Today while walking to the train station I came upon a groundhog. I use "came upon" advisedly: I nearly stumbled over it. It showed absolutely no fear, even when I was within four feet, moving and making noises. And when it finally did move, it came over and crossed the sidewalk right it front of me. I'm afraid it might have been sick; it stumbled three times while I was watching, fell over and had to struggle to get back up, but there were no visible injuries.

Hooray for defective wildlife!

Actually, I've been noticing groundhogs a lot more than ever before this year; there's one that's often grazing at the corner by the stoplight, and Mom says a pair have just moved in next door. Either this is a bumper year for them, or I've just been noticing more, as I drive around and walk around in different places.

I've been paying a lot of attention to what I see, of course. I've filled my camera card three times with pictures of flowering weeds, and yesterday, taking advantage of the nice summer day (by which I mean, it was cloudy and clammy rather than being sunny and soupy), I went out in the back yard with a measuring stick and some graph paper and mapped all the trees in our yard. Today, after doing errands at school, I went out and worked some more on identifying them. There are fifty-five 'woody plants over four feet tall' (my official cut-off for the map, since we've quit mowing parts of the yard, and there are lots of young voluntaries amongst the raspberries and jewelweed) and I have identified, either tentatively or securely, all but ten of them, with twenty-five identified species, and at least five more unknown.

I think I *am* going to try to do write-ups on as many of them as I can, once a week or so - mostly for my own practice, but why not share, eh? I could even cross-post to e2 and my lonely abandoned community big_backyard and if I get good pictures, maybe one of the photo communities too. I have an entry on Liquidambar styraciflua already mostly written since yesterday.

Mind you, this is something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time, so who knows whether it'll actually go. Not as long as I've been meaning to fix that plasma globe, though; and I did finally manage that. (It looks cool, if I do say so myself, and it hasn't lit anything on fire since I fixed it!)

What's with you actually getting things done, kid? You may well ask. See, the laptop situation is currently like this: the no-internet laptop is plugged into the wall. It is being used solely as a battery-charger, to charge the battery for the no-plug laptop. This means I can only be online for about an hour at a time, with two hours to wait in between. On the one hand, this is a very silly situation, and I ought to just give up on the things already and get something that works. On the other hand ... it means I can only be online for one hour out of every three, and I'm actually getting things done. So I kind of like it, actually, even if it means I'm reading very, very little fandom stuff at all.