Little Birdie on My Windowsill and More

I had another little visitor this morning. The camera was in the living room so I had to go get it and was afraid this little guy would fly off before I got back. But he stuck around just long enough to get his photo taken. There are several birds flying between the tree and just to the right of our window. I wonder if the crack in the building is back? The birds used to build nests in that crack each spring and I could sit here in the office and listen to the baby birds chirping in the wall beside me. No more. :( Nope. It's still filled with that black tar someone filled it with while we were gone a couple years ago. However, if you look closely, you can see that the plaster is beginning to crack off on the other side. When I looked up there from ground level yesterday I could see that there are a whole bunch of cracks above our flat. It's just the plaster that's on top of the stone/brick the building is actually built of, but I know the rain here eats away at brick and stone and causes a lot of damage. (I think that is called "acid rain". Ha.)

Here are the two photos I took last night when we went out to find the noctilucent clouds which didn't exist but saw the ISS instead. Whew! that was a sentence!

While taking this first photo I held the camera at one angle and it focused on the cemetery and the gravestones which totally washed out the sky. It does give a good view of where we were at, though. This is a Jewish cemetery and it is located directly across the street from the building next to us (our building is on a slight bend in the road). We usually walk on the 'our' side of the street and then cross over at a cross walk to get to "our" Oskar store which is located right next to the cemetery. Last night we crossed at the corner of our building where they have put in a new stop light. That was a whole lot easier than trying to wait for speeding traffic and being afraid someone would run over us in the cross walk! I don't know why people have to speed every where here. I mean SPEED - like 60 miles an hour and accelerating down 3 blocks between stoplights when the limit is no more than 35. ALL the vehicles do this, not just the "speeders". It is very frustrating and dangerous - more than one person has been killed in the cross walk to the store in the years since the store was built. But I digress - altho the subject of this paragraph IS supposed to be the cemetery across the street...... And here is a photo from a slightly different angle. For both photos I set the camera in a hole a chain link fence which surrounds the cemetery to stabelize it, angled it differently and used a non-flash setting. I like the way this one looks. The sky was very pretty last night with lots of orange and pink near the horizon. Now, to the photo above, just add a bright light about the size of Venus at sunset, and fly it across the left side of the photo, way up high. That is the ISS. :) :)