Pictures and More Pictures

Last weekend, Julie, Terry and I celebrated the 4th at a burger joint. Why not? It was great, and Julie, a vegetarian, really liked her veggie burger. She liked it so much she wanted to have another one the very next day. So, I looked ’round the pantry and here’s the recipe I came up with. (more…)

Julie gets this message quite often while working on her thesis. “There are too many spelling or grammatical errors”. Therefore your paper won’t be able to run the automatic spell checker.

This problem seems to be complicated by writing a work in multiple languages. What we did to fix the problem was first select the entire text, then double click on the language down at the bottom, select the language, deselect automatic language detection. The kicker is you have to do this once selecting the main text, and then again selecting the footnotes.

Wilbur and Orville have now both taken to wing, the older one already two days ago, the second one just yesterday.

Unfortunately we weren’t witness to their first airborne flaps. Just like the hatching, one minute they seemed to start doing it, and then suddenly a day later they just did it.

Nonetheless, we’re both quite excited and proud of the little ones. It’s odd to be so fascinated by something so mundane. But then again, we don’t get out much.

Pigeons reaching adulthood on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

You can see it here: they are nearing adulthood. They resemble the adults in all but size. Still not able to fly, but soon no doubt.

Those birds are getting big. They appear fully feathered, and resemble the parents in two aspects, the first being a little bit of yellow fluff is visible yet and the second that they won’t fly away.

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When they first hatched, they were covered in yellow fuzz. A few days later they started to grow quills. Looked pretty gross. Now the feathers are starting to really develop and the little guys look a lot cuddlier.

When the parents land in the box, they both go “peep peep peep!” and struggle violently to drink from the parent’s mouth.

Whenever the little chicks see me, they click their beaks to warn me to keep my distance.

from May 15

Today

The Egg – a set on Flickr

The subletter came to inspect the flowerboxes on Saturday, and had to be physically restrained from discarding the eggs. She is of the belief that they won’t hatch, because –she claims– the city use chemicals to make all pigeons sterile. How about that?

Just the same, around noon today, Julie noticed tiny cracks forming on both eggs, as if pecked at from the inside. According to sources on the internet, pigeon eggs need 24 hours to hatch. We were unable to monitor the eggs after the first hour, because the mother came home to roost and has remained there since. What surprises with the warm sunlit morn bestow?

The eggs are expected to hatch any day now.
We are very excited.