When your kid joins you in Atlanta!
1. At Oakland Cemetery’s Illumine evening event
2. Quick stop at AmericasMart revealed some surprises 🤔
3. Waymo 😍
4. Book vending machine at Krog Street Market
5. Georgia Aquarium (yes, we saw the whale shark, I just didn’t get photos)
6-9 Oakland Cemetery, with a surprise visit by Kenny Rogers 🎶
10-11 Woke up to pea soup — and an amazing photo of the Truist building as the fog moved on
12-13 Marietta antique mall
14. Seriously, EVERYWHERE (this print was in our Marietta hotel room)
When in Atlanta attending the ACES (American Copy Editors Society) conference at the massive Westin Peachtree Center hotel:
1 Airport art-birds
2, 3, 4 The Westin — a concrete spaceship with a view
5-9 The King Center and MLK historic park, where almost everything is closed for remodeling but it was moving to see Auburn Avenue.
10 You can see the Westin from all over
11 Mural on the way back to our hotel
12 The Polaris rotating restaurant at the Hyatt was integrated from when it opened in 1967
13 A birding excursion on Friday morning at Centennial Olympic Park
14 The exciting moment when we were the first to learn that AP Style now says “healthcare” is one word
15 No actual rats were seen
16 Sweet poem at the rose garden at the MLK center
To my great excitement, chickadees are working on a nest in our next box!
Here's a 4x sped-up video of the work being done by "my" pair of chickadees, named Paolo and Fifi. (I don't know why they have those names, they just do. Ask their moms.)
Mark made this little nest box for me to the specifications chickadees like and put in a teeny Wi-Fi camera. We placed it inside our porch 3 years ago because, for a couple of years, the chickadees had come, repeatedly exploring the porch corners. The first year, nothing happened. Last year and again in the fall, a chickadee gentleman showed the place a few times, and he has even spent time sleeping atop it, which Amy Ajva tells me might mean he's claiming it.
Then I learned chickadees prefer to excavate their own nest cavities, so we put wood chips inside (Mark: "Do I have wood chips!!!"). Starting while we were out of town, they have begun removing these wood chips. I was worried that our return would upset them, but chickadees can recognize specific people, and they don't seem bothered. Over the past 10 days or so, they visit the box 15-20 times a day, sometimes just looking around, more often removing beakfuls of wood chips and dropping it I don't know where -- they fly across the front of our house and take the chips a ways away, not right outside the nest.
From what I think I see, Fifi sometimes thrusts out her legs and does some flapping to help shape wider outsides and a flatter, empty cup in the middle, while Paolo looks around and then carries out chips. At least some mornings, Paolo comes in first to check. The other day, when Fifi was inside, Paolo waited outside and sang his "fee-bee" song to her.
They usually come and go for a minute or two, with long pauses between. I chose this video because, for four minutes, they came and went rapidly -- and I sped it up so you don't have to spend four minutes watching. Enjoy!
‼️ * Please vote by 9 a.m. PT/12 noon ET! * Ani & I are down by 13 votes!
Please go to /final4-foldsvsdifranco/ THIS MORNING and vote for me & Ani DiFranco! Voting is open until 10 a.m. MT on Saturday, March 28. @anidifranco@righteousbabe
The @marchxness tournament has been fun. But what brought me in was sadness: the grief and self-recrimination of Ani DiFranco’s achingly beautiful song. Here’s one more dive, this time with feeling. Hope you’ll vote for me, but if not, I’ll go out singing. Thank you, @anidifranco@righteousbabe
