American robin

This week's bird is a cheery fellow.

It's a red red robin just bob-bob-bobbin' along.  These birds are ubiquitous at the moment, but they only turn up at the start of spring.  From something I saw on the local news the people hereabouts view their arrival as an indicator that spring has really sprung.

American robins are actually thrushes, just with fancy coats on.  The red breast is a deeper red in the males than the females, which makes it fairly easy to tell them apart and identify pairs.  They like to scour our back lawn for worms.

As you can see the red breast is balanced by quite a dull grey-brown back and a black head, but the overall coloration does make them stand out, even in the trees - as long as they aren't facing away from you, when it can be quite tricky to tell if you're looking a a robin or perhaps something more exotic.

They don't make a lot of noise during the day but they do have a complicated song which is part of the dawn chorus. Mrs Walles and I have also heard them singing in the evening.  One quite surprised us by starting up just outside our open front door recently, not least because we seldom actually see them as they sing.  We weren't sure what kind of bird was making the noise but when I poked my head out the door I saw it was a robin sitting on the lawn singing his little heart out.  I didn't notice any of the throbbin' mentioned in the song...but I guess that was just to make the rhyme work, anyway.

Thunder and lightning

Sorry posts have been scarce this week, Mrs Walles and I have been away. More on that in upcoming posts.  Right now, though, I'm distracted by the dirty great thunderstorm headed my way.  It shouldn't be a surprise, thunderstorms have been forecast for our neck of the woods today just like they have most days for the last two weeks.  But it's been a lovely sunny day until now and I thought I would be able to get away with nipping out to the shops for ingredients for tomorrow's dinner.

And of course as I closed the door I heard a crack of thunder and looked up to see half the sky consumed by dark and brooding clouds.  I retreated uncertainly and now, having checked the weather, find that the storm is predicted to be severe with possible hail and gales.  So I think I'll give the shops a miss for the moment, at least until it has passed.  To be honest I'm not too worried about postponing my jaunt - it is very hot and muggy out right now.


A storm passed over us on Monday accompanied by something I had never heard before, a constant loud and low rumble.  At first I took it to be thunder and but it was so unfamiliar that I actually began to wonder if it really was thunder, or if it was some weather phenomenon hitherto unknown to me.  In a moment of panic it occurred to me that a tornado might make a sound like that (we aren't at much risk of tornadoes here - but it can happen).  Fortunately I was mistaken: it was rolling thunder after all, and a few minutes later the torrents of rain and wind arrived.  It wasn't a twister but it was dramatic all the same.

And now that I've finished this I'll stick my head out the door and see if it's all clear.  Well, I'll look out the window first - otherwise, if I'm not careful, I'll end up with a spiky hairdo and a shocked expression.

Northern flicker

As I write this a rather impressive thunderstorm is approaching, so if this entry stops abrubptly you'll know why.

Anyway, the bird this week is the northern flicker, which Mrs Walles and I have been hearing more than seeing recently.  Until just recently hardly a day would go by without a couple of these astonishing birds perusing the grass out the back.

I haven't seen one for quite some time.  Mrs Walles saw one today, though, which reminded me that I'd been meaning to blog about them.

If they look a little like woodpeckers, that's because they are.  Unlike a typical woodpecker, though, they don't peck trees to eat, only to nest.  Most of the time you see them on the ground looking for tasty morsels in the grass.  But it's spring, and nesting season, so I expect the flickers are busy doing other things.  They'll be back, though.  I remember they were around a lot in the summer last year - then it was little flicker families being shepherded around by the mother.

I like them because they look like an artist has gone to town decorating them, with spots and dots and gold and a bib and a swoosh and a little red thing here and...well you get the picture - literally.  A total contrast to the minimalist crows from last week, these birds are baroque and then some.  And that decoration tends to make them look like they're smiling, like a clown's makeup, whether they're in a good mood or not.

So I look forward to their return, though the wik wik wik call we keep hearing suggests they aren't far away anyway.  Out of sight, maybe, but not out of hearing.

Who's the boss?

We had a power cut this morning, for about an hour.  One of our neighbours knocked on the door to check if the power was off here, too, which saved me wondering if it was just something wrong with our wiring (which wouldn't surprise me, given the way things are set up in this house, but maybe that's an American thing...).  He was annoyed because he'd just put a load of laundry in the drier, I was annoyed because I'd just started cleaning the bathrooms and there is no natural light in either of them.

See anything odd about this picture?  Fifty years ago I doubt it would be two men stuck with the domestics to do and no electricity to do them with.

Anyway, this inversion of gender stereotypes pleased Mrs Walles very much when I told her about it.  And not surprisingly because there are (especially in conservative places like this) expectations about men and women.  Case in point: the bill in restaurants.

When you ask for the bill (or check - ooh, look at me) it comes to the table and invariably it will be placed in front of me.  Because I'm the man.  Even though we live in supposedly enlightened times and it's usually Mrs Walles doing the honours at the moment, it still comes to me.  And not just in little ma and pa places, big chains, too, where you might think some carefully thought out company policy would make them put it in the middle of the table or something.  Maybe they tried that and all the men felt insulted and emasculated.  Or maybe nobody really thinks about it - except they do, because Mrs Walles does and I don't imagine she's alone.  It's just strange.

Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and fold some clothes.  A fella's work is never done!

The Beeb

Having come from New Zealand to the US, I suppose it is a little odd that I distract myself from the culture shock by seeking out programmes produced in a third country which I have never visited.  But I'm hooked on the BBC (and, to be fair, other British stuff, but let's not get sidetracked).  I'm especially keen on the radio, ever since I discovered over eight years ago that BBC radio is crazy courteous enough to put all their shows online for anyone to listen to anywhere in the world.

It's just a shame that they don't do the same thing with their TV shows.  A lot of them can be obtained on DVD over here and Mrs Walles and I have now built up quite a collection (Mrs Walles is particularly partial to the Vicar of Dibley).  But not everything can be had (alas, QI is denied me now).

There is even an entire cable channel called BBC America which, you might think, would help satisfy my cravings.  You'd be wrong.

Let's have a look at tonight's schedule, shall we?  At 8pm there's an exciting episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  That's on a lot, for some reason, even though as far as I can tell the only thing British about it is one of the actors.  Before that there's two repeats of Top Gear - at least it's British - and afterwards there's three episodes of The Tudors in a row.  And that's a good night.  They used to have the news on, but that recently shifted to public television.  You can also catch The X Files on BBC America...I guess it was popular in Britain?  Perhaps you're a fan of Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - in which case BBC America is the channel for you because it plays it several times a week.  They can't get enough of it.  I mean, it's set in England, right?  Don't worry, though, there's new programming coming soon - they're particularly excited about repeating the old new Battlestar Galactica.  For some reason.

Now, to be fair, you do get Graham Norton only a week after they show it in the UK.  That's about the only upside though.  I can only assume that nobody remotely connected with the BBC, or Britain come to that, has ever watched BBC America.

Fortunately some of the other channels pick up a wider range of output from Britain, like The IT Crowd.  So all is not lost.  I wouldn't mind if BBC America were lost, though.  I wouldn't be able to watch Kevin Costner in a jerkin 24/7, but somehow I think I'd live.

American crow

This week's bird, the crow, I had previously seen only when a TV show or movie needed some dark and moody symbolism.  I'm pretty sure there's an unwritten rule that every funeral scene must include a crow.  As birds go they don't have a pleasant reputation in our culture.  And I can see why, when they hang around in skeletal trees looking all broody and Byronic like this one.

And their loud caws are pretty unpleasant, too.

So it's no surprise that the scarecrow was invented.  Nevertheless, I don't mind them.  They are quite interesting to watch as they feed in little packs of three, with two poking around on the ground and a third keeping watch from a tree, occasionally rotating jobs.  And they are big.  Some of the ones we see around here are probably about the size of a chicken, but sleeker.  There are supposed to be ravens in Pennsylvania, too, (which, partly thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, have an even creepier reputation) but I haven't seen one - they are supposed to be even bigger.

But in the end they are just birds, and their reputation is undeserved.  If you ask me it's all about colour.  The blue jay is very closely related but escapes the crow's stigma because of its bright decoration.  But it's actually the more aggressive of the two, I believe.  Setting helps, too.  Here's a crow in the spring.

 Much better, don't you agree?  Much less of the harbinger of doom about it.

Indeed in the spring and summer the crow stands out clearly, unlike a lot of other birds which blend in.  So it is showy in its own way.  Alas, I doubt my attempt to rehabilitate the crow's image will do much.  The cardinal and blue jay are always going to be the stars of tea towels and garden flags, let's face it.  But I still like the crow.

Out of order

One of the things I'm probably never going to get used to is the way Americans write dates.  I'm fine if the month is spelled out in letters - it's hard to go wrong there - but the convention that the month comes first throws me off if all numbers are used.  Today is the eleventh of May, which I would write as 11/5/11, but here it's 5/11/11.

I look at that last one and part of me thinks it's the fifth of November, and another part has to pull back on the reins and correct myself.

The really annoying thing is that in my everyday life I come across both - this is the fault of the internet,  I guess, for making both kinds of dates available.  The result is that whenever I come across a date written this way, either month-first or day-first, I have to stop and think to figure out which it is.  It's even worse if I have to write the date, which I've been doing recently on various immigration forms, because the only thing to stop me tripping up is my own brain, which is confused about the whole matter anyway. 

Maybe it will become easier with time.

Suffering succotash!

For some reason it never really occurred to me that Sylvester's catchphrase might refer to a real thing, certainly not to a thing you might find stacked in the supermarket.

Even after seeing it there in the freezer I wasn't exactly sure what it was - Mrs Walles thought it might be some kind of green leafy thing, while to me it evoked some kind of delicious squash, but the outside of the bag showed corn and beans.  And it turns out that's just what it is: a mixture of sweetcorn and lima beans, boiled.  It's basically mixed veg (though there are slight variations, according to Wikipedia - which I must stop relying on so much).  It's from the Narragansett word msiquatash - I actually looked that one up in the dictionary.  On a hunch I also looked up "squash", and it too comes from Narragansett, this time asquutasquash.

Curious to know who these people were who made such a contribution to the language of food and cartoon cats I looked up Narragansett (in the dictionary, honest, but this way you can read about them, too) and found that it was a language once spoken by various tribes in New England and Long Island, which is fascinating especially since Mrs Walles hails from that part of the world.  I see on the Wikipedia page that they're trying to revive the language, well, they've got two words to build on right there.

Ah, what an amazing language English is.  At least the borrowed words from far-flung parts of the world show that the British took the time to talk to people before they seized their land.

An old-fashioned deck-raising

Mrs Walles and I noticed the other day that something structurally unsound is going on with our back deck, so we emailed our landlord.  We heard back that she is arranging to have it rectified (possibly replaced) by some Amish, which is very exciting. Only in Pennsylvania.

I hope that there will be fiddles and lemonade and Harrison Ford skulking in the background...though I suspect it will be actually be some Amish men Just Getting The Job Done.  And they probably wouldn't appreciate it if we charged tourists money to stand in our yard and watch them work.

I've seen Amish working before, actually, roofing a house down the road.  They don't have to pay tax, and they have an outstanding reputation, so naturally the non-Amish contractors hate them because they undercut them and take all their work.

But that's nothing to do with me, I'm just wide-eyed outsider, who thinks it's neat to be connected in any way with these interesting people.  Let's face it, I'm not likely to have much contact with them otherwise.  They probably view a person like me (a computer programmer and technology writer) as some kind of antichrist.  I don't think they go in for popish rituals like exorcism, but I'd rather not find out the hard way.

American goldfinch

I won't run out of birds for the bird of the week any time soon, as the change in season is bringing all different kinds into our back yard.  Grackles and catbirds and woodpeckers, oh my!

For this week I've chosen a very showy new arrival, the American goldfinch.

I hadn't seen any of these until we put the feeder up, and even then they took their time arriving.  Apparently they can be seen in large flocks in the winter, but I don't know where.  Ah, well, they are here now - or at least they were.  After the rain we've had the last week or so they seem to have fled.  The weather did keep me from cleaning and restocking the feeder this week, though, so maybe they'll be back once they twig that there are free sunflower seeds again.  My field guide says they can be found anywhere there are thistles and sunflowers, which is promising.

When they are around they are really around, though.  There's room for four birds to pirch on our feeder at a time, and quite often I would look out and see goldfinches on all four perches, plus a couple clinging to the outside waiting their turn and also one or two sitting on the deck.  The seed disappeared like it was going out of fashion.  Here's three of them captured at it (they're quite flighty so it's a difficult thing to achieve).

Despite their size, about that of a sparrow, the black forehead makes them look quite tough, if you ask me.  That bottom one looks like he's about to ask if I have a problem in a menacing, Al Pacino kind of way.

But they do look very pretty and they definitely brighten up any day, even with their Hitchcockian tendencies.

Lincoln people together

There wasn't a heck of a lot to see from the hotel room we stayed in in York last week, as you can see.

We weren't in the thick of it.  The most interesting thing about that picture, as far as I can tell, is the road running through the centre of it.  That's US Route 30.  If you turned left on it and drove and drove you'd eventually end up in Atlantic City, New Jersey on the Atlantic coast.  If you turned right you'd eventually find yourself in Astoria, Oregon on the Pacific Coast.  It's a road that runs across America.

There are several of these, a notable one being Interstate 80 which also runs through Pennsylvania on its way from New York to San Francisco.  But even though it has been superseded, Route 30 is interesting because it was made up largely from large parts of the Lincoln Highway, the first highway to cross the country.  Many stretches of Route 30 still follow the Lincoln Highway, though the bit in the picture above is not one of them, but rather one of the many bypasses that evade town centres that the original highway passed right through.  On the whole, though, Pennsylvania is a good state in which to follow the historic route.  It's a nice drive and some stretches (such as west of Lancaster) give a real taste of what highway travel must have been like in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.


It's said that the Lincoln Highway inspired the vast Interstate Highway System which eventually put it and its friends in the shade, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then in the army, travelled along it in 1919.  It may not be as famous as Route 66, but it has outlasted it (lasting almost a hundred years is itself an impressive feat here) and gathered a lot of history along the way.  I think Route 30 deserves to be remembered, even if it is by a foreigner who doesn't drive.

Drinks with dinner

I don't know if this one is just because I'm unworldly or whether it's a genuine American phenomenon, but Americans seem to make a strict habit of drinking (in the general sense, not just alcohol) with each meal.  Having a drink with a meal doesn't weird me out, but having one with every meal took a little time to adjust to.

Before I came here I would have a cup of tea at breakfast and maybe after lunch.  Sometimes I'd have something with dinner, especially if I was out, but I didn't make a habit of it.  Now we are together, Mrs Walles and I have something to drink with every meal: coffee and juice with breakfast, tea or something cold with lunch and something cold again with dinner.  When in Rome...

On the whole this is a good thing, especially at home.  Here there is always orange juice in the fridge, and sweet iced tea and a plethora of fizzy drinks - even diet ones - that New Zealand manufacturers apparently have yet to discover.

In restaurants, though, things are usually more bleak.  Americans drink juice at breakfast but not other meals, so you can't usually get it unless the place serves breakfast.  There is always a standard line up of Coke or Pepsi products, most of which are packed with sugar (or, rather, high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener of choice in this corn-fed land).  Your options are pretty much diet cola or water, unless you're feeling rakish with respect to calories, and even that doesn't expand the range much.

There are exceptions, of course.  Perkins, one of our regular places, has chocolate milk and shakes on the menu, and another restaurant chain called Ruby Tuesday (ah, Ruby Tuesday) offers not only juice but delectible exotic juice cocktails with limitless refills.

But in general, the drink options seem limited.  Not any less limited than they might be in New Zealand. But in this land of plenty - where you can have your food customised about a hundred different ways - the relative dearth of drink choices leads me to think that those drinks with dinner aren't supposed to be enjoyed in their own right, they're just lubrication to help the food go down.

This all makes me sound ridiculously petulant and ungrateful (not to say that I'm not) but really, I think I'm starting to understand the American attitude.  After all, when the food is this good - and it is really good - who cares about the drinks?

The green green grass of home

As I've mentioned before, they like their lawns in this part of the world.  That's no problem for me: I'm fond of an expanse of turf myself.  With the onset of spring the lawn in our back yard has erupted into a colourful display.  Apart from the rich green, of course, there are a lot of weeds that make for a picturesque effect.  Lots of dandelions.  Lots. And quite a few different little purplish things that are rather pretty.  Now back in New Zealand I'd generally view dandelions and other weeds with disdain, but here the general effect is very like a meadow, with a liberal application of wild flowers.

I'm not the only one enjoying it, here's a bunny enjoying the view: lunch as far as the eye can see!

The meadow effect is helped along by the fact that there are no fences worth speaking of out there, so it's not just our back yard we look on to but the back yards of at least a dozen neighbours on our block.  There's at least an acre of meadow out there looking picturesque.  Or at least there was until the mowing started.  They do like a lawn here but preferably a neatly trimmed one.  Mrs Walles agrees that the view has been very pretty, but I suspect our view is a minority one and the others - quite understandably - prefer their lawn shaved neatly into submission.

It's interesting to watch the mowing spread.  One person decides enough is enough and mows their patch, then a sense of guilt compels everyone else to follow suit in short order.  Unless, like us, you can't get your mower to work.  We borrowed the neighbour's yesterday to mow the little patch out the front (I do have some standards) after ours refused to budge.  I've exhausted my limited knowledge of small engine repair, and it's going to take a few days for the professionals to fix it.

So at least one little block of untamed nature gets a reprieve - at least until next week.  I think I can be patient.