Sometimes the day just gets a little odd:

It was a bit of a surprise to look out the kitchen window and see a red [oops: grey, not red –Julie] fox under the bird feeders.  Our feeders are a bit of a distance from the house and our screens don’t come off our windows, so this was the best I could do of photographing the fox thorough a screen window, but I think it came out pretty well.

Here’s a pair of Tom Turkeys that we found displaying on our way to a bird walk a few weeks ago:

Last night I recorded this:

and this:

Last week we were out Kayaking and I managed to get this photo:

I’d never tried getting a photo from a Kayak before.  It was cool, but a little scary and tricky.  Without realizing it I started drifting towards a nest and had to act very fast not to intrude on their territory.  

Yesterday, I was working on some web design work on the porch.  As usual, I made sure I had my camera.  In the course of about half an hour I saw a Baltimore Oriole, a Pileated Woodpecker, an American Redstart, a Red-Eyed Vireo, and this black and white warbler:

But really, I’m writing to post about the new line of note cards I’ve developed, including:

You can see them all at my new site, http://chickadeecards.com/

I’ve tried some new stuff on that site: a javascript which allows for previewing of the cards when you mouseover the thumbnail (does not work on IE 8 or handheld browsers) and some other cool bells and whistles, but I’m especially proud of figuring out how to make the site look completely different on an iPod than it does on a desktop browser.  

Feel free to check out the site, give feedback on the usability, etc.

In the meantime, I am getting heavily back into music again and doing major skill honing, learning how to program some design stuff I didn’t know was possible– learning a lot more about CSS then I knew a month ago– dramatically improving my skills with complex cross join sql queries– I’ll find some new work eventually, and I’ve still got part time work teaching and picked up a new web client last week, so I’m good, and kind of enjoying the Summer vacation.

One of the very fun random things I learned how to do this week is to take a collection of images and combine them into a collage.  If you check out the links from any of those photos, you’ll see a website banner at the top (this won’t happen on iPods and small-scale browsers but on desktops it should be fine, except possibly for IE 8).  Every time you reload the site you’ll get a slightly different version of that banner.  The bird image sequence is chosen at random.  I did the same thing with a different banner for night photography:

http://juliesmagiclightshow.co…