Why I Oughta...

Just a few days ago, I posted a photo of the Illinois Bird Field Guide that Nat gave me for Christmas and today I can share that is already paying dividends!  We had a visitor to our suet feeder that I was able to get that grainy photo you can see above.  There's a screen up in that window and I didn't want to get too close for fear of scaring him away, so you're going to have to deal with the Zapruder film-version of my woodpecker.   But..that's him up there.  I've posted about woodpeckers before here on the blog last summer when I showed our tailprop suet feeder back in Elmhurst here .  But for the first time, we're able to identify our visitor - which is very exciting!  (at least to me...) I snapped that photo before the bird flew off and then scurried over to my office to open up the field guide to figure out who it was.  As you can see in the photo above, he has a red head, right?  Welp...that would be a big tell!  He's NOT a red-headed

Just like last year, the fine folk over at  +Fitbit  mailed me my 'year end summary' of activity. This year, I traveled 1926 miles.  And that's with a pretty sad December.  My device was on the fritz for the most of part of the month and I was just waiting until Christmas to get a new one.  (Which...thanks to my mother-in-law, I did!) To compare to last year:  I went 576 more miles this year over last . Some of the stats make a lot of sense.  For instance, Tuesday being my most active day sounds right.  I play Cardio Tennis every Tuesday morning.  I get in 3-4 miles every Tuesday before 7 am. The fact that April was my most active month is interesting to me.  I started a new job in April.  I went from working from home a lot to commuting on the train and walking from Olgivie to Aon almost every day. June 23rd is a puzzle, though.  It is a Sunday.  I think it might have been the day that we had the Bird's 1st Birthday party?  I must have been hustlin' ar

I started wearing my FitBit on April 27th, 2012.  Since then, FitBit tells me that I've traveled 1350 miles - or as they say "more than length of the Tigris River"! The fine folks at FitBit sent out this 2012 summary note yesterday and they included a few little data points that are interesting.  Some of them I understand like Tuesday is my most active day.  That makes sense because for all of 2012, I've been going to Cardio-Tennis on Tuesday mornings. The month of May was my most-active month and that kind of makes sense in that I had just started to track my activity, so I'm guessing I was motivated to get in those extra stair climbs or a few more steps each day.    Looking back at my calendar I can't quite figure out if there were any other dynamics at play that caused me to move a little bit more in the month.  Nothing jumps out. Also, the June 7th date - as my most active - puzzles me.  That was a few days before the Bird was born so maybe I was r