Yup. You heard me right. A pigeon. Not that we haven’t had pigeons here before. We have. A lot of them. They used to nest on one of our decks. We took steps… This one was different. This pigeon was banded.

Our visiting pigeon flew in about 6:30 or so, and he stuck around until after sunset. He was wearing two pretty bands, one a dark blue, the other a bright green. The blue one clearly has (or had) some writing on it. Even in the closeups I couldn’t read it. The green on, on the other hand, is clearly legible. On the green band are the letters AU OCF, which stand for the organization where he’s registered, American Racing Pigeon Union, and the club his owner belongs to.

After digging around on the Internet a bit more, I found that this is a racing pigeon, probably registered here in southern California. I couldn’t find his owner’s name, at least not yet. From what I can see, it looks like he was registered in 2008. I think that’s the date there. I had to zoom in on several photos to see that last number at all, and I’m truly guessing at it. I can’t see his entire identifying number—the first digit or two are missing in all the pictures—but the part I can see is clear: 0652. There are one or two digits in front of that zero.

We were both quite amazed at how long this pigeon stuck around last night. He didn’t seem to mind us moving around. Dave even went downstairs for his camera, came back, went back inside to switch lenses, returned, and the bird wasn’t fazed. At one point he jumped down off the railing onto the deck itself. By that time the cat had arrived, and we didn’t want her to have squab for dinner. He’s so tame that it was difficult to scare him back up onto the railing. He flew next door, sat on their roof for a minute or two, then returned. That’s when Dave got the last shot above. If you look through the window, you’ll see a very curious cat looking out.

You’ll never guess what I did after knitting all afternoon on Friday. Well, you might. You got it. I ripped it out again, and started over with fewer stitches. I thought for a while yesterday afternoon that I might have to do that again, so I blocked what I had (I love modular knitting needles; they’re great for this) and measured it. The yarn should just make it. Whew. I was quite happy to pick the thing up again after it had dried to resume knitting. Not that I got much done after that, but that hardly matters. It was forward progress I was after, not its opposite, and that’s what I got.

I usually drape an off-white sheet over Nicole when I use her for photo ops, but this morning I didn’t have to. The lovely light gold yarn shows up quite well against her dark green fabric, and since most of the shawl has been blocked at this point, I didn’t need to lay it flat and pin it out. So, now you can see how it really looks. So far. I have to say I’m quite pleased with it.

Huge thanks to one and all who participated in the shawl naming contest that Dee held over on her blog last week. There were 99 comments to her post, and at least that many suggestions, as a number of people had more than one idea. Wow. You all came up with so many good names that it was difficult to choose. But we did. Late on Friday we collected up our favorites and compared notes. The winning name, Tilia, was suggested by 2ply (no blog referenced). 2ply will receive a kit for the shawl when it’s available. Here’s what she wrote:

     I chose the name because parts of the pattern look like lime leaves and lime flowers. The lime trees are flowering now, announcing that it’s spring. Lime flowers have been used to relieve anxiety and the linden tree is the tree of lovers in Germany. Meetings used to be held under tilia in order to restore peace to communities. A peaceful, beautiful shawl.

She references both the lime and the linden there, because they’re basically the same tree. They’re in the same family, any way. She doesn’t mean “lime” the way we do here in the States. The genus, Tilia, covers what we call linden trees.