meteor misses east coast

wow: from my view, the meteor hit somewhere near the potomac in charles county at about 12:40pm on valentine's day this week, but it actually fell into the ocean...this time...yeah: i saw it while driving on route 301 on the harry nice bridge leaving virginia, heading into maryland...of course: no one believed me, but i saw what i saw...and what i saw was something (fairly) large...on fire...headed toward the ground at a high rate of speed...sooo glad i am not alone!

national bird feeding month

the birds dont really need our help to find food this time of the year, but attracting birds to your yard can make the doldrums of winter seem so much brighter! so, dutifully, i cleaned and filled my freeze-less bird bath and filled the feeders around the yard last week in honor of national bird feeding month...but no one came: it has been so cold here in the temperate mid-atlantic, that even the birds are staying indoors! the bird feeder stayed full-even the squirrels werent interested-until sunday when we got a spring preview with temperatures in the mid-40's: then i saw me some birds! i saw six swans on the potomac...an eagle sitting in her (?) nest...titmice and chickadees...a flock of blue birds hanging with a bunch of waxwings...several thousand cackling grackles...a red shouldered hawk...a coopers hawk...four or five different varieties of woodpecker-types...and a white breasted nuthatch.  a ring necked kingfisher perched above my head on a dog walk by rock creek. 
now there are cardinals, robins and of course, starlings.

making lemonade

as i walk around my neighborhood after snowmagedon 2.0 i cant help but notice the vast amounts of fallen brush and branches caused by last week's heavy snow/ice combo...

many of the piles have been tagged as "too large" by our sanitation engineers, so they are laying all over the place.

why not recycle some of it into something fantastic?

canadian design group urban tree salvage showed off some of their inspired pieces at the 2011 toronto design show last week.

they need to get some trucks down here stat!

omg: gmo alfalfa approved

for the last few years, a consortium of organic growers have fought the use of bio-engineered seed by big business. the growers  are fighting the use of 'gmo's for a variety of reasons...mainly because bees pollinating genetically modified plants would also visit nearby organic crops, thus polluting them. well, according to slash food: they gave up! monsanto has just received the food and drug administration's backing to grow unrestricted amounts of alfalfa...to feed livestock, among other things...great.