CHANNELVIEW, TEXAS — Yes, I just finished blogging about California birds from a motel east of Houston. Fjord and I are birding the Upper Texas Coast tomorrow, and I have a list of target birds:

• Greater Scaup
• Virginia Rail
• King Rail
• Groove-billed Ani
• Sprague’s Pipit

Wish us luck!

DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS — Thanks mainly to Fjord, I’ve completed some behind-the-scenes maintenance, including a switch to the latest version of WordPress. Unfortunately, there are a few problems still to sort out:

1. The categories display has gotten messed up, partly because of the import and partly (it seems) because of the way the new version of WordPress handles parent categories.
2. My blogroll is gone and will have to be rebuilt.
3. Static pages are MIA but can hopefully be recovered … ?
4. A few older images in posts may be broken temporarily.
5. A few more trivial problems hardly worth mentioning.
6. Do you see anything else that seems different, odd, or broken? At the moment, there should not be any wholescale changes in layout, and everything should still be working. If not, please let me know.

DALLAS, TEXAS — Tonight, Search and Serendipity will have to go offline for up to a few hours. We hope to be up and running again late tonight or early tomorrow morning.

DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS — We’ve moved! Search and Serendipity now resides on my own domain: http://djringer.com/birding/. Please update your links and bookmarks right away. New posts will appear here from now on, and the old Blogspot site will slowly fade away.

Note: My feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/thewanderling/) remains the same, so you do not need to alter your subscriptions.

I’ve also made the switch to WordPress, which pretty much rules. The learning curve has been a bit steep, but I think we’re going to make it.

My main concern was getting all the old posts and comments transferred over; the WordPress importer doesn’t work with the new Blogger. But thankfully, Ady Romantika has developed a script to import from the new Blogger to WordPress. But — augh! — it relies on allow_url_fopen, which DreamHost has disabled for security reasons. [Update 01/10/07: Ady's script has been modified to work even when fopen is disabled.] I thought I was sunk, but my talented friend Shroud (who writes a newspaper column and can be a bit eccentric) managed to modify the script so it uses cURL … and (after many tries) voila! All posts and comments appear to have come across almost perfectly.

There are still a lot of rough edges and missing features, but I’ll work on them as we go along. My Blogger labels didn’t transfer over as categories, so I’ll have to redo all of those at some point. Please let me know if you have any trouble, if anything looks strange, or if something is missing that you’d like to see.

GREENE CO., MO. — I went walking well after dark, when most of the neighbors were sealed up tightly in their boxes and a chilly wind roamed the quiet streets.

Why? Oh, I wanted to see the light displays, and to feel the cool night air. And I hoped I would hear an owl, but I did not.

I didn’t realize until the day was almost gone that this is winter solstice. That means that Search and Serendipity is two years old today. The blog itself is not that old, but two years ago on the winter solstice, I began a project: to write about the birds I encountered over the next solar year.

The project soon floundered because I didn’t have an audience — and because the spring semester roared to life soon after. But three months later as I watched a singing cowbird, I had what I thought was a revolutionary idea. I should write a blog about birds! And so a few days later, I began. I decided to put up the entries I’d written earlier in the solar year, for after all, the solstice made a good beginning.

Two years ago on the solstice, I wondered what life after college would bring. I couldn’t have imagined then that of the next 24 months, I would spend nearly half in a nation called PNG.

And now the solstice has come again. A new year has begun.