Along Troon shore, stared rainy and cold, got a little warmer and changed to dull. Lots of dog walkers. But I saw quite a few birds. Greenfinch, stonechats & linnets on the dune side. Turnstone, sanderling and redshank at the edge of the sea. Took blurry photos of them all. Good enough for id & iNaturalist. Also a small dead porpoise washed up on the sand.
Walked part of the Finlas Loop yesterday. Sparking hill day, snow. A lot of deer. Deer seem less inclined to run off in the winter. Fox track all over. A glimpse of an eagle, later watched for 10-15 minutes as it circled back and forth along the skyline above.
map, photos & notes: walkmap
I continued to try and note one ‘natural” thing every day. Fell short, especially towards the end of the year. Leaving for work and getting home in the dark does not help. Here is the 2024 list. I don’t keep the online list up to date, just every month or two.
I also tried to record/podcast each month, but stopped after August. I do enjoy the process. But I suspect I had an audience of none.
I am going to continue in 2025, perhaps making each note a little longer, 2 or 3 sentences. So far:
2025-01-01 Rainy morning. Dumping the rubbish. A very black and shiny crow was making a lot of noise on a neighbour’s washing line. Round the front the traffic is sparse. Across the street, in a pollard, a blue tit is calling.
2025-01-02 Clear blue skies and frost. High tide, at the end of a small rocky outcrop a heron hunches away from the sea and cold. A starling perched high by drain hole under the eaves making experimental sounds.
Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller★★★☆☆ 📚
Increasingly crazy survivalist father takes his 8 year old daughter to live in the German woods. Tells her it is the end of the world. Told from the girls POV with compulsive foreboding leading to a guessable horror on the last page.
According to my Books page I’ve read 49 books so far this year.
There are the ones that I gave ★★★★★, in my rather careless system.
Read: This Is What Happened by Mick Herron ★★★★☆ 📚
One nasty twist changes this in quite a surprising way. Not quite what I expected from Mick Herron.
Likes why post, what to post, and how to post by .
Here are a few specific reasons why you should post:
* Search everything you write. Do you post long comments or issues on GitHub? Do you post on public mailing lists? Post such things to your own site, so you can more easily search everything you’ve written on a topic. Then post a copy to those external destinations.
Lots of other ideas. Including Use a local text editor, I do sometimes. I used to use TextMate pretty exclusively, but drifted away because of post kinds, then blocks. Thinking about it a good bit more since testing WordLand, which I am enjoying.
Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★📚
A subtle & grownup take on the post apocalypse novel. I think I enjoyed everything about this. Flits between characters & time before & after the Georgian Flu which kills 99% of the population.
None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.
Winter Flora along the Forth & Clyde Canal.
