Ramblin' Rosen

Wife
Originally uploaded by TW.

I haven’t had time to blog lately–I’ve been busy working on the new tursa.com shopping cart, plus I’ve been swamped with work at my day job–but I haven’t abandoned Ramblin’ Rosen.

To tide my readers over until I have time for a longer post, here’s a picture of me taken by my husband.

Coot in St James’s Park,
originally uploaded by lilitu93.

Yesterday, my husband and I went to St James’s Park in Central London. For those who aren’t familiar with the park, it has a man-made lake that is a sanctuary for many exotic and native waterfowl living there. I took along my camera to take pictures of the birds and posted the best of the bunch to flickr .

I took several photos of this strange bird, which I assumed was one of the exotic birds that lived in the park. When I looked it up on the Internet, I found out that this weird bird is, infact, a native of Britain called a coot that lives all over Britian except for some parts of Scotland.

It’s a good thing that we went yesterday, as the weather seems to have changed today, and it’s definitely no longer summer.

I don’t normally cover politics in this blog (unless, of course, they relate to the subjects I normally write about), but I thought I’d pass on a few links to help Americans living abroad who want to register to vote. I found these links through an article in the Guardian about the two parties’ efforts to encourage expat voting.

Instruction on registering

• Federal Voting Assistance Program - The official US government site
• Overseas Vote 2004 - A Democratic-sponsored site that helps fill in the official forms. Although the site is paid for by the Democrats, the site itself is non-partisan.

Party sites

• Democrats Abroad
• Republicans Abroad

I just used the Overseas Vote 2004 site to fill out the Kansas form—I highly recommend it, even for Republicans, as it’s a lot easier to use than trying to decipher the official site, and it fills out the form for you. All you have to do is print it, sign and date it, then fax and mail it. (Faxing is only necessary if it’s near the cut-off date for your last state of residency.)

As people who read this site could probably guess, I’m not a Republican. I’m planning to vote for Kerry, though I’m not sure I’d really consider myself a Democrat, even though I have registered as one before (that’s a whole other discussion). I wasn’t really planning to vote, since Kansas always goes Republican in Presidential elections, but it’s a lot easier registering for an absentee ballot than I thought. Also, even if my vote doesn’t affect the outcome of the election itself, it’s a good idea for expatriates like myself to stay involved in the political process, so that the government does not forget that we are also US citizens and constituents, even though we no longer live in the US.

The Organization of Professional Aviculturists in Florida is raising funds to help save the birds of Howard Voren’s aviaries. His aviaries in Florida were hit very hard by Hurricane Frances–almost all the trees at the aviary were uprooted, and many landed on the cages. From the site:

Almost every tree on the property, including a canopy of jacaranda trees Howard planted 20 years ago, have been uprooted and they have fallen on top of cages. Hundreds of birds are still trapped in damaged cages. Virtually everything has been crushed and is standing in muck.

The site has some very sad pictures of scared parrots stuck in their cages. Also, the parrots who have already been rescued are in temporary shelters that are not suitable for long-term use.

If you can spare even a small amount, please consider donating through the site. They take PayPal, as well as other methods of donation.

[Thanks to Teddy of parrotlink for posting about this to various parrot lists.]

Feathers 4,
originally uploaded by lilitu93.

Today I took some photos of fur and feather textures. I was inspired to do this by the Textures group on Flickr, since this month’s theme is textures that are soft to the touch.

This is one of my favourites of the photos I took today. It’s a close-up of my cockatiel Fred’s neck and shows three of the four colours on a standard tiel. It isn’t obvious at first what it’s a photo of, unless you know cockatiels well, and it really shows off the feather texture.

I have other photos I took today in my Textures photoset. One of the ones of Vic will be used in the CD art for the forthcoming Sol Invictus release, The Angel.

Elsa Closeup,
originally uploaded by FuzzyButt.

This photo of Elsa, a Siberian/Canadian lynx is part of Fuzzybutt’s Flickr photostream. Fuzzybutt volunteers at the Barry R. Kirshner Wildlife Foundation in California. He’s posted many of his photos of large cats to Flickr, including a wonderful picture of him cuddling a worried leopard.