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first phoebe of 2019
Thursday, March 21 2019
This morning when I went to the brownhouse as part of my pre-work ritual, for the first time in 2019 I heard a phoebe (the species of tyrant flycatcher — to most people it's a drab grey bird with an unremarkable monotonous call). They're an important harbinger of spring and give me joy to hear, though with large pockets of snow still extant around the house, I wonder what they'll be eating. They live on insect caught out of the air, thus the name of their tribe.
It was raining a little on the drive to work, which actually made the commute safer. Why? Because there was no sun in my eyes as I drove eastward. Sometimes the sun is so terrible as I drive down Dug Hill Road that I slow down to a stop. I will not drive into blindness.
It was too rainy after work for me to collect firewood, but I quickly found another chore to do. We have two stone-with-tile signs at the end of our driveway with numbers indicating the street address. In recent months, the tile letters on the north-facing sign had delaminated from the underlying stone, so I needed to fix it. It turns out I had used epoxy as the original adhesive, and in less than a year it had turned soft and rubbery, causing two of the three numerals in our street number to fall off. Since I have a bunch of thinset that will probably go bad before I can use it, I decided to use that as my adhesive. So I mixed up way too much and attached the numerals, smoothing out the thinset to make it so water wouldn't pool around the numerals and eventually form wedges of delaminating ice.
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