At least the birds think its Spring.

The weather here in L.A. has been decidedly un-spring-like lately, but that hasn't stopped some hummingbirds from building a nest in our backyard.
These images are frame grabs from a webcam we've set up to watch them. The video camera is looking through one of our (very old) windows, and its really dark, so there is a fair bit of distortion, but you can basically see whats going on. In the background of the images you can see a chain-link fence... that should give you an idea of the scale of the nest. Its about the size of half a ping-pong ball.


There is one egg in the lower portion of the nest, and one baby above the egg. Its there, I promise.






Mum's feeding the baby, who is around one day old, maybe two. You can see its beak and giant bulgy eye pretty well.

Star Search 1.0

Frequent star sightings are part of living here in L.A. Its odd how often I will see a familiar face on the street and not be able to immediately determine how I know them. Are they a work acquaintance? Or an actor... or waiter... or (as the joke goes) perhaps both? I often find myself smiling a greeting at people before realizing that I don't *actually* know them. I even waved once at one of the Alias actors on the studio lot, since I've seen him there so often. On the other hand, there are a couple of working actresses in my tap class that I didn't know about until I saw them on TV... startling, I assure you.
Most of our star sightings are of the B variety, and we play a sort of actor trivial pursuit while we try to figure out who they are:
"Movies or TV?"
"TV I'd say."
"But he was younger..."
"Yeah, much younger. Chubbier maybe. With different hair. I'm thinking... he was in an X-filles episode."
"Oh... yeah, yeah... He played a vampire pizza delivery guy with glowing eyes. Yeah, that guy."
This past week though we've had a couple of pretty good ones. First was Timothy Dalton at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset, in his weekend sloppies, standing in line to buy a book with the rest of the unwashed. He has a little less hair than in his Bond/Flash Gordon days, and glasses, but it was him. The second one was Adam Sandler, in plaid flannel, standing outside of the Market City Cafe in Burbank and talking on a cell phone. He made me giggle as I walked by, because for some reason I didn't expect his voice would really sound like that.