Retirement Travel and a Weird Mix of Other Stuff
But when I was halfway through my walk, I saw a Robin bathing in a puddle.
My first thought? Aw, that poor Robin needs to go hang out at my house so he can use a real birdbath (above).
My second thought? That puddle looks pretty refreshing. Maybe I should splash right on through.
It was tempting, but I didn’t do it. Maybe another day…
Even if I couldn’t go outside first-thing yesterday morning, I had to go out. I had to walk. After the storms had passed, I was ready. I left the house at 10:15 (early lunch!). It was 71 degrees (not too bad) with 84% humidity (bad).
It was gross.
Humidity measures the moisture in the air. Just how bad is 84% humidity? Late yesterday afternoon, while it was raining, the humidity level was 74%. That’s ten whole points lower than when it was not raining.
I was hot. But I did it. It’s a good thing, too, because we got hit by some wicked storms yesterday afternoon. Check out these pics…
As the storm was rolling in, I snapped this shot from inside of the house.
Then Hubby said, “The sky looks really cool over there.” I had to step outside to see (and document) just how awesome the sky looked. Notice the airplane in the pic? You have to look closely. At first glance, I thought it was dirt on my lens. It is towards the top of the frame, just left of the center line. If you click on the image itself, a larger view should pop up. I left the image large intentionally so you could get a closer look.
Here’s what the sky looked like to my right.
And here’s how it looked on the left. The storm was moving fairly quickly.
It had been thundering for a few minutes at this point, and I could see a few distant flashes of lightning. Then I saw a wicked lightning bolt straight ahead of me, but off in the distance. THEN there was a bolt of lightning that was much closer.
There was enough electricity in the air to change my camera settings!
That’s when I went inside.
I was dealing with it though, until I managed to hit some unknown sequence of working keys/not-working keys that made this happen…
I did not alter this image. That’s how my monitor looked. I couldn’t take a picture of actual work (aka “secret stuff”), so I went to the Google page. But first I had to close the 15 things I had open.
That is much easier said than done. YOU try using a mouse once when your image has rotated 90 degrees to the left.
How to fix this? Restart the computer? I did that. The screen was still cocked to the left. A quick Internet search (thank goodness my personal computer was handy) yielded a few suggestions of hot-key combinations to try. They didn’t work. Luckily, once I was logged back in to my employer’s network, the security settings made the computer revert back to the default settings.
I did discover how to fix it in the future. Right-click while on your Desktop and you’ll see a pop-up menu with NVIDIA Control Panel as one of the choices. I’ll remember that for next time.
Because I just couldn’t bring myself to train at 6:30 AM when I woke, I decided to do it during my lunch break. Bad idea. It was HOT.
The body gets rid of heat by sweating. As sweat evaporates, the body cools. When it is really humid, sweat doesn’t evaporate very fast, so the body doesn’t cool very well.
I kept pushing though. Luckily, since I now wear a cool heart monitor which Hubby bought me, I knew that I could slow the pace a bit and still maintain a decent training heart rate. That and I remembered reading that you SHOULD slow the pace during times of high humidity so you don’t overheat.
Anyway… it was miserably hot. My body is not used to that kind of heat. So I was determined to get my ass out of bed this morning and do my 45-minute brisk walk.
But I woke up to this…
Actually, this image is from about an hour after I woke up. My house is smack in the middle of this map. When I got out of bed, the leading edge of a thunderstorm (dark red on the lower right) was bearing down on us. My morning training was doomed.
At least I managed to get downstairs and let the doggies out before it hit.
Speaking of the doggies, when CeCe was still alive, she and Meg would get up with Hubby in the mornings, go outside, come back in, get their goodbye-I’ll-be-back-biscuit when Hubby left, then come back to bed. Belle used to be a total morning girl. I guess we’re a bad influence. Now, when Hubby is leaving for work, the dogs stay in bed, barely lifting their heads to say goodbye when he goes. They both wait until I get up before they’ll budge. Isn’t that weird?
Back to the training plans. I guess I’ll be sweating it out again later today (big sigh). The good news is, it’s getting much easier for me to walk. I’m up to 45-minute brisk walks. Next week, I actually start adding short jogs into the regimen. It’ll be interesting to see how that feels.
Hubby has been doing maintenance on his motorcycle. It is still in pieces. I hadn’t ridden for awhile, so after I was sure it wasn’t going to rain, I went for a ride by myself. I went to Brookside Gardens in Wheaton Regional Park. Wheaton is a suburb of Washington, DC. I’d been there before, but after seeing some of my Flickr buddy’s photos from there, I wanted to revisit.
It a nice, very large park. My destination was the nature center. Traffic was horrendous, and I was way overheated, so I didn’t spend much time there. As a result, I didn’t shoot a ton of pics, but managed to get a few really good shots. I hope you enjoy them.
This one is my favorite.
A turtle. I keep seeing lots of these for some reason.
A cool flower in the conservatory.
A very large fern. It was like 5 feet tall and 8 feet wide.
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| From ToadMama’s Web Abode |
Well, I hate not knowing what critters are called. Like, not knowing if it was a moth or a butterfly was killing me (not really). I looked through a bunch of pics last night — a whole bunch, like hundreds — to no avail.
Finally, I asked someone at the Butterflies and Moths of North America Web site. This helpful fellow responded to my e-mail query and told me it is a Spiny Oakworm Moth (Anisota stigma).
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| From ToadMama’s Web Abode |
He told me that at this stage (photo immediately above), it must have just emerged from the cocoon and hadn’t yet dried its wings. That would explain why the wings were moving constantly.
So, now we know. I hope you feel just as enlightened as me.