.thar she blows.

Isn't she lovely in all her gaudy glory?

.with the naked eye.

The unseen matrix that makes us solid enough to hug, to touch, to kiss....

cytosine

 guanine

thymine

 uracil

That which makes us unique...

 dna

 The blood in our veins...

hemoglobin

The stuff that fuels our life in all of its achievements and losses...

atp

The part of us that prompts us to search out knowledge and pushes us to create...

brain

The stuff that makes each of us an enigma to others and to ourselves...

testosterone

estradiol

Cheers.

 

mint julep

*All these images are photomicrographs.  They came from The Molecular Expressions Photo Gallery.  Go and see for yourself and be amazed at what beer, antibiotics, flavors, dinosaur bones, and religious items look like under magnification.

.feathers friended.

(Leif came up with this post's title.  He's very clever.)

So here is the deal, in case you weren't already in on the secret.  Birds?  They're stupid.  Now, I am not making a generalization here.  Not all birds are stupid.  Just Red House Finches because those are the ones that we've got nesting and hanging around our house.

Why are they stupid?  Because it took them weeks to figure out that there was birdseed in the bird feeder, and that was only after our help.  We had to start by putting seed out on the porch and the railing.  That took them five days to figure out and it was directly beneath their nest.  Once one of them figured that there was food less than two feet away, suddenly there were four birds.  Then six birds...then eight birds.  Lord knows where they came from.  If spontaneous generation hadn't already been scientifically disproved I would be suspicious.

About a week went by with us continuing to put birdseed out on the porch in the hopes that one of them would land on the bird feeder and make a very pleasant discovery.  Finally I got fed up with the birds' obvious lack of consideration for my porch and so I decided to make finding the bird feeder tremendously easy for them.  We went to the pet store and got one of those bird treat stick thingies and I tied it to the bird feeder.  I watched those boogers try to figure out how to land on that thing for a good two hours (I know.  Who has free time to do that kind of shit?  Me, that's who).  Success! 

Now they fight over who gets to be in the bird feeder. 

Yes they are stupid.  Very, very stupid.  But being stupid has never stopped me from loving something.  They really are the closet thing to a pet I can have since God decided it would be funny to make me allergic to every single cute animal on the planet.

So here they are.  My Red House Finches and the interloper, the Black-throated Sparrow (who totally dominates the poor finches).

Black-throated Sparrow (or Dennis, as Leif likes to call him).

.for the birds.

A pair of sparrows have made a nest on our porch.  When our front door is open we can see them on the telephone lines outside, flying back and forth from their nest.  I've never been much of a "birder" but lately I've been loving watching all of our feathered friends that live around our apartment.  So I got this bird house/feeder from Anthropologie yesterday.  I'm hoping that it attracts some of the other birds that I know are in the neighborhood even though it means cleaning up bird droppings (yuck).