PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

snow 2004-01-28 - 10:28 a.m. The Kenya story and pictures will have to wait until I get home. It's too big for a public computer. But I'll try to start updating regularly again. Right now in Amsterdam it's snowing and a bum just offered to sell me a dubious bicycle. Oh sure. I can go biking in the snow on a stolen bicycle but it wouldn't be an authentic Amsterdam experience unless I was talking on my cell phone while I did it. On Monday night we tried one of the famous rice tables at an Indonesian restaurant called Sarang Mas. There were at least 15 dishes of this and that, and it would be hard to pick a favorite, but there was a cucumber spicy salad that was a particular stand-out. The banana fritter was fairly addictive too. Yesterday we took a bus and boat tour of the area. In the morning we went out into what passes for countryside and saw a wooden shoe factory, a cheese factory, and any number of windmills. We were given generous samples of cheese, and the sheep's cheese was particularly outstanding. I should have ordered some but didn't feel like filling out the customs form. We visited the ports of Volendams and Marken, where we checked the birds and sampled the Heinecken. I'd hoped to see wild swans, and I saw them in abundance, full adult pairs and also first winter juveniles with their "goofy" patchwork of brown and white plumage. "Goofy" was D.'s word. Poor swans! In the afternoon we got an overview of the city of Amsterdam with its many overpriced old buildings. The largest park in the city, or so we were told, was still a postage stamp, but as the guide explained, Amsterdam is greatly overpopulated. The most unexpected bird sighting of the day was a noisy flock of Ring-necked Parakeets lounging around Rembrandt's Windmill. The diamond factory was most unimpressive. I could have given a better talk on cutting stones, and they mostly just hustled you into a room of commercial grade jewelry that they wanted you to buy. I guess I expected them to have decent security so that they could actually show you some top quality diamonds. But it wasn't a museum, after all; they were in the business of selling, not displaying. As the sky darkened and the lights came on, we took a boat tour of the city. It was visually stunning with all of the lighted bridges over the various canals, but the constant yik yak from the pilot and his assistant, not to mention the television monitor, was a major distraction, and I'm not sure I would recommend a boat tour to anyone if they had to pay much extra for it. We had originally planned to take a candlelight tour tonight but we both agreed that we didn't want to take the risk of getting another chatty pilot. Before dinner we walked around the red light district to see the girls in the windows. I don't know what I expected -- well, actually I do know what I expected. I thought the girls would be nude. I don't know why. It's just one of those misconceptions, I suppose. They were mostly just dressed as sluts, although a few wore scanty underwear. I hate to say it, but I didn't see any great beauties among them. Couldn't a man get that for free? However, if you stood back and ignored the details, instead just enjoying the play of the lights, the area was quite beautiful with red lights instead of white ones on the bridges over the canals. There was an Asian area nearby where we drifted back to try a Malaysian restaurant, which I think was called Malaysian Restaurant, but perhaps it had another name hidden somewhere I didn't notice. The music was bird calls and the food delicious although I'm not sure how to describe it or even what the dishes were called. We just didn't have a gustatory vocabulary for such an unfamiliar cuisine. And so today I was thinking of trying to use up the last 9 pictures on my memory card, but now it's snowing, and Amsterdam is again too dark for photography. I have a much better appreciation for why the old Dutch Masters created such dark paintings. Tuesday's Bird List: Note: I observed many flocks of geese, probably Graylag Geese in particular, but I'm not counting them because the bus always whizzed by too fast before I could get my binoculars on them. I can tell that it's good goose viewing country though. Great Crested Grebe Eurasian Coot Common Moorhen Grey Heron Common Buzzard Black Headed Gull Ring Billed Gull Eurasian Oystercatcher Mallard Eurasian Widgeon Goldeneye Tufted Duck Mute Swan Feral Pigeon Wood Pigeon Rose-Ringed Parakeet Jackdaw Magpie European Starling House Sparrow back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford