pastiche and bunting

I woke up at 7:45 a.m., just in time to drive to the Connemara Meadow Preserve for the First Saturday bird walk. Rodney Thomas led the walk. May is a great month for Summer arrivals and Spring migrants. We saw Indigo Buntings, Painted Buntings, Baltimore Orioles, and a few vireos and warblers. Roughly 16 of us walked for 3 1/2 hours. It's great to have a wildlife sanctuary a ten minute drive from my home. Connemara Meadow was once a farm, but was donated to a conservancy to preserve its open spaces for wildlife. My only quibble is that the bird walkers, being diligent about stopping for birds, brought me only 5,100 steps on my step counter. Had I walked alone at a state park, I would have seen fewer birds but walked 12,000+ steps. Yet the May Connemara walk is always a good one, and I'm richer for the experience.

I dined at Denny's on egg whites, turkey bacon, fresh fruit and a slice of ham. I took Beatrice for a walk, during which she stared longingly at squirrels in trees. Then I created a new song using samples for the Secret Mixter regular event I was assigned Jason Brock's samples, who records on the Mixter as Spinning Merkaba. I used a curious electronic instrument called Noiser 1.0, which alters samples in unpredictable ways. I recorded and edited several Noiser passages, and then edited them in Audacity into a song. I was intrigued by the result, a somewhat unconventional pastiche that nonetheless vaguely resembles a song.

In the early evening, I went to Green Park near my home, where I got some good pictures of a singing male House Finch. Then we headed out to Silver Thai, where I had monsoon rolls with tofu and spicy bah-mee soup. It was a good day.

passing of the computer guard

I woke up early this morning. I posted my Secret Mixter upload and reviewed others' songs. I ate a bowl of Kix Cereal and skim milk. I walked at the Chisholm Trail in Plano, where I watched an Eastern Phoebe flit from place to place. At my Weight Watchers meeting, the computers were down. I was up a bit over two pounds, just as last week I was fairly inexplicably down all but .2 of the same pounds.

I went to church at First UMC. The young man who is the Recreation Minister gave a good mother's day sermon about having in the past year married a woman with two children. He went from a single man in a one-bedroom apartment to being a family man helping to raise two daughters. The service was good.

After the service, I ate two soft beef tacos at Casa Taco. I went home. I took Beatrice for a walk around the neighborhood pond.

Recently, I bought a used 12" laptop on eBay. My $ 54 cheap eBay laptop capably served its job as my workhorse work travel laptop for a bit over three years. But it seems, despite an adequate battery, hopeless at charging. I have not sorted out its issue, which may be fixable but is beyond me. The new laptop cost $ 102, cord and all. It is also a 12" laptop, but its i7 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and 320 GB of hard drive storage make it more impressive than the prior computer's U2500 Core Duo, 2 GB of RAM and 60 GB hard drive.

I had an Elementary OS installation disk handy, so I tried installing that. But something went amiss. So I created a new Q4OS disk and installed that operating system. Soon I was loading the desktop mega-package and programs like Audacity, WINE and OpenShot that I regularly use. I still need to add a few things I use to make music, but it was good to get it set up.

I drove to Green Park and walked about a bit more among Northern Mockingbirds and swooping Barn Swallows. Then at home, my wife made an impressive 7" flatbread pizza with Canadian bacon and low-fat mozarella. We watched "Wallander" on PBS. I fired up the old $ 53 laptop and extracted onto a USB stick all the files I want to move to the new computer. At some point, I will wipe its disk and sell it on eBay as a parts-only system. Who knows? Maybe the buyer will know how to fix it.