Small Steps

We keep waiting for the phone to ring telling us that Ibi is ready. It seems that everything in our lives at the moment is in limbo and hanging on that one thing. In the meanwhile, we keep taking steps that lead forward, even if they are small steps. I got 117 waypoints programmed into the GPS between yesterday and the night before. That should see us from Pensacola to Anclote Key, just north of Tampa. Others will be added during breaks, but that gives us a good head start.

We have a huge wind chime in the backyard that is tuned to the same frequency as the Matinicus Rock sea buoy in Maine. I got it with the idea that hearing the sea buoy occasionally would keep me from feeling so high and dry in Oklahoma. I enjoy it, but it didn’t help. The wind continues to roar, which just sets that poor thing into a cacophony that the real sea buoy would never know in anything short of a Nor’easter or hurricane. In spite of the wind, I still got about 8 miles in yesterday, and my usual 500 reps on the rowing machine. It’s about time to step that up. As for paddling, the forecast is still saying the wind will die down Thursday.

The underlying good news is that harbingers of spring continue to make themselves known. Here are a few crocus standing proudly around the house.

Find the two honey bees in the second picture. They’re the first we’ve seen this year. NW Oklahoma is so arid there are few places for birds and wildlife to find water, so we keep a bird bath in the backyard. It attracts as many birds as the feeder does, as well as squirrels. A game warden that lives a quarter-mile away has bee hives, and there’s a steady shuttle of bees to our place for the bird bath. During the summer we’ll have as many as 25 or more bees at any given moment lined up around the perimeter of the bath drinking.