Gleanings of the Week Ending May 14, 2022

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago – Some possible explanation: human populations reached a large enough size to share/divide labor and knowledge with others, writing….however, brain size/IQ relationship is not deterministic.

Operating rooms are the climate change contributor no one’s talking about – The health care industry accounts for 8.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Operating rooms represent 70% of waste in hospitals and 3 to 6 times as much carbon as the rest of health systems.

Where tornadoes strike most frequently is changing – More erratic tornado activity and the broad impacts of climate change.

Do you have a lost twin? - The rate of twins among live births is only about 1.3%. But as many as 12% of all naturally conceived pregnancies may begin as twin pregnancies.

Wild fox kills 25 flamingos and a duck at National Zoo – We see foxes in our neighborhood. They seem to have adapted to the suburban environment. This one was very efficient to kill 25 birds, though.

A 10,000-year history of geo-ecological change in Yellowstone’s lower geyser basin – A study using a 26.5-foot core from Goose Lake.

US could cut transport emissions by 34% b 2030 – The current trend will reduce emissions by 19% but a bit more focus would provide a bigger reduction.

Garbology: How to spot patterns in people's waste – We’ve been getting rid of a lot as we prepare to move. I try to do as much as possible via donations and recycling…but there is still a lot going in the trash. Some of it came from Texas with us back in 1983…and was still in the same box!

6,000-Year-Old Slate Rings May Have Symbolized Relationships – Friendship rings? Careful analysis revealed the rings had been intentionally broken…and shared (i.e. pieces of a ring were found in two separate burial sites).

How Taipei discovered an active volcano on its doorstep – Disconcerting. Even of there is some ability to provide early warning of an eruption…could the city be abandoned quickly enough?

Tenants of an Old Farm (eBook)

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I enjoyed Henry Christopher McCook’s books available on Internet Archive this past winter. My favorite is Tenants of an Old Farm first published in 1884 (the version in Internet Archive was a revised version published in 1902 so it must have been a relatively popular book during his lifetime). I’ve selected three illustrations from the book – there are more in the book…worth browsing.

McCook was a Presbyterian clergyman that ‘spent his summers studying ants and spiders’ according to his Wikipedia entry. Evidently many of McCook’s nature books were illustrated but Daniel Carter Beard (founder of the Boy Scouts of America); he is mentioned in the author’s preface as providing the ‘comical adaptations’ for the book but the illustrators were Edward Shepard and Frank Stout.

House Maintenance

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My husband has taken the lead in getting our existing house ready to go on the market. We are enjoying a new refrigerator as a result because the old one’s ice maker was expensive/time consuming (a special order) to replace. We bought another black, side-by-side. It is the same size on the outside, but the inside seems to have more room and there is no ‘handle’ that sticks out from the door so the area in front of the refrigerator seems larger. I like it….and I hope a new owner will as well.

He also did a radon test; the sump pump (that wasn’t working) replaced by a plumber when the result was a little high. Now he has done another test. If it isn’t low enough, he’ll have a specialist in radon remediation decide the best approach.

We are getting rid of our lawn mower before we leave so he has already hired a yard mowing service to mow the yard every 2 weeks. Right now he is leaving it to me to clean out the flower beds and we’ll put down mulch in some of them.

Last weekend we started the process to get the house recarpeted shortly after our belongs are out of the house.

Since we already did one round of interior and exterior painting touch up back in March – we are hoping that we won’t have more to do after the furniture is gone.

Hopefully we have identified the most significant maintenance items…we’re primed to contact a realtor!

26 Months in COVID-19 Pandemic

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COVID-19 cases in Maryland are increasing but all the counties in the state are still green in the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Level map. Most of Missouri is too. Still - the positivity is 5-8% in Maryland and 8-10% in Missouri…not low enough for me to be comfortable in crowds or in indoor spaces without a mask. How does that translate into our increased level of activity?

Buying a house. Both my husband and I wore masks when we walked through the house we had bid on and then the next day when we talked to the inspector. There was a meeting in the realtor’s office where we wore a mask as well. During our travel, we masked at rest stops and in registration/hallways of our hotel. We brought an air purifier into our hotel room and got takeout for meals.

Birding. We masked at the Harriet Tubman Byway visitor center and the registration/hallways of our hotel. Otherwise - the activity was outdoors, and we didn’t mask. All our meals were picked up from drive through windows.

House maintenance. We’ve had more people in our house for maintenance purposes in Maryland…preparing the house to be sold. We mask while they are here, and they do too.

Broken tooth. I have an appointment with the dentist because a molar cracked…needs repair. Hopefully the precautions the dental office has in place are effective. This seems like the highest risk situation of all the things I’ve done recently.

And we are moving over the next month! I am realizing that the precautions I have in place (following guidance re boosters, masking when I am indoors other than at home, avoiding crowds, keeping hand sanitizer in the car, taking an air purifier with me on road trips) are probably going to be my strategy for the foreseeable future unless the infection rate drops dramatically. So – this is the last of the monthly posts even though the pandemic is continuing. I’m not getting complacent…I’ve simply accepted that this is the prudent way to be…nothing new to post about every month.

Our Yard – May 2022

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Damp weather has been my excuse for not doing yard work…but I finally did a walk around and an hour of work a few days ago. The holly at the corner of the house was hiding the weeds behind it. They are gone now. The front flower bed had quite a few little trees: red maples and tulip poplars; they’ve been pulled.

I appreciated the oak near out mailbox. The tree has been declining but it looks like the spring rains have helped it come alive for another year. The Virginia creeper on its trunk has leafed out as well.

The azalea that drapes itself over a side of the front porch is blooming. I’m going to trim the bush beside it to give it more room….or maybe that will make it easier for the deer to nibble the tender azalea stems.

The nine bark bush is blooming. I will trim it after the blooms are done.

A branch broke in one of the bushes…I cut it out and the bush looks lush and green. There were also some vines growing up through the bushes…which I removed.

My goal in the chaos garden was to cut down everything except for the spice bush and, of course, the sycamore. I started but didn’t make much progress during my hour. I discovered some irises getting ready to bloom – which I won’t cut down!

Overall – I had a wheelbarrow of vegetation that I cut or pulled that was added to the brush pile at the edge of the forest. On the way I noticed that the violets are beginning to bloom. I dodged the ferns coming up under the deck as I returned the wheelbarrow to its place; there seem to be more ferns every year.

30 years ago – May 1992

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The highlight of May 1992 was the birth of my second niece. My daughter and I were in Dallas within a few weeks of her birth. It was a learning experience for my daughter who was very interested in babies at her daycare but had never seen one as young as her cousin. We all noticed the baby’s REM sleep when she was positioned in her carrier in the middle of the large dining table while my sister’s daycare swirled around the kitchen and den.

There were more mundane events too: doing the family grocery shopping every week together, my husband traveling for work using a back brace to make the longer plane trips tolerable, me with an ear infection after catching my daughter’s cold (she was outgrowing her tendency to get ear infections), my daughter trying to figure out the difference between ‘an accident’ and ‘on purpose,’ and a sister discovering that her new house had bearded iris in one of the flower beds.

As I read back through my notes of the time, I realized that it’s easy to remember the high points of out lives without them but not the details of how much energy keeping up with a 2.5-year-old took. Just reading a list I made of what we did on one Saturday was a potent reminder of how exhausting it was.

Ocean City Inlet & Heron Park Field Trip

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The last of our Delmarva Birding field trips started at the Ocean City Inlet…where the high point was seeing an American Oystercatcher fly in and land on the rocks for a short walk.

The next stop was Heron Pond – an area in Berlin, MD that is in an industrial area and on the site of an old chicken processing plant. There are a series of ponds that clean water and provide habitat for water birds. The highway is nearby but there is a screen of vegetation…and there are birds on all the ponds. Some of the first birds we saw were cormorants.

Followed in close succession by ruddy ducks (the males have blue bills!) and northern shovelers.

Two northern shovelers were feeding together…swimming in a tight circle.

The last pond has structures on its surface to filter water and those structures provide a haven for turtles and birds. There were several Canada geese on nests and a little blue heron finding a snack!

And that was the finale for our 4 field trips with Delmarva Birding.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 7, 2022

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

A Watershed Moment: Key Findings About Potential Drinking Water Contamination – The sources of contamination are varied….but the list of primary sources is relatively short.

Better residents’ health after switch to electric buses – A study from Sweden. Improved health is a benefit of electrification of transportation!

Should people get rid of their yards? – Somewhat depressing conclusion: “Most people would rather make an aesthetic choice with their lawns than an environmental one.” My plan is not to eliminate the yard in my new house but to minimize it over time with the addition of bushes along the fence and extending beds around trees and around the house.

We talk the fastest growing green jobs with LinkedIn Sr. Editor – The “job vs the environment” is changing. The “green economy’s ability to expand job opportunities is too significant to ignore.” This growth in green jobs is like the 1970s for computer related jobs – a lot of new types of jobs and many of them will extend for the duration of a career starting now.

Discover the Microscopic Wonders of Olympus’ 2021 Image of the Year Awards – Taken with light microscopes…lots of finesse preparing the specimens.

Known to be toxic for a century, lead still poisons thousands of Midwestern kids – Two things I learned from this article about the state I am moving to: Missouri is one of the four states in the Midwest that is struggling to alleviate lead poisoning in children…and it is the number one producer of lead in the US. Hope they are making progress.

Top 25 birds of the week: terrestrial birds – Always enjoy the bird photographs! This group includes a roadrunner….a bird I always associate with Texas but the photograph was taken in California!

Tests indicate bronze age daggers had a practical purpose – Evidently the daggers were thought to be ceremonial objects prior to this analysis.

Should we be eating three meals a day? – The number of meals may not be as important as consistency….and giving the body a long enough ‘fast’ time to rest.

The Great Barrier Reef through Time – Landsat Images used to illustrate recent research on the growth of the reefs as the ocean changes. Evidently the reef has been more resilient to past sea-level and temperature fluctuations than previously thought….but increased sediment input has been a bigger problem.

eBotanical Prints – April 2022

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20 additional botanical print books browsed in April and added to the list. The list has quite a variety this month; the last two books on the list (about orchids) are part of a series of books; the rest will be on the May list. The publication dates have quite a range (1776 - 1926)….more drawings than color.

The whole list of 2,370 botanical eBooks can be accessed here. The list for the April 2022 books with links to the volumes and sample images is at the bottom of this post.

Click on any sample images in the mosaic below to get an enlarged version. Enjoy the April eBotanical Prints!

Voyage a la nouvelle Guinée * Sonnerate, Pierre * sample image * 1776

Collection de planches pour servir au Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine * Sonnerate, Pierre * sample image * 1806

Jagttagelser over vextriget i Marokko. Observations sur le règne végétal au Maroc * Schousboe, Peder Kofod Anker; Betherand, Emile Louis; Lang, Joh * sample image * 1874

Le grand jardin de l'univers V1 (1785) * Buc'hoz, Pierre-Joseph * sample image * 1785

Herbier colorié de l'Amerique * Buc'hoz, Pierre-Joseph * sample image * 1783

Illustrations of Himalayan plants * Cathcart, John Fergusson; Fitch, W.H.; Hoooker, Joseph Dalton * sample image * 1855

A second century of ferns * Hooker, William Jackson; Fitch, W.H. * sample image * 1861

Illustrations of the forest flora of North-West and central India * Stewart, J. Lindsay; Fitch, W.H. * sample image * 1874

Illustrations of the British flora: a series of wood engravings, with dissections, of British plants  * Fitch, Walter Hood * sample image * 1908

Illustrations of the principal natural orders of the vegetable kingdom * Oliver, Daniel; Fitch, Walter Hood * sample image * 1874

A handbook of flowering trees and shrubs for gardeners * Notcutt, R.C.; Dykes, William Ricatson * sample image * 1926

Our ferns in their haunts, a guide to all the native species * Clute, Willard Nelson * sample image * 1901

The fern allies of North America north of Mexico * Clute, Willard Nelson; Clute, Ida Martin * sample image * 1905

The romance of our trees * Wilson, Ernest Henry * sample image * 1920

Aristocrats of the Garden * Wilson, Ernest Henry * sample image * 1917

Root and stem vegetables * Dean, Alexander * sample image * 1910

Roses, their history, development and cultivation * Pemberton, Joseph Hardwick * sample image * 1908

The Rose in America * McFarland, John Horace * sample image * 1923

Orchidaceae: illustrations and studies of the family Orchidaceae - fascicle 1 * Ames, Oakes * sample image * 1905

Orchidaceae: illustrations and studies of the family Orchidaceae - fascicle 2 * Ames, Oakes * sample image * 1905

Preparing to move (1) – May 2022

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The pace of our preparation to move to Springfield, MO has increased since my last post about our move a little over a week ago.

The most physical activity has been toward packing since the date for the movers to arrive at our house in Maryland has been set for early June:

I started out with a goal of packing 20 boxes a day for 5 days…only succeeded because many of them were already packed and all I had to do was add them to the inventory and tape them up. Then the goal became 10 boxes for 5 days…not as easy because I was packing more boxes. Now my goal is 5 plus until they are all packed. I had to buy more boxes.

There are some items we have packed in the original boxes they came in….much easier for them to be safe going on the truck.

I watched a video on packing glass/ceramic items and have now packed most of those items that will go on the truck. I used a lot of packing paper, bubble wrap and squiggles – extra carboard inside the boxes if they were not double thickness boxes. The cardboard, bubble wrap and squiggles were reuse items from packages we’ve received over the years and stored in the basement.

We’ve identified an issue with the piano moving…determining how to remove the humidifier box that makes a bump on the underside of the piano.

We cleared a corner of the basement to put items that will remain with the house after the movers leave since we will be here off and on until the house is sold. I am also clearing all the closets and those too will contain items that will stay with the house.

My daughter is coming for a few days before the movers to help with last minute packing and will take a carload of items back to Springfield.

About my inventory list….I have it as an Excel spreadsheet with the box number (I bought a roll of number labels from Amazon), contents, location in current house, destination in new house, date packed/taped, transport (which car/trip, movers, movers take apart before move). Then I do a Pivot Table to summarize my packing (date x transport). Obviously almost everything goes with the movers but I can easily click on the pivot table cell to produce a list of items I’ve slated to go in a particular car and trip. For example…I will probably make 3 trips to and from before Missouri between now and when we close the sale of our current house….and I have a list accumulating for each of those trips!

We are also making progress with items we don’t want to move:

We’ve taken a load to the landfill/recycling center and already accumulated another load which we will take today.

I took wire hangers back to the dry cleaners and old glasses to a optometrist office that is a collection point for them.

I’ve discovered that I don’t use plastic bags for packing and there were a lot of them in the packing materials we accumulated so I am taking a bag stuffed with them to the grocery store every time I got.

My husband is marking off maintenance items at our current house:

A plumber replaced the sump pump.

A new refrigerator was purchased, delivered and installed since replacing the ice maker in our old one was so expensive

The creak in floor outside my office is gone after much effort to find the joists

And finally, there is activity in Springfield on our behalf as well:

The appraisal came back higher than our offer…good news.

An agreement to the list from the house inspection was reached and radon remediation will be done before we close.

Overall – I think I see the light at the end of the packing tunnel…

Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge

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The Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge field trip was our second April visit to the place (I posted about our visit back in 2017: part 1, part 2). A new visitor center was under construction and the old one no longer had feeders (where we saw goldfinches last time) and the purple martin houses had been moved to another area, so we didn’t see them either. The field trip still started with a look around the visitor center grounds. It was a cool morning. There were several spring flowering trees (dogwood and redbud)…and birds flitting from the trees to the grass to the man-made structures.

We started around the auto tour route. There had been a lot of rain in the days before our field trip and the water level in the ponds was higher that I remembered. We also learned that because the area is tidal salt marsh, the water levels are not as easy to control as in some other refuges; the refuge management is challenged to maintain the marsh as sea-level is rising.

There were plenty of birds around: northern shovelers, red-winged black birds, green-winged teal, and mallards were a few I photographed.

There were relatively large numbers of great blue herons. They don’t nest at the refuge but come here for food.

There were also great and snowy egrets in mixed groups.

I took a sequence of a great egret landing.

There were bald eagles too. I photographed a scruffy looking juvenile settling on an almost submerged log.

The big surprise of the morning was a roost of black-crowned night herons. From the place we were standing…they were on the other side of large pond; they looked like fuzzy places in the trees…

I thought tent caterpillars at first! With binoculars and big camera lens, the birds were easy to identify. My husband provided a magnified/cropped image of one of the birds. There were over 70 birds roosting!

What a thrilling finale for a Bombay Hook field trip!

Harriet Tubman Byway/Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

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The 2nd of 4 Delmarva Birding field trips was Birding the Harriet Tubman Byway. It was a mixture of cultural and natural history of the area around Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and Cambridge, Maryland – an area Harriet Tubman knew well as she was growing up and returned to after she escaped slavery to help others make their way to freedom. There is a map of the byway available from the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center (we stopped there before the field trip…great orientation for the cultural history portion of the field trip) of the sites along the byway; our field trip visited a handful of them with excellent guides. From a natural history perspective - two species that are gone for the scene that she would have known are the American Chestnut and Carolina Parakeet.

The birding at Blackwater NWR was spectacular – just as every time I visit the place; it is where I saw my first Bald Eagle in the wild (in 1990 when my daughter was a baby). This year there were several Bald Eagle pairs that are nesting at the refuge. At one nest, the babies had evidently just been fed and were sleeping off their meal; the adult was still at the nest watching over them.

Osprey are making use of the nesting platforms and snags. There are more snags that ever because the water level is rising at the refuge…killing more trees that remain standing for a few years.

The muskrat mounds in the marsh were numerous. The color of the mounds is good camouflage for small birds. One of our guides commented that sometimes an eagle wll perch for a little while on a mound. If the muskrats are home…they probably go very still until the large bird leaves!

Rusty, the screech owl, is a well-known resident along the wildlife loop. The bird has a favorite perch in a pine with an hollow which provides protection for the bird’s back/sides. The hole where the bird might ‘live’ and raise young is in a nearby tree. The eyes moved while we watched but the bird was otherwise very still.

There are still parts of the refuge where the water level can be controlled; small fish swam in the shallow water….good snacks for some of the birds we were seeing.

Great Blue Herons are nesting at Blackwater. They like the tall pines just as the eagles do.

Great Egrets were also fishing in the shallows. I learned that they too were nesting at the refuge, but I didn’t see those nests.

Somehow moss and pine needles seemed an appealing mini-landscape on the spring day.

Redwing blackbirds were noisy….defending territory…finding mates.

The field trip group continued into Cambridge to the courthouse – a place where the laws governing slavery in Harriet Tubman’s time were administered. The short lecture and conversation were thought provoking and heartbreaking. Fortunately, the field trip ended on a happy note at the nearby Harriet Tubman mural in Cambridge.

Stay tuned for my posts about 2 more Delmarva Birding field trips!

Phillips Landing Park

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My husband signed up us for 4 Delmarva Birding field trips as a last excursion to the eastern shore before we move to Missouri. The first field trip was at Phillips Landing Park near Laurel DE. It was a weekday so most of the other participants were retirees like us; we had two guides that were very familiar with the area…so we saw more than we would if we’d gone on our own.

Shortly after we started, my camera had a problem and I was challenged to work around it by using the eye piece rather than the screen for the rest of the morning….not what I usually do so my focusing/composition was not as good as usual even though the skew of pictures toward botanical rather than birds was probably about the same as it would have been with the camera working perfectly.

The plants are at the height of their variety in the spring with blossoms and unfurling leaves – the bright greens of mosses growing rapidly in the new warmth – unfurling ferns….good for photography although my eyes were itchy from the pollen laden air.

The high point of the botanical sightings: One of our guides pointed out a native orchid in bloom beside the path. They aren’t the large showy orchids of warmer climates; it takes a sharp eye to notice them!

There was an area near the path that looked like an egg laying site for a reptile….but something had found the eggs before they could hatch. There were eggshells among the acorns.

I did managed to photograph a few birds: courting cowbirds in the parking lot, a yellowlegs among the reeds, and a prothonotary warbler high in a tree.

The park was a good mix of habitat – watery area near the parking area (Broad Creek that flows into the Nanticoke River nearby) and a path through forest.

As we returned to our car, I saw a tiger swallowtail flit across the grassy area nearby. A good finale to a morning field trip!

Zentangle® – April 2022

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30 tiles – because April has 30 days.

It seemed like there were more tile shapes this month – rectangles of different sizes, foot shaped (created on cardboard that held footies I bought for summer) and round.

Many of the tiles were made while I was travelling. I had a box with blank tiles and a few pens that was easy to pack; the color selection was limited. The box was just barely large enough to provide support for a tile as I drew patterns and finished with colors.

I’ve already planned to only create square tiles for the next month so that I can use my phone rather than a scanner for the May post…I don’t want to delay the post because I am between houses (i.e. without the luxury of my full home office)!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. “Zentangle” is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 30, 2022

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

India’s fantastic freshwater fauna and where to find them – I was caught by the picture of the dancing frog at the top of the post. Other unusual animals featured in the rest of the post…some very different than what we see in North America.

Meat consumption must fall by at least 75% - And not just because of climate change. Health and economic effects also contribute to the rationale.

Top 25 birds of the week: birds communications – Pictures don’t impart sounds…so the post is really about bird body language.

Meet the Eastern Phoebe, the flycatchers that coexists with humans – It’s always easier to hear this bird than see it! We have one that visits our backyard almost every morning this spring.

A community of seed savers has a recipe to revive rare varieties of collard greens – I became a fan of collards in my CSA share…now I am thinking that I might try planting an heirloom variety! I like them better than kale because the big leaves are flatter – easier to roll and the cut to make slaw…or as a last ingredient into a stir fry.

U.S. has warmed by 2.6 degrees F since first Earth Day – This was my first look at this metric. Maryland is bright orange (3 degrees increase) and Missouri is white (1.5 degrees increase). Maybe another aspect of my move to Missouri could be climate related migration!

The US will phase out incandescent light bulbs – Ban takes effect in 2023…but lots of people have already made the transition to the more efficient bulbs.

Picturesque clouds of Greenland – Cloud streets and vortices.

22% of new cars in Europe have a plug! – Hurray! Hope the US will catch up sometime soon.

Spatial maps of melanoma – Diagnostics…enabling more precise medicine. Tissue samples must be supplemented with multiplexed imaging techniques to diagnose and treat melanoma more effectively.

Egyptian Mummies

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Sir Grafton Elliott Smith’s Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire N° 61051-61100 The Royal Mummies was published in 1912 and reflects the knowledge/assumptions from that time. I had never seen so many photographs of mummies presented in one book! Some of the mummies were very damaged – by looters or deliberate desecration in antiquity, poor quality of embalming, ravages of time, or damage occurring when the wrappings were removed. It’s awe inspiring to see remains that are so old…yet realize that they still are recognizably human. I selected 4 sample images from the book that is available on Internet Archive…enjoy more by following the link to the book directly.

Ancient Egypt has been a topic that has held my interest since my elementary school years – part of my first exposure to world history. So much has been explored and published…and yet there are still new finds in the country; I always scan the article that show up in my news feeds about ancient Egypt. This older publication demonstrated to me that there are nuggets in the documents that are over 100 years old!

Unique Aspects of Days – April 2022

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So much happened in April that was unique – or at least something we had not done in over 25 years! More that half the ‘days’ featured this month’s post are related to our move. I’ve listed then in the order they occurred and am surprised at the move milestones that occurred in April:

1st virtual house tour. This was not an option 25 years ago and both my husband and I were skeptical that such a tour would be ‘good enough’ to enable us to be comfortable bidding on a house. The first one convinced us that such tours were adequate to eliminate houses from consideration! Our realtor was very patient and good about highlighting aspects of houses as she walked through…and later in the month – after several experiences with virtual tours – we did indeed bid on a house before we saw in in-person.

Finding no houses available in Springfield that we liked. What a depressing day. Both my husband and I were primed to buy a house but there was a day that we had eliminated all the houses on the market.

Bid on house. And then a house came on the market. It wasn’t perfect but we had honed our idea of what we wanted enough to know that it was as close as we were going to get, and we could live with its imperfections. We scheduled a virtual tour and bid on the house the same day.

Contract signed. After one round of negotiations the contract was signed….and we were on the path to buying a house!

Seeing our house. Within 4 days we were in Springfield and walking through our house for the first time. It had a surreal quality after seeing it so thoroughly in the virtual tour.

Accepting a mover’s bid. Long distance moves are expensive and the last one we had done was paid for by our employers. The process has changed somewhat…the biggest one being the virtual way of creating the inventory of what is being moved!

There were some other unique experiences/sights in April:

1st long road trip with my husband post-pandemic.

74 black crowned night herons roosting.

A policeman – lights flashing - removing a deer carcass from a narrow roadway. I was thankful that he was taking care of it before the morning rush hour.

Several bald eagle and great blue heron nests…close together.

Zooming - April 2022

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I am featuring 12 pictures this month using the zoom feature of 3 different cameras (my phone which is digital zoom, my point and shot with optical zoom, and my bridge camera with even more optical zoom).

The point and shoot provided more than half the images: Sidling Hill, the Japanese garden and some of the spring flowers. The bridge camera was used for the spring looks at redbud and tulip poplar. The phone was used for the peacock horse sculpture (at a Kentucky rest stop) and the morning light picture. Using all three of my cameras in ‘zoom’ mode was a first!

Enjoy the slide show!

Ten Little Celebrations – April 2022

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April was a whirlwind month---with more than the usual amount of drama because of our plan to move to Springfield, Missouri. More than half the little celebrations I selected for the month have to do with the move:

Finding a house we liked and getting it under contract. It was new (and high anxiety) to do the contract with only seeing it virtually…thrilling to do the walkthrough to confirm that it was THE HOUSE for us.

A good driving day is always welcome, but we particularly celebrated one of the days heading home; perhaps a sunny, spring day is balm to the stress of the drive and the anticipated events of the next few months.

Home again is always something I celebrate. This time I savored the house that has been home since October 1994…realizing that soon I would be transferring the joy of homecoming to a new place.

Initiating contact then selecting movers. This was not a single day event, but I was pleasantly surprised at virtual inventories and other options. There are some things that have changed for the better since my last long distance move in 1983.

22 boxes packed in one day. I set a goal for myself to pack 20 boxes a day for a week and I achieved that goal! I celebrated the most on the highest day (22 boxes).

There were other things to celebrate in April…

Early morning at the grocery store. I love the quiet at the store before 7 AM with spring far enough along that it is light at that time…but still full of morning color.

A medical test that found nothing. Sometimes finding nothing is worth celebrating…particularly as we get older.

No traffic on the Bay Bridge. We made a 2-day trip to the Eastern Shore (birding field trips) and celebrated that we didn’t have traffic on the bridge – coming or going.

No traffic on the Bay Bridge. We made a 2-day trip to the Eastern Shore (birding field trips) and celebrated that we didn’t have traffic on the bridge – coming or going.

A wealth of birds. There were 4 field trips over 2 days…and we celebrated that we saw so many birds – some species in larger numbers than we had ever seen before. Stay tuned for blog posts coming next week.

Japanese Garden. I enjoyed our visit the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden in Springfield MO although the celebration came afterward as I looked at my pictures (too noisy from the mowers while I was in the garden).

Missouri to Maryland

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We made the road trip back from Missouri – having walked through the house we are buying and brief by the house inspector (the final results were still pending, but we did get to talk with the inspector about the house while he was in the house). The route was a reverse of the one we had taken from Maryland (see my post here). The weather was dry both days….much appreciated. The temperatures stayed cool even though the sun was shining most of the time. On the first day, our route started in Springfield, Missouri, crossed southern Illinois and Indiana, and ended in Lexington, Kentucky.

The part in Missouri parallels old Route 66…one of the rest stops highlights that history. Evidence of spring is easy to find at every stop.

I wondered how long the leaning tree near one of the picnic areas - caught by neighboring trees before it could reach the ground - would stay in that precarious position.

I zoomed in on the back of one of the horse sculptures at the Kentucky welcome center: Peacock feathers!

The next morning we left before sunrise and I took a picture the sunrise blush silhouetting trees on a ridge. The route the second day was from Lexington, Kentucky, through West Virginia, and ended at home in central Maryland.

More spring: dandelions already going to seed before the other plants in the bed even have buds, red buds planted along the roadway and rest stop parking lots, azaleas just beginning their bloom, daffodils still blooming in the mountains (done for the season at lower elevations). There was enough breeze to extend the flags in West Virginia…but not at the same time!

And then we reached Maryland. The scenic overlook/welcome center had good views of the lake and daffodils were still blooming there. The Sidling Hill stop had yellow tulips. And then we didn’t need to the stop at South Mountain. We were keen to be home!

Even though the weather was good for driving, my husband and I realized during our first day driving that our two days in Springfield had not been long enough to recover from the trek to Missouri. He was having lots of neck and shoulder aches and I was feeling exhausted. We agreed that short turn around trips with that much driving should be avoided from now on!