Just because you happen to live in suburbia and are hiking/walking on a paved trail, does not mean you need not be watchful of your surroundings.
As I came down the Thompson Creek Trail this morning, about halfway through my morning walk, I spotted a gathering of people, all of whom had their phones out. Gotta be an unusual animal of some kind.
Yep. Just your average Southern Pacific Rattlesnake slithering from one little haven to another, across a cement bridge and then over to another spot where it could hand out for the duration of the day that was promising to get nice and hot.
Here's a link to a YouTube video that I took right after I took this still shot. The agave plant where the snake eventually took refuge is literally up against someone's back yard wrought iron fence.
Over the course of the year, there is an ebb and flow as the seasons progress throughout the year. Many of us have our ebbs and flows with our job as well. It's at this time of the year that my thoughts usually turn back to my job since the school year is starting throughout most of the country.
This year, however, as most of you are aware, that changed for me because I retired at the end of the last school year. So instead of going to my first day of school, I went on a hike today. That's the first time I haven't been at a first day of school in 36 years. Then, after I got back, my son and I went to the local REI store and I purchased a new hiking shirt, something that would wick the sweat away from my body a little bit better than my T-shirt did today.
Summertime, for me, was always a more leisurely time period. No alarms, unless I set them because I wanted to do something. Getting up a little bit later in the morning and just enjoying each day without having to rush to get things done. Now it seems like the entire year is going to be more like that.
My wife started back on her work day routine this morning, so I woke up when her alarm went off, but didn't immediately get out of bed. During our regular work week, I'd get up first, take a shower and then she'd take a shower, after I "warmed up" the bathroom. Well I didn't do that this morning, but I did eventually get up and made a pot of coffee for us to start the day.
So it's a little bit different now. Next week, instead of creating second week lesson plans for four or five different classes, I'm heading out on a camping trip into Utah, Idaho and Nevada. In October, I have a road trip planned to Denver, because there's a major exhibit of Monet paintings at the Denver Art Museum. It's only there from October to February so when, as a teacher, could I really see something like that? Now I can.
In September, during the week, I plan on doing an over night trip to Paso Robles to see the Sensorio Paso Robles Field of Light. My hope is that I'll have something like that to do each month. I'm looking forward to new explorations and adventures. That's my new normalcy.
We've had lots of June bugs this summer for some reason. It's probably because we had such a wet winter. I actually saw a photo today, that said it was a good thing they only eat plants.
Every so often, I like to take photos of insects and creepy crawly things. Most of the people on Facebook already know this. I like spiders. Insects, not so much, mainly because they're pests. They fly in your face and annoy the heck out of you. They suck your blood and spread disease. And so I like spiders and bats, because they eat lots of insects.
However, insects do provide many important things for us. They pollinate the flowers we love to smell and they pollinate the flowers of all of our food we eat. We need to be thinking very clearly about bees in the future. Actually, we need to be acting on bee welfare right now. We run out of bees, half of our population of people worldwide will probably disappear due to mass starvation. That's a sobering thought.
And so I leave you with this June bug on some Hydrangea flowers. Yes, I know this post is in August, but I took the photo in late July.
