The breaking day

I wake while others sleep, but do not wake slowly. Once i have fallen out of dreams, i am immediately, fully awake. Maybe there is a minute of sitting on the side of the bed, focusing my eyes, but it is only posturing.

When last we left, we were bound for Chicago on Thanksgiving vacation. Now, back at work, things are business as usual. My employer announced huge layoffs recently (in good company there, as employers everywhere are doing daily now). There is no certainty, only a bit of anhedonia at CoH.

Some unseasonably warm weather has blessed the locale. Warm winter days are possibly my favoritest season. You have beautiful, blistering vistas, but none of the pesky, biting bugs that mar the warm summer months. My hiking companion and i visited Knob Noster as well as more local spots which during the summer are almost inhabitable.

A deep forest trail is apparently the best place to spot a stealth bomber. They fly out of a miltary base adjacent the park, going, i guess, to iraq or afghanistan.

There is no particular theme here today. Just a general update before the world's alarm clock goes off.

Sunday Nature Walk

Today was warm but not oppressive, so we went to Heritage Park in Olathe, KS, which turned out to be quite a good spot. We found a geocache that had previously eluded us, spotted turtles and what I have narrowed down to some sort of Heron, and discovered paddle boats that were, unfortunately, out of season.

A few highlights have been posted over at my flickr site. Definitive identification of the bird would be most welcome. Bonus points for the rather large spider, which was prepping it's meals for the next few days when we spotted her.

True Names

Yesterday, as i was driving to a friends house to help him move, a cardinal shot across the front of my car from the trees along the side of the road. I sometimes wonder whether squirrels and birds do this intentionally, thrill-seeking. It happens more than i would expect. Lightning, say, happens quite a lot, but i've never in my life had it strike within twenty feet. Birds, however, often fly in front of my speeding car.

But that aside, what occured to me as this particular bird passed a foot or so in front of the grill, was what i would say if it in fact collided with the car. 'I hit a bird yesterday'? I suppose, if one hits another human, it's enough (at first at least) to say, 'I hit a man the other day'. But later, you'd probably want to know what man i had hit, know his name.

So it passed through my thoughts as i drove on that, were we to afford all species proper respect, i would need to know this cardinal's name. But to have unique names for every bird, and squirrel, and dog would require a fair amount of specification.

In my current job, i'm often having to look up various people in a database. When they tell me their name, i take the more obscure of the first and last, since that will tend to return just their records. I despair a bit when it's a Bill Smith or Elizabeth Jones, because each of those four names will invariably return several pages of records.

So, to be fair, I suppose we already need finer indicators. Bill Smith with Vanguard Publishing, Elizabeth Jones of Thirty-two Terrace, Northwest. Likewise, pets often assume the family surname, though clearly your dog is not of your blood, so that's a bit loose.

But in the moments after this cardinal missed my windshield, i was struck by the idea of home many more names-- beyond the given and the sur-- we would need to name individuals across all species. Seemed like a cumbersome idea at the time.