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there aren't many creatures
Wednesday, December 28 2016
This morning I took the dogs on a walk down the Farm Road, over through the abandoned go-cart track and then home through the woods on the bluff west of the Farm Road. There's still a couple inches of crusty snow in the forest and few signs of life. Given how few tracks (even tiny bird and mouse tracks) one sees in even weeks-old old snow, one gets the sense that there aren't many creatures actually living in the forest.
[REDACTED]
I'd been "working" for hours after-hours, so I owed it to myself to have some me-time in the middle of the afternoon. I loaded up the dogs and drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, hoping there would've been an influx of Boxing-Day goodies. (As I passed the West Hurley Park, Ramona's head turned to face the tract of woods where the remains of that deer carcass had been such a distractive nuisance on Christmas Eve; there was no way I was going to knowingly make that mistake again.) Unfortunately, there was nothing of value at the thrift store. If anything, the shelves seemed to be unusually uncluttered. There were plenty of Christmas decorations, though. And for some reason there was also Christmas music playing from a speaker somewhere (normally all one hears there is the weird drones of Tibetan singing, punctuated here and there by the sound of singing bowls).
I drove to the Ghettoford in Uptown to get myself some easily-prepared food such as frozen pizza, corn chips, beans, and, well, beer. Gretchen would be gone for a few days, and I needed to prepare properly to fend for myself.
Today I took delivery of a new camera, a Nikon CoolPix P510. In the past, my criteria for cameras was always that they be small and have a good zoom lens, which usually meant they were Canon Powershots. But now that I can take photos with my smartphone, a special-purpose camera can be larger, since if I'm bringing it at all, photography must be an integral aspect of the outing. A Nikon CoolPix P510 is almost too big to fit in a jacket pocket, but it has an astounding 42X zoom. You need that sort of lens to take photos of wildlife. I've had good luck with a big Olympus SP-55OUZ given to me by my father-in-law; it has a nice a 30X zoom lens, though it requires double-A batteries for fuel and eats through them too quickly for photography to be much fun. This new camera actually comes with GPS electronics and can geotag photos as they are taken, which is great for someone like me who likes to know where (in addition to when) pictures were taken.
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