signs warning drivers: "TUESDAY / 11 AM - 2 PM / EXCEPT DELAYS."  So I guess that's a combination of both expecting the delays and accepting them.  (When I said "except delays" to Robert, he closed his eyes, lifted his face, and held his hands palms up to the sky.  Indeed.)  But this evening, the sign read: "EXPECT DELAYS."  No doubt they've decided that it's too much to ask that we take these delays in an open, philosophical manner.  It's enough that we be warned -- that's their look-out.  How we process that emotionally, spiritually, etc., is up to us.


3 comments:

jen said...

We used to see wild turkeys at Logitech. Very fun.

I'm actually surprised they fixed the sign!

Mom said...

We saw wild turkeys on 10th St on the hill before turning onto Maple early one morning after taking Sally to Clyde Boyd for a band thing. Neat to see babies, though!

Sally said...

Perhaps turkeys are a more common workplace sighting than it seems like they should be. Seeing the little ones was pretty awesome. I was also surprised they fixed the sign -- I'm glad they did so before all the baseball fans arrive in town. It's nice to establish basic literacy.