Birds and Bees and This and That

Just a few miscellaneous things today:

• The May Magknits is up.
• I've been grading exams. Did you know the US Civil War was in 1658? Or maybe it was in the 1950's. No, that can't be right, because World War I was in the 1950's.
• If I ran the world, all grownups would get naptime every day.
• If you go to San Francisco and you're the least interested in knitting (and why else would you be suffering my blog?) you must go to ArtFibers. They sell only their own yarn, which is unavailable anyplace else. Yes, you can also mail order, but going in person is infinitely better. They will custom-design a pattern to your specs for free. They have a comfy chairs where you can sit and try out all their yarns while looking through 2 huge windows over Sutter Street. The staff is always very friendly.
• Even while seated at an empty table in a quiet room, Thing 1 can find approximately one thousand things to do other than her math homework.
• Ruthie+new wood floors+spring=rampant tumblefur
• I have become completely addicted to PostCrossing. It's especially interesting to see the wide variation in times for a postcard to arrive in various places. They seem to average a little over a week to most of the world, but so far have ranged from 3 days to the Netherlands to 21 days to Estonia.
• Thanks to a certain someone (thanks, Knatolee!!) I'm now daydreaming about Newfoundlands.
• I've been being distracted at work by birds lately. There's a group of 3 ducks that hang out outside my building--a male and female Mallard plus a male wood duck--and I find them really charming. I'm not sure who they ended up in an interspecies menage a trois, but they all seem happy. The wood duck is slightly more standoffish than his Mallard friends, who I saw mugging a toddler today for his goldfish crackers. The resident geese--I'm sure including that lazy one from the parking lot--keep flying by my window, honking loudly. And today in the evergreen just outside my window there was a little bird with a strikingly yellow head. I've looked it up, and I think it may have been a Hermit Warbler.
• Knatolee points out that today is Honeybee Appreciation Day. It's kind of cold and damp out today, so there aren't many bees outside to appreciate right now. But yesterday I spied my first Humungobee of the season. They're actually called Valley Carpenter Bees, but I like my name better.