NaNaNaNaNaNaBATBOX

 Right Bird, Right House! - this tool from Cornell Ornithology will give you a list of different species you can expect to attract, and has plans for building nesting boxes. I came across it this morning while looking to see what kinds of owls I might reasonably expect to attract. But that was before I remembered there are Great Horned Owls in the area, and in the late afternoon, you can hear them calling back and forth. I would be willing to guess that they don't require a nesting box if they're raising young already, so I think I'm going to go back to my original idea of building and mounting bat houses.

Bat house info for my Florida friends.

The last few days have been crazy busy for me. After finishing up in the yard this weekend, a lot of tasks I'd normally have done got pushed to Monday and Tuesday, and those days were pretty much non-stop. Today I just have some routine things to do and will hopefully be able to get back to art. 

We're going to be moving our fire pit into the area where we plan to eventually put the solar panels. I'll be scooping up all that nice ash and dumping it on my garden beds. I may also move my rain gauge, which was in a good place when we put it up in 2015, but nearby trees have grown enough that I worry they're beginning to block some of the rain collection. I'm thinking about one of the garden fence posts, since there aren't many large trees in that area. That might also be an ideal place to put up a pole for bat houses. There will be bat guano - which would be great in compost. Hmm.

I like it when I can get different natural systems or processes to work together. Instead of "I am a human and I am going to work my will upon this environment!" I tend to think more like, "I'm lazy. How can I get all this stuff to manage itself with the least amount of fuckery on my part?"

And we have our FastPasses for the spring Disney trip! We didn't get Avatar, but Animal Kingdom has "extra magic hours" one morning while we're there, so we may show up at rope drop and hit it then. Fox also picked up some rides in Magic Kingdom I missed in October because of my anxiety episode. We're not even bothering trying to get on any of the Star Wars rides at the moment, though we got to do Star Tours, which was cool. I haven't done Smuggler's Run yet, but we couldn't get passes for it, and they're still farting around with the tiered pass system. 

Some of the regular ingredients I cook with are kind of hard to get so I order them from Amazon. I got a fresh box of sea salt yesterday and noticed that the back was stamped with an organic food label. It's from Great Britain, so it was a name I didn't recognize the way I would, say, Oregon Tilth. I'm so glad to know my salt's organic. Because, yanno, rocks. Also it's not chemically organic since it doesn't or shouldn't contain carbon, but hey, at least they didn't label it "non-GMO." I know they just slap any applicable label they can on products to get them to sell, but seriously. 

Sorry, I'm just more than slightly skeptical of "organic" labels, because people are apt to twist things, and make it look like their product is something it isn't, and also because there are other people who don't bother questioning those labels. 

Anyway, as much as I'd like to sit here next to the fire and read all day, I do actually have a few things to do.