Earthworn

Yes, an earthworm.

I try to grow a little something for the cats and dogs to browse on during the winter, and bird seed sprouts easily and quickly and they all like it. I re-purposed a pot I had used to grow herbs in. The pot spent most of the summer outside and unknown to me picked up at least one earthworm.

I started this pot of bird seed last week, with lots of water and stirring. Today, it's sunny, so I thought I'd move the pot into the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the window. The instant the pot moved into the sun, this earthworm crawled out of the shallows and wriggled around on the surface.

I'm not sure who was more tickled, me or the 7 year old who got to hold an earthworm in January! After his portrait, he was returned to the pot where we watched him point his nose down and burrow back into the soil. A sprinkle of water to make sure he wasn't too dry and I'm sure he's fine.

Snowy tree

I haven't been taking many photos so I had to go back a feww weeks for this image. This was taken on a clear, bright day that followed a cloudy, snowy night. The contrast in my spirits is just as pronounced as the contrast in he weather. What a lovely sight to wake up to!

An ordinary day

Just an ordinary day. The sun is out, which is a bit unusual :-) but the snow is mostly off the street, the school bus is picking up children and people haven't headed off to work yet so there are cars on the street.

Morning sun

It seems as if the skies have been a solid, leaden grey for a long, long time - it's so good to see the sun in the morning for a change! After Christmas, when the lights are no longer turned on, the amount of colour goes way down. Everything seems to be grey or brown. Even the snow is grey after a short while. Dust and dirt, I suppose.

Seeing a bright flag like this is like a jolt of caffeine for the eyes. Once I got past that, I rather liked the textures of the side-lit planter boxes (can one call a concrete planter a box?) and the shadow of the hibernating trailing plant.

Census preparations

Schenectady's population has been declining since our industrial heyday in the 1950s. There was a minor scandal during the previous decennial census which caused more than one city official to declare that we were under counted for political reasons. The official population stands just below 62000. New York politics is way too complicated to explain in a blog, so I'll leave that at that, but the upshot is that the city really, really wants to make sure that every resident is counted.

Federal and NY State funding relies on the population count as well as the byzantine NY State Education Department calculations on school aid distribution. So many programs rely on the population count that it's become one of the key indicators (as crazy as that sounds.)

Apparently the Census people have an equally strong desire to get the count right, because they've given money to the city to buy advertising, to prepare us to be tallied. I picked up this t-shirt at a public meeting reviewing the city's block grant development program. It's not just a generic census shirt - it has the city seal on the upper left breast with the mayor's name as well.

Not much different

After being away for 20 days the street looks pretty much the same as it did when we left. Snow on the ground, snow banks atop the grass and grey skies.

Back from holiday

I was away on holiday and got so caught up in the preparations that I didn't think to set up automatic posts for my time away from a computer. This is what it looked like when I left and it hasn't changed much upon my return!