Emma continues to show she belongs in the Milán Pack. Just now, with the street full of youths, not all the most reliable-looking, and with bass thumping [...]]]> To fit in around here, you really have to be a character. For one thing, you need to help keep the other denizens of the madhouse entertained.

Emma continues to show she belongs in the Milán Pack. Just now, with the street full of youths, not all the most reliable-looking, and with bass thumping from the speakers of a truck across the street, what roused Emma to bark fiercely?

What but her nemesis, a young mother with a pram?

To be fair to Emma, the mother was walking a somewhat stout little dog. That’s got to up the threat factor.

•••

To further support Emma’s pack-appropriate eccentricity, on our walk today we got rained on. At home Emma doesn’t like to be out in any kind of weather. By which I of course mean weather, as in, the weather doing something, not just sort of being there. Today, though, she happily ignored the fact that it was raining. As long as the rain stayed light.

To my surprise she didn’t even react to fairly loud thunder. Usually if any kind of boom is even audible when she’s outside, she’s shrieking and thumping at the back door to come in. Out on the ditch this afternoon, she didn’t even blink. Apparently she figures Daddy will protect her.

(This might be ill-advised. Daddy is tall, hence liable to attract lightning.)

I enjoyed the rain myself. Mostly. It’s a rare treat to see New Mexico on a cloudy, rainy day. And light rain falling on me actually feels pleasant. Certainly knocks down the heat.

But then as we approached the point where I intended to turn around the rain began coming down for true. Then Emma was, like, “Daddy, can we seek shelter now? Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?” Fortunately there were trees with thick enough foliage to offer some respite.

Even then I was more concerned by the lightning. If I’d expected that, or if I’d heard thunder before we set out, I would have kept us home. Naturally it waited until we were on our way up the ditch.

Mostly it seemed to stay fairly far away. Although supposedly, I gather, lightning can smack you from over-the-horizon out of a clear sky. Which mainly fosters in me a sense of fatalism: hey, if lightning can hit me from a blue sky, why should I sweat a little I can actually see and hear?

Although there was one flash-crack near enough to make both of us jump. I didn’t feel quite so damn blasé then.

As I anticipated the hard rain didn’t last long. After just a few minutes it stopped raining altogether.

With summer actually well underway there aren’t many birds in evidence except at dusk and dawn (I’m taking that latter on faith, believe me). There were the usual pheasants screeching in the fields, although I didn’t see any, and a scrubby molting mallard (I hope it was molting.) As we walked back toward the exit from the ditch I saw half a dozen or so swallows flying in spirals just above the trees ahead.

Terrestrial wildlife was a bit more active. Early on we heard a bullfrog groaning. Despite the fact it sounded, as they always do, like something suffering acute intestinal distress, it also sounded happy, somehow.

Coming back I saw round ripples emanating from a point near the ditchbank, from which I deduced a frog had just hopped in. If so there must’ve been a pair, since as we got closer one launched itself from the bank right where the ripples were coming from.

A little farther along I saw hopping across the trail into the weeds to the side that noble creature, the toad. This was a particularly fat and splendid specimen. I’ve always really liked toads, for some reason. They do eat a lot of bugs, which is certainly to the good.

By this time it had started raining again. Not hard, but not lightly, either. Since I’d put the most vulnerable item of the sundry electronalia that I load myself down without before setting foot out the front door (my Palm) in my water-bottle carrier I wasn’t worried about being soaked. It would’ve felt much better, though, if the wind hadn’t decided to start blowing kind of briskly.

The final quarter to half mile of ditch is lined both sides with nice, tall trees. That brought us relief from the wind, if not so much the rain, which commenced to fall straight down. I heard something stirring in the brush to my right, the west side, and looked to see a cottontail bunny dart off into the tall grass of the Nature Center field.

All in all, it was much more pleasant than walking in hammerhead heat. And any walk where you don’t get fried by lightning is a good walk, yes?

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by [...]]]> A bit of an experiment today – take that as yesterday, Friday, May 2^nd, the day before this nominally posts.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by the Nature Center, I decided to try my hand at an audio diary. I keep a journal of our walks anyway, and it’s struck me several times just how convenient it’d be to be able to record interesting events, sights, impressions, and suchlike, just by speaking. I do carry my beloved Pilot T/X religiously, but writing into it’s … not so efficient. Especially since Graffiti 2, their writing interface software, basically sucks. Although in truth I’ve never been terribly accurate at writing on my PDA.

But talking, obviously, is pretty easy.

Also, of course, it’s my intent to dictate my fiction on the go, implementing what I’ve long thought of as my “Man in Motion” concept. So I reckoned this’d be a prime opportunity to test several things at once.

What follows, therefore, is my transcript of the day’s session. It runs 1006 words. It’s proofread, but not edited – I’m proud I only said “um” once. It’s as close to word-by-word as I could make it.

Feel free to skip this one. If not – here goes:

===

Okay this is me, down on the covered trail by the Río Grande Nature Center, and once I got to the levee path it wasn’t a bad day. The wind’s mostly blocked off, so it’s mostly cool and pleasant, and I’m glad I’m in the shorts. Just heard a woodpecker going off; there’re many swallows curveting around, many, many, and the Nature Center fields here right by the bridge back east across from the bike path are flooded into such an extent we actually have Canada geese swimming in some of it, which means it’s flooded pretty deep. I guess that’s the way our government saves our precious water resources, although in truth the runoff this year is liable to be high. Anyway, it’s about 4:37 p.m. if I didn’t mention that. I’m gonna try keeping an audio diary here some, and just see how this works. We’ve got the machine set up so that it’ll transcribe into Dragon on the notebook computer, so good for us.

My God! Couple minutes later – I saw my first hummingbird of the year hovering up here by a tree and while I was at it I saw another one – there’s two of them! Hooray for that. A flicker just went by. Actually saw the first swallows a couple weeks ago when we were out here. And as I say, they’re really going to town down here now. . . .

You know, it really is so beautiful down here – I sat as the wind starts to mount, fortunately mostly over my head – that as always after I’ve laid off a few days I wonder why I’m not out here every day and possibly all day every day.

My God, here’s a dead tree to the side of the road, that looks as if it’s been pretty recently gnawed on by beavers – it’s not actually the road; it’s the foot trail still – along the east side of the clear ditch, but, wasn’t that way when we were last here. Actually haven’t been this way in a few weeks, plus the wood is still kind of yellow, almost orange, meaning it’s fresh. Haven’t seen beavers down here in years and years, but evidently they’re still here. The color of the wood is actually a lot like the color of the bellies of some of the swallows that we have; I can never remember if they’re barn or cave swallows whose bellies range from yellow to an orange that’s almost red, with very shiny blue backs. We have some of those as well as some of the white-bellied ones skimming along not for above the water. I guess there’s bugs down there.

We’re a few yards in the past where the beavers were, and something big just went into the water, although oddly enough it kind of seems as if it went into the water from a low-hanging branch, which doesn’t make sense, so I’m wondering if instead something big such as, well, possibly a beaver disturbed the branch as we passed. And now we have kind of a shrike-y looking bird, sitting up here on a branch as we approach the cut-out where Emma’s gonna go get water and I’m going to turn back.

Now, also the last time we were down here we saw a couple o’ muskrats gamboling right down by the cut-out where we’re now heading down . . . don’t see ‘em today. Here comes a mallard. . . .

It occurs to me in my vanity that regardless of how well this turns out transcribing in Dragon, I’m going to save it off as an MP3 and then save it to CD, in my vanity, as an audio diary, so there. I’m, in fact I’m so vain I may decide to put some of these up on my blog for download, and, as a play on “podcasts” call them “oddcasts.”

Okay, I noticed that every time I stop and start again, I start a new audio file, which doesn’t really break anything. However, um, I’ll go ahead and hit “Pause” from now on until I’m done for the day to simplify things. I’m, I’m guessing that using Audacity I can go ahead and join these files together if it really is important to me to do so, and it probably won’t hurt with the transcribing at all.

Okay, we’re back on the levee bike path now approaching the bridge back to the Nature Center, and Emma just found something down in the bosque to our right that was really interesting to her, and she really wanted to go and see and I wouldn’t let her, pursuant to our rule that I don’t want her making any . . . ooh, wait, Emma! Huh. I wonder if there’s lizards out, she just did it again. I don’t want her making any little friends I can’t see, and the corollary’s, I don’t want her making any little friends that I can see. I basically don’t want her sticking her nose in any place and coming out with something clinging to it. So . . . the poor child has had to cope with frustration here.

I also note as we approach it again that the sign by the entry to the Bosque Loop path says that the fire danger today is “very high,” which I don’t recall seeing before. I don’t know what the difference is between that and “extreme!” Here’s Emma peering out in the, out in the leaves again. I don’t know if it’s just wind rustling or there’s really something out there. Anyway, what I figure is that they had some extra money for their sign budget that they had to spend.

Okay, we’re back in the car. We did 3 miles straight up. Hadn’t intended to go that far. It’s 5:13 PM. We did 5295 steps, 4664 aerobic steps, 48 aerobic minutes – that’s pretty good – 361 kilocalories, and – that’s it, this is Victor, signing off his very first audio diary for May the Second of 2008.

===

And there you have it. And I did: I did save the files as MP3s, although I’ve not yet burned them to CD. Reckon I’ll wait till I have more.

On the whole I’d have to call it a successful experiment. It took me a while, maybe an hour, to proof it against the MP3s played in WinAmp, so it wasn’t real efficient. This time.

But I expect there’s a learning curve, in dictation as well as transcription. For that matter I dictated a mess o’ Annja earlier today, and discovered again how I can get frustrated with DNS; sometimes it just seems obtuse in transcribing what I say. And of course a fair amount of that is my simply not e-nun-ci-ating clearly enough. Practice will fix a lot of that, especially since the program also learns from my corrections.

On the whole the recording came across pretty clear and the transcription was reasonably accurate. One complicating factor was the aforementioned wind: there were times, especially when we were on the elevated bike path, that the wind boomed loud enough to register as attempted words when I did the voice recognition thing.

In any event, there’s a lot of what I was up to today (as I said, technically yesterday; but to me the day don’t change until I’ve been to sleep. Or decided not to go to sleep.) Both personally and professionally.

As [...]]]> I just got back from taking Emma on a walk on the ditch that leads along the eastern side of the RGNC wildfowl preserve. It was a beautiful Spring midday, mostly clear; the sun was hot and the breeze cool, a combination I really enjoy. Too bad we don’t get it too often.

As we were heading back to the car along the southern fence of the RGNC fields I saw a couple of ring-necked pheasant cocks (okay, get the giggles out of the way. It’s what they’re called. Deal.) Albuquerque’s North Valley down by the Río Grande is infested with pheasants. The males strut around, looking absurdly gorgeous with their shiny green heads, red-circled eyes, golden breasts, and long-feathered tails. And of course what they’re doing is trying to attract babes.

So these two cock pheasants came running toward the fence through green ground cover that was maybe chest-high on them, four or five inches on average. It looked as though they were racing. Their courses converged until they came within about eight feet of the fence, when they stopped ten feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back out into the field, again angling toward each other, until they were walking side by side.

Then they stopped and turned toward each other. They started doing this bobbing routine, one ducking low while the other rose up, like pistons in a two-stroke engine. It looked suspiciously like a courtship dance; I was wondering if we were going to see some serious gay pheasant action here. Right out in front of God and everybody. Think about the children! (Imagine that as said by Bill Clinton in his customary Berkshire hog-as-televangelist squealing grunt.)

More likely it was some kind of rivalry dance. As I watched this Emma and I started walking again. Before we’d gone more than a few steps this hen pheasant comes booming out of the low brush right by the fence. She flew off at an angle past the fancy-dancing males and out into the field. The nearer male turned right round and went running off in her direction, chuckling to himself in triumph. The other emitted a loud clack of dismay. “Dammit!”