Sleepy, chilly Sunday morning here in Virginia. No snow on the ground, and indeed, the sky is mostly clear and somewhat sunny, but it is certainly cold enough outside. Went out and fed the horses earlier and made sure the ice on their water trough was broken up. But now it's nice to be sitting indoors drinking tea and eating zucchini bread while reading the comics and doing the crossword puzzle.

    Going back a few days though to Friday, it was also a chilly winter day. An easy morning indoors of course, but then it was time to get up and moving. Headed outdoors taking the good ol' chain saw with me. There had been a stack of logs and limbs outside the woodshed that had been cut the last time I was here in Floyd. The idea was to attack that stack and get it all cut up and stacked away. Did managed to get it all cut up, something that certainly isn't as easy to do when there is no one there to help, but it got done and I even managed to move and stack nearly all of it before Rima got back from work for the day.

   We finished stacking up most of what was left, but wanted to take advantage of the daylight to actually do something a little more fun. So we took off for a short hike that took us out through the upper pasture and down the main road to the north. About a mile up we turned right and headed down an old road that use to go down to the river and ford it, but which is now nothing more than an overgrown path. Getting down to the river we decided to walk back along the bank until we reached the path from it up to Rima's house. Didn't quite get that far because of the steep, really, really steep nature of the land along there, as well as the near impenetrable nature of all the rhododendron and other trees along the way. We clawed our way up the hill at times, slid back down it at others and finally fought our way through a tangled mass of rhododendron to finally emerge just down the hill from the house. It was a fun walk, bit maybe a bit more than either of us had expected.

   We got cleaned up after that and headed into town to meet up with one of Rima's daughters and grandson for some dinner at the local Mexican restaurant. I had this wonderful meal of chicken and carna asada for my meal. With a few chips and salsa thrown in, it changed my mind about the quality and taste, of Mexican food east of the Mississippi River. This was really good stuff!

   On to do some grocery shopping, which is always a lot of fun with a two year old little boy that likes to 'help', before heading back home again where we watched a couple episodes of the first year of the Big Bang Theory. I think Rima is now hooked also.

    Yesterday was just a pleasant day of hanging out around the house. Rima was suppose to work all day, but because of the bad weather the training that she was suppose to be running was cancelled. So we hung out drinking tea, watching the snow and the rain come down and watching a few more BBT shows. We did make and bake a zucchini cake in the afternoon before going out in the cold for a walk. Much less strenuous today, but still enough to let you know you've been doing something other than walking in the mall. Got back in time to eat a piece of still warm cake with some more hot tea. Yum!

    Rima is off to a Quaker meeting this morning and then is having lunch with some friends. I'm going to hang out here until about 1:30 when I'll go meet up with her and head on into Roanoke. We have tickets to the Nut Cracker at 3:00 and then some dinner somewhere there in town. Right now though; there are a few photo's below from a few weeks ago when we were both still down in Florida and it was much, much warmer.

A day at Manatee Springs and Cedar Key Florida - Dec 2013 

This is a small sink hole about 100 yards from the main spring at Manatee Springs State Park. This pool is called Catfish Pool and is actual connected via underground tunnels to the rest of the spring. The whole area below is honeycombed with interconnected waterways of which more than 5 miles of it have actually been explored and mapped by scuba divers.

No Manatees at the spring on the day we were there, other than this one.

A look at the actual pool where the main spring comes up. Over 50 million gallons of water per day come out of this spring, more so in a wet year. You can see the bubbles where the main spring comes out in the right hand side near the top of the water.

Cypress knees along the river.

A pelican over near Cedar Key.

I just like this building for some reason.

 

Rima and yet another Manatee. Even though it's Florida, it was still a little chilly there on that day.

Cormorants and pelicans.

This pelican was perched on the rail of the fishing dock waiting for someone to catch something and feed it to him.

The rest are just more pictures of the pelican.

 

 

 

He was starting to take offense at me getting so close.