Wednesday, June 23, 2010

a truly slow day

Not a large page count for the day. Higher marks for variety though.

Read another essay (5 pages) in The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts, "Nest Gains, Nest Losses" by Scott K. Robinson. Really good. Another example of how we don't always realize the detrimental effects of our actions. Songbirds have enough problems to deal with these days, and this article pointed out yet another. The author and several other research teams in the Midwest worked together on a comprehensive study and found that the fragmentation of forests is really hurting several songbird species. Thanks to the parasitism of cowbirds. Cowbirds must live within four miles of farmland and open spaces to forage for food, and thus the fragmentation of forests is leaving less and less deep forest where songbirds are safe from their parasitism.

Then on a totally different track, I read the first 15 pages in a book I got yesterday, Organize Now! A Week-By-Week Guide to Simplify Your Space And Your Life by Jennifer Ford Berry. Now that school is coming to an end for the year, I'm on a quest to get my life, my home, my everything organized again. Not sure if this book will actually help...I don't plan to follow it to the letter or anything, but it does seem to be full of tips I can put into practice. My first step (though not a tip gleamed from the book) was to start another blog to chart my progress. Yeah, just what I needed, huh? But I'm hoping that tracking my progress will provide motivation. (And yes, I do realize that setting up another blog was maybe not my most productive use of time--I could have been reading or trying to finish up the last of the school stuff for the year or working on actually getting something organized--my excuse being that I was feeling really sick most of the day and just couldn't stay focused on anything "productive.")

Finally, at bedtime, I managed to read 10 pages in Harry Potter before falling asleep.

2 comments:

  1. Yay another blog :D I've actually looked at that organizational book myself before! I'll have to see how you like it. The songbird essay reminds me of this book I have on my TBR that I've been wanting to read for ages called Silence of the Songbirds. It looks so good. Nancy reviewed it a long time ago and I bought it right away..sadly, I just haven't read it yet :(

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  2. That organising book sounds like fun! I'm going to use our move later this year to de-clutter my life (with any luck). I'm always afraid to read books about biodiversity, because they make me so sad. :( (Silence of the Songbirds has been on my TBR list forever thanks to Nancy too, but I don't have the guts to pick it up!)

    Also, now that I've read a few posts, I LOOOOVE how your blog is set up Debi. In fact, I'm more than a little jealous of it! The sidebars, the posting style, it's all just so perfect. You rock. :)

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