Not dead yet...

How 'bout another road-to-recovery post?

Often on spring mornings here in BeautyVille at Special Education Today Central (AKA “home”), I take a mug of coffee onto one of the porches, start the Merlin app on my personal digital communication device, and practice identifying birds by their songs. As of today, I have not engaged in that activity for nearly a week, because of the recent surgery, but I broke that five-day streak! I am typing this post from a porch in the morning. Yay!

Here is photographic evidence that I was there.

Photo of the place setting for. my morning.coffee on 20 June 2026 as I listened to birds. Photo ©️2026 John Wills Lloyd. If you copy it and use it, please provide at attribution and don’t modify it. I’m thinking Creative Commons license 4.0.

So, it was nice to be out on the porch! There were lots of birds. Merlin reported 34 species, including two kids of crows, two kinds of flycatchers (Acadian as well las the resident Great Crested), a Scarlet Tanager, and many other among the usual suspects.¹ And let this post show that I’m not dead yet. (Indeed, I’m reminded of the often shared clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail—see the IMDB enttry about the 1975 movie—from which I took the title for this post.)