Vögel von Deutschland

Even starlings seem exotic in a foreign land.

 Another distracted post about Germany: this time I intend to focus on birds. We'll see how that goes. The older I get (and I feel I'm getting older by the minute which, of course, is the case), the hazier my memory becomes. That's not so unusual, but it's particularly inconvenient when my camera stops working and I have to try to remember what birds I've seen actually looked like. Not having a proper guidebook with us wasn't so helpful either. We kept meaning to stop by a bookstore to get one (as we have done in France and The Netherlands), but that didn't so much happen this time around.

 But enough with the excuses! What of the birds?

 One of the highlights was assuredly the very obliging black woodpecker, a video of which (taken by Scott on his aged iPhone), I posted a few days ago.

The cinematographer in action

 The woodpecker was in Great Garden Park (or Großer Garten if you want to practice your German) which is--I think--sort of in the heart of Dresden, though I have to admit I never developed any sense of how the city was actually laid out. It's sort of small, maybe, is Dresden; I know we ended up outside the city limits in one direction while out on a walk and in another direction when we went for a bike ride. But this park is definitely quite large. And, for the most part, well manicured. It contains an old palace, too; Scott theorized it was where August the Strong housed visitors he didn't so much want to see, though googling suggests otherwise. We heard a great many birds in the park--with Merlin id'ing all sorts of them, but the woodpecker was, I think, the only one we saw clearly enough.

Merlin ID list for video, above

 We also saw several times, but failed to get any sort of photographic evidence for, a number of what Merlin declared to be great spotted woodpeckers. Having checked out (from SPL, after we were home again) a bird ID book for Europe, Birds of Europe, I now know that there is also a mid-sized spotted woodpecker and possibly a small one as well, and I certainly can't say for sure which we saw. But I'm trusting Merlin to have been able to distinguish between their calls so I'm claiming to have seen the GREAT one. (Though I do remember thinking one of them was distinctly smaller than the others . . . )

 The Eurasian blackbird was the most obliging of birds; we saw him (or her) quite clearly on several occasions, but failed to get any proper photos. Also seen more than once was the European robin, also a mighty-fine bird. Again with no photos. And ditto the great tit, which one imagines must be related to our chickadees.

 I was pretty excited when we read that a bird we'd seen on our bike ride along the Elba was a "goosander," but now I find that that's just the local name for what I originally thought it was, a common merganser. Still, it's one of the rare birds I photographed with my real camera before it gave up the ghost, so I'm still taken with it:

"Goosander" is a better name than "common" merganser anyway.

 Also seen on that bike ride when my camera had not yet died, a whole mess of greylag geese, some of them banded:

A sampling of greylags, enjoying a Saturday outing on the Elba

 One of my favorite bird experiences of the trip was all the house martins hanging out by the Augustus Bridge. We encountered these our first full day in Dresden and I found them absolutely mesmerizing.

Trust me when I say this does not at all capture the experience

It was in Frankfurt that we saw the Egyptian geese hanging out on a bit of public grass:

A little alarming, really

 A park in Berlin--the Tiergarten, maybe--turned out to be the best spot for birds--and of course I had neither binoculars (stowed in our luggage in a locker at the Berlin train station) nor camera (ditto stowage and not working anyway). We were just taking a shortcut through the park to get from the Brandenburg Gate to the art museum with the Vermeers, you see. But then we encountered a charming hooded crow family.

Crowlet behavior is a universal constant

 There was quite a bit of activity on the other side of the path too. My attention was first drawn to what we're thinking was a common chaffinch fledge, harassing its parent, and then a Eurasian nuthatch put in an appearance, followed by what we're saying was yet another (great) spotted woodpecker. And I even sort of got some photos (Note that I'm not saying any of them are good photos!):

Young common chaffinch who first drew my attention

Adult male common chaffinch pretending not to notice its offspring

Trust me, it's a Eurasian nuthatch

 Also seen hither and yon, a grey heron, many magpies, mallards, probably common chiffchaffs, and a pigeon of some sort that seemed so common I didn't even bother taking a photo, and now--predictably--I can't find anything that's a match. There were also a number of what I assumed were house sparrows and only now wonder if perhaps they were something marginally more exotic--Italian sparrows (a cross between house and Spanish). Alas, there's no way of knowing now. We also heard what I'm assuming was a cuckoo about a million times, but never got any sort of look at anything that might have been making the noise, sadly.

 I hope to have more scintillating--or at least in-focus--photos for a future post. Stay tuned!

 

Video interlude: Black woodpecker in Dresden's Great Garden Park

Scott took a wee video of the most obliging bird we encountered while in Germany. The video should be live in about half an hour. In the meantime, a snap of what Merlin hears on the soundtrack

Deutschland für Alex (Round 1)

I've said that I'd post about the trip to Germany (Saxony, for the most part) that we took earlier this month so here I am, attempting a post. While we insisted that we had learned our lesson and were not going to try to do too much or spend all our time running from pillar to post, somehow we ended up spending a lot of time in transit and a lot of it felt like a blur, even at the time. My proper camera was temperamental for a bit before deciding to die outright so I ended up taking a lot of photos with my phone--and I'm here to tell you that an ancient Samsung is not a great instrument for bird photography. I've spent the last few hours pulling some photos off the phone, adjusting some in Photoshop and comparing others to the illustrated ebird list for Dresden. I'm here to tell you it's all a bit tedious which, I fear, this post will also be. 

A more-obliging-than-most-but-still-very-out-of-focus adult male common chaffinch

But since it's customary for me to take shots of the view out the window of wherever I'm staying--and I always do so with Alex in mind--I may start with those photos, unexciting as they might seem, starting with views out of two of the Dresden rental windows:

View out kitchen window (facing east, maybe)

View facing west (obvs) out main room window

The Dresden rental, as I call it, was absolutely fabulous. As you can see in the photo above, it was like being out in the country, but it was a short tram ride to bustling central Dresden (to be addressed in a later post, most likely, since any photos I have of that area are on the dead camera's memory card). I loved the rental so much that I interrupt this views-out-windows series for a view of the breakfast table, for what is the point of international travel if not obsessing on one's own mundane activities?

Last breakfast chez Frank

I could (and, in truth, may) do an entire post as an ode to my new most beloved baked good item, the humble Brötchen. The Seattle area offers two possible sources for a proper Brötchen (which is so inadequately defined as a bread roll or bun), but I'm also planning to try to bake some myself, probably using this recipe. But just look at that charming tea set! I never find such things in rentals and yet! Oh, I was in heaven. But back to the other rental view windows:

Night view from the Scandic Frankfurt Museumsufer

Because, it seems, I am incapable of traveling to Germany without assuming that one must start in Frankfurt, we started and ended our trip there. Which was fine, really. Scott found Frankfurt quite enchanting, and the hotel was reasonably priced and excellently located, aka within easy walking distance of both the Städel Museum (which houses a most excellent Vermeer) and the city's hauptbahnhof. It was just happenstance that it was so very convenient to the BioKaiser where my love affair with  Brötchen began:

The tea at BioKaiser was also oh-so-lovely

Our penultimate night in Germany--as well as our last full day--was spent in Berlin. We saw a few of the sights (perhaps the subject of yet another future post) and had some spectacularly bad cocktails (with very few exceptions, one should just stick to beer when in Germany), but for now, I offer just a view from that rental's window--or I would if Blogger weren't having a bit of an emotional crisis at the moment. While waiting to see if that resolves itself, I'll insert that I would not so much recommend this particular rental. It looked lovely, but it was pretty dysfunctional, with a shower with a very slow drain and a door that didn't shut sufficiently and a stovetop we couldn't convince to work. No tea kettle or tea sets, either. The location was decent, though the area might have seemed a wee bit sketchy.

It looks pretty urban but those trees were full of birdsong

Because sometimes it's just a drive-by photo post of flowers

Lily of the valley with a hint of sweet William

Peony, lilac, columbine, and spray of fennel frond

Iris, geranium, rose, columbine, forget-me-not, "Ballard flower," and "that weird spiky purple thing"

Seattle Independent Bookstore Day, 2026 edition

This year's planning strategy

It's Seattle Independent Bookstore Day Eve chez Aurora. We've been doing this for a decade or more now, and perhaps we've finally reached the Shipton and Tilman level, in which the planning fits tidily on the back of an envelope.

There are now thirty-three bookstores participating in what is laughingly called the Seattle Independent Bookstore Challenge. In reality, the Seattle Passport includes stores in Kirkland, Mercer Island, Edmonds, Burien, Poulsbo, Bremerton, Shoreline, Kingston, Redmond, and Bainbridge Island, and, goshdarnitall, that's just The Crazy. And we're just not going along with it, at least not on Saturday. As it is, we won't make it to every store in Seattle even. Not by bike. Not starting at our local that opens at 10:00 am. Not and end up at Oaxaca for a celebratory dinner which is, I tell you, a non-negotiable for both of us.

With age, I tell you, comes wisdom. We're going to the bookstores we like most and that we can reach without too much anguish. Oh, I'd like to visit Magnolia's Bookstore tomorrow on what I consider to truly be Independent Bookstore Day because I absolutely adore that bookstore. Both of us would prefer to hit Open Books tomorrow too. But Magnolia is fairly isolated and closes at 6:00 pm, while Open Books is located near the start of our run but doesn't open until noon. It's not inconceivable that we should somehow squeeze them in, but it's not exactly what you'd call likely. 

I'm crossing my fingers we manage to reach eleven stores tomorrow and find them open and stocked with books we are eager to buy. That seems a reasonable, rational approach to the day.

Follow-up post of the results sure(ish) to come. 

Seattle Public Libraries Passport Fun!

Cut-paper art done by a staff member at SPL's Southwest Branch

 If the Imaginary Reader knows the most basic essentials about my character, then they know that I can never resist a passport project that involves traveling around by bike getting stamps. I was, therefore, the ideal market for Seattle Public Libraries' passport and postcard promotion in which one could fill a library passport with stamps from each and every branch of SPL and get a postcard featuring that library* to boot. For free! Just for asking! 

Final passport**

Earlier this week I collected my final stamp--from the Broadview branch. There was no big fanfare though the librarian there asked me which branch I'd liked best. I told him that was an impossible question to answer, but that I could say which one had surprised me the most: the Southwest Branch. Southwest is not an attractive building from the outside and, very oddly, it is closed on Saturdays as Scott and I discovered when we biked there after a visit to Fresh Flours. But I gamely returned during the week and discovered the amazing artwork featured above and some of the friendliest librarians imaginable inside that ugly building. And the Birdhouse is less than a block away!

 It's been swell to have a reason to get out and explore some new neighborhoods over the last several months. Yes, months. I collected my first postcard at the Columbia City branch last fall sometime. At that time I didn't know about the passport stamp business so I had to stop by there again as part of my "by light rail" day on which I got a handful of bike miles and a lot of value out of my orca card. 

  I shouldn't have been surprised to find that almost every single librarian I interacted with was friendly and helpful--to an amazing degree. The person at the Southwest branch found a couple of stickers to use so that the ink wouldn't smear where I'd covered up an earlier (misplaced) stamp. The woman at the Magnolia branch was so troubled by the failure of her stamp to fully absorb the ink that she found a second, less-battered stamp to use and helped me affix that new, improved version in place. The "learned something new" person at the Northeast Branch told me about the forgotten room discovered at the University District branch during its renovations (currently closed so no stamp from them, though I got a U-district postcard from the NE woman), while the Lake City librarian enthused about their branch's George Tsutakawa gate--and told me about how his only other gate in the city had been stolen from the Arboretum during COVID. (His son then replaced that one, using his father's old plans.)

One of Lake City's gates (there's a much better image on their website)

I was also struck by the "beyond books and DVDs" nature of several of the branches. Oh, they all had computers for public use (and plenty of public making use of them), but a number of branches also offered basic essentials and Green Lake even has a visiting food pantry. (The Wallingford branch is tiny, but it's adjacent to a local food bank.)

I'm not sure if my definition of "great public art" is exactly what the designers of this program had in mind; I know that the Central Library downtown is supposed to be gobsmacking, but what I liked most was a bit more homey:

No longer accurate, but delightful nonetheless (Queen Anne branch)

New Holly branch pillar (Superman is dropping books on Seattle)

 And of course there has to be an obligatory bike shot:

The weirdest bike racks ever (but at least they had them!)

The postcard haul . . .

\

And a final reason why I love living in Seattle and love its library system:

*The Madrona-Sally Goldmark Branch was out of postcards!

**Predictably, I replaced a few of the categories with my own.

It's been a minute

Selection of books mentioned in this post (plus an aging bouquet)

The thing is, I've not been inclined to post so much for considerably more than a minute, even in its most current, slangy sense. It all seems sort of pointless, you know? What sort of posts would the average German woman be writing in 1939, you know? As it happens, I can answer that, because I bought  On The Other Side: Letters To My Children From Germany 1940 - 46 when we were at the Persephone shop in Bath a few years back. It seems that one just sort of goes on with the quotidian of existence, regardless, and that's pretty much what I've been doing. 

For me that means a fair bit of reading so I've decided to post a reading recap here, rather than wait until the end of the year. Possibly because I don't have so much certainty about the end of the year, the way things are going. Happy thoughts. Books then, in reverse order, because that's how I do things. I expect this list to become vaguer about the books as we go along. Let's see, shall we?

The Tainted Cup  I put my name on the lengthy hold list for this at Seattle Public Library (hereinafter SPL) after asking Victoria, from whom we buy our goat cheese at the farmers market, what she was reading. It's sort of a Mycroft Holmes-esque mystery in a fantasy setting. I found it surprisingly engrossing and have since put my name down for the sequel at SPL.

Little Weirds  This one was also a recommendation, this time from an anonymous librarian. In addition to reading, I'm filling my idle hours by collecting SPL passport stamps (another post, perhaps, some day), which means I'm going to a lot of new-to-me library branches. This collection of short essays from a stand-up comic/actress is sort of a mixed bag; just when I found myself thinking she was insufferably shallow, she'd say something particularly insightful. 

 Runaway Horses  Another library book from another SPL branch display, this time all the books on the display had a horse component because it's now the Year of the Horse. I thought this was an Italian mystery and it sort of is, but mostly it was just fucking weird. (On the up side, googling for the Iain Pears mystery series that I thought about referencing here, led me to discover that Mr Pears has written a couple of new books since I last checked in on him--hurrah!)

Castle Richmond  The long-time Imaginary Reader will realize that things were seeming particularly bleak a few weeks back for I turned to the Trollope shelf for distraction. Sadly, this stand-alone novel was set during the Irish Famine and so a little less fully escapist than I might have hoped. The main story was pretty decent though there was shockingly little in the way of foxhunting.

Murder in Mesopotamia  It's sort of too bad that this list is in reverse chronological order because this was the last of the Agatha Christie re-reads, rather than the first. Poirot enters, as I dimly recall, on about page 180.

Cat Among the Pigeons  Or maybe this is the one in which Poirot is a very late addition to the story. A murder set in a girls school, several characters make use of the titular phrase which struck me as a little odd.

 4:50 from Paddington  Jane Marple this time, with a plucky young sidekick / stand-in.

Two Women Living Together  Another book from SPL (as were, come to think of it, the Agatha Christies), possibly from the Peak Picks display. Nonfiction, for a change, this one is written in alternating chapters by the two women in question. They're friends and roommates, not romantically involved, and the book offers a window into daily life and concerns for unmarried Korean women. I liked it, rather.

Mrs Christie at the Mystery Guild Library  The book that (obviously) inspired the Christie kick already recorded. This again came from SPL (do admire how financially responsible I've become!), checked out because, well, why wouldn't I? It's a mystery set in more or less present-day NYC, featuring a ghostly Agatha Christie, and it was a bit of a hoot.

The Lincoln Highway  A serendipitous read--I found this in a Little Free Library while on a bike ride and I was between books. I'd read Mr Towle's previous blockbuster and liked it okay (while not seeing what all the fuss was about) so I figured I'd give this one a try. It was much the same: a good time while not exactly earth-shattering. And a bit morally ambiguous in the end, which I found surprising and refreshing.

Halcyon  Alas, we have come to the first real stinker of the list. Thankfully, this was another SPL book so only my time was squandered. I have no one to blame but myself; I was attracted to the font of the title on the spine and the flap-copy was intriguing. But the story itself was sloppily written and, oh, just painful to read.

The Way to Colonos  The first one I've drawn a blank on, though looking at the link I see it's the retelling of three Greek myths/stories, originally published in the early 1960s. You know how books written in the 1960s often feel oddly dated and sort of permeated with an air of self-conscious thrashing against societal constraints? This is one of those.

Five Found Dead  Another title that now draws a blank. Unsurprisingly, it's another mystery, this time by Sulari Gentill, some of whose books I've really liked while others have been a bit so-so. This one falls on the more favorable end of so-so. Also checked out from SPL. (I'm determined to get my money's worth on my local taxes, apparently.)

A brief intermission to note that I heard somewhere that mysteries are popular because they make people feel like there's order in life, that things happen for a reason, that there's a logic at work. And that when people do bad things, they get found out and punished. Which might explain why I've been reading so many mysteries this year.

The Correspondent  Another one checked out from SPL, this time based largely on the cover art though I also had read a good review of it. The reference librarian looked at the book enviously and said she was looking forward to reading it herself, so I had some reason to have high expectations. Shockingly, given that it's an epistolary novel and I still have PTSD from Pamela, it did not disappoint. This is possibly the best written-for-adults book I've read this year.

Rock, Paper, Incisors  The third in a series of children's books about two friends and not-romantically-involved roommates, Skunk and Badger. A lot of the action in this installment revolves around the couple of orphaned rats they have taken in. Yes, these books are the reason I have to qualify my "best read" endorsement of The Correspondent above with "written for adults." 

The Mystery Writer  This mystery novel by Sulari Gentill starts off much stronger than the one listed above, but it becomes seriously unbelievable in the final sections. Great characters, somewhat absurd plot.

The Black Wolf   It saddens me to say--and I will refuse to be held to it--but I sort of think the time has come for Louise Penny and me to part company. I get that she doesn't want to write cozy mysteries for the rest of her life and that there's only so much she can do with the population of Three Pines, but the increasingly extreme international conspiracies . . . Well, I was going to say that the plots are just getting too outlandish, but given recent events, I sort of feel that maybe they're just too realistic. Regardless, it's not really my sort of thing.

The Dog of the South Another sort of stinker--and this time I own the book. I loved Portis' True Grit, but this one just left me fairly cold. The style is sort of Lolita-esque in some way that I'm just incapable of detailing. Meh.

Eyes of the Rigel  Translated from Norwegian, this is the third in a series that is just so fine. Not a ton happens and it's slow moving and somehow spare and it's just lovely. I'm happy this one is on my shelf.

A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband  My mother bought this odd cookbook--though I swear it had a different title--at a yard sale when I was a child and I was charmed by the little stories that introduced each batch of recipes. I was ever so pleased to track it down some months back and order a copy of my own for my mother's has long since disappeared. The edition I got clearly resulted from someone scanning an existing book and hastily reassembling the layout; the typesetting is awful and the index is a mess. And, for the record, the recipes are truly vile; I made one of them and I won't make that mistake again. But Bettina is just as charmingly know-it-all as I remembered.

The Paris Apartment  A sort of far-fetched but still engaging enough mystery. I checked this one out of SPL because a friend had mentioned reading a Lucy Foley novel, and while the local branch didn't have the book she was reading, they had The Paris Apartment. If nothing else, it made me remember fondly the place Scott and I rented in Paris a decade ago. We should go back. And maybe just never leave.

Egg Marks the Spot  The second in the Skunk and Badger series, this might be the weakest of the three. It seems to me that the truly best children's stories of this sort (and I'm deliberately leaving that vague because I'm not sure what "this sort" is) don't have a real villain in them; the protagonists may have to overcome some obstacles, but there's no one actively bad in the story. There's a villain in this installment so it's a little weaker than the first and third volumes, but it's still a good time and features a Very Surprising Development.

The Luminaries  I'd pretty much forgotten this book entirely despite it being one I bought (at Paper Boat Booksellers) based, I think, on a shelf talker recommendation. It wasn't awful, but I also didn't love it. As the review I've linked to puts it, "as we read on, we don't read in." I'd forgotten how the final forty pages or so are essentially just notes for how the chapters might be written. Forget the "not awful"; that ending was just fucking lazy.

"Slowly, Slowly, Slowly," said the Sloth  Okay, so I bought this boardbook to give to my new nephew; I had to read it first to be sure it was appropriate, right? Sloth knows how to approach existence. Recommended for all ages!

Wintering  This one (also borrowed from SPL) was recommended by a friend, but--forgive the pun--it left me cold. It was less a how-to than a "why-I-did" and I just didn't care all that much about the author or her issues.

All the Birds, Singing  A Christmas present from Scott, I hadn't heard of this and I don't think he really knew a lot about it either. It was a weird, dark-dark-dark sort of book that just got weirder and darker as it went along. I loved it.