Regardless, we truck on. Last weekend, we even had a bit of an excursion.
The first time we went to Jack Block Park in September, we saw a bunch of crows (they were molting, it looked weird) and a couple of stellers jays.
Since then, we have thought of JBP as "A Place With Stellers Jays!" Of course, a lot of places are places with stellers jays. The jays are fairly present throughout West Seattle, albeit less ubiquitous than most feeder birds. We have at least one resident that hangs out just a bit further out from the duck pond. And there's one that shows up outside of the school from time to time.
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They are one of those semi-elusive regulars, up there with northern flickers. Often around. Frequently heard. But not quite as easy to spot or photograph.
But JBP is stellers jay central now, I suppose, so we made a Pilgrimage the last weekend of February.
Jack Block Park is a West Seattle park built on the remains of a shipyard and a wood treatment plant. To one side, there is the ocean, a couple small beaches, and plenty of flora/fauna, on the other sides there are the following: train tracks, an RV park, and a ton of still functioning shipyards.
It has a cool vibe.
One of my favorite parks. It has a nice post-apocalyptic mix of Nature(!) and Industry(!). Views of downtown against a backdrop of random cormorants...
Oh and Goldeneyes!
Kind of hard to tell from a distance, but they have rather distinct glowing golden eyes, hence the name. Very pretty.
And representing that blissful union of urban and wild:
Doing their beautiful and slightly grimy trash bird thang!
Not to be forgotten, an eagle showed up!
Making little high-pitched noises you'd associate with a much milder and smaller bird, really. But Eagles really do often just sound like seagulls. (They noise we associate with eagles and that is often played in movies is almost invariably actually a red-tailed hawk sound)
At any rate, we saw a wonderful bevy of birdies, but no stellers jays were in sight. Even the crows themselves were hanging out by the train tracks instead of the park. Alas. We did get one extra bonus bird on the way out, though:
A northern flicker just to the side of our departure point making all manner of excited noises!
Allan was not particularly demoralized, but we did promise to look extra closely for steller's jays on the usual crow walk.
We lucked out!
A bit of a treat to start the week.
Monday and Tuesday were sleepy days. I really think we had been that excited with our JBP triip.
Monday was a series of missteps - our regular walk being (once again) interrupted by significant landscaping at the pond. I swear they are just cutting everything down to a nub and I don't love it.
Bright side, we saw the stellers jays again on our alternate route!
Then Allan discovered that the animal they were covering in Animal Adaptations (her Tall Mountain Homeschool class) was a skunk! She had misunderstood and thought crows were the next animals to be covered. She was so sure it was going to be crows that day that she made a note on her calendar so that she could wear her crow sweater, her "I'm Just a Girl Who Loves Crows" socks and both of her crow bracelets.
It was a bit devastating. But after we talked her down, it turns out that skunks are funny because they make a stinky smell that some kids are convinced are "farts" and that is just intrinsically hilarious no matter how many times you say it. And apparently, they'll cover crows this coming Monday. Gosh I hope they do!
Tuesday was a tired day. But Wednesday, things had mostly turned around. At least for Allan.
I'm a little off my game, as evidenced on Wednesday afternoon, which is when Allan casually announced, "you know you forgot to give my breakfast this morning, but it's ok, I wasn't really hungry..." Whoops! (Also, she's never hungry)
Andrew has decided he's getting to work later than he'd like. Which makes sense. He was previously working from home, which is a much speedier commute. That's a pretty big loss. And best attentions aside, it's harder to get out of the house "at seven" than it is to walk upstairs at 7:30.
This is one I have minimal insight into. Even when I was on a night owl schedule, I have never been the type to wake up slowly or experience much sleep inertia. Once I'm up, I'm usually up with the most energy I'll have the rest of the day, and there's a flurry to do as much as I can before the energy and focus plummets to earth.
When I lived alone, I could be dressed and heading out for work within about fifteen minutes after my alarm.
Nowadays the first hour of my morning looks something like this: wake up, get dressed etc., wake Allan up (a complex and involved routine), make sure she takes her meds, engage in the series of call and response games (pretend you're a cuckoo and I'm a reed warbler... pretend you're a lonely rakasu crow!) required before she's ready for her individual wake up time, then get downstairs to make coffee, re-up the cat's food, do a quick vacuum of the living room and main bathroom (kitty litter bathroom - anyone who's been to my house knows I'm not a neat freak and the amount of debris I get with just that tiny vacuum each day is pretty impressive), make Andrew's lunch, bring Andrew coffee and say good morning, put the bird feeder out and make the humans breakfast.
Oh, wait I also generally catch up with emails, text with Allan who sends me pictures and birds a lot from the bedroom, write people back, watch whatever videos and memes I've gotten over the evening, check the calendar and update the budget. Oh, and several mornings I also get some form of laundry started.
So, yeah, my solution to wanting to leave the house earlier is "how about you jump right out of bed as soon as your alarm goes off because you've been sort of awake and checking the time for the last hours anyways..."
Or something like that. Which is... probably... annoying. So, I kind of let people who aren't me solve their not-me challenges.
As a result, other elements of Andrew's wake up routine are getting condensed. So as of this week, I come down with coffee to do the "good morning" thang about ten minutes earlier (one snooze cycle earlier) than previously. This seems like a little difference, but it involves restructuring the order of things-I-do-in-the-morning. I'm easily flustered apparently. Everyone is shocked.
Still using my phone moderately less. So far, no big thang.
It's always hard to say much about these sorts of changes.
Changing anything up at all has an effect that isn't necessarily specific the actual changes involved. Not necessarily "placebo" in that classically understood way. But any disruption to routine will require a level of awareness and intentionality that's not typically present in the day to day. A lot of the decreased stress or increased productivity that we credit to "dropping our phones" or "the new organizational system" is really just "not being on default autopilot".
It's sort of similar to how a new gluten free or meat free or whatever diet may initially cause unintended weight loss, but only because you haven't figured out how to compensate for what was removed. And you might feel better- at least for a while - because at first, you're being really aware of what you do bring into your body. Those changes don't really indicate much beyond this: if we could be super-duper aware and intentional of everything all the time, we would probably live our lives differently... And burn out because that's not sustainable. We need habit. We need routine. We need autopilot.
The first week or so, I cleaned. A lot. Until my perennial injuries protested. I don't think that was a natural "I clean more when I don't use my phone!" I think it was a mixture of having recently deep cleaned in preparation for the bug sniffing dog, and not having fallen into any routines yet.
I also spaced out. Which is good. That's the goal. But I think over time we regress to the mean. This is why I don't necessarily think that studies where people give up their phones for a couple of months and see improvement across any variety of metrics necessarily are that meaningful on their own.
You don't know where you'll settle.
But for now, I've reduced my phone use by many hours a day. Mostly I use my phone for maps, music, a couple of games I play with other people, ebird/merlin and messaging when I'm not at the computer. That usually takes up about 2 hours (sometimes longer if I - heaven forbid - make an actual phone call or two). But that's a lot less than I was averaging before.
Here's where I'm putting back those putative hours saved.
1. Reading. A little bit more. I'm not in an obsessive cycle like I get into sometimes. I'm not wandering around reading all my full hours and nose stuck in a book. But I do read a bit more before bed and when I'm out waiting places and I have a coffee table book that I flip through from time to time and some magazines.
2. Ornithology class. This kind of doesn't count. I'm not spending more time on it. I started this after it was gifted to me in December and am almost done with it. But it's a way I spend my time anyways and I suppose maybe I've run some flashcards more than I would have previously.
3. On the computer. There are activities I've moved to my computer. Screentime to screentime, but since I hate holding still, it tends to involve less rabbit holing sprawl. And more "come back when I hear a messenger notification, type something and wander off again. "
4. Staring out the windows. There are two. They get a lot of watching, regardless because of the birds. But in those little interstitial moments, looking out the window becomes a go to in the absence of "checking the phone." Which is cool. There's almost never a total dearth of activity out the window and it can be utterly fascinating stuff.
5. Watching YouTube shorts.
Allan doesn't necessarily navigate transitions with ease and grace. It can be hard! We've developed a thing where if she's finished one thing within a half hour of another activity, I set a timer and she switches to Youtube Shorts instead of starting anything else. I detest auto advance and have it turned off wherever I can, so she has to consciously advance from video to video. Meaning, she actually watches them fairly closely or at least has to check back in every minute or so. It never seems to gain the same hypnotic momentum I associate with scrolling insta or the like.
Our YouTube shorts roster is largely educational videos about birds, snippets from nature documentaries, and artists doing small projects. It's a nice mix. Allan is usually quite private about her YouTube (despite insisting on watching on the big screen in the living room), but she loves to share bird videos with me, so I have always gotten plenty of summoning calls during shorts time. So now, I just sit down once she puts them on and watch them with her. It's nice actually to devote my entire attention to them instead of bobbing between electronic sources.
Honestly, I can't think of much else. I'm not socializing more (slightly less in some ways), writing any symphonies, or doing much differently than before.
I think it was such a supplemental activity, that it didn't outright replace activity, so much as play in the background of it. It's always easier than I expect to just cut that noise, though the habit to grab and unlock the screen whenever I leave a room is still there. But, yeah, turns out I'm probably not addicted. Just kind of distracted and compulsive.
I think the quality of my tv time has increased most notably. Which isn't a terrible thing. There's a communal quality to experiencing something *together* like when you watch something with other people. Where as phones take you out of a room, tv brings an experience into the room. Something like that. It feel affirming to "see the same thing" as others around you.
At any rate, who knows really how anything is going, but definitely spring is springing, so I'll defer to that.
Happy final February and off we go into unrepentantly irreversible spring!
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