What a Party

• I've put up a picture by Audubon of an Egret. I stumbled upon it. When I was golfing in Texas a couple of summers ago I saw one, and asked the guys I was golfing with what it was. It looked a lot like a whooping crane. They called it a water bird. Mom and I were talking about the sand hill cranes and whooping crane that fly down here and spend the winter at Bosque Del Apache. She mentioned wondered what the birds that would spend time on the lake by her house there in Canton were called. I think this is it.
  
• The pre-inaugural celebrations have been impressive. The good lady over at Yikes who lives in D.C. has mentioned how different the feeling is in the whole town from the last eight years. This reminded me of a book I read years ago by the Republican energy Czar under Ford, can't remember his name or the name of the book. The one thing he wrote stuck with me over the years. He recounted something that happened on almost all airliners that left Russia. There would come a minute when the captain would announce that they were leaving Soviet air space and everyone would start clapping and cheering like they were at the Super Bowl. He said it was a natural reaction to the oppression that was felt by the omnipresent fishbowl that was life in a totalitarian country. I see a similarity in the exuberance of the coming inaugural tomorrow. It's not just a new day, a new hope, but a return to freedom. A freedom many were late in recognizing as important because they had been frozen by fear. Finally they realized that fear of our governments excessive intrusion into every aspect of our lives was worse than fearing terrorists.