By way of apology to the wild birds in our neighborhood

Written towards the end of May, just in case

By Moristotle

Besides missing Siegfried, who will be kenneled for the month of June, a sadness of being away from home, mostly in Paris, is the knowledge that our neighborhood’s wild birds will find no seeds in our back yard all that time. They won’t even find their favorite feeders. I took the favorite feeders down this morning to stage the photograph shown above. Though it may look inviting enough to you, I who delight in seeing & hearing birds there, find it a desolate spectacle.

Don't look grumpy

But, then, how does grumpy look?

Click to enlarge so you can read
some of the book titles

    Anyway, I did this self-portrait yesterday, with our new, digiscoping-ready Nikon Coolpix P100 camera. All we need now, to hook it up to the field scope, is a wide eyepiece, something I failed to order with the camera and the adapter.

Actually, the expression we should be seeing in the self-portrait is relief. I started out the day fasting for an upper endoscopy scheduled for about 9:30. And, though only vaguely aware of it at the time, I was in a shitty mood.
    But as soon as I was come to again from the procedure (which had involved light sedation to render me sleepy and amnesiac), I felt quite chipper—even before I'd had anything to break my fast, even including the two cups of cranberry-grape juice and two packets of graham crackers I was given a little while later. The sunny feeling made me realize that I had been fairly worried about the procedure, with its potential for finding that I, too, along with Christopher Hitchens, might be expected to die fairly soon of esophageal cancer.
    Not anytime soon, at any rate.
    So let's admire our relieved look.
_______________

Dwarf Grumpy

Here's how Walt Disney & Co. thought grumpy looked: