This Cooper’s Hawk landed on our bird feeder yesterday morning. One moment the finches, wrens, jericoes and quail were flocking about, happily pecking at seeds, the next they’d poofed and this guy appeared, as if manifesting full-blown from Zeus’s forehead.
Oh yeah, they eat mainly birds. Prowling the feeders seems a titch unfair, though I suppose we’re technically still feeding birds…
We’ve been working the last few days on setting up a new group blog, the Word-Whores. It’s Allison‘s baby and there will be seven of us altogether, which lets each of us blog on one day a week. This is a group of gals who are all some of my favorite people. We plan to launch on January 1, 2011. 1/1/11 – nice symmetry to that.
At any rate, we’ll all blog on a similar theme each week, so we wanted to come up with a year’s worth of topics. We each submitted at least eight ideas and then voted on the whole list. The top 52 became our year’s worth of topics.
It was really fun for me to see the results. (Hey – I like spreadsheets, okay?) Every suggested topic received at least one vote. Six topics received unanimous votes.
The one topic I really didn’t like got six votes, too. I was clearly the only person who didn’t like it. Marcella – whose sci fi comes out ONE WEEK FROM TODAY! – said that the one topic she didn’t like made the list, too. So then we spent some time talking about those topics and how we’d address them when it came time. By the end of the conversation, I had a good idea of what I’d write for mine. And I realized I spent more time thinking about the one topic I didn’t like, than all the rest put together.
There’s a lesson here somewhere. The same kind of lesson as joining a book group because you’ll read books you wouldn’t otherwise. Working with a group of people means you entertain ideas you normally wouldn’t. It forces you to turn your perspective and see the world from a slightly different angle.
And you know I always like that kind of thing.