Brief Notes of Nate

Rampant blog related absence these days... Nate House is not the exception...

Scenic Overlook. Ink on sticky note, summer (?) 2006, between 9 AM and 5 PM.

Some quick notes as the East Coast slouches towards the middle of the night, lest anyone think I've fallen off the end of the earth:

* Baby geese are neat. My office building sits next to an artificial lake, which I expect is the main draw for two breeding pairs of Canada geese that have settled nearby for the spring. As you walk through the parking lot you can often see one or both goose-families (parents plus four or five goslings) browsing in the grass or the office's beach volleyball court. The young ones grow at a pretty fast rate, starting out as adorable little things with yellow down and stubby wings and getting noticeably larger from week to week. By now their plumage is darkening, especially along their necks as they begin to develop the characteristic look of the adult Canada goose. Witnessing this process makes me want to narrate my afternoon walk to the car in a David Attenborough-type documentarian voice, saying things like, "This remarkable cycle of growth and development makes it entirely worthwhile that geese are pooping basically everywhere on the property."

* I have a new cell phone with a built-in camera. What I lack is a subscription plan allowing me to freely email those pictures to myself, or the ambition to upload amateur software onto the phone to let me download images over the Bluetooth serial port, at least until the phone's warranty expires. Good times with technology. This would be great, though, for the baby geese, if it were functional, and if I had been taking time-lapse pictures of said baby geese for a few weeks.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates are terrible again. I mean unequivocally terrible. ...I want to say less than I could on this whole matter. I was reading this NY Times piece on the historical travails of the Philadelphia Phillies as that organization approaches 10,000 losses, and mostly just saw parallels with the current Bucs, such as "penurious ownership" or a fan/actor's description of his fandom as being "like someone sticking a nail in your head and hammering it once a day". I propose a new, cross-Pennsylvania rivalry: race you to 20,000.

* I spent a little time this evening Internet-chatting with a customer service rep and/or text recognition program employed by Comcast so I once again have access to my personal web page through that service. I hope to make up for some recent blog absence by posting some older, somewhat ungainly content there, hopefully in time for Bloomsday...