Yesterday, unexpectedly, the rain stopped for a while. After the mad-squirrel event of the morning (the post caps are still all cattywompus), everything was quiet for half an hour. Then the birds came.

I’ve talked before about the hot-needle birds which might be bushtits and hang out in flocks of forty or fifty. Yesterday, we got a mixed flock of birds of biblical proportions: like a plague of locusts. I lost count–a couple of hundred? A mixed bag of different tiny little birds flicking from tree to tree in the ravine, a kegger of crows doing a flyby (thirty of them maybe) nine or ten robins, and one electric blue Stellar’s Jay. And they flicked and swooped and cheeped and fleeked and pipped and shrieked for about twenty minutes. A free show, just for me.

All that stuff was a welcome break from pondering layers of website navigation and floating social web bars (you’ll see what I mean when LambdaLiterary.org goes live in the next few weeks).

It rained again last night, of course (and the wind was astonishing), dumping all kinds of no-doubt-interesting-to-tiny-birds detritus on the deck. So with luck I’ll get to watch another show this afternoon. Or, eh, maybe not. I’ll be on Skype half the afternoon, talking to the web team about ad placement and nav bars.

Anyway, I hope there are lovely things where you are to brighten your Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.