Nature! part 2

Besides lovely birds, we also have many other interesting wildlives. Here are some animals we have seen around our house. These are pictures that Jeran or I actually took.

American Toad
Treefrog
Garden Orb Weaver Spiders
Carpenter Bumblebee
Dragonflies
Large beetles
Cockroaches
Squirrels
Rabbits
Lizards

N
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Nature!

As Jeran likes to exclaim whenever we see a squirrel in our neighborhood, "Nature!" We have some interesting animals around our house - not interesting like platypuses or wildebeests or two-headed snakes or anything. Just little examples of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

I work near a window looking out over our front yard. We have had a little birdfeeder sitting outside the window for a lot of the past year and I have been able to identify over 10 types of cute little birds with the help of my handy pamphlet "A Pocket Naturalist Guide to North Carolina Birds". Included are the following (I didn't take these pictures - I wish!):

Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus)

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea)

Tufted Titmouse (Baelophus bicolor) which was the cutest bird I have ever seen. Seriously, it was adorable.

House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus)

Eastern Wood-Pewee (Contopus virens)

And of course, the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), which is North Carolina's state bird. They are much bigger than most of the little birds that come around and quite the bullies.

Yep, I am a birdwatcher at home. And its not really like in this picture, thank goodness. I almost always stay in my chair. :)


This post is dedicated to Andrew per his suggestion.

The missing water mystery

So for a while I have been trying to figure out why I have to keep refilling our two cat's water dish. It is a big one, the water cooler style so they always have water (or at least that is the idea). It is very convenient when we go away for a few days because we know they will have water for that long (before we got this I used to leave the toilet lid up, just in case). Anyhow, recently I have noticed the dish is completely empty very frequently. I finally found the cause. It was kind of funny. Hence the video:



The floor was obviously too wet for Diego's liking. And there was nothing in that dish BUT water. Yep. Toby is a crazy cat. I decided if he liked water so much I would put a little in the bathtub and give him a bath, which we have never done (cat's are so nice like that). That didn't go over so well, and while I didn't force the issue enough to get scratched, it didn't seem to have much effect on the water fascination. They have a regular water dish until the ground around it stays dry for at least a week.

This post makes me laugh, btw, because everyone else's blogs are full of pictures of their kids or whatever and this is about the same idea, just we just have cats... shrug. Also, please don't ask why I didn't notice that there were probably a few liters of water on the ground when the jug was empty. The answer is I don't know.

Technology and age

So I have been wondering about something for a while now. Sometimes very difficult to teach an older person how to do something new with technology - like how to add an attachment to an email or open a text message on a cell phone. And that very same thing is probably very intuitive to someone of the younger generation. Well.... what I have been wondering is this:

in about 30 or 40 years, will the people who are now young and are adapting quickly to new technology quite easily, be in the same situation as the current older generation who didn't have technology so integrated into everyday life when they grew up? Or will we be more easily able to understand and accept new technology since we are accustomed to technology in general?

This would be a very good Psychology/Technology/Learning study and research topic. How does adaptability to technology now affect individual learning and adaptability when new technology emerges in future decades?

I am open for discussion. And, yay!, I wrote on my blog. I think next time I will write about the birds and the bees. :)