Mokka mit Schlag

Mexican Amberwing, Perithemis intensa
San Diego Wild Animal Park, 2008-06-07

For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, most but not all e-mail sent to elharo@macfaq.com has not been arriving for the last 24 hours or so. I’m shifting a few things around to try to fix the problem. In the meantime, please try one of my other addresses if you need to reach me.

Hmm, maybe I spoke too soon. In what I can only surmise is simply Murphy’s Law at work, for some reason Thunderbird today started to move all my metalab.unc.edu e-mail into my Junk folder so that wasn’t getting through either. I’ve now recovered that, but bleah. It never rains but it pours.

Hmm, you know. Yes! That’s it! Thunderbird’s spam filters went into overdrive sometime around 8:00 PM yesterday evening and began classifying all e-mail as junk, no exceptions. (Apparently there is one exception: accoounts in my address book are not listed as Junk. That’s why the test messages I sent from me to me still got through.) Now how to fix it?
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White-lined Sphinx, Hyles lineata
Santiago Oaks Regional Park, 2008-05-04

Sunday morning (2008-05-18) around 8:00 A.M. Jill drove us over to Covington Park in Morongo Valley. It’s a local hot spot. The greenery and water pull in a lot of birds at the western most edge of their ranges, plus there are feeders.

We started with the feeders at the house across the road when I heard a woodpecker. It didn’t take us too long to locate it, and it turned out to be a Ladder-backed Woodpecker, #425. This is a Western species that doesn’t usually cross the mountains to the coast. One was seen regularly at Irvine Regional Park earlier this year, but I hadn’t really chased it and never saw it. This one cooperatively posed on a telephone pole:

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From the L.A. Times:

Proposition 98

• Yes 39.1%
• No 60.9%

Proposition 99

• Yes 62.4%
• No 37.6%

Prop 99 was actually weaker than I would have liked–I would have preferred a measure that banned eminent domain for private development, period, not just for owner occupied residences–but 98 was just over the top.

Of course now we get to miss the fun of watching the courts sort out the mess that would have resulted if both had passed, since they actively contradicted each other.
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Desert Spiny Lizard, Sceloporus magister cephaloflavus
Butterbredt Springs, Kern County, CA, 2008-06-01