It is easy to stop blogging. I'm going to try to blog every day this week. It is a holiday week for us with school out for a totally bogus Winter Break, designed just to make the school year longer. Someone somewhere thinks students retain more information in their heads if the don't have a summer break. The interesting dicotomy in that is that the person who had accumulated enough information to make this pronouncement, got his or her education, with summer breaks. Perhaps if they had not had summer breaks they would be so smart that they'd realize that it doesn't make a difference. Getting a vacation didn't make me stupid.

I wanted to blog about the birds. You hear bad things about the birds all the time. Nesting areas destroyed. Massive declines in bird counts. Song birds dissapearing. I can't dispute any of that. When I walk Patches in the morning right now it is still pretty cold. Usually below freezing or close to freezing. We walk just after sun up with the glare of low angle sun casting looooong shadows interspersed with golden blasts of light. While we walk we hear the birds. There are so many bird calls that it can only be described as "the bird orchestra, warming up." You know how the orchestra sounds sitting on the stage waiting for the maestro. They create that unique aleatoric music (okay I'm being intentionally ironic here) that we associate with orchestras. Trumpets blaring, strings in chaos as though all tuned to different pitches. The birds sound like that. Scratching strings, blaring calls, and an occasional player, flying on to the stage from the wings to take their place. If they made much more noise it would be scary!

Our student Johanna was in Lie to Me on TV recently. She is soon to be in 9 episodes on Greek, another TV show and she's in all the promos for the new season. It is good to see her shining face.