Welcome to the duck pond!

I'm highly amused right now.

In front of our new house there is a rather long driveway which bisects two very large parcels of grassy land (eventually our landlord may sell them to house developers, but that's some time in the future). On one side of the driveway he made an attempt to flatten out the parcel, leaving a couple of small depressions in the lawn -- neither one is much bigger than an area rug. Well, in the last few days we've had some rain (in Seattle? who knew?) and the depressions have filled up and turned into puddles. The water is no more than two or three inches deep at the deepest. And out there right now, foraging for insects and trying valiantly to swim in these tiny puddles, are a mallard duck and drake.

I managed to squeeze off a few shots before the digital camera's batteries went dead. (I'll post one later when I get the necessary cable hooked up.) Also, since it isn't really a duck pond if you can't feed the ducks, I went out and tossed them a few bits of sourdough bread, which they seemed to appreciate.

Now y'all promise me you won't call the state wildlife division or they'll come out here and declare my front yard a protected wetland, and I won't be able to use my driveway!

UPDATE: Well, the camera was set to low resolution, so the pictures I took of the ducks didn't turn out very well. Nonetheless, the intrepid Captain Midnight "enhanced" a photo for me:


He is silly.

UPDATE #2: They came back on Saturday, and Captain Midnight took several photos. This was the best of the lot:

If I were inclined to name them, I'd probably call them Mal and Jemima. But they're wild ducks, not pets. Even so, they like sourdough bread. And fortune cookie crumbs.

OK, so that was a long nap.

I feel like Rip Van Winkle now. (But refreshed! Very refreshed!)

Actually, my time in the last little while has been consumed with the business of moving. We are now partially ensconced in our new place in the Puget Sound area of Washington, with boxes yet to be unpacked -- but now that the computers are back in one piece and we have Internet access, HELLO WORLD! (It may or may not provide insight into our characters to note that, although we were wired up for Internet access as soon as possible, we won't actually get telephone service until early next week. Yep, we're geeks.)

This evening provided one of those small warm-fuzzy moments when I wandered into the local supermarket. As I strolled around looking for leeks and yogurt and hair conditioner, I began to notice that my fellow shoppers hailed from all over the world -- India, Mexico, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Korea and China; I counted at least five different languages other than English being spoken. The checker who helped me was fluent in both English and Spanish, and the teenager who bagged my groceries had originally come from Russia. It strongly reminded me of my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there were so many people from so many different places, with so many different traditions and beliefs and creeds, that it was impossible to single anyone out for being "different." And yet we did have one thing in common -- whether by birth or by choice, we were all Americans.

It was beautiful out tonight -- cool, with a fine mist of rain falling. All the cherry trees are in bloom. There's nothing like the scent of a spring cherry tree in the midst of a rainy night.