I am not burned or even particularly tanned. I guess the light was just pink.

Reading: Nick Hornby's collection of short stories, Speak to the Angel, although tomorrow I am questing for the last Anne of Green Gables books, because Evelyn Waugh convinced me I need a break

Moving: walked a bit in the park

Watching: magpies and goslings

Listening: Beatles

20 May 2001: Unbelievably beautiful day

Yesterday having finished A Handful of Dust I opened All the King's Men.* Its first line is something about a highway, about how it was a good highway and fine and new. Hemingway: I closed it. I need some Lucy Maude Montgomery.

* 23 May 2001: I had All the President's Men here for three days. I've been confusing the two talking with Haitch for a while now, and each time she has corrected me, until finally she asked me if I was backward. Well, Meg Murry is backward, as declared by Calvin O'Keefe himself, so it can't be a bad thing, and yes I am. Anyway, Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, and today for my birthday she gave me All the President's Men

Spectacular, stunning day. Phenomenal. The kind of day when you can watch big puffy clouds setting like clipper ships over the horizon. After work we went for a stroll in the park. The view of Mt. Evans from behind the museum was the best I'd ever seen: the foothills green with spring and greener with so much rain showing their contours, the lower range of mountains ribbed and detailed in the afternoon sun, and Mt. Evans fantastically complex in the snow. A sight like that doesn't make up for as many nestlings and squirrel kittens as probably perished yesterday, but it's some consolation.

Our usual short constitutional is to the knoll behind the museum to enjoy the view, and then around the lake and home. Today we saw a lab mix happily carrying its dummy to the pond to swim, and its foster brother, a border collie/ Newfie mix, watching uncomprehending as the other swam and retrieved. RDC wondered at the uncomfortable-looking dummy; I told him it's bumpy to teach the dog to hold it lightly, with the gentle mouth the Labrador Retriever is bred for, so that when it retrieves in the field, it doesn't mar the bird. Because of course you're going to mount your trophy. Or you don't want Fido's tooth marks in your fowl. Or, in this case, since I doubt this dog will ever be hunted, just because you want a professional-looking dummy instead of a reasonable other retrievable object for a dog you'll never hunt.

All over the pond swam pairs of geese with batches of goslings in their wakes. Two pairs we saw had about a dozen each clearly from different hatchings, too disparate in age to be of the same clutch but too close in age to have come from successive clutches to the same parents. Do geese babysit? Adopt? We saw wee ones who emerged from their eggs no more than a week ago and much older ones already losing their fuzz and gaining the markings of Canada geese.

On the other side of the pond, a man didn't bother to choose a goose- and duck-free section of pond to throw a stick. His dog, a chocolate mostly-Lab, went in after the stick but got distracted by geese. It swam all over the pond after geese it had no hope of catching, harrying them and not responding to its master. This is why some people don't deserve dogs, if they're not going to train them right. The owner saw us watching--Shadow loved to swim but, being so fat, didn't have endurance so I was concerned--and said the dog would come in when it was tired and not to worry about it, but of course the geese "taunting" it had turned its head. The geese involved in this deliberate taunting--by prey animals of a predator animal--had goslings with them. Some people not only don't deserve dogs but also have no brains.

It is almost 11 and I am going to bed, but I have to say there is nothing as sweet and trustful as a tucked cockatiel napping in your lap with his head on backward and his beak in his wing. A couple of times Blake has straightened out to tug at the sleeve of my fleece, encouraging me to keep my arm bent at a more hospitable, cozier angle.

I disturbed him moving the camera, even though I know very well that a tucking cockatiel is one who wants to go properly to bed, thank you, in his own sleepyspot in his own cage with the covers to keep the cats and dragons away. So I'll stop now. I miss dogs, when they pawpaint and are named Mathilda and swim after sticks not geese, but I wouldn't give up having a parrot for anything.