Two morning's wake up call

One day last week while getting out of bed I heard a bang on the window. I looked out and there sat a slightly dazed male quail! I felt bad for it having flown into our window, but also took the opertunity to take some pictures at a much closer distance than fully coherient birds allow. After a couple shots he must have been feeling better and seen me moving through the window and flew off. I got another chance though just a couple mornings later when a female quail did the same thing! That time a grabbed my zoom lens and took a lot more pictures to make sure I captured the slightly blind bird... the only thing we can figure is that the lighting is such at that time of day that the quail see a reflection in the window and try to fly through it. We haven't heard it happen again yet, but here are some of the pictures I got when it did.

Life as we know it...

Life is crazy, and by crazy I mean crazy busy. I know people say, "Just wait until..." you fill in the blank, but I'm trying not to think about it possibly being even busier someday because it seems busy enough now. There is only one week left in the term plus finals week and then we get a week break... maybe. On top of my regular work I'm trying to piece together the class I'm going to be teaching next term... it's coming along, but pretty slowly. Mark spends almost every spare moment studying trying to finish up his external studies classes at the same time as his other classes and get good grades in them all (which he's been doing really well with so far). I wish I had gotten a picture of him the other evening when he fell asleep face down on his books while studying. I've been pretty bad at taking picture of what's been going on with us lately, although it's pretty much the same thing every day... pry ourselves out of bed, inhale breakfast, rush to work and school, sit in my office, get in a plane, get out of a plane, sit in my office some more, come home, eat dinner, study, go to bed. I haven't had much time to do much creative stuff, but here's what I have done in the last month.