Like Damp Earth, Leaf Litter, and Moss...

...was the smell of the woods on my hike yesterday. I forgot what springtime in the woods smelled like and realized how much I missed it. Yet again I caught myself slogging muddy trails after dark, but I don't mind. Again also I will mention that I find it strange that the woods in the night-time was one of my biggest fears well into my teenage years, now it happens to be my biggest source of zen moments and spiritual/mental/emotional epiphanies. I am noticing more and more that life in general and mine in particular is filled with odd paradoxes and like a newly learned word... the moment you grasp it and integrate it into your vocabulary, suddenly it is popping up everywhere, causing you to take note of it; 'prescient' being one of them, and seemingly apropos given some recent life circumstances which I won't expound upon right now.

A lovely quote spotted on a placard in the meetinghouse library today:
"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." -Rabindranath Tagore
It gave me some food for thought, even more so than much of the reading I've been doing lately.

I finally got a laptop computer, purchased for $200 plus some mind-numbing computer work for a couple of friends. The model I worked on was a Dell Inspiron 1500 which turned out to have some device driver issues, a couple of viruses, and a bazillion spyware programs on it. The model I received for this bargain price was an Inspiron 1100. Definitely not top of the line, but more than sufficient for my purposes. I also needed to do a bit of work on this one being as it was infected with one of those malicious RIAA rootkits as well as more viruses and spyware. Both machines are now in excellent working order.

Oh yeah, and I know this post is totally going A.D.D. on you, so I should just run with it now... a few random pictures I found lying around on the computer (I can't remember whether or not some of these have been posted here before):

Me (around age 20 or 21?) and 'Little Buster Brown', a baby robin that my sister's dog brought in unharmed after finding it outdoors. He was an awkward-looking little pink blob with quills when I first took him home and brought him up on a diet of meat-based baby food, worms, and assorted bugs. It was amusing for visitors to see me puttering around in the back yard with him on my shoulder or head. I enjoyed making them think I was some sort of ultra nature boy. Raising this little guy was easy, but the problematic part was letting him go. He just kept coming back no matter how often or how far I took him into the woods. The most amusing scenario was when I thought he was finally gone and he came barreling out of the bushes, landing SPLAT! into a bowl of spaghetti that I was enjoying on my parents' front deck.

A nice silhouetted sunset shot that I took while walking to a friend's house the other evening


'Cromwell', a wild turkey who frequents my parents' back yard


A couple of macro shots of a 'Cherry' shrimp, Neocaridina denticulata sinensis, in one of the planted displays at my workplace

Back when I had long hair, not sure what got into my head back then (I drank a lot back then, so possibly too much Captain Morgan???) ;-p

Glamour shot