Navel-gazing nudibranches

Earlier today I was wondering whether I'm a bad blogger, whether I should feel guilty for skipping posting a few days while pursuing the S &V weight loss plan (for the uninitiatied, that's Sweat & Vomit), and that raised the question of what distinguishes a "good" blogger from a "bad" blogger--frequency? quality? length?--which in turn suggested that there are so many different types of blogs that my best bet would be to assess how well I am meeting my own goals re: blogging, perhaps by means of a handy rubric, but this would require once again raising the tiresome issue of what in the world I think I'm doing here, and that's one rabbit hole into which I do not intend to be lured. So let's talk about something completely different.

Birds, for instance. The woodpeckers are abundant this year: downy, hairy, red-bellied, and the signs suggest pileated as well. The other day we wandered into a remote part of the woods and found a tall dead pine tree with I would guess 98 percent of its bark scattered on the ground around it as if it had just exploded off the tree, but the trademark holes spelled out woodpeckers. Since the last time we saw that tree (which could not have been all that long ago), it had been completed denuded, which is a pretty cool word. Denuded. Very satisfying. Like nudibranch, a word I encountered today in a sentence approximately like this one: "After they went into town to tell the story to everyone, a biologist told them that they were nudibranches."

I suppose the lesson in there is that it doesn't matter how many times you've been to town and told the story; when the biologist tells you you're a nudibranch, it's over. Unless you want to start thinking about whether you're a good nudibranch, setting goals and objectives and assessing them on rubrics. When the nudibranches start blogging--well, there goes the neighborhood.