14 December 2010

Peck at whatever seeds, worms

The other morning, I opened the shutters in the spare bedroom where I set up on work-at-home days and found myself face-to-face with a tufted titmouse.

The bird was at least as surprised by this as I was.

Titmice live year-round in these parts, but I tend to notice them most in the winter, when they and the dark-eyed juncos visit the birdfeeders and take shelter in the hollies.

The junco is the real snowbird; they spend their summers in Canada and there is something oddly comforting about the fact that they do. Winter comes to the capital, so hot and humid only a few months ago; temperatures plunge, snow falls, and the local population mutters and complains. Yet here are these birds, reminding us that somewhere, it is worse.

Both titmice and juncos are birds after my own heart, being swift, bright-eyed creatures with sweet faces and soft grey feathers.

They are, in fact, all the right shades of grey. Is there a hex code for 'titmouse belly'?

And that reminds me, I have to migrate the blog to a new template. Blogger has added all sorts of new features that I cannot use on this template. There appears to be a new template which is in every visible way identical to the current one, but I will need to copy down the hex codes and plug them into the new template so I can keep my mostly-right shades of grey.

In my copious free time, of course.

Hilda Morley

4 comments:

  1. Um...what's a hex code?

    It is indeed worse somewhere else (always a good thing to keep in mind, no matter the season!) and I'm always amazed that birds fly such distances to avoid brutal weather! We have titmice and juncos here as well.

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  2. Hex codes, or hexadecimal codes, are six-digit codes that are used to designate colours in html documents (like web pages). The numbers and letters correspond to the quantities of red, green, and blue (RGB) that are used to produce the colour on a standard computer monitor. The current background of my blog, for example, is #E5E4E2.

    And yes, it's always worse somewhere else. Thank goodness for the juncos.

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  3. I'm curious what features you'd like to play with but can't yet.

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  4. There are a lot of editorial things the old template didn't have -- like the ability to adjust the width of the sidebar without having to get into the guts of the code -- that are just nice. I hadn't updated the template since I moved to Blogger from diaryland, other than to change the colours, so the code running it was several years old.

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