Will Wonders Ever Cease?

 Here's one for the "Every time you think you've seen it all, you find out that you ain't seen nothing yet." department:

The Chicago Rat Hole has charmed thousands. Neighbors have had enough. (msn.com)

I thought that Uncle Ken's mystery bird looked like a kestrel, except for the fuzzy head.  Kestrels are the smallest of the North American raptors and are sometimes called "sparrow hawks".  I tend to agree that the fuzzy head might mean it's a juvenile, although this doesn't seem to be the right time of year for that.  

I also remember a bird called a "night hawk" from Chicago, but I never saw one close up.  They used to soar high above the city lights on warm summer evenings catching insects in flight.  They usually hunted in pairs, calling back and forth to each other.  There was a pair circling over the Gold Front Bar the first week I spent in Cheboygan.  I took it as a sign that my destiny lay here.  

This morning's minion

 So look who I saw perched on my railing yesterday morning.  Never seen anything like this before.  Peregrine falcon I was thinking.  We have maybe a handful of them downtown hanging around our tall buildings and poaching pigeons at their leisure.  With our great hordes of pigeons (ungainly and almost comic as they plod the streets and sidewalks looking for a stray bits of potato chips dropped from the careless hands of munchers, but majestic when they all take flight at once, white wings flashing, then turn 90 degrees together and then again and again like a slow moving tornado into the sky) there are plenty to support hundreds of those falcons, but falcons don't like neighbors living to close to them.

Looked like a youngster, kind of soft and fuzzy in the face, not yet hardened into the cold and ruthless face of the predator.  This is the best of the three photos I could get of him before he was gone.  I looked up images of peregrine falcons on the computer, and he looked like them, sorta.  They were all adults without the soft and fuzzy faces, but they had that kind of stripe from the top of the head through the eye and down to, well the chin I guess.  I contacted my birdwatching sources to confirm.

Finches were the first to colonize my balcony, maybe ten years ago attracted here by sunflowers, and soon I was providing seed.  There were four of them, two couples, red faced males and all brown females.  They had graceful good looks and their song was sweet.  Pigeons came later.  I wasn't too happy about that, mainly afraid that my neighbors wouldn't like them (many people don't, refer to them as flying rats, but you know, they are God's creatures, as are rats for that matter) and I was afraid that that they would report me (against the rules to feed birds on the balconys) and I'd end up in the dreaded board's star chamber.

At first there were three of them, Mom and Pop and Junior I guessed.  They were pretty tame, I could almost touch them, so I got to be friendly with them.  But the one I assumed was Pop had a mean streak.  When I put seed down he would fight Mom and Junior for it, and even if I spaced the seed apart he would drive them away from the balcony,  Nothing uglier than a pigeon fight on your balcony.

And then I got these other birds, sparrows I call them, but they are just brown birds, kind of squat as opposed to the lean and graceful bodies of the finches.  And they don't travel in double dates, they travel in mobs.  The finches mostly graced the railing, but these guys are all over the floor of the balcony like, well a mob like I said.

Well speaking of the sparrows there was one on the floor of the balcony and at one point the newcomer made kind of a halfass dive at it, but maybe due to his youth it didn't work out and the sparrow fled.

The reports from my experts came in later, kestrel, kestrel, peregrine, but the last, seemed like the guy just said what he thought I wanted to hear.  I'm a little disappointed to hear.  Peregrine falcons sounds so much more noble than kestrel, like the difference between a privateer and a pirate.  But still kind of a nature experience for urban Uncle Ken. 

Hoity-Toity

So I'm noodling around one of my newsfeeds and up pops a list of the most famous restaurants in every state and what do I find?

MICHIGAN: Hack-Ma-Tack Inn and Restaurant in Cheboygan
"The restaurant features classic dishes like escargot, prime rib, filet mignon, and roast duck."

Well, La-de-DAH, but sounds a little pricey to me; I'll just have the horse-doovers.

"What"

Cool article, Mr. Beagles, something that I was not aware of.  Always good to learn something new especially the dynamics of storms in this era of climate flux.  Those patterns remind me of the swirling atmosphere you see in photos of Jupiter and Saturn and there is more than a passing resemblance in the design of the Tesla Valve.

So, did you have an entry in last weekend's Outhouse Race in Mackinaw City?  Rumor has it the winner was full of shit.

 

Say What?

 Y'all know anything about this?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/this-weather-phenomenon-on-lake-michigan-stunned-meteorologists-friday/ar-BB1h5vI9?ocid=wi

Jabbering in January...

Running a little late but, "Happy New Year!"  Better late than never, as they say.

Wasn't that a delightful little break from the "urgency" of posting all the time?  Gave me time to reflect and ponder, an activity I can't get enough of but not to the point of where I'm going to share my thoughts.  Too much information these days if you ask me.  You didn't?  Oh.  Never mind.

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Glad to see Mr. Beagles is back, out and about in Cheboygan.  I still read the Tribune every so often, not as much as I should.  I saw that some grade school kids are raising a baby sturgeon to be set free this spring, not something I expect to read about in this neck of the woods.  What woods, you ask?  Not sure, but they're there...Urbs in Horto, cha,cha, cha.  And according to the Trib, this weather is the perfect time for folks to go owl watching.  Who?  That's right!

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Since Uncle Ken has the greenest thumb around here I was wondering if he had any house plants or are they all on the balcony.  Well, what's the story?  I know that houseplants can be problematic for pets and other children; most of the greenery I have comes with a warning.  There's a house a block or so away from me that has a nice little stand of bamboo; I'll have to talk to the owner about getting a cutting or something.  According to the local garden center, bamboo is considered an invasive plant and it's illegal to sell seeds but wouldn't bamboo make a swell addition to the jungle of The Geezer Chateau?  Grows like crazy, too.

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Remember that nice little watercolor of a spider that Uncle Ken shared a while back?  Here's a pic to show how big (or little) they actually are in case you were wondering.  Still cute, too.

 

 

diseases of our youth

 I don't remember the flu so much as I remember the rites of passage for kids of the day.  Measles, German measles, chicken pox, mumps.

Some kid up the street, or maybe it was you, would get it and then most of the neighborhood.  It was like no big deal, you'd be laid up for a week not feeling very well, but sleeping a lot so the time passed quickly, and there was this: no school.

For measles, and usually the rest, the room was dark.  I used to sneak a comic book by the window and pull the shade aside.  Later when it was discovered that I needed glasses, that was deemed the cause, my own bad behavior six years earlier.

But not only did you get to stay out of school but your wishes became commands.  "Oh Kenny, please eat something."  "I don't feel hungry."  "Please, anything."  "Well, maybe I could eat a bowl of grated cheese."  And there it was.  So great.  Probably Velveeta, but Velveeta was just fine with me at that age.

Poor Mom, washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, and now a kid in bed that had to be catered to.  But that's the way it worked back in the days of Father Knows Best.

On the darker side there was polio.  Those dreadful iron lungs.   You were supposed to stay away from the beach, but we went there anyway.  It never came to Homan Avenue.  And then this guy Salk discovered a vaccine.  Big hero.

There was tuberculosis and smallpox too.  Their vaccine left a little scar on your left arm.  Going to check on my arm this morning after my shower.  I remember us being marched from the classroom into some room by the office and there was somebody with a white coat dunking a syringe into some jar.  We pulled up our sleeves and lined up.  I was not a burly lad, but I was not afraid of the needle like some kids were.  Sock it to me I proclaimed boldly baring my arm, but even then the hot babes were not impressed.

Anyway, even though those sicknesses were not that bad, they did take up easily a month of your life, not to mention the stress on Mom grating all that Velveeta, and sometimes kids did die.  They have all virtually disappeared from the USA and that is a mark of progress like washers and dryers and automatic transmissions, but now we have those damned anti vaxxers.  But I won't get into that now.  I am going to pop into the shower and scrutinize my left arm.

The Road to Recovery

 Remember when we had a bout with the flu as kids?  It was no big deal, a couple days of puking and shitting, then it was back to school like nothing happened.  Truth be known, that wasn't the same kind of flu that killed millions of people back in 1918, but that's what everybody called it.  I guess what I had this time was something in between, no puking and shitting, just loss of appetite, not only for food, but for everything else as well, including beer and cigarettes.  

Now I seem to be on the road to recovery.  Today I cleared the snow off of my truck, moved it, and plowed the part that the professional guy was unable to get to the two times he was here.  Clearing the snow off the truck would have been harder if my granddaughter hadn't done it a couple days ago when she came all the way from Petoskey to buy our groceries for us when I was still incapacitated.  We only got a few additional inches since then, and it was that light fluffy stuff that used to be normal for this time of year.  I haven't re-started the beer and cigarettes yet.  I don't miss the beer, but I do crave a cigarette now and then.  I find, however, that the craving goes away in a few minutes if I just ignore it.  I may never smoke again, but I'm not committing to that.  The last time I quit was for three and a half months when I had that bleeding ulcer back in 2008, and the only way I got through it was by telling myself that it was just temporary.  

the river

Close up of Thursday showing the path of the ice breaker

Wednesday 

                                                                        

                                                                     Thursday
 

We are getting two more single digit days and then it will be warming up.  I don't expect that we will be getting much more ice in the river out of this cold spell.

By the river

 I remember as a lad at Tonti Elementary school hearing about the the river and how it was reversed but it didn't make much of an impression on me at the time because I wasn't sure where the river was or even if it was in Chicago because you know how they go on and on about boring stuff, and anyway I spent a lot of time putting my pencil, eraser down, on the desk and making a slight shushing noise and raising it slowly up, point first, and the whole thing was a spaceship blasting off which was way more interesting than whatever Mrs Porwancher was droning on about.

Well you know, I lived in Chicago, so I pretty much  knew everything about it.  When I went downtown I was careful not to crane my neck up to look at the skyscrapers lest people think I was a tourist.  When I went down to Champaign I was all like what a podunk, though later I was so fond of my beer drinking buddies that I began to think of it as the land of milk and honey.

But when I went to Texas, well Son, that was something altogether different.  Illinois was just where people went when they thought Indiana was too full, but Texas, what a story.  And when I took the bus downtown from South Austin and we crossed the Colorado River everybody set down their newspapers or whatever, because this was before phones, imagine that, and looked down at the sparkling river and its well adorned banks and let out a sigh because it was a pretty little thing.  Well I did.  

Well I have gone far afield as I often do.  Just so happy to be typing with a cup of coffee at my side in the morning.

Anyway now I live right on the banks of the river and I know the river well.  

Those photos are kind of trick shots, making use of where the narrow sunbeams shoot down the streets between the buildings to accent the steam.  But it has been a pretty mild winter up till Sunday so the river is pretty warm and the air is like really, really cold.  

The current is pretty sluggish and we always get some ice on the river.  Every five or ten years it does freeze over entirely from Wolf Point to the mouth but then they bring out a little ice breaker and, like a tractor in the spring, it ploughs a little path in the middle of the river.  If it's a pretty cold day you can see steam rising behind it.  Pretty cool.

Less than half an hour till sunrise which will let me see the river better and I will check for ice.

This is an hour later, plenty of steam but no ice.  Here are a couple photos from about ten years ago.

Shiver Me Timbers!

I have been sick with the flu the last few days, so I have been spending a lot of time watching the Weather Chanel, and I noticed that youse guys have been even colder than us'ns lately.  That's unusual but not unheard of.  While our weather hasn't been exactly tropical, we haven't gone below zero yet this winter, and I hope we never do.  As far as I'm concerned, zero ought to be cold enough for anybody.  I mean, why do they even call it zero if they want to get even colder than that?  Anyway, being down with the flu, I actually had to pay somebody twice to plow our driveway, the first time in the 23 years at this location.  Of course I've been sick before, and we've had tons of snow in our driveway before, but never both at the same time.  I'm feeling better tonight, so maybe I will be able to keep up with it from now on.

Those are neat photos of the Chicago River all steamy.  I suppose the current is swift enough to keep it from freezing over most years.  Does it ever?  

Pictures are worth thousands of words