Tiny Featherballs

Babby Birbs

babbybirb

Right now the highlight of our backyard adventures is the fact that my wife found a nest full of babies.  I am guessing these are “Babby” Robins, largely because anytime I got near the nest a Robin would make a horrible racket I assume trying to drive me away.  The cute little things have been trained well because they went from happily playing around with each other to being completely still the moment I got anywhere near them.  I am guessing that is a defense mechanism to freeze up completely as to keep motion from attracting a predator.  They are freaking adorable and they are in a location where we can pretty easily watch them as they do their stuff.  There is a leaf in the way so I had to get pretty close to get this clear of a shot, but as far as seeing their general well being we can track that from the comfort of our patio.  I am absolutely certain there are more babies out there, but I am guessing this might be the only group that is actually inhabiting one of our bushes…  that they probably mistook for a tree considering how overgrown they were.  It makes me wonder if there have been Robins nesting in it all this time.  I know last hear there was a group of Robins that nested in a gap in the stonework on the side of our house near the garage.  Unfortunately a huge windstorm came up and the next morning I found that nest on the ground with both eggs cracked open.  I am kinda worried about how precarious this nest looks, but I guess since they have already hatched and are already fat little feather balls…  hopefully they could function if something happened to the nest.

whiteflowerbetter

I talked yesterday about the batch of flowers that I thought were the first fatality of the backyard.  Sure enough all of the red flowers died out, and the white ones looked pretty sickly for a bit.  However yesterday after finally getting some solid sun, the white ones seem to be pulling out just fine.  It is my hope that now that we have freed up most of the space from the dead plant, that the white flower will go ahead and fill that space in.  I snapped this photo largely because of the droplets of water on the pedal.  All of the other flowers seem to be thriving which is awesome, especially after getting some tasty sunlight.  Honestly I wonder if the red one struggled not because of the watering situation but due to the fact that we went several days without much direct sunlight.  In any case the backyard is just as peaceful and relaxing as ever…  with the slight problem of it being insanely muggy.  The pool however seems to have finally warmed up so I am looking forward to using it in the near future.  I had stuff to do last night or I would have potentially taken a dip.

Challenge of Thursday

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On Thursday nights I have a standing date with Jex and Squirrel to do some Challenge of Elders, and often times a Nightfall.  Now the entire idea behind this is just to make sure that no matter what we get at least one set of characters through the Challenge of Elders that week.  Often times folks start running these like mad on Tuesday nights, a night where I already have a commitment in the form of the FFXIV Pony Farm/Raid night.  So that means I miss out on a bunch of the easy clan pick up group action.  Now most weeks I slide into another Clan group without problem, but  we simply set aside this night as a way of making sure that we get at least one set of drops from the challenge.  I look forward to the night because I greatly enjoy hanging out with Squirrel and Jex, because the two of them are the folks that revitalized Destiny for me and introduced me to the amazing Axioma clan.  Last night we got started a little earlier which means we also had time to squeeze in a Nightfall afterwards.  This weeks Challenge included a score bonus for super abilities, so a couple of us were rocking the Bad Juju as a way of feeding our super/orb generation machine.  One of the rounds we managed to score around 50,000 points which I am pretty damned proud of.  Unfortunately we still were just shy of the 90,000 armor score, which allowed us to have one match where we broke out our Sleeper Stimulants and just tore down the bosses.

As far as drops worth mentioning… I picked up a 330 Aegis of the Reef, which is the Taken themed Pulse rifle.  So far I have to say I am in love with this thing and it dropped with a solid set of perks.  In the first slot it came with Send It and Reinforced Barrel… which since the gun already has decent stock stability I have chosen Send It.  In the second tier it came with Full Auto, which is an interesting perk to get on an already stable pulse rifle, but unfortunately you can really burn through your ammo reserves quickly.  In the last slot it has a very interesting situational case of Third Eye and Life Support, letting me swap between the two based on what I need worse.  For the time being I am rocking Third Eye because I love having radar up all of the time.  When we got around to running the Nightfall I managed to pick up a second Darkblade Helm, this one sitting at 335 with almost exactly the same stat package as my original one that was only sitting at 305.  It was a straight upgrade and I guess I will wear it for awhile to get it nice and upgraded as an option.  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed running around with this helmet just because it looks cool.  All in all it was a pretty great night, and through all of our shenanigans I managed to gain rank from Variks, Vanguard, Future War Cult and the Cryptarch netting me a bunch of random infusables and legendary marks.