Tree Preservation

Hearing a raven cawing outside my window this afternoon after breakfast, I decided to go out and take some pictures of the birds, which are a pervasive presence in Santee. But as it happened, I wandered outside for about forty minutes to-day without actually seeing any close up--I heard them a lot, but didn't really see any.

I did take a lot of pictures, though, mainly of the area behind the house I remember as being a little more dense with foliage. Now it's mainly a couple desolate fields with dead, grey trees;


I guess it was deemed a fire hazard or something.


I particularly liked this tree.



A drainage ditch.


Further along the ditch. Foreboding, no?


Thirsty, anyone?

The river the ditch empties into;



The backyard, and Snow the cat demonstrating to me that it's hard indeed for a cat to find an uncomfortable place to sit;


I watched the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles while eating breakfast. Another episode I really liked, again featuring dialogue where people are subtly testing each other, deciding how they can operate while not completely losing faith in each other, and deciding what the right, hard decisions are. Ellison freaked out a bit much for a seasoned detective when Shirley Manson's kid went missing, but otherwise the episode was great, especially for Cameron. She's a perfect liar, utterly innocent, perfectly pragmatic, and lethal. I love that the writers realised what a tangle of dilemmas this presents for characters who are supposed to be strong and caretakers at the same time.

I went to Tim's last night and played some more Fallout 3, fighting a bunch of mutated ants with flame throwers. There's some nice, subtle stuff in that game, too, like the sewage plant I found myself in where a bunch of mutated roaches had mysteriously lined a counter with teddy bears, and hesitated before attacking me, unlike the other roaches I'd encountered.

Tim introduced me to the "Do a barrel roll" minor internet phenomenon;



And I watched the eleventh episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night, one of my favourite episodes of the series so far. I wonder if the writer's strike lit a fire under the writers' asses. In any case, Starbuck finding her corpse and ship, and Leoben's reaction, were wonderful. Though why any of Starbuck's friends would let her wander around alone with Leoben I can't fathom. Maybe they never heard of Stockholm syndrome on Caprica.

Dee's suicide and Adama's reaction to it were well done. Though I have to admit I find the ongoing saga of Gaeta's missing leg hysterically funny, I don't know why, and I feel oddly guilty about it. Especially when he started singing.

And already, we're seeing healthy looking foliage, supposedly two thousand years after nuclear war. At the very least, they oughta be able to get some use out of Earth.