Saw a male hairy woodpecker t’other day–I’ve seen a few that I wasn’t sure if they were downy or hairy, but this one was the size of one of the big red-bellied woodpeckers, and the downy woodpeckers are generally smaller than my hand, so I’m pretty confident it was a hairy woodpecker.

Other than that, nobody new at the feeders–Lumpy has been the real local excitement recently.

Mostly took the weekend off. Read a lot. Read “DaVinci Code.” Went “Meh.” “Foucault’s Pendulumn” was better, if I wanted a conspiracy theory, and it didn’t have nearly enough about Da Vinci to make up for it. Plus there were a few wild inaccuracies–“Phi”, the supposed mystic number found in nature, 1.618, is a total load as described. If you divide the height of a human by the height of their navel, as the author suggested, you do not get 1.618 unless they’re a mutant freak. (I, for example, am 5-foot-7, or 67 inches tall. In order to get PHI, my navel would have to fall at approximately 41.5 inches. There’s something that falls in the vicinity of 41.5 inches–or rather, two somethings–but it sure as hell ain’t my navel.) The problem with numerology like this is that you can invent it, cold turkey–you just pick a likely number and start coming up with things that have that sort of relation. It’s like the pyramids. Yes, if you multiply the height of the pyramid by some number or other, you get the distance from the earth to the sun. If you multiply MY height by the right number, you get the distance from the earth to the sun, but this does not prove that I was constructed by an ancient spacefaring civilization so much as it would prove that I have way too much free time to be playing around with numbers.

Not having that kind of free time, I’ll go back to painting now.