Night Visitor

Often I hear these guys on the deck railing at night getting into to bird feed. Last night I was having trouble sleeping so I just looked out and turned on the light because that's something I do in the middle of the night, just to see if one of these fellows is there. And he was. Usually I then open the sliding door and that sends the raccoon scurrying. But instead I got my GH4 which pretty much always has the 100-400 zoom on it (200-800 35mm equivalent). The light was really low and I was holding the camera in my hand. I felt lucky that one of the three shots I took actually came out. Then of course I opened the door and he disappeared. 

This morning I woke a bit late. I tried using my iPad instead of my iPhone as an alarm and that did not work. So my morning was a bit rushed. I got ready in time to go to the Bellingham Music Club concert at 10:30. It was the winners of the Western Washington University students and they were really amazing. Turned out to be all guys this time which is rare. They were all excellent. The one with the most connection with the audience was the percussion player. He was great and fun to watch. If you are in the area a week from Thursday, they will be performing more music at Night Beat at Bellingham High School starting at 7:30 pm. It's worth attending.

After the concert a small group of us went to Mykanos Greek Restaurant for our usual lunch. There were only seven so we sat at a round table and it was lovely because we could all hear each other. I had a special of artichoke chicken on linguini.

After that I visited Arvin at Silverado. I stayed almost three hours and we had a lovely quiet visit together. We met his friend Joe from Adult Day Health because his wife was attending a class in creativity there and Joe was hanging out with everybody at Silverado. It was lovely to see him. At five he joined Arvin for dinner and I headed home. I was too full to have dinner tonight. There were quite a few of my Alzheimer's Society friends at the class. I forgot it was happening. Another friend said, "you don't need this class. It's for Boeing engineers." That made me smile.

I'm having a quiet evening at home now. A giant bird feeder (much bigger that I realized) arrived from Amazon today and soon I will hang it up and get rid of some of the older ones I have. This one is solid metal and has a mechanism that closes when something heavy steps on the bar. I am hoping to discourage some of the squirrels and the raccoons. I'm also planning to cut back on types of bird food. My friend Ric who is the one who power washed my deck and fixed the step stairs out of the doors, said he gets plenty of birds with black sunflower seeds. Sounds good to me so I am going to try it.