Friday, March 3…Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of (U2)

   Kim was able to image last night.  When we’re in Arizona, his first target is always the Orion Nebula. The night sky in Charlevoix isn’t clear like it is in Arizona. Proximity to Lake Michigan is the culprit behind the clouds. So it’s good to start on something he knows and have it serve as a refresher for how to do everything that needs doing for a quality outcome. 

  The temperature last evening was hovering in the mid to high 30s so being out there setting everything up while his hands were freezing is a testament to how much he enjoys what he’s doing. With his current set-up, he can get it going, come back to warm up in the camper and just check on it occasionally to make sure the technology is still doing what it was told to do.  Then he spends another hour or so processing the data he’s gathered on the computer.  His first comment this morning was that he thought the finished image from last night needed some adjustment so he immediately started reprocessing it and after about 45 minutes was satisfied enough to post it on Facebook. I agreed…today’s efforts produced a better image than last night’s.     

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   Cardinal at the feeder today! Saw it as I was about to open the door…I think I may have squealed with excitement before I quickly grabbed my camera to document the occasion. 😎  The hummingbirds have also been coming to our feeders. Saw one early this morning before our site was fully in the sun.  I thought these little guys go into torpor overnight and usually don’t emerge until the day has warmed.  It was definitely not warm out there this morning so either this one didn’t get the memo about torpor or it’s a rebel and refuses to conform.

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   Went down to change out the camera on Nutt Rd.  The other one seems stuck in a time warp.  It was last used at Kim’s deer blind in the U.P. and it doesn’t want to move off that point in time or acknowledge that it’s currently in Arizona.  Of course, we didn’t realize that until we’d driven away from it yesterday. So, Kim changed it with a camera that is fully in the present; already took picture of me standing in front of it and then another of me walking away. So now, hopefully, we’ll see some javelina action.  And we have some work to do with the one stuck in November. 

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   What I thought was a dead calf laying by the culvert down the road is, in fact, not a calf at all. I noticed the half-eaten carcass the first day I was out walking and since I don’t do dead things, I’ve kept to the other side of the road with my eyes averted while walking. Today we encountered George Aros on horseback, and he asked if we had seen the mountain lion and pointed to where the dead calf was. Wait, what?! That’s not a calf?  It’s a mountain lion?  George assured us it was and said that he’s lived here for years and never saw or heard of a lion in the area.  But there was no mistaking the paw…the big cat-like paw.  He said that wherever and however the animal met its demise, the head was cut off and the body dumped. Yuck!  Apparently, George doesn’t shy away from dead things like I do.  But seriously, there’s mountain lions around here?😟

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      Signed up for the Coolidge Days 5K Walk/Run…we, of course, will be walking or limping, as the case may be now.  We walked down to Nutt Rd today which is a roundtrip walk of just over 3 miles or the equivalent of a 5K.  It’s good training.  On the way back to camp, I fell on the road. That’s not good training. L Scraped up my leg but that was the extent of my injuries; everything felt fine or so I thought until I took a short nap this afternoon. Woke up, stretched and that’s when my right foot yelled at me. Took me a minute to realize that it had to be from the fall.  Don’t know exactly what I did to my right foot since it was my left foot that stepped on a rock, twisted and sent me flying downward but the right is not happy with me. So last year, our goal was to walk it in under an hour…certainly not banking on that tomorrow.  Will massage it, stretch it and put Icy Hot on it prior to walking and hope for the best.

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   At the IGA the other day, I asked two young cashiers what was being built outside of town and pointed in the direction of the new structure going up.  They looked at each other in surprise and one said, “There’s something being built?”  They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

   At the IGA today, I asked another cashier about the big structure being built outside of town.  He said that he’d heard, which probably puts this in the rumor column, that it was going to be a drywall manufacturing plant.  But at least he knew what I was asking about and  agreed on my description of its size. 

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The traveling sheep are back! Saw a herd of ‘em cleaning up a cotton field near us which I expect is not their normal home. And my first thought was “Sheep eat cotton? That must make their mouths dry.” Then I saw another herd on the way to Coolidge. Don’t know if they’re from the same herd or there are now two separate herds.  Just another thing I look forward to seeing when we’re out here.

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   Took my first Arizona bike ride today to Coolidge. Left a little late in the day so I did my errands and just headed back. Felt good to be on the bike even though it was a less than ideal temperature…but I have gloves and jackets in my saddle bags and I’m not afraid to use ‘em! The temperature is supposed to be solidly in the 70s for the next week which is just about the perfect temperature to ride. Looking forward to that.

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40 Days of Lent challenge:  Send an unexpected test or letter to someone today. This one I did inadvertently. Earlier in the day, I spontaneously sent a message to someone showing them something I found that I thought they might like to see. Then later when I remembered that I still had the challenge hanging out there and started thinking about who I could text, it hit me that’d I’d already done it without the challenge being the reason for doing it. 😊


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