Every night, a bird chirps furiously and incessantly for what seems like hours, just outside my bedroom window. It's still chirping when I fall asleep. It's still chirping when I wake up in the middle of the night.

There's only one string of chirps, so I assume it's a solo performance by the same bird every night. It repeats hundreds of different patterns of chirps, none of them exactly the same but similar. The string of patterns of sounds is kinda like a car alarm, but random and a thousand times more tolerable. I could listen for minutes trying to find a possible sequence, trying to listen for my favorite sounds and patterns. (After a couple of minutes, I fall asleep.)

I wonder what's going on out there... What type of bird is it, and what is it trying to accomplish at this hour?

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This is the first post from my new laptop. It arrived via UPS a few hours after I found out about my federal tax issue on Monday. What a killjoy. But you know, that just means I'm going to have to find a way to turn the laptop into a straw-into-gold machine. This little baby is going to pay for itself, and then some...