Life has flowed on rather swiftly as I watched this morning, with the high winds and hard rain not-so-slowly tapering into intermittent sprinkles with watery sunshine trying to break through, just in the last 40 minutes. Last night the rain lashed and the trees were tossing, so this seems to really be the edge of the system passing over us.

It was raining like the North Sea here this morning, gray and cold and driving, but we were snug inside, watching the storm-tossed waters from a safe perch on the banks. As a cautionary lesson, a sailboat - looks like 23-30' - has washed up sideways on the opposite bank in some previous storm. It sits there with its keel pointed toward us and its superstructure faintly visible along one edge. White foam crashed on the shore four feet down from its current position, so we know the weather gets a lot sportier than this.

Watching time flow, and watching the tidal currents swirling past, is so dramatic here. Five minutes ago an enormous flotilla of birds that look a lot like greater scaups (unlikely to be in such a large group; I'd say buffleheads but there are no white head patches, winter loons but there are no characteristic calls) passed us, all strung out in a line, two hundred birds or more. I'm going to have to get out the binoculars and really watch the birds, now; perhaps this experience will come in handy when we're living on the boat. I remember the last time, we wound up giving our own names to the birds because we were not birders. At least the ospreys, the night heron and the snowy egrets were easy. But the varieties of diving birds with more or less duck-like characteristics, not so easy.