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A Thursday afternoon adventure
Oct. 2nd, 2014 09:03 pmWith the weather beautiful, the air clean, my body finally healthy, and my grant proposal away in JG’s inbox, today seemed like a great day for a walk. And then J. got off work early, since they’re renting their office parking lot to football fans for charity, so we went off on an adventure!
Well, we didn’t really plan an adventure – we just went for a walk along the little semi-paved woodland path between the houses in the Brae Burn neighborhood. We drove over there rather than walking, because I didn’t want to overdo things. Once in the woods, we saw a mama deer contorting herself to lick at her tail, while her fawn stood behind her and stared at us, and we found a very healthy-looking woolly bear caterpillar, which we decided not to bring home to live on my counter.
Then on the way back, we decided to follow a deer trail up the hillside onto the cemetery land. Our neighborhood cemetery owns a substantial amount of acreage beyond what it’s currently using (and in fact I think they’re trying to sell it for new housing). Right now it’s mostly meadow, because in prior years they’d cut down a lot of trees, and in fact, that’s what makes it interesting, because they’ve made a couple of huge piles of tree stumps. It seems they have birds nesting among them.
Anyway, so we headed up the hillside, but hadn’t gotten as far as the top when we heard some commotion behind us. A woman runner was shouting at some aggressive dogs, whose owner was indifferent, then the runner came up the trail behind us, told us what had happened, and headed off to the left. We then went up to the crest of the hill (among bits of scruffy poison oak, along with daisies and lupines that I recognized from the foliage – I should go in June to see them blooming), and gazed out at the biggest pile of stumps. Then we decided... why not avoid the dog situation and have a proper adventure and just walk all the way back to my house? So we did – it actually wasn’t that far, and mostly downhill.
Here’s J, showing the scale of the tree stump pile:
Well, we didn’t really plan an adventure – we just went for a walk along the little semi-paved woodland path between the houses in the Brae Burn neighborhood. We drove over there rather than walking, because I didn’t want to overdo things. Once in the woods, we saw a mama deer contorting herself to lick at her tail, while her fawn stood behind her and stared at us, and we found a very healthy-looking woolly bear caterpillar, which we decided not to bring home to live on my counter.
Then on the way back, we decided to follow a deer trail up the hillside onto the cemetery land. Our neighborhood cemetery owns a substantial amount of acreage beyond what it’s currently using (and in fact I think they’re trying to sell it for new housing). Right now it’s mostly meadow, because in prior years they’d cut down a lot of trees, and in fact, that’s what makes it interesting, because they’ve made a couple of huge piles of tree stumps. It seems they have birds nesting among them.
Anyway, so we headed up the hillside, but hadn’t gotten as far as the top when we heard some commotion behind us. A woman runner was shouting at some aggressive dogs, whose owner was indifferent, then the runner came up the trail behind us, told us what had happened, and headed off to the left. We then went up to the crest of the hill (among bits of scruffy poison oak, along with daisies and lupines that I recognized from the foliage – I should go in June to see them blooming), and gazed out at the biggest pile of stumps. Then we decided... why not avoid the dog situation and have a proper adventure and just walk all the way back to my house? So we did – it actually wasn’t that far, and mostly downhill.
Here’s J, showing the scale of the tree stump pile: