Today I went for a run for the first time in probably about 6 months. I didn’t go that far; I would estimate that I went a little over a mile. When I got back to our apartment complex, I decided to walk straight down the road, rather than turning right towards our street. I walked to the end of that street, and realized that there’s a pond between that street and ours. It’s still half frozen over, but there was a large white swan and two black ducks with white spots in the pond as I walked past. Since I was feeling adventurous, I took a right turn into the woods to try to cut over to our street or to get near out apartment. I followed the tracks that some kids made with their quads and made my way back to our apartment. My legs felt pretty sore, especially my calves.
When I went inside, I told my wife about the pond and she was really excited since she loves animals and nature. She was busy with school work, but asked me if we could take a walk over to the pond at her next break. I agreed to go back.
A half an hour later we made our way through the woods. Trish brought some stale Ritz crackers, and fed the swan. The ducks were no longer there, so the swan got a snack all to itself. I was making stupid comments like “Mmmmm stale Ritz buttery-goodness” as the swan finally started to chomp on the now soggy crackers. When the sleeve of crackers was gone, we walked out of the woods a different way, and wound up by where I park my truck. As we got near our apartment I told her how I came back earlier and pointed to the trail close to our building. We decided to walk past our door and keep going in the opposite direction. We got back on the quad-forged path and found yet another pond. We walked around it and saw some ducks. I’m not sure but they might have been the same ones I saw earlier in pond #1. Anyway, we went up a large hill and found what looked like a tree farm. There were mostly bushes, arranged in a deliberate fashion, in an otherwise empty field.
This hike added more soreness to my legs and took about a half an hour but it was a lot of fun to explore the area right near our building that we never knew existed. The ponds were nice surprises in particular. Next time I will bring my camera. I was kicking myself for not bringing it today. We’re definitely going to go for more adventures through the woods, and I’ll post pictures here next time.
OK, about this website. I haven’t really posted so often, and I’ve certainly been lazy about additions in terms of navigation and site design. BUT, I have re-organized the menu layout on the right side a little more logically, and I have added pages about Long Island weather. I realize that this is only useful to Long Islanders, but mainly I put it there for myself so that I can quickly reference what kind of weather I’m in for. Sorry for the selfishness.
Anyway, this weekend should be fun. I’m going to practice with the band tonight. We have been working on 2 new songs, one is about 98% done, we just need to get a little tighter on it, and the other is still very much in progress. The basic parts of the ‘incomplete’ song are done, we just need some more lyrics and to tighten up.
After that, we’re going out for a friend’s birthday at a small club/bar kind of place. Good times, good times.
Other than that, I’ll probably just do some school work and relax on Saturday and Sunday. Maybe I’ll finally go through some of the boxes of junk in our apartment and separate, organize and throw out things. I’ve been putting it off, yes, but I have been really busy the past few months with work and school. Oh well, hopefully I’ll be motivated and do it. Now that it’s written on this blog, maybe that’ll help. (:
A friend of mine at work tipped me off to a great weather site called Intellicast. You can check your local weather or anywhere you’d like across the country, and there are up to date semi-real-time radar loops. Pretty cool stuff.
I used to always go to Weather.com, but since I’ve been using Intellicast, I haven’t seen the need to go back there.
One more ‘site’ worth mentioning is Google. They have their own weather feature on their site now as well. If you type “weather [zip code]” or “weather New York, NY” for example into the search box, a brief forecast is displayed before search results. Also pretty cool. Google has more and more cool things added to their site, and it seems often that new features are introduced. One last thing while I’m talking about Google. If you need a definition for a word, and you’re too lazy to go to Dictionary.com, you can type “define:[word]” into Google’s search box, and definitions for that particular word are displayed just like search results. Fun stuff. Enjoy.
