I'll park my feathery ass wherever I please!

      "Anthropomorphize" is the five-dollar word of the day.
     I'm assuming regular readers of this blog already know what it means. But for the benefit of newcomers, who seem to arrive daily in platoons, we'll crack open the Oxford English Dictionary:
     "To attribute a human form or personality to." 
     Hmmm. Not quite a satisfying definition. I didn't consider the "form" part — if you look at the headlights and grill of a car and see a face, you are anthropomorphizing the car. 
    And "personality" seems too broad. I would define it as "ascribing human qualities to objects or animals not in possession of them." Like detecting a note of defiance in this bird parking himself where he may, the sign be damned.
    That's ridiculous, of course, because birds can't read. What I am doing is projecting my own sense of "fuck you" defiance, which you'd think would be softening after a few days of vacation — spent busily working, of course, just not at newspaper stuff. Except for the ... ah ... important obit that I recast on my first day off. Just worried that the guy would die while the older, not-so-sharp-or-good version was kneeling in the on-deck circle. You can't say, "Whoops, I was taking time off, so let the inferior obit slip by..."

     Well you can. I suppose I'm worried about being yelled at by people who left years ago. Muscle memory. Whatever works...