Archives March 2014

The past few days Cindy has been telling me that she was not seeing my blog posts on my Facebook wall.  It didn’t make any sense since when I looked at my wall the posts were there clear as day.  Well apparently it wasn’t just her that was not seeing the posts, nobody else was.  It had something to do with the mechanism the blog uses to post to Facebook.  Somehow it is posting in a way that makes it visible only to me, despite the FB view settings for it being “Friends”.  So the simple fix is a quick cut and paste of the link instead of using the plug in.

Last night both Cindy and I made an attempt at this month’s BB challenge which is maximum duration wall handstand hold.  I shot the attempts with my GoPro.  The video quality is great, the audio quality is not.  I didn’t give any consideration to what happens when you have the GoPro mounted in the waterproof case.

I knew Cindy would be able to hold longer than I could based on past experience.  I didn’t expect her to crush me like she did.  I stayed inverted for 65 seconds before my shoulders gave out.  Cindy stayed up for nearly double that time, coming off the wall at the 1:55 mark.  The handstand beat down will give me motivation to hang in there longer next time.

Cindy and I considered going out last night for St Patricks Day even though neither of us have any track record of doing so in the past.  We instead decided to stay home and drink a couple beers.  It’s safer and I have 3 cases of beer left over from the Super Bowl party to get through anyway.

For the second day in a row I saw this truck on my way into work in the morning.  Both days my eyes were drawn to it via the left leg that was resting on the driver side fender.

The old Chevy S-10 had a bare frame in the back, no doors and looked like it has lived a very rough life.  The driver of the vehicle looked as you would imagine they would.  No Florida state vehicle inspections leads to cool sightings like these.

The rest of this week is going to be very busy.  The first sign of daylight isn’t going to come until Saturday evening.

On Saturday morning I ditched running as my back was still not feeling great when I rolled out of bed.  Instead I started off my early AM at a much slower pace playing some WoW and Hearthstone.  Around 9 I took the party van over to Cindy’s apartment to get the last couple large/heavy items that would be going to my house, her big screen TV and a large potted desert rose.

I had to load these in a way to still allow access to the bed in the back of the van since I was picking up the girls on my way home.   They didn’t seem to mind the 50″ tv that was lined up behind the front seats.

Once we got home I got to work distributing the items to their new spots.  The desert rose went out front in between the two existing potted plants.  The tv went into the guestroom, replacing the diminutive 15 inch LCD set that was there before.  The tv transformation was dramatic.  Cindy’s tv takes up pretty much all available wall space between the open bedroom door and the closet.  Future guests will have quite the AV experience available to them.

I spent a good portion of Saturday afternoon doing a full yard mowing followed by weed whacking.  It was my first time mowing everything with the new sun canopy installed.  As expected extra care was necessary mowing certain spots and other spots could no longer be traversed with the canopy installed.  I’ll exchange another minute or two of weed whacking for being able to mow without the sun beating on my head on the tractor.  I wish I would have done this 10 years ago. After the yard work I was actually warm enough to jump in the pool, giving Sadie her first 2014 splashy splash session.  The water felt quite cold for about 30 seconds but after that I was able to settle in and splash Sadie for 5 or 10 minutes.

When Cindy got home we promptly gave both of the dogs a bath.  They both suffered through the indignity with flying colors.

We spent Saturday evening at home.  It included watching my latest Netflix rental, Bad Grandpa.  To be quite honest I was hesitant to even put this in my queue.  The last Jackass movie was so lame that I was almost not willing to watch anything with Johnny Knoxville’s name all over it.  I was totally prepared for this movie to be horrible and even envisioned myself turning it off mid-flick if it was as bad as I feared it could be. Well I was wrong, very wrong.

Both Cindy and I laughed a ton, it was sort of a mix of Borat with a sprinkle of Jackass.  The little kid in the movie was a great part of the chemistry, despite the age inappropriate things he had to do/say.  The movie was really, really funny, believe it or not I am giving it an A-.

On Sunday morning after dropping off the dogs at Ali’s, Cindy and I took on a bike/swim brick.  The first part of the ride when we were heading north had a very quick pace, topping out at 24mph + for a brief period of time.  Of course I knew this meant we had a big tailwind pushing us along which was going to be in our face on the way back.

For most of the south ride Cindy was in the front being a wind breaker, she likes to put herself in those difficult riding conditions because it offers better training rewards.  I took over for a brief part towards the end of the south ride before we did a final U-turn to head north back towards the water park.  With the wind once again at our backs Cindy took off like a bat out of hell, she likes to see what sort of top speed she can hit during the last segment of this ride.  She said she touched 28 mph at one point.  I couldn’t tell as I was a couple hundred yards behind her at that point.  I only caught up to her right before getting back to the entrance to the park.

We had a decent swimming session.  I logged three 400 yard segments at a mundane 9:15 pace.  Considering this was only my second swimming session of the last 6 months I was ok with it.  Cindy put in 1000 yards.  It was her first time swimming since the Key West tri in December.

After we were done we got right out of there as we had two stops to make on the way home and list of things to accomplish once we got back.  Sunday afternoon seemed to fly by in a blink.  Cindy made a nice dinner followed up with an even better homemade apple pie.  We enjoyed both while finally watching the third part of the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo  series.

It was good but the whole reading subtitle deal really is not my thing and distracts from my overall enjoyment of the film.  As a whole I would give the movie series a B+.

So last week I finished up my second week trying out Gunnar glasses at work.  The first week I had them I wore them basically full time, 8 hours a day at work and my eyes felt like shit.  They were bloodshot, aching and dry at various times, the exact symptoms they are meant to lessen.

Last week I did them more in shifts, wearing them for a period of time and then going without for a bit.  It seemed to work out better, my eyes felt much better than the week before.

I still have not noticed any improvement in the problem that caused me to by Gunnars in the first place, distance focus.  We’ll see what week three brings.

Most of the week I have been dealing with pain in the lower right section of my back.  The odd thing is I can’t attribute it to any exercise related activity.  Some days the pain has been enough to force me into a limp, other days it has been less severe but still there.  Today the pain level is somewhere in the middle.  All I know is it has sidelined any near term plans to run.

Cindy has the majority of the things she needs moved into the house at this point.  Most of the stuff left at her apartment will either be going into storage or with her daughter when she finds her own place.  It’s been nice having her around more or less full time.  Her energy level and seemingly endless supply of positive thinking is a good counterbalance to my up and down outlook on things. She helps smooth out my bumps in the road.

Last night her and I played a couple head to head games of Hearthstone, it was fun.

This weekend we may check out another movie.  The county fair, a half mile from my house, opened up last night.  We will probably check that out as well but save it for a weekday night to avoid some crowds.

The weekend chore list right now is standard size although I do have a couple things that could/should be done at anytime.  Those things are mulching the property and redoing the front brakes on the Tacoma which are pulsating badly.  I really don’t feel much like taking on either of those things at this point and time.

I haven’t felt very inspired to write much the last few days.  It happens from time to time.

Where I just don’t feel like saying much

Yesterday after work I stopped at Costco to get something.  Even though it was a Tuesday night there still were a quite a few people milling about.  I have complained in the past about how I dislike my shopping experience at Costco, despite my support for their business model where they pay their employees real wages, despite being in the highly competitive retail market.  Unfortunately, there are just too many human beings that crowd the aisles of my local Naples store and I find it extremely annoying.

Last night in the span of 30 seconds I ran into 4 different individuals, all women, blocking the aisles through thoughtless cart placement.  Two of them stuck their cart in the middle of the aisle at an angle, making it impossible to pass on either side.  Two of them pulled the classic bonehead move, park your cart on one side while you look at stuff on the other side, turning yourself into a shopping cart/human barricade. Each successive female got an increasingly frustrated sounding , “Excuse me…” as I tried to snake around them.

When The Bachelor first came out nearly a decade ago I watched the first season of it and never have returned as I deemed it as not worth my time.  Well Cindy has been a long time Bachelor fan and indirectly got me watching this current season with the infamous Juan Pablo.  Well even though I realize the show is trash tv at it’s finest, I have to admit I found last night’s finale fascinating.  The guy has cemented the crown as the biggest d-bag bachelor in the history of the show.  He is the male equivalent of a beautiful woman that has air between her ears and a horrible attitude to boot.  The most amazing part of the show was how Juan Pablo’s family basically told both of the final two girls that JP is more or less an asshole.

There have been a lot of press down here lately regarding vehicles hitting cyclists and pedestrians.  In the past couple months there have been a number of these cases.  As someone who has a road bike and has put a decent amount of time in on two wheels on our local roadways I have seen a lot of this firsthand where vehicles get far too close to me as I am pedaling in the bike lane.  Luckily I never had an impact with a car/truck.

Just yesterday I saw a guy on a bike that got knocked over on my way to the gym and then on my way home saw a driver making a right hand turn lay on his horn and narrowly miss a guy in the crosswalk.  There is no excuse for a driver to hit a pedestrian or cyclist.

However I have also seen the side of this coin.  You see, in these incidents there is one common factor, human beings are involved.  Human beings do stupid things and this is often the case with pedestrians and people on bicycles.  I can’t tell you how many times I have seen both cyclists (on sidewalks) and pedestrians cross in front of cars or enter intersections without so much as a momentary glance to ensure they are seen.  Yes, drivers are responsible for making sure they spot people on bikes or on foot but that does not absolve cyclists/pedestrians from doing their part to avoid potential accidents as well.

Hell 5 or 6 years ago when I was going to the gym I knocked over some Hispanic guy on a bike that crossed in front of me as I was looking the other way at oncoming traffic.  Yes I should have made sure the other direction was clear but he should have made the effort to determine if I saw him or not.  Instead he just went straight ahead like he had a set of blinders on.  As I said, I see this behavior ALL the time, so much so that I just assume the other person will not bother to look at me.  Failure to exercise common sense in your own personal safety is your problem first.

Yesterday I missed my lunchtime gym session due to being out at one of our remote branches.  I wanted to make sure I got some type of workout in.  Thanks to the time change last weekend I am once again able to enjoy ample amounts of daylight after work.  I decided to put it to use out in the barpark.  I was able to finish up a 5 circuit Ray’s Way workout before Cindy got home which added up to 50 pull ups, 75 dips and 100 push ups. When Cindy got there she used the back yard as a track, putting in a fast pace 2+ mile run before doing some work on the bars as well.

Last night we watched the finale of True Detective, the HBO show that crashed HBOGO on Sunday since so many people were tuning in.  It was really a well written and acted show. The finale was appropriately suspenseful and tense.  I’m not sure if they are going to do multiple seasons of the show with each season getting a fresh set of cast members or not.  Having Woody and Matt on a show is a chemistry that is going to be hard to match moving forward.  Great show, watch it if you haven’t.

Last night in bed we were watching another suspenseful show, 24. (somewhere in season 6)  During one very loud scene where shit was blowing up we were startled by a crash in the bathroom.  The clock I had on the wall had fallen off courtesy of the vibrations of the subwoofer that is on the other side of the wall, talk about realistic sound….  Unfortunately the clock, which I happened to be fond of, broke on impact with the tile floor. Thanks a lot Jack.

Last night I recall having several odd dreams but I only remember sparse details of one of them.  I was suddenly transported back to PA present day.  I was driving down the street at night behind the outfield of the high school baseball field, near the intermediate school.  More than half of the houses still had their Christmas lights on their house and lit up.  I recall saying out loud “What the fck? It’s March.” End of dream.

Saturday morning I drug myself out of bed to go do the club bagel run.  The bagel run is a run of varying distances, anywhere from 3 miles up to 13, the duration is up to you.  Afterwards everyone meets at the running store and enjoys some free bagels, juice and coffee.   Cindy and I only ran 5 miles as I am trying to increase my run distance slowly to avoid knee pain complications.

For the second half of the run we were joined by an older guy named Eric that I never saw before.  It turns out Eric had only been in the Naples area for a week and was trying it on for size as he is looking for a place to relocate to from New York.  Eric has had quite an interesting life which started off in Albania and found him living all over the country including Alaska, California and Manhattan.  He also was a tremendous endurance athlete in his younger days.  He ran something like 27 marathons with a personal best of 2:56, that is VERY fast.  He also did the Kona Ironman, geez.

Here I was thinking my 5 mile run at a 9 minute mile pace was actually half decent, lol.

On my way home from the run I had an unplanned stop at Ali’s.  I had been talking to her about buying her office furniture she wanted to unload since she plans to get new stuff when she moves into her new place.  The furniture is nothing fancy but at least I knew it fit the corner at the house well since that is where it resided for many years.  Well I wound up picking the furniture up.

To get the stuff out of Ali’s condo was a bit of a chore.  I had to disassemble the L shaped desk most of the way to be able to get it down the steps and into the bed of the Tacoma.   In addition to the desk I grabbed one of the two file cabinets and a small bookshelf.  To give Ali a place to work we moved ANOTHER small desk to be used temporarily for her computer equipment.  Yes the process was on the tedious side.

When I got home I wasted little time getting busy.  I first removed the used ottoman I had bought with hope of Nicki using it as a resting spot.  She never showed any interest in it whatsoever so I carried it out to the road and plopped it down for someone to take. I then used my furniture sliders to relocate the treadmill to the master bedroom and tucked it next to the far wall where Cindy can use it while having the TV on for a distraction.

I then brought in the desk parts and reassembled them.  The desk was quite a few years old and never felt all that sturdy as is often the case with much furniture you put together.  I decided I wanted to try to stiffen things up.  I did so by utilizing countersunk 2 inch deck screws at various spots.  They worked as I hoped, there is no more wobble or squeaking, the desk feels much better.

I also had a lawn tractor project to knock out, installing my new sunshade.  I saw it as an opportunity for my first ever tractor maintenance video.  The install was very straight forward and simple but I never want to miss up an opportunity to monetize a video for ad dollars.

The new shade is nice.  After I finished installing it I quickly mowed the front mound of the house to test it out.  Even though the sun was out and shining brightly I felt quite comfortable with my head and neck being completely in the shade.   It should make those August mowing sessions more bearable and less UV intensive, something my skin cancer filled history appreciates.

Saturday night was when Cindy and I went to go see the new 300 movie.  I was quite excited to go for the reasons I outlined in the blog last week.  I also was apprehensive since I think every single Zack Snyder movie after 300 was disappointing.  I didn’t want the new 300 to suffer the same fate.  We met up at the theater with our friend Alfred.

Well I am happy to report the movie was good.  Now if you didn’t like the first 300, you won’t like the second.  This isn’t Gone with the Wind, this is blood soaked, smash your face violence where the bad guys (and girls) get what is coming to them. At one point Cindy told me I was hurting her hand from squeezing it too hard during some of the battle scenes, it’s just epic action. I had no idea that for the most part the movie timeline takes place along the original 300 story.  For some reason I thought the new movie was sometime in the future.  They did a good job tying the two together.

Of course for this to be a true 300 movie it had to not only have CGI enhanced violence, it also had to have sex and nudity.  The way the sex was delivered was unexpected.  All three of us exchanged confused looks when it went down.  When you see the movie I am sure you will understand our confusion.

So anyway I thought the movie was good, close in delivering the same straight to the vein testosterone injection as the original 300.  No it won’t incite any deep thoughts or  warm and fuzzy feelings.  Instead you will feel like going out in the parking lot and wrestling an alligator.  I give Rise of an Empire a shiny A, deal with it. Cindy liked it too.

After the movie the three of us hung out at the nearby Fridays for a bit and drank a couple beers.  I hadn’t seen Alfred in a little while so it was good to catch up.

On Sunday I originally had some loose ideas about doing bike/swim brick.  However the clock change forward after a late night, early morning fog and a lack of motivation derailed those plans.  Instead I spent a good portion of the day just being lazy.

Sure I did a few things like help Cindy pull some more stuff out of her apartment, set the Roombas loose on the pool deck, and a few other items but for the most part I just fked off.  I played a lot of WoW and enjoyed doing so, it’s weird how all of a sudden I am liking it again.  Cindy and I also finally got to try out the portable ping pong net I bought her for Xmas.

We utilized the dining room table and it worked out well.  It was a little more narrow and shorter than a regulation ping pong table but it was close enough that neither of us really noticed.  I left the table cloth on the table just to minimize the possibility of ball damage. Doing so took a little bounce out of the ball but not much.

It turns out the dining room is a nice spot to play some ping pong.  We played three very close games and except for a couple times, had no issues with anything getting in the way. The portable net system is really good quality.  Cindy is quite a capable ping pong player, I struggled to beat her all three games and each game was only decided by two points.

I had fun partaking in my lazy Sunday but I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel like a bit of a slob for doing so.

So finally, finally, finally, my DB driven websites came back online early yesterday afternoon after being down since early Sunday morning.  Since I have had a presence on the internet in the 90’s, I have never had my content be down this amount of time.

To have this type of outage in 2014 is even more incredulous since high availability technology has improved so much in the last 5 years.  IX really has managed to set the bar to a new low.  I am pretty sure no major webhost in the last 5 years has had an outage of this duration.

The official description of the incident was IX’s RAID 14+2 SAN had a drive fail, and then as a hot spare was being swapped in, another drive failed which put the entire SAN into a failed state.

I have questions about why this would happen as the SAN was described as actually being 5 storage arrays, each one with 14 drives  in it.  I don’t follow why a failure of two drives in one of the 5 arrays would bring down the whole shebang.   If a massive array of 90 hard drives was toppled that easily then there was some poor engineering/planning/configuration utilized.

Last night I received an email from Faithi Said, the CEO of IX, declaring the recovery process was now officially complete with a promise of a full investigation of the circumstances that lead up to this mess.  Noticeably absent from this email was any mention of compensation for this clusterfck.  Many, many people literally lost thousands of dollars as a result of this outage.  A simple “sorry, our bad…” just isn’t going to cut it.

Last night on the way home I picked up a Craftsman tractor shade at the small Sears location in Bonita Springs.  I bought it online.  I had the option of having it shipped to a store and picking it up for free or paying almost $70 to have it shipped to my door.  It was a pretty easy decision to go pick it up.

The store appeared to have exactly one employee in it, at least while I was there.  It seemed pretty representative of the dire situation I read that the Sears family is in.  As I was waiting for the guy to be free I walked around the store, mostly looking at kitchen appliances since I have plans to update my set sometime in the future.  I was surprised at just how expensive most of what I looked at was.  There was a fridge sitting there tagged at $3600, wtf??  Sure it was big, something like 33 cubic feet but still it gave me sticker shot.  The floor was littered with high priced appliances, tons of them $2k or more.  Obviously Sears is not looking to be a low price leader, sheesh.

So the guy retrieves the box and asks me if I have the confirmation email on my phone.  I realized I did not.  I ordered the canopy the same day my IX servers went down.  The email confirmation was one of the casualties as initially IX f’d up and had things configured so people sending email to me would have gotten an undeliverable bounce message, meaning a number of emails sent to me in the first 24 hours vaporized in the the internet bit bucket, including the Sears email, great. Luckily he was able to confirm my order using some other method.

I actually have thought about getting a canopy for my yard tractors for years, ever since I saw my old neighbor Rick tooling around his yard on his sun shaded John Deere.  With my skin cancer history, avoiding unnecessary sun exposure is a smart move.

The addition of the canopy will make certain tractor maneuvers no longer possible under low hanging objects but I’ll trade that inconvenience for a less UV intensive and 10 degree cooler mowing experience.

This weekend we have a BIG movie to see, the sequel to 300 comes out.  As silly as it sounds, the original 300 really had a big impact on my life.  It was that movie and the published 300 workout that the actors on the film used that transformed my fitness routine.  Up until that point in my life my gym routines were pretty static, routine and yielded no real results beyond maintaining my current level of fitness.

The 300 workout is a brutal circuit that really pushed my mental and physical endurance boundaries.  I was REALLY into it.  I even have two pages dedicated to it the description of the workout and my log of 300 workouts which I maintained for 2-3 years.  When I did 300’s I had no real concept of the difference using full ROM and good form made.  Looking back now, with many of the movements I used poor form.

My 300 workouts eventually morphed into my current day calisthenics/bar focused exercise regimen that I have been doing for most of my 40’s.  So the point is, to me a new 300 movie is a big f’n deal. Cindy is a big 300 fan as well so we both are very excited to go see the film in 3D on Saturday night. I HOPE it lives up to epic-ness of the original.

I am planning a double endurance training weekend with hopefully a 5 mile run tomorrow backed up by a bike swim/brick on Sunday.  We also might be doing more work with getting the house ready for a full time second occupant.

For the last two days I have spent time in my underwear in front of two medical professionals.  Yesterday I had a physical required for my insurance coverage.  Because of my age the physical had the requirement of a DRE (digital rectal exam) aka. finger up the ass.  Thankfully my health advocate waived that requirement for me when I told her I just had a full man part exam late in 2013 as part of my visits to the urologist.

My physical went fine except for one thing, my blood pressure readings were on the mildly high side.  They actually took it twice, once at the start and again at the end of the visit.  The first numbers were like 140/76 and the second reading was 145/85.  I attribute the high numbers to slamming my customary large cup of coffee prior to the office visit and the involuntary anxiety any visit to a medical office invokes for me.

Despite these explanations, I was given a portable BP machine to check my readings the next two weeks just as a precaution. Both my mom and dad have high blood pressure, although I think theirs has as more to do with lifestyle choices.  When I checked it late afternoon the numbers had dropped to 123/80 so I feel confident coffee and nerves were the real catalyst.

My email services for my internet domains were restored yesterday, unfortunately my DB driven websites are still dead in the water.  They should hopefully be up and running within the next few hours.

The president of IX, Faithi Said, posted a more technical explantion of the hardware failure, claiming the array that failed utilized RAID 14+2, meaning it could tolerate a maximum of two simultaneous drive failures.  Supposedly one drive failed and then the drive that was actively being swapped in to replace it had a failure as well.

I am quite interested in seeing what sort of compensation will be offered to IX customers after this mess.  It seems surreal they have servers that are down for going on their 5th straight day.

Last night Cindy’s daughter stopped out with her Mustang.  The passenger side mirror had been broken for quite awhile.  She bought a replacement which I offered to put back on for her.  Replacing the mirror was extremely easy, little more than removing a trim piece and removing and replacing three screws.

While she was there I looked at some other cosmetic issues the car has like two damaged wheel wells and a missing front air dam.  Cindy’s daughter can be tough on things she owns, espcially vehicles and smart phones.  I think she has gone through 9 phones in the last three years. Afer doing the repair Katie and her friend hung out with us a bit which was nice, I don’t see much of her normally.

This morning I was once again in my boxers in  front of the dermatologist.  I got a clear screening for basal cell activity but got some cream for a rash that I have had for quite awhile.  Apparently I am not treating it long enough.  I have hit it with cream until it stops but then it will return.  The doc said I need to treat it a solid week or two beyond being symptomatic to make sure it is gone for good.

So I have been wearing my new Gunnar computer glasses all week at work.  As advertised they make things on my screens look cleaner, crisper and larger thanks to the slight magnification.  However there is something else going on, my eyes feel worse after wearing them all day.

One of the things that Gunnar users typically report is wearing the glasses eliminated the eye strain, dryness and headaches they were experiencing previously.  Although I don’t have headaches, my eyes feel MORE tired wearing the glasses then when I go at it naked.  They also feel dry, very odd.

A recurring message in reviews of the glasses is you need to give your eyes an adjustment period to get used to them so that is what I am planning to do.  I am just a little freaked out that I am developing symptoms that Gunnars are supposed to help correct.  If this is still the case a week or two later then I will have to reevaluate.

Here I am day 4 of no blog. IX webhosting is STILL in the process of recovering servers.  A four day outage is like years in internet time.  It will be quite interesting to see what sort of compensation plan they come up with for customers that haven’t already jumped ship. On a positive note, my email server was restored early this morning so at least that avenue of communication is once again flowing.

Over the weekend Cindy and I had a discussion about living arrangements.  The lease on her apartment is up soon.  The talk was about the idea of her moving in with me at the house.  To some it might sound like a big leap but for those that are more familiar with the situation it really isn’t that much of a stretch.  Cindy already spends a good chunk of time each week at my place.  We have spent plenty of time going through day in and day out together, enough to know there are no major personal obstacles/problems with living under the same roof .

Sharing the living expenses would be a major financial plus for both of us and Cindy is always eager to help me out at the homestead with whatever needs doing.  Really my only two concerns were not being able to my own thing and lack of space.

Cindy has never been the demanding type, just the opposite really.  She loves to do things with me but is fine doing her own thing if I want to do the same.  Space-wise she actually doesn’t have all that much stuff.  Getting her “moved in” really shouldn’t be that involved at all.

So anyway we decided to move ahead with the plan.  I think it will be a good thing for both of us.  It should be complete by this time next month.

So I arrived at work pretty early this morning, before hardly anyone else was there.  As I walked in the door I spotted some movement on the ledge in front of the windows.  As I focused I saw it was a small bird.  The bird looked wobbly and weak, having a hard time standing up and not moving much as I got closer to it, not a good sign.

I went inside but I quickly returned outside with a small box.  My office has about a half dozen feral cats that hang around, the little bird was sure to be killed by one of them if I let it be.  I wasn’t sure what I was accomplishing by bringing the bird inside, perhaps only giving it a quiet place to die.  It allowed me to pick it up and put it in the box with little fuss.

The bird was small and almost looked to me like it could be a baby mockingbird.  He didn’t seem to have a broken wing as he did move around a bit and was able to keep both of his wings tucked back in what looked like a normal position.

I wondered if it was a baby that dropped out of a nest.  I went back outside and looked at the nearby trees, seeing if I could spot a nest.  I saw none.

I got my hands on a plastic cup that I cut the sides off to create a makeshift water bowl for the bird.  I showed the bird to my boss.  She brought in some small pieces of bread in case it was hungry.  The bird didn’t show any interest in either although he did make some noises when I tried to move him around.  The noises sounded like something a baby bird would make.

I told Cindy about my office guest.  She said the wildlife conservancy located near the main post office would be the logical place for the bird to go, if it was a youngster hopefully they could feed it until it was ready to go back out in the wild.  I asked Cindy if she would mind picking it up since her work was nearby, she was fine with it.

So as I worked I would check in on my little feathered friend.  He seemed to just be resting but when he noticed me he seemed more alert than when I first found him.  I had the top of the box open since it seemed obvious he was not old enough to fly.

Cindy told me she was in the parking lot so I walked out with the bird in the box, showing some co-workers along the way.  I found Cindy in the lot and showed her the bird.  Just as she was saying how cute it was the bird took off and flew to a set of trees 100 feet away.  My mouth dropped open as I looked at Cindy.  He can fly!  I was surprised and relieved that the little guy apparently was ok.

I thanked Cindy for stopping by and went back inside with my now empty box.  I guess the bird did actually fly into the window and was just dazed/woozy.  I’m still glad I took him in as I am pretty sure one of the cats would have finished the little guy off without a second thought.

It’s always nice when an animal in need story has a happy ending.