Last week I pulled up my for-fun acoustic-coding Go project the last commit was from April 27th, exactly 3 months ago. Well that just smells like yet another abandoned project. But instead of feeling bad, I tied up the main functionality and added a small feature (after getting reacquainted with the code). It started as an elaborate joke and my mate and I had a chuckle, delightful.

In the last year or so I’ve realized that I’m a cyclical hobbyist and instead of feeling guilty for not doing my hobbies consistently (I know it sounds ridiculous) I have accepted that! This means that my projects don’t have to be abandoned projects, they can just be on hold and I can pick them up when I’m interested again. This is fundamentally different than being a serial hobbyist, where you’re chasing novelty; not saying I won’t add hobbies but I genuinely like the thing and come back to them. Part of me is sulking that I’m learning basic things like this about myself this late in life, but the rest of me is trying to learn how to be happy about small victories that change the larger narrative about my self lore. Be kinder to yourself y’all, it works 😭

So what are these hobbies that I cycle between?! I enjoy film photography, woodworking, bicycling, scuba diving, open hardware/software, watercoloring, and indie web/blogging.

It’s was a day! I’m dog sitting for a friend’s very high energy young rescue with more than a touch of separation anxiety. We go on a lunch walk and stumble upon this hummingbird. How do you try to help a tiny struggling bird while a high prey drive dog wants to pounce on it!?

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This is the dog, Sandy. She is very very sweet but loses her mind when she sees a prey animal (we’re working on it).

Well I don’t know how but I managed to grab the bird without Sandy eating him (don’t know gender using him to distinguish from she dog). Well she wouldn’t eat him per se but violently shake him and launch him into orbit. I still needed to do a little bit more of the walk to keep Sally from being too energetic. This bird (does he need a name?) was so exhausted that it just lay in my hand and didn’t even have the energy to squeak or struggle. I got him back home and tried to get him to drink some sugar water. Y’all this bird is so tiny and had a thinner than needle tongue. He was drinking the sugar water and surprisingly Sandy didn’t notice.

note: someone suggested the excellent name Ernest Hummingway.

I cannot emphasize enough how tiny and how still this bird was. I’ve never seen a hummingbird be still but it was encouraging to see him move his neck around a bit and blink. The sugar water treatment carried on for a while.

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I took him outside with the dog along on a leash (see separation anxiety from above) and felt like a Disney Princess but the struggling single mom flavor desperately trying to make sure one kid doesn’t eat the other. Everytime he would try to fly away he would just struggle to the ground immediately. It was not safe for him to be inside or outside.

Well at this point I had no choice but to attend a meeting with a hummingbird in the hand. He was definitely worth more than two hummingbirds in the bush.

Over the next two hours his strength started returning and I tried to move his wing a bit so it was not stuck under his other feathers. He peed on me. But eventually started getting feisty but still not able to fly. Keeping Sandy oblivious was very stressful!

He started getting more feisty so I put him outside on the grass and left him with some sugar water. Checked on him a couple times throughout the afternoon. Called the Humane Society, they can’t help but said I could bring him in a box to the county to euthanize him 😭

In the meanwhile he had perched himself on some grass (on grass! this is a tiny bird). I left my phone inside in the chaos of making sure Sandy didn’t eat him so no photos, she clued in big time when he got more and more feisty. and when I finally came back at the end of the work day, he was gone.

I’d like to think to greater adventures or he became part of the food chain. But we tried the best we could. And that’s the story of how I spent an afternoon with a hummingbird in the palm of my hand, wild!