Valentines and Owls

Whew.  What an odd week.  Monday at work there was a lot of network problems, which made it feel like a stereo-typical Mercury Retrograde Day.  It was a rainy week, too, which made things like the electric throw extremely attractive.  I forget which day having the throw really helped my feet feel like something I could walk on instead of places where someone had stuck icy-cold electrodes into my toes.


Saturday, Mark and I went for a walk downtown and had a belated Valentine's Snack.  Our reasoning was that if we tried to eat on Friday night, we'd be packed in between wall-to-wall Valentine's Day Couples.  We found a cute little place on Willamette and 14th, which used to be a Really Large Antique Store, but is now a series of Big City Style cafes and eateries.  Our stop was a brewery-pub with a kind of Arts And Crafts feel.  We ate a lot of yummy and fatty snacks, the most popular being battered and fried cauliflower, dipped in plum sauce.


Sunday, the skies cleared, which made it a good day to visit the Cascades Raptor Center.  I turned up the ISO to 800 and left the tripod home.  This time around I missed events where the birds were brought out of their aviaries, so I failed to have cage-free photos.  I did manage to blur out some bars while taking photos of Dimitri the Eurasian Eagle-owl.  The sunlight streamed into his aviary at just the right angle, and, fortuitously, was illuminating him and not the mesh of his enclosure.  I even managed to get a few photos of him saying, "Who-whooo," which makes the white feathers at his throat bulge out.

Mark joined me and we visited Puck, who flew up to the edge of the aviary to show us the mouse tail he was eating.  Other bits of mouse appeared to be stashed away at various corners of his enclosure.  Newton seemed to be speaking to Mark, and we wondered if he wanted us to feed him.  Apollonia wasn't as agitated as she's appeared in the past.

Just before we left, we got to see Dimitri get weighed and fed--he became excited, and made a deep sound like, "Naaaah, naaaah!" which I thought was a small child or possibly the sound created by some folks who 3-D printed an Ancient Egyptian's larynx.  But no, it was Dimitri, which became clear when he flew nearer, and said, "Naaaaaaah!" from a perch right next to us.   Then a trainer came in and directed him to roost on a scale and other perches for pieces of rat.


I managed to get to the Gym Monday (as previously reported), Wednesday, and Friday; doing the Push-Pull, the Aerobic, and the Push-Pull routines, respectively.  


On the writing front, I managed to polish and submit a story.  I should submit some more.