Two feeders!

One of the attendees at this morning's breakfast made mention of the high turnout of hummingbirds over at his place, to which I asked if he had more than one feeder available. When the answer came back in the affirmative, I knew I had to get off my dead end and put up a second feeder, because although the one I have up is being slowly sucked down, it appears this is being done by one bird, who is very, very aggressive about defending his "turf."

I took a look outside a little while ago and there must be nearly a dozen hummers doing their thing around the feeders. I am sure that among them is one bird that is (a) very tired, and (b) resigned, at least for the nonce.

Cheers...

(no subject)

An eFax this morning reminded me that I had to send in corrections, if any, to the proof of my review of Elsevier's Dictionary of Nuclear Engineering that had been sent earlier in the week. Fortunately, there was not a thing that needed changing, which guarantees that I missed something.

Reviewing dictionaries is not easy, and of course, the adjective "bilingual" should be prepended to the noun. Several years ago, I had worked with one of the coauthors of the volumes, which list for nearly $400, and I really, really wanted to like the books, but in the end, they seemed to me to have some fairly serious shortcomings, including one or two that I didn't explicitly mention in the review.

For the first time in many moons, however, I shall have two submissions published in two consecutive months in dead tree journals (albeit not for pay); the first item to appear is supposed to be my wiki article, which I finalized early during my trip to Kazakhstan, and the second will be the dictionary review.

* * *The masonry standard is finished, mostly. I have a page of diagrams to incorporate, and of course there is the obligatory review, but the bulk of the work is done. I coaxed about 35 pages out of my Epson; these will be the focus of my attention tomorrow and Sunday.

* * *The absolute lack of anything to watch (despite the selection of Dish Network channels) caused me to snap and go to the local Radio Shack affiliate to see what they had for rent. Feht swears by something by Penn & Teller, but I was in the mood for something... different. I think I found it with an independent film called The Station Agent, which was mildly entertaining. I also rented something called Starship Troopers 2; don't ask me why... maybe I'll watch it tomorrow night, or something.

One clue regarding how often we rent stuff around here was finding out that I still had a late charge outstanding with the RS affiliate, dating from December 2002! The owner was kind enough to expunge that charge without requiring me to pay for it.

Cheers...