Zipped Up! (A-to-Z Challenge completed)

Well, it’s the last day of April, and I’ve now zipped up my 26th blog post of the month to finish the 2013 A-to-Z Challenge.

At the beginning of the month, blogging about a different alphabet letter each day seemed fairly do-able.  I wrote out a list of various words for each letter to give me blog topic ideas, and most of them were RVing-related.

But as you readers know, just as soon as those plans got made, life decided to revise them.  Most of the RV topics flew out the window, and my daily posts began to get delayed into small batches of posts at a time.

In the end, though, I’m glad that I continued to see this project through to its completion.  It’s been hard to prioritize the mountains of work that have hit me and the family since my mom’s death.  So, this little blogging project has often times seemed like the one thing I could comfortably manage and maintain control of.

I’m going to try and continue blogging more often in the future.  Probably not up to a daily level, but hopefully more than the 2 or 3 posts per month I’d been doing previously.

Who knows where I’ll be next year, but I’d certainly like to try the A-to-Z challenge again next April, and encourage my fellow blogger friends to do the same!

Yoga Bear

Earlier this year, I started attending a weekly yoga class here in town.  I was encouraged by one of my older friends who said yoga was absolutely critical to her ability to maintain her body’s agility and flexibility.

So, I trotted my overweight “Tinman” body over to the Community Rec Center to see if the fine yoga instructor could turn it back into a youthful, svelte machine.

Well, the svelte part hasn’t happened just yet, and when Spring came, my fellow classmates decided to forego the gym for outdoor activities and our Spring yoga classes got cancelled.

Now, I try to practice my yoga moves at home on the living room floor.  I remember how to do most of the moves just fine and am able to get most of the same stretching benefits as before.  But there’s just one downside to my new yoga studio….

When Millie sees me laying on the floor, she hovers over to give me a quick inspection…

and then goes to bring me her Frisbee.

Yoga, schmoga….. it’s time to PLAY!

sigh!

In Search of Xanadu

Ok, you darn A-to-Z Challenge, do I really need to blog about the letter “X”?  Well, here it goes!

Xan·a·du (zn-d, -dy)
n.
An idyllic, beautiful place.

Most RVers, and certainly all nature photographers, are motivated to travel by one compelling reason—the (seemingly) endless pursuit of that “perfect” place.  Our Utopia.  Our Xanadu.

When I took my first big cross-country RVing trip with my T@B trailer back in 2007, I remember visiting Montana del Oro State Park on the central California coastal bluffs overlooking the Pacific ocean one cloudy afternoon.  The scenery was pretty nice, but as I started shooting a particularly nice little cove, I couldn’t help but wish something would make it “spectacular.”  God must have been listening to photographers that day, because within a few minutes, he poked the sun out from behind the clouds, rolled a perfect wave onto the beach, and I got my Xanadu!

A few years later, I was at Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and had driven past the island at Lake of Two Rivers at various times during the week.  It was pretty, but I’d seen islands in a lake before, so no big deal.  Until the last morning of my trip, when a layer of ground fog floated across the lake at sunrise. Ok, now THIS was looking more like the Xanadu I’d been searching for!

As thrilling as it is to see a landscape transform itself from “just pretty” to “pretty spectacular", I’ve more often had a different feeling when traveling to beautiful places, especially if I’ve lined up a long consecutive itinerary of pretty places.  Pretty gets boring.  The “wow” factor, that Xanadu moment, becomes increasingly elusive. Now, that long journey starts feeling like endless miles of pointless searching.

Perhaps the frustration comes from the realization that Xanadu doesn’t always require a physical place.

Monks and priests seem to often find it within the walls of their monastery.  Homebound-people sometimes describe the same feeling from just sitting at home.  They don’t need to travel long distances looking high and low to find it.  Their Xanadu is found from within.  A virtual Utopia!

Are we travelers and RVers the unfortunate few who have yet to discover this within ourselves?

Or do we simply have the bar set that much higher because of all the spectacular places we’ve experienced in the past?

Perhaps Xanadu is ultimately the combination of both our physical and spiritual worlds.  The idyllic place cannot give us complete serenity until we can bring to it our own serenity.

Where is your Xanadu?

A Walk in the Woods – Seeing an Endangered Species!

After what seemed like weeks of cold and wet weather, we finally got a couple of warmer sunny Spring days to enjoy here in Chicago!  I met up with my friend Kate, and we decided to take her kids (my goddaughter, Olivia, and her brother, Bradley) and my “fur-kid” Millie for a walk to the local forest preserve after lunch.

7-year-old Bradley was eager to walk run Millie up and down the trails, while 11-year-old Olivia was interested to compare my recent Master Naturalist classes with her own Junior High science studies.

Not much of any green was showing yet on the bushes and trees in the forest, but the groundcover was now growing, and we spotted a number of birds and animals out gathering their daily food.

Around a bend, we came upon a turtle stopped out in the middle of the trail (most likely scared out of it’s wits with the gathering crowd!). 

I held onto Millie and kept our distance, allowing my zoom lens to get a better look at the turtle.  After a few minutes, when the little gal decided that none of the human giants around her were there to cause her any harm, she stretched her head and legs out a bit further from her shell, and poked her tail “rudder” out to make a fast dash to the grass and woods in the distance.

The kids had never seen a turtle up close before and were thrilled to watch at how quickly it moved!  Within a few seconds, the little thing had made it safely to the grass and gave a short glance to tell us “thanks” as it headed on to the shade and safety of the woods.

I didn’t realize until researching my photos later that we had actually witnessed a close-up encounter with an Illinois Endangered Species!  Click the photo above larger, and you’ll see by the distinctive yellow throat that this is a Blanding’s Turtle.  They used to be quite common in the Great Lakes region, but have increasingly lost their habitat in the past few decades, and are prone to get run over by cars because their natural protective instinct is to retract completely within their shells rather than to move quickly out of danger.  These turtles are also slow to reproduce, not typically breeding until they are 20 or more years old (they can live into their 70’s!).

I hope that turtle has many more happy years at the forest preserve!  How cool!!!

A short time later, as we rounded another bend in the trail, Bradley pointed out a few white tailed deer trying to camouflage themselves in the barren woods.

They did a pretty good job of blending in until they decided to walk out onto the trail!

Still always a treat to see these common, but beautiful, animals up so close!

After the thrilling animal sitings, the kids took turns trying out the binoculars to look at birds.  My little point-and-shoot camera was not up to zooming in sufficiently for any good bird photos, so I stuck to just focusing on the kids and the thrills they were having at discovering so many different species around them!

Hopefully, this day will be far more memorable for them than an afternoon indoors playing video games

The Unvirtuous Vegan Vagabond

Well, it seems with all the flurry of activity and emotions this month, and hosting out-of-town visitors as well, that an unwanted guest managed to slip their way into the house and has been hiding out in the kitchen all month.  Yes, the “Food Crack” dealer left my fridge and pantry filled with lots of sweets, snacks, and booze left-overs.

The virtuous vegan would have thrown all that stuff out, and I did a good job at immediately pitching any items with meat.  But, I was much less rigorous about the “vegetarian” and higher calorie vegan items— what vegan would not want to drown their sorrows with chips, salsa, beer, and cookies?

Of course, now I’ve discovered that all my newer-sized jeans are becoming too tight to wear comfortably.  So, with my 1-year vegan anniversary looming on the horizon next month, it’s time to take action!

I’ve now evicted the Food Crack dealer from my kitchen, and am preparing to start my first Juice fast later this week.  Hopefully, this will be a good way to renew my Vegan vows and re-dedicate my fitness and weight-loss efforts that I’d been neglecting in recent weeks.

Now that Spring has sprung, I’m also hoping to get the View out and start doing a little vagabonding as well.  No time for long trips until my Master Naturalist class finishes up in June (and I get further along with projects on both my and my mom’s houses), but I can at least get out for a couple days at a time to take a break and recharge.

Thank you to my fellow Vegan Vagabonds, Tessa and Evelyn, who have been posting to the Vegan Vagabonds Facebook page and blog site these past few weeks.  Hope you guys will let me jump back onto the wagon and continue the ride!