Busy day

[catsittingstill]

Well, I got a slow start this morning, chortling over the comments on my last few entries, listening to the Birding By Ear CD (presently working on singsongers, robin, scarlet tanager and summer tanager) and generally puttering. Picked up the bird book, but it was too late in the morning to see much, came back inside feeling kind of bored and restless.

Then it occurred to me that there's a faculty lunch at Carson Newman (the college where my husband just started teaching) that I could go, and that while I was over there I could check out the library and the swimming pool. I don't need to sit around the house bored and lonely. Ha!

So I bought 30 pounds of tomatoes at the produce stand (open again--yay! Guilford wasn't sick these past few days, just fishing), left a note for Kip, who was away from his office, went to the gym and got the schedule for the swimming pool, checked out the periodicals at the library (they have Science, and Science News and Cell, but not Nature! How strange is that? But they do have several cool Tennessee-specific nature magazines), collected Kip, went to the lunch, discovered a friend of a friend was planning a road bike ride that afternoon and would I like to join?, hurried home, sliced 10 pounds of tomatoes and put them in the dryer, pumped up my bike's tires and shocks, went on about half the road bike ride, but had to turn back early so as to be in time to have dinner with a couple of friends of ours. Whew.

Gonna get out there, meet new people, make new friends and find fun things to do. Today was a good start. In the meantime, I'll have lots of dried tomatoes.

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

You may wish to contact the Tennessee Ornithological Society for guides to TN birds. There's a short on-line bibliography of reference materials on Tennessee birds (which inclues a Southeast land-resource book written by someone from the Nature Conservancy). In some ways, I wish my daughter had gotten into birding when we were in Tennessee, but she was still a wee one then (and horses were king, at least to her).

You may wish to ask your spouse if Carson Newman's library resources include electronic access to Nature. Or if you can get courtesy access to UTK's library. (I forget exactly how far Jefferson City is from Knoxville.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestions; I'll check them out when I have time :-)

And it may be that Carson Newman gets Nature but doesn't choose to display it for some reason; they have signs up saying that they don't have space to display all the current periodicals and to check the catalog for library holdings. I was cruising through in a hurry and didn't bother.

Birding is cool. I think I didn't appreciate them as a child because I saw birds all the time so I never really looked at them. I watched the hummingbird feeder while I was washing and slicing tomatoes yesterday and saw at least two hummingbirds feuding over who was allowed to drink there. They're fearless!