It's been awhile since we posted here. I'm not sure why. I have started a couple of posts that I didn't feel happy enough with to publish, and I've also felt a little bit of a blogging-related malaise. What's the point?
If part of the point is keeping people who don't see us very often, but may be interested in what's going on in our lives updated than here's an update to satisfy the obligation!
This March is a bit of a drag for Libby. She isn't taking a class at Biola, anymore, but work is pretty exhausting. It seems like most of our energy revolves around her classroom.
Work is par for the course for me. Nothing too interesting is going on.
I've read a few books. I aborted a post about Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of the Dead. That was a very good Christmas present from Gabe and Emily. It was an interesting reflection on the experience of prisoners in a Tsarist siberian prison camp largely based, to the extent that he didn't even really change some of the characters' names, on his own time in Siberia.
I also just finished both of Flannery O'Connor's novels. It's hard to make sense of Flannery O'Connor, but she is without doubt a talented and thought-provoking author. The books themselves are incredible and really hard to describe. If more American Christian fiction was published along those lines, it would shake up some stereotypes!
Finally, we're also involved in a time consuming project in the local hills surveying remnant populations of coastal Cactus Wrens. Cactus Wrens have suffered a lot from habitat destruction and the recent fires, so the Nature Conservancy is sponsoring a region-wide effort to learn about their status and begin a long-term monitoring strategy for the birds.
We volunteered, and so we have committed all of our Saturdays to the birds for awhile. The plan is to map cactus scrub habitat on acetate overlaying Google Map satellite images. After getting all of the patches in our region mapped, we'll revisit them every couple of weekends through July. The reality is that mapping the cactus patches is a lot of work, and can be pretty difficult because of the surrounding vegetation and terrain. It's still fun, most of the time, though, and we're getting to know the local hills a bit better.
It turns out they're designed mostly to hurt and annoy people who venture off of their trails. Buyer beware!
1 comment:
Really cool about the cactus wren project.
I sort of want to have a running bird survey this spring of the woods near our place. I'm interested to see if we trap a lot of migrants here. It seems ideal for that.
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