Month: June 2005

At the rear of the corporate campus where I work, we have a 250-foot-tall radio tower located among a field of large satellite antennas. About halfway up the tower is a platform that has for years been home to a nest for a couple of red-tailed hawks. They usually produce 1-3 new baby hawks every spring.

In mid April we observed the mother hawk staying on the nest pretty much 24-7, and by April 24th we had the first sighting of a hatchling. After confirming that the hatchling existed, I brought my telescope into work and set it up on a high floor of an adjacent building where we had a decent view of the nest (I built an 8-inch Dobsonian telescope several years ago from scratch — it took me a month of weekends). People were able to come by any time to take a look. I didn’t man it the whole time — I just left it there for people to look through.

We have a campus-wide cable television system that feeds our own TV networks (plus a few not ours like Comedy Central and the Weather Channel) to all offices so they can see anything that’s airing at any time for whatever reason. I know the engineer who runs that system, and we managed to get my telescope fed into the cable system. I have a small video camera that hooks up to the telescope focuser (where the eyepiece normally goes) — it was a gift from my Dad about a year ago.

So now everyone on campus could tune their office TV to channel 75 and watch the Hawk Channel. From what I heard, folks were glued to it. I singlehandedly destroyed campus productivity for the month of May.

We watched the hatchling grow from barely peeking over the edge of the [big, deep] nest, to being just as big as the adults, albeit with adolescent plumage. The mother hawk brought it kills (rats, pigeons, mmmm!) and the baby devoured them. It’s quite the gruesome sight, although I don’t think I ever laughed as hard as I did watching that baby gulp down the last big serving of rat.

About 6 weeks after we first spotted the hatchling, the now full-grown hawk disappeared from the nest. We saw it a few days later at the very top of the tower, and since then have seen it down nearer the ground, apparently learning to hunt, being bombarded by mockingbirds.

Yes, I now have a blog.

I’ve resisted doing so until now for several reasons, but for my first blog entry I’d like to write about the one reason that streches back the longest, to before blogs existed.

Should I write?

I’ve been stuck behind two problems that I see with even starting to write. The first problem is that of eventually being embarrassed or troubled or trapped by what I write. I’ve always been kind of happy about the fact that I have no written canon (yes, I said canon, you can laugh now) to bind me to my past opinions. Past opinions that I would now find embarrassing. Past opinions that others would read and use to form their opinions about me NOW, or worse.

Do I have any particularly embarrassing opinions in my past? I don’t think so, but who knows, perhaps I’ve conveniently forgotten them (I do recall voting for Ronald Reagan for president at the age of 18, but I’ve long owned up to that and have already written it off to youthful indescretion). But I guess I now feel like I just need to get my stuff “out there”, if for no other reason than to see what happens. To quote the Butthole Surfers, it’s better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t done.

The other problem that I’ve been stuck behind is that I’m a perfectionist, and so I’ll never quite feel that what I write is good enough, and I keep adding and adding to it and never just calling it done and leting it go. Being a perfectionist leads to all sort of other things but maybe I’ll talk more about that some other time. Right now I need to just make a reasonable best effort and press the stupid “post” button.

Back to the concept of being trapped by your own writing, I’ve found it liberating that there’s nothing out there to pin down what I think. But another consideration is that without pinning down your thoughts, you can’t examine them completely, and perhaps develop them further and even discover contradictions or other problems. In this regard writing is therapy, and while I don’t think I need therapy (some would dispute that, I’m sure), I am intrigued about the possibility of learning more about myself by doing this. I’ve been thinking about this for what seems like 20 years, and I guess it’s about time I get to it.

So what am I going to write about? I really don’t know, but if the above is an indicator, it’s going to be somewhat personal. I feel like I know more about what it’s not going to be: I’m not going to passing on the latest blogsphere meme, I’m not going to pontificate about politics, I’m not going to wax eloquent about what I had for breakfast.

Finally, I’m not yet comfortable saying my name here, although I expect that at some point I’ll get around to that.

One thing that prompted me to start up this blog is that recently I’ve done a few pretty cool things, and I want to write about them. So here goes.