Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2026-02-08: Trumpeting Swans Edition

What happened during the week of February 2nd - February 8th, 2026:

⛔️ I had a brief scare with my car on Saturday 01-31, which ended up being a nothingburger by the time it was examined on Tuesday 02-02. I got stuck on an unplowed road at Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, with a furious drive in reverse being my only way to break free. In the process of getting unstuck, I packed a lot of snow deep into the grooves of my rear tires, which then rode as if my alignment was thrown off. There were noticeable vibrations in the steering wheel once I went over 30-35 MPH, so once the car started to shake, I took a long slow route back home and made an appointment for Tuesday 02-02 to check out the tire alignment. In the meantime, temperatures started to warm and the impacted snow started to melt off my tires. On Tuesday, the folks at the shop gave the car a thorough exam, and pronounced it free from any alignment issues. They also said I was one of several customers over the last week with identical symptoms, as this “alignment” issue comes up with heavy snowfall.

🛩️ Next week is the San Diego trip! All meetups have been sorted, and the itinerary is more or less set. Starting on the afternoon of Sunday 02-08, L. & I will get serious about our packing. Temperatures in San Diego during our vacation will be predicted in the upper to low 60s for highs, and mid-40s to low 50s for lows. The skies will be partly cloudy throughout the duration, with rain being called for on Sunday 02-15 and Monday 02-16. It’s possible the rains could be a harbinger of desert blooms, or it’s possible it will be a wet adventure. In any case, the San Diego weather should be more pleasant than what’s happening by me now, and it’s still a change in scenery.

📯 My vacation also means next week's update will likely have to wait until I return on Tuesday 02-17. Or, it may be rolled into the update on Sunday 02-22. I'll keep you posted.

📫 Work has been a sea of meetings this week, and my patience for them has decreased. It’s likely short-term syndrome kicking in thanks to next week’s plans, but still. This irritation is likely why I’ve taken a whack at my Outlook rules, as I want to filter out as many irrelevant messages as possible. I cannot unsubscribe to these messages as they are sometimes relevant, but I want to avoid distractions from messages that really matter. I am also morbidly curious to find out how many emails I get overall, so keeping everything in the Inbox should provide me an answer that I’m sure I won’t like.

🥱 Bear Blog has its own monthly writing carnival, with February’s topic being of Boredom. No, not the Japanese band, but the state of being. Once I found out this month’s topic, thoughts and music immediately sprung into my head. You can read my take on Being Boring (and yes, I am making a Pet Shop Boys reference) if you aren’t, you know, too bored or anything like that.

🎒 Oh, and finally, my Sony camera backpack went live on eBay as of Friday 02-06. It’s a solid backpack for someone with a bigger lens collection than me, so I hope it can find a good home. Otherwise, if nobody buys it by the end of February, it’ll get donated and someone can find it at Goodwill for super-cheap.

Items Of Note From Last Week:

Outbound Actions

Internal Obligations

Media

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:

Best to get the difficult topic out of the way first, as many of my articles and podcasts ended up talking about the latest release of the Epstein files. I’ll pick Trashfuture’s take on it, as the gang drops a line that will likely stick with me: Jeffrey Epstein was "a kind of nefarious Forrest Gump, facilitating or gleefully observing a huge number of the events that made our world feel so irredeemable, connecting a world of post-Soviet and American oligarchs with European aristocrats, western financiers, and basically every intelligence agency.” If Woody Allen weren’t so discredited, you could also compare Epstein to Allen’s Zelig, but I’ll stop right there, since The Verge goes further into the Woody/Epstein ties, along with links to #MeToo, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many other similarly unpleasant folks. "Well, we’re living in the world Epstein wanted. We couldn’t have gotten here without a little help from his friends.” If you feel the need to take a long hot shower after both Trashfuture and The Verge, I totally understand.

This week’s vocabulary word is “Triumphgeschrei,” which talks about the triumphal shouts (in German, but you should be able to translate in your browser) made by geese when rivals are chased away from a potential breeding partner. It is both appropriate that I learned about this waterfowl-related term from A Duck In A Tree, but also sad that the podcast didn’t group this term with recordings of geese honking in triumph. While Bob Duchense is quite familiar with geese and other waterfowl, he was on the visual hunt for a totally different bird: a Boreal Owl. A trip to Quebec in bitterly cold weather finally allowed him, after 30 years, to see this bird in the wild for the first time.

The Memory Palace often uses a plot twist in its brief stories to drastically change the mood, and the latest episode was no different. Stories about young Hawaiian men on scientific expeditions in the 1930s and 40s turned out to be less about biological discoveries, and more about territorial claims by the United States prior to World War II. The podcast links to an online digital gallery if you wish to dive further into this secret mission, which itself wasn’t publicly discussed until the early 2000s. Some of these young men were still alive when their stories and missions could finally be unveiled.

Stories like what The Memory Palace brought up can certainly lead to disillusionment. Being told that your time on a remote Pacific atoll was for advancing science, when it fact it was merely for a land grab, is a sure-fire path towards a lack of trust (and this doesn’t even get into the land grab history of Hawaii itself, nor with the decades of secrecy that followed these young men’s missions). It is possible to break through layers of disillusionment, which appears to be the case with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi according to the Japan Times. Her personality and non-dynastic entry into politics (that is, she isn’t related to any former politician) has been part of her appeal to an otherwise tuned-out young voting populace, which is one of many reasons why her call for a snap election on Sunday 02-08 may pay off. If her gamble is correct, she may have enough political will at her back to start tackling some of Japan’s intractable issues of regional declines within the country due to rapid depopulation, rising xenophobia, and a shrinking workforce. Closer to home, my state of Missouri willingly wishes to create intractable problems for the future. A movement to eliminate the state income tax, along with slashing capital gains taxes, would drastically affect the state’s budget for years to come. Nevertheless, these ideas are quite popular in state government circles, according to the Missouri Independent. They could look next door to Kansas to see what happened when a former governor led a disastrous experiment along similar lines, but apparently what happened in Topeka could never happen in Jefferson City, because Missouri people are...built different?

Finally, let’s make a quick swing through Japanese tourism videos. The weak yen has made Japan a cheap place to tour, with these two videos illustrating how in different ways. First, CAPSULE JAPAN takes a short ferry ride from Kyushu (third-smallest of the main Japanese islands) to Shikoku (fourth-smallest island) for the low price of $23! It’s a well-equipped ferry for what amounts to a short 2.5-hour ride, including cabins and a small store for buying meals to eat onboard. If our traveling friend was still hungry after landing in Shikoku, he could have made his way towards the city of Matsuyama, as that would have been the closest location for a Saizeriya restaurant, a chain of low-cost Japanese interpretations of Italian cuisine that are wildly popular with families. Our Solo Travel Japan friend decided to tackle a full meal at a Saizeriya in Tokyo, complete with appetizers, salad, wine, soup, escargot(!), Hamburg steak, Doria, AND two desserts. The cost? ¥4050, or as of this writing, $25.80. Effectively, you can spend the same amount of money and either gorge yourself at a family restaurant, or you could take a ferry between two islands of mainland Japan. Your choice! I'd likely take the ferry and find a better restaurant, but your mileage may vary.

Picture time!

Let's try a new feature to reward folks who've made it this far in the blog entry.

Due to the driving mishap mentioned at the beginning of this week's update, my time viewing Trumpeter Swans became limited. Our only major view was from the Audubon Center at the bird sanctuary, which helpfully set up spotting scopes trained on flocks of gathered birds. Bald Eagles and White Pelicans also congregate at this spot along the Mississippi River, as the nearby Melvin Price Lock and Dam keeps some water flowing in icy conditions, allowing many of these birds to forage for fish and other prey.

I spent about five minutes trying to line up my iPhone camera with the eyepiece of the spotting scope, but that perseverance paid off with at least one good photo. Those white lumps aren't snow, they're Trumpeter Swans huddled together. I haven't seen that many swans in the 20 years or so I've visited this sanctuary, and my only disappointment was that I couldn't hear them bray about like a 7-year-old kid learning how to play the trumpet.

Maybe 100 Trumpeter Swans in total, or close to it! OK, at least over 50.

#BearBlogCarnival #Boredom #Documentation #Jobs #Life #Mundanities #Photography #WeeklyNotes