Sarah, the Great-horned Owl

Bike Wheel Shadow

Red-tailed Hawk

Saturday was an active day. First, Anne and I walked several miles in the morning. It was cold, but brilliantly clear. We stopped at Big Daddy’s Cheesecake for breakfast. We had eggs not cheesecake, so wipe that smirk off your face. On the way home, we shopped for dinner at Schnucks.

We were going to make a pasta dish with a saga cheese sauce. This is a dish that we’ve made for years, but the store was out of saga cheese. The helpful people at the cheese bar suggested a suitable substitute and we were able to amaze them by describing our planned recipe. It is dirt simple:

• Cut the saga into bits and place in a ceramic bowl.
• Add minced vegetables and an imperial glop of oil.
• We’re using red bell pepper, red onion and peas.
• Place the ceramic bowl with cheese and vegetables on top of the cooking pot for boiling the pasta.
• Bring the water to a boil and add pasta.
• Rotini pasta is recommended, because it holds the sauce better than a linguine would.
• The heat from the boiling water will heat the ceramic bowl and melt the cheese and cook the vegetables.
• After the pasta is cooked, drain water and mix with cheese and vegetables in the ceramic bowl and serve.

Having done our shopping by foot will make this a car free day. We are just so fricking green. I checked the mail after we got home and there was a solicitation from one of the local Toyota dealers. They made an offer to buy our Prius. They offered $20K. We had paid $26K for it new, almost two years ago. I figure that if this pitch is not just a total scam, which it almost certainly is, they have to be planning on reselling our car for almost list again.

Anne thought that this whole idea was rather stupid, because if we sold the Prius, we would just have to turn around again and buy another car. Then she had an epiphany. What if we bait-and-switched the used car dealer instead of letting them do the same to us? Instead of selling the two-year-old Prius, why not sell them the twenty-year-old Prizm. It’s sort of a Toyota. The first three letters are both the same and instead of a car that would be hard to part with, because it is all about ‘us’, why not a car with some zoom in it? We’ll entertain $20K or best offer. 😉

I went for a bike ride in the park this afternoon. I had done some Internet research and had a pretty good idea of where to find the Forest Park owls. I found one, Sarah, on the nest. I woke her up and she eventually retreated further into the tree trunk. The pictured shot show her kind of half awake. I never could find Charles, but I hear that he is still around. This pair has been nesting in the park for seven years now.

Later I spoke with a woman who was busy looking at something with binoculars. She had seen a kingfisher, who had a fish. It had been beating the fish against the branch. It must have flown off by the time I arrived. Later, I saw the Red-tailed hawk in the same tree as the kingfisher was in. Earlier in the day, during our morning walk, Anne pointed out a mated pair of Red-tails lazily circling high above us.