I suspect this is now a trend for me
Cat Dreams:
Last night I dreamed I was back in high school again. It was the usual type of dream, trying to remember how to find a classroom for a class I hadn't taken where I had to go take a test. It's just that now, with Jasper in the room at night, I found I was not only worried about which hall I was in, and if I had my books, but I was also distressed that I'd somehow misplaced my kitten. I was wandering the floors of my old school, trying to follow the sound of meowing.
Ice Walk:
Over the weekend I finally got out to the woods for the first time in several weeks. The paths in the woods haven't been cleared, but enough other people have been through that you can tell where they are by the footprints. There were places where the melt water had cleared the path entirely (well, except for the water itself) and most of the snow has compacted down to little more than ankle height, because it's been wet but it hasn't been terribly cold. It was interesting to see how the white snow has accumulated a layer of brown-black dust atop it, a little glimpse of the cycle of the soil.
Still, walking in crunchy, wet snow is exhausting in a different way than a simple long walk is- you can't tell until you've stepped if a particular patch of snow will hold your weight or drop you down a few more inches, and whether it's firm or sliding. It was slow going, and as a result, I did less than a quarter of the normal walk because my knees were shaking from the effort at stabilizing. Still, there were patches where I was happily leaping from spot to spot, so it's not like it was stressful. I only saw a few people, though one of the fellow travelers said that the path on the other side of the next road had been cleared entirely.
The reason I wanted to go was that I wanted to take some suet cakes to the woods. I took in three. The first of them, a peanut butter cake, I left my a tree where I saw a squirrel with only half a tail foraging. The second I put down when I'd gone as far as I felt able to go, to mark the farthest end of that path. I didn't feel up to making it back the way I'd come, by then, so I took a side path out to a development to walk back by the roads. I left the third cake there, to note a new path. At the top of that walk, when I was out of the woods but not yet among houses, there was a gorgeous stretch of blue sky and a hawk was circling, calling, laying out the boundaries of its territory with song.
Last night I dreamed I was back in high school again. It was the usual type of dream, trying to remember how to find a classroom for a class I hadn't taken where I had to go take a test. It's just that now, with Jasper in the room at night, I found I was not only worried about which hall I was in, and if I had my books, but I was also distressed that I'd somehow misplaced my kitten. I was wandering the floors of my old school, trying to follow the sound of meowing.
Ice Walk:
Over the weekend I finally got out to the woods for the first time in several weeks. The paths in the woods haven't been cleared, but enough other people have been through that you can tell where they are by the footprints. There were places where the melt water had cleared the path entirely (well, except for the water itself) and most of the snow has compacted down to little more than ankle height, because it's been wet but it hasn't been terribly cold. It was interesting to see how the white snow has accumulated a layer of brown-black dust atop it, a little glimpse of the cycle of the soil.
Still, walking in crunchy, wet snow is exhausting in a different way than a simple long walk is- you can't tell until you've stepped if a particular patch of snow will hold your weight or drop you down a few more inches, and whether it's firm or sliding. It was slow going, and as a result, I did less than a quarter of the normal walk because my knees were shaking from the effort at stabilizing. Still, there were patches where I was happily leaping from spot to spot, so it's not like it was stressful. I only saw a few people, though one of the fellow travelers said that the path on the other side of the next road had been cleared entirely.
The reason I wanted to go was that I wanted to take some suet cakes to the woods. I took in three. The first of them, a peanut butter cake, I left my a tree where I saw a squirrel with only half a tail foraging. The second I put down when I'd gone as far as I felt able to go, to mark the farthest end of that path. I didn't feel up to making it back the way I'd come, by then, so I took a side path out to a development to walk back by the roads. I left the third cake there, to note a new path. At the top of that walk, when I was out of the woods but not yet among houses, there was a gorgeous stretch of blue sky and a hawk was circling, calling, laying out the boundaries of its territory with song.