Watching crows

At my morning bus stop there is a tiny patch of lawn between the sidewalk and the apartment building that fronts the street. It's a sparse bit of grass on a little slope with a few trees sticking out of bare rings of exposed dirt. There's always a squirrel there, bouncing from tree to tree.

There is also a trash can next to the stop, and as it sits on the sidewalk directly between the park entrance and the 7-Eleven, it is almost always full. Mondays, it is overflowing.

I arrived at my stop this morning with my usual punctuality, which meant that that I'd just missed one bus, and had another ten minutes to wait for the next (If they didn't come so often, I think I might pay more attention to the time. Maybe.)

There were two crows there, picking chip fragments from the pavement. They flew out of reach when I arrived, and chided me for my rudeness in interrupting their breakfast, so I moved out of their way and leaned up against the schedule pole to watch them.

Now, pigeons annoy me with their fat complacency, and gulls add just that note of raucous noise to that same complacency that shrieks across my nerves like steel on slate. Corvids, on the other hand, inspire a certain fondness in me. Ravens are my favorites, with their mythic ties, but crows are bit easier to come by, and I've noticed an amost smugly mafiosa appeal to them. What other animal could be called a murder when grouped?

And so I watched them. One was slightly larger than the other, but if it was a difference in gender or age, I must confess my ignorance. The larger one was a bit smarter, for it was the one that pulled the chip bag from the garbage can and upended it on the lawn. Turned it round and round by the corners until the chips spilled out, and once it had eaten a few, it would peer inside, then turn it over again.

This was fascinating of course, but what killed me was when the smaller one picked up five or six chips at once, walked a few feet, and then stuck them in the grass and started covering it with the odd leaf and grass clump. I could have sworn I was watching a squirrel for a moment. It picked up a few more chips and carried them off to the roof of the 7-Eleven to eat them while the other crow kept showering the lawn with chips, and then I had to desist my observations, for my bus had come.

Spammity-spam

524 new messages over the weekend, of which some 346 were spam. Is it any wonder I procrastinate on checking my email?

I just moved my lists over to misha@madstop, so it'll be a little easier to weed the spam out, but until I can get a bigger hard drive for my laptop, I'll still be checking things online instead of downloading it and being able to run it through a filter.

I was sitting at my computer yesterday, looking at prices, but I'm also the last one in my group to be using the old 3 D&D book instead of 3.5, so there's another looming purchase. Assuming I can pry anything out of my wallet after this next paycheck, of course.