Every Autumn this species shows up more abundantly, though in point of fact some individuals live here year round. I lack the wisdom to know if we get a migrant population passing through. The Summer bird the Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher becomes more abundant in Fall, for example, as its main populations in Oklahoma (where it is the "state bird"), Kansas and Nebraska head south. Perhaps the Eastern Phoebe does something similar. Perhaps instead its substantial numbers signal a defense against predation, as with our local Cottontail Rabbit population.
I ate Kix cereal for breakfast with skim milk. At lunch, I walked in Salmon Park in Sachse. I ate Church's fried chicken and fries for lunch. My work day proved busy but satisfying.
After work, I talked to my wife by phone about her adventures in her home town of Kansas City. We discussed a surprise for one 11-year-old niece--a visit to us by airplane, to be announced tomorrow.
As I got out to walk in Crowley Park in Richardson, I saw a young woman working on her violin under one of the picnic shelters. The image was cinematic-the violin stand, the trees, the open space, the shelter. To my ear, she traced out a mariachi song with her bow. I thought how earlier in the week a passing bicyclist whistled a Journey song as he pedaled.
After my walk, I stopped in Subway for a turkey sandwich and baked chips. I later treated myself to a bowl of Trix cereal and skim milk. Now Beatrice and I are enjoying a quiet evening at home.
I spent some of my time experimenting with Linux distributions in the virtual machine Gnome-Boxes. First I had to sort out how to turn on virtual machines in my laptop's BIOS. I understand why one might set that "off" by default, but I thought it was silly. It should be "on" by default, with the option to turn it off. After I stumbled around and turned virtuazation on, I tried:
a. Cub Linux, which creates a ChromeOS-like look using the Chromium browser over an Ubuntu distribution. It booted quickly, but I think that PeppermintOS does the same things and yet perhaps does them better.
b. Porteus 3.1. This extremely light operating system is always zippy and useful.
But its "Unified Slackware Manager" package managers a bit hit-or-miss. Its predecessor, Porteus Package Manager, worked better for me, though in fact I do not really know how different they are under the hood. I wonder why the Puppy Package Manager works so much better with the Slackware package repositories.
c. Debian Dog, a simple Puppy Linux OS that uses Debian repositories.
Tomorrow I rise early, and plan on having fun.