Birding the Fatherland
Following a whirlwind month and a half in Indonesia and the Philippines, I flew to Washington for another attempt at moving to the US. This, like the last one , proved to be a failure and I only made it a month and half before returning to Asia once more (in fact, I'm on my way to Manila as I write this). I was technically supposed to be in DC for the entire time, but unsurprisingly that didn't work either, and I ended up making multiple trips even in what was supposed to be a quiet month. The first of these was less than a week after I arrived in DC, as I was making a visit to my dad's hometown in northern Idaho for my late grandmother's belated memorial service. The ceremony had been delayed for almost 4 years for pandemic-related reasons, but it was a welcome excuse to reunite with family members I hadn't seen in decades, and hear stories of growing up in the mountains of the Idaho panhandle. I won't get into the details of the reunion, but thankfully there w