Endeavour

It's a verb, a noun, a ship, a space shuttle, a detective ... a beautiful word.  The synonyms are strive, seek, attempt, undertake, aspire, and aim.  To me, those words are just as important as words like succeed and win.  When you read biographies and stories of scientific or medical discoveries and such, it seems that it is often a case of getting it right that time, rather than getting it wrong ten times before that.  

Captain James Cook's ship was called The Endeavour.  Cook was an explorer, a navigator, cartographer and Captain in the Royal Navy.  In three voyages - the first on HMS Endeavour - he sailed across largely uncharted seas, and mapped lands from New Zealand and Australia to Hawaii, adding islands and coastlines to European maps for the first time.   Originally, in 1766 the Royal Society engaged Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun.  This reading enabled astronomers to find the distance of the Sun from the Earth, which then could be used as a unit of measurement in calculating the parameters of the universe.

The photo above shows the replica that the Australian Government and the Australian National Maritime Museum built of the bark Endeavour - http://www.anmm.gov.au    Add this to your bucket list!

-oOo-

The Space Shuttle Endeavour was named after Captain Cook's ship.  For the first time, an orbiter was named through a national competition involving students in elementary and secondary schools.  They were asked to select a name based upon an exploratory or research sea vessel.  NASA's website tells us that the Space Shuttle Endeavour's adventure began with a flawless liftoff in May 1992, beginning a journey filled with many firsts.  A primary assignment was to capture an orbiting, but not functioning, communications satellite and replace its rocket motor.  Unfortunately the Shuttle wasn't designed to retrieve the satellite, which created many challenges - an unprecedented three-person spacewalk took place.  In all, it was the first time four spacewalks were conducted on a mission and one of them was the longest in space history, lasting more than eight hours.

-oOo-

Endeavour is also the first name of Detective Morse - the TV series that actually makes you have to think about the clues as they're unravelled.  A good story, and set against a background of the beautiful city of Oxford - the City of Dreaming Spires.  Whether it's the new series, set in the 1960s, or the old series which was made in 1987-2000,  I really enjoy everything about it.  The locations, the story, the college background, the famous red jaguar, the interaction between the characters.  I'm also a big fan of the Inspector Lewis series, a spin off from the original Morse.   I get very homesick when I see the characters taking some time out for a pint in a local country pub, often sitting outside on a Summer evening, and just talking about the day  - or in this instance, the case.

I was going to add the story of Ernest Shackleton's voyage to the South Pole, but realized that his ship was called HMS Endurance.  Another great word, but one for another time.

-oOo-

Endeavour.

Something we all should be doing.

A favourite word.

The Birds ... Update

So, after my musing about how much memory birds have, I put out some bird food.  Just one of those squares of seeds and grains melded together with fat of some kind.  It's been good to see the birds coming back and bouncing around the deck, balancing on the little metal basket, and then  ....

It's a pretty terrible photo as it was taken through the kitchen window, but I think you get the general idea about the kind of birds the food was attracting!  After shooing the "bird" away a couple of times, I moved the curved hook thingy around so that he couldn't sit on the railing and take the food.  He came back and it was so funny to see him try to reach out for the seeds - he balanced carefully on the edge of the top rail, leaning as far as he could, but just couldn't reach.  He hopped down to the flowerpot that I'd put the metal hook into, but he couldn't climb the thin piece of metal.  He tried jumping, then was back to the top rail again but, after much tail flicking and general annoyance, he gave up.

Sorry, Mr S, better luck next time.

It's For The Birds

We had some snow here a couple of days ago and I noticed some bird tracks on the deck, outside the kitchen window.  Looking over the deck, I also saw several little birds scratching around in the dead leaves outside.  I used to put out various kinds of food for the birds in Winter and Spring, but haven't done so for ... well, it must be three or four years, now.  That's what surprised me - do the birds remember which gardens have bird feeders?

I know they say that elephants never forget, but maybe birds have long memories too.  I'm sure it's true that the same birds turn up at places along their route where people regularly have bird feeders, but I was surprised to have them turn up here after so long.  As soon as I did put bird food out yesterday, all the little birds (and thankfully not the huge crows) came a peckin'.

No, it's not Spring yet - don't hate us East Coast!  This is the green I'm yearning for right now, as the trees and grass are that dull brown/black of winter.  We don't get a huge variety of birds around here, but occasionally there's a blue jay or red crested woodpecker.  I'm still hoping to see a bald eagle balancing on the little square of bird food that I leave out there.  Could happen - there are some around here, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Here's a fascinating bird fact - there's a german word, Zugunruhe, which describes the restlessness found in birds before the migration south.  This is from a 2006 story in the New York Times -

Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in PLoS Biology,  studied African stonechats. Stonechats are in the thrush family, and many breed in Europe and fly south in winter. The birds that the researchers studied were residents in Africa, and were thought not to have a genetic predisposition to migrate. What the researchers were looking for was evidence of zugunruhe in the resident stonechats, which they raised in the lab at the Max Planck Institute, under a variety of circumstances.

The scientists did not expect to find it in the resident birds. But they did. The stay-at-home stonechats exhibited the same sort of nocturnal restlessness as their migrating relatives. The conclusion: some level of zugunruhe may be common even in birds that don't migrate.

I believe there have also been experiments involving putting ink on the feet of birds in a cage and putting paper at the bottom of the cage.  In the morning, it seems to show that the birds spend a lot of the night in the southern quadrant of the cage, feeling - I presume - a little bit Zugunruhe.    

Green Eggs and Freckles

A few day's ago, my husband was doing some work for a woman who had some land outside Poulsbo, and she kept - among other things - chickens.  Very free-range chickens.  She gave him a half dozen eggs and I've only just gotten around to using them.  Opening the cardboard container, I saw that we had four brown and two green eggs.  The green ones were beautiful, a very pale, almost translucent mint green.  I hadn't actually seen one before but, hey, I'm pretty much a city girl ... I've seen other coloured eggs in magazines but never the real thing.  It seemed a shame to use it.

(Dang, that pine branch would have looked so effective if I could figure out how to get rid of the bottom shadow on the uploaded image.)

I remembered that I'd taken a photo of some spectacularly freckled eggs way back in the Summer.  I don't know anything about what comes out of the south end of a north bound chicken - do different coloured eggs come from different breeds of chickens?  Does it depend on what they eat?  The weather?  I have no idea.

Another thought - I seem to be getting a "thing" for egg photos.  How many of something do you have to have to be technically called a collection, or an accumulation or an amassment?  A digest? (burp) ( 'scuse me)  Why yes, I did just check the Thesaurus.  Do three items count as a kit or a caboodle?  While I ponder this question, here's egg photo number three...

This one I love!  It was in the window of the butcher's shop in Frinton-on-Sea in the UK, where my Mum lives.  Now, every time I see the phrase "Free Range" I always, mentally, finish with "from Happy Chickens".  Makes me smile every time.

And just to end on an eye-rolling note, here's a golden oldie from the 1970s ...

Why did the punk rocker cross the road?
Because he was stapled to the chicken!



Thank you, and good night.

I Love the Sunshine ... I Hate the Sunshine ...

We're having my favourite winter weather - brilliant blue skies and cold temperatures.  I much prefer this to the grey, drizzly days we're known for in the Pacific North West.

There's just one trouble with all that sunshine.  It shows up all the dust and smeared windows in the house.  I'm not the best at housekeeping - my theory is that if it's tidy, it looks clean.  I'm not sure how guests view that theory but it works for me!  Don't get me wrong, our house is clean, just not really clean, if you know what I mean.  I keep saying that we need to have overnight guests about once every three months, just so the house gets the full and proper cleaning it deserves.

Ahhh, the sun.  Sunshine, sunrise, sunsets, sunburn ... good memories and bad!  That darn sunshine is showing up the fact that I apparently can't wash windows very well (nice smears on the front windows, right by the front door), and of course it's letting me know that it's been a while since I dug out the dusters and vacuum cleaner. Yes, I DO know where they are.

Now I can't wait for Spring and the bright green leaves to appear on the trees.  While the rest of the country is having horrendous weather, here on the west coat we're having a very mild winter, with slightly above average temperatures, and not enough rain.  I don't think the ski business is very happy with the lack of snow - it looks spectacular on the Olympic and Cascade mountains, but apparently there's not enough to really enjoy it.

What I don't think people here realize is that the weather moves further on from the East Coast and is hitting Ireland and the United Kingdom with high winds and torrential rain.  Seaside towns are being battered, rail lines buckled by landslides, and the fields across the country are under water.  There are towns in Somerset that are actually cut off from the rest of the world by flooding.  These photos from the UK's online Daily Mail newspaper give you an idea of what's happening - and has happened over the past few weeks.  Yikes.

Photo Courtesy Tony Carney/Apex/Daily Mail

Photo Courtesy Apex/Daily Mail

I'm not sure how we got from sunshine to cleaning to flooding, but I know there's a tenuous link there somewhere!