Journal of a Sabbatical

February 18, 2000

snowing

Today's Reading: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, Winter: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O Blake

We now join our regularly scheduled life, already in progress...

Wilbur's regularly scheduled life seems to consist entirely of napping either near me or on me. That's OK with me as I wouldn't mind napping either. I guess I'm still in some sort of reentry state.

My project for the day was to be putting together the bird list from the trip, in taxonomic order. This is, among other things, what Bird Brain is for. However, the instant I entered a date in the current year, umm that would be Y2K, my Mac crashed complete with the little bomb icon. I thought they'd stopped doing the bomb icon several releases ago. Anyway, it crashed spectacularly. I started laughing and laughing and laughing some more. Bitten by the Y2K bug! In Bird Brain of all things. So I checked their web site and ordered the new Y2K compliant upgrade, still laughing.

Since people have made bird lists before they had software to help them, I brought my notebook with all my sightings in it and the checklist from VENT with me to Starbucks along with a few other random pieces of paper that might help me list everything in the right order with the date and place of the sighting. I was engrossed in this task when Dan & Geri arrived. Geri wanted to look at my notebook, so I handed it over and gave up on the list project for today. I can wait until the Bird Brain upgrade comes next week.

I'm chatting with Dan and Hussein (who has joined us in the meantime) when Geri asks "What is austral negrito?" "A little black bird" I reply. "Do you have a picture?" "No. I didn't take any pictures of it: too small and too far away". Geri insists that when I put my trip journal on my web site I must have a picture of every bird or I will get thousands of e-mails from people who want to know what these birds look like. Actually Geri said thousands of Geris ...

Anyway, that would be a task on the order of putting together the Collins field guide in the first place. Well, maybe I exaggerate a little. I think most people who actually read the bird lists will actually possess the requisite field guides, especially Harrison's guide to seabirds. I tease Geri a little bit saying that all households have at least one copy of Harrison - but of course that wouldn't help in this particular case because the austral negrito is not a seabird - she'd the need the relevant Collins book.

Furthermore, I doubt that I will get thousands of e-mails about austral negrito or blackish cinclodes or any of those other southern birds. The readers of this web site do not number in the thousands. I'd be surprised anymore if they numbered in the tens since I haven't been updating regularly. .

Later in the afternoon, I poked around with several search engines and did not find any sites with visual catalogs of southern birds, so I can't even link to someplace to show what they look like. Oh well.

Nobody seemed to have heard the same forecast as to how much snow we are supposed to get tonight, as the flakes begin to fall. The weathermen differ wildly in their accumulation predictions. I don't feel a tremendous urge to stock up on white bread and batteries though.

After Dan and Geri and Hussein left, Tom and I got into one of our long theological discussions. For a nonbeliever, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about God. My theory for today is that what people experience as a higher power or god or spiritual force is actually just a particular brain state. God is a chemical reaction in the brain. Whatever it is inside our own brains, not an external being somewhere else. Tom pointed out that this actually comes close to what the Quakers mean by an inner light. We both decided to go home and reread William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

But here I am reading the last little bit of Voyage of the Beagle and watching it snow.