And there’s another female who’s spent off and on the last week trying to figure it out. I think we’ve created a monster!

Background: some years back (maybe 7, maybe as many as 10) we started feeding the birds during the winter. We set up some seed feeders for the juncos and jays (mostly), and some hanging suet feeders for chickadees and nuthatches - and bought a heated waterer after a chipmunk and several mice drowned in the dog’s bucket….

Everyone was really happy…. and then we had this female jay decide that she’d rather have the suet from the “upside-down” feeders than seeds. She spent a long time (couple of weeks…. at least….) watching the “upside-down” birds, and finally she figured out how to do it. So she fed at the suet feeders and the rest of the jays ate seeds.

We’ve been watching her every winter since. It’s a LONG time now…. so back to the original question: how long does a jay live? We just put the winter feeders back out today…. will we see her again?

I christened her “Juno”….

So during the posting hiatus, nothing really happened. I lost my temper a few times with the idiots racing around on ATVs, which accomplished nothing since I only did in-house rants (private in other words) because confronting the idiots might get me shot, or my horse shot, or the fuel tanks filled with gas and sugar (it’s a diesel)….

We spent some time looking for property in a different area of the state, and making basic plans about how to clean and sell this house. I am NOT looking forward to packing! But that’s a year or more down the road…. I AM looking forward to not living in this area any longer though!

And during the last “property looking” trip, we got caught at the Realtor’s house for several hours while the “Torrey Flood” (due to a true Southwestern US upstream gullywasher - where the heavens open and the goddess dumps HUGE BUCKETS on a very dry area!) receded so we could get back down the road…. Here’s a couple of the photos the Realtor took - the flood at this point was about 1/4 mile wide and over 15 feet deep in spots, with boulders the size of small cars hitting the bridge!

But as we may know it intimately in the future…. yes, wholeheartedly yes!

(Another great post on this whole “nexweb” concept here…. and here….)

I say that having come recently from a disturbing discussion regarding the progression forward (using xhtml/xml as the “progressing” technology) of a new blogging platform - with a final “vote” in favor of regression to html 4.01 which seems not only shortsighted in the extreme but in the case of the software under discussion, deliberately obstructive. I was one small voice/vote in that debate, and had this series of articles popped up sooner, I would have perhaps had more ammunition in the particular discussion.

My point? If you cannot imagine the future - no, I’m not talking specific details per se; I’m talking an overarching ability to allow your imagination to encompass things which it perhaps cannot even BEGIN to actively visualize - you will remain mired in today. Regarding the software platform, those “four horsemen of the non-apocalypse” effectively mired a potential bright star in the mud of today’s technology. Why? Because they A: feel threatened by a Web which apparently they are not only not capable of imagining, they aren’t going to be capable of using; and B: their agenda is stagnation, not stimulation.

Today is nice. It’s safe. It doesn’t require any ability to flex, to change, to IMAGINE change. Is that where YOU want to be?

Or do you want to GO, to reach the stars, to stretch your entire being reaching for that next level?

I know where I want to be, to go, to reach. How about you?