why must so many of my post titles have exclamation points?  i can’t imagine that i truly feel the exclamation this morning because it’s pretty early and i’m just sitting here on the couch trying to wake up,

but the live loon cam is really cool…well, really neat.  it’s a neat thing.  kevin sent me the link.  LIVE LOON CAM.  It’s streaming footage of a loon nest on a lake in minnesota.  this guy named larry built the nesting platform and it has audio and you can watch the loon sitting on the nest.  he just sent me the link a couple of days ago and when i watched it, first the loon was there, then it wasn’t.  i then checked out larry’s blog and he has been writing about waiting and waiting and WAITING to see if the loon was going to lay an egg.  it seemed like there was some doubt that it’d happen this year, but she’s laid one several years in a row and usually when people have webcams on the nesting loons they only lay eggs 50% of the time.

but then yesterday, larry was extremely excited because she LAID THE EGG.  i didn’t actually see this and i haven’t actually tried to see if it’s possible to view the footage from the event, but i bet it isn’t possible, but so now the loon is sitting there on the nest.  so i wonder how long she’ll have to sit there, and then of course the egg will HATCH and that would be neat to see except i wonder if larry spends most or all of his days and nights watching the feed…or the actual loon…because it seems he’d hate to miss it.

i can’t spend ALL my time sitting around watching the loon cam, but there’s something appealing about doing it.

for example, this morning i looked and the loon was sitting there.  just now i looked and she was swimming around, and there was the egg lying all by itself.  i read larry’s latest post – he wrote that both the mother and father loon will sit on the egg, and 99% of the time they’ll be sitting on the egg.  so i saw something rare, the loon swimming in the water, but i didn’t even know it.  so i’m getting some valuable education this morning and it’s  not even eight a.m.!

more importantly, larry wrote that the loon will sit on the egg for TWENTY EIGHT DAYS.  it’s good to know that, so i don’t have to be obsessive about watching for an indeterminate amount of time.

christine is coming to visit today!  not till this evening.  i spent much of yesterday cleaning, and it made me realize that i’m horrible, HORRIBLE at keeping the place clean.  i mean, i knew this already, but when actually cleaning it made it that much more obvious.  i’m happy that everything is fairly clean now and wish that it could be this way more often, but i know i’ll just plunge back into the slovenliness again because i can’t help it.

ok then,

thursday may grace.

p.s. i’ve been sitting here for about 15 minutes now, watching the loon cam – the loon left the nest again while i wasn’t looking and she hasn’t been back!  where is she?  isn’t the egg getting cold?  i can’t keep watching, i must go now…i also watched the egg being laid – some loon viewer recorded it.  basically, the loon is sitting on the nest, and after a while she kind of sits up a little and you can see an egg there.  not quite the most dramatic thing in the world, but when have you ever seen a loon laying an egg?