Biking, birds, and happiness.

This entry is a bit late.

I blame Mina.

I blame her for introducing me to the 17-mile biking trail down a certain mountain.

It took us about 7 hours to do, mostly due to us dismounting and wandering off to ooh and aah at the environment, just about every 5 minutes. This means that at the end of it all (what with me not having biked for something like a year), both her and I were –beat-!

Monday was perpetual agony in muscles that I didn’t know I had. The blog post, which was usually written on Monday morning, didn’t get written. Surprisingly, the handle-burns on the insides of the palms disappeared within the day. Odd.

Of course, the trail was bloody great. It wound down the mountain, along a raging mountain stream-turn-river. There were beavers alongside the river. I think I saw one.

These are some of the formations that they've built.


A beaver pool right under the biking bridge.



Also seen were the clubmoss ferns.



Yellow violets.



Dutchman’s breeches.


Some sort of trillium.


And views to die for!


Now that Elrin’s finally ordered a bike for himself, hopefully we’ll be getting out there more often!

On that news, I’m finally getting back to driving. After six months of home-boundness, it’s bound to be interesting, and not a little hazardous!


Home front.

The tulips are still blooming, and the veggies are growing larger by the day.


The common birds in the back yard these days are limited to titmice, cardinals, house finches, bluejays, and mourning doves. Woodpeckers are also sighted daily, albeit in a distance.

Otherwise, it’s been mostly sunny with a 10% chance of nuthatches.


An occasional mystery cat dropped by to stare at the birds. (This one’s #3, I believe).


With everything coming into bloom, the scenes from the bedroom windows could only be described as ‘something else’.



In other news, we’ve been keeping busy, wedding invitations have come in (they are currently being modified), and Elrin’s got a new computer chair, which he is unfairly excited about. (But some of us get to take ceramics class at the local art museum, so HA. Hooray for tax refunds!)

Time is really flying by. When I first moved out here, I’d have never thought that being a “simple” stay at home artist could be so involving. Moving out of college and into a household was challenging, in that initially, I was restless about getting things done, and accomplishing something, and.. I’m not sure how to put it. Being “successful”?

It’s funny, that I feel more fulfilled right now than I’ve ever felt during the 6 years of college. Computer addiction's dissolved into nothing. (Got the vide ogame "The Witcher" some week ago, and have yet to even start on it!) Hiking, biking, cooking, gardening, cleaning, painting, reading, writing… Doing all that, and having a loving significant other as well as friends to do those things with.

I would’ve never thought that I’d say these words, even as recently as a year ago.

But, here goes.

I am happy.

Grape hyacinths

House plants.

The non- variegated spider plant’s decided to produce an off-shoot, which means that I must be doing –something- right. The variegated spider plant is still blooming, and so are all four of the unnamed African violets. Seems that all of the latter are old-fashioned varieties, preferring to rest between massive caps of flowers, rather than flowering continuously. Which is the way I like it. You’ve got a rosette of fuzzy leaves sitting there for weeks, and all of a sudden- Bang! Flowers.

Speaking of flowers, here is one of the grape hyacinths, mentioned some posts ago.



According to the almighty Internet, one can plant the bulbs outside after forcing them. It also looks like hyacinths can be invasive. The second fact I knew already, since there’s some kind of dwarf grape hyacinth, that’s rather common in town during mid-spring. In a parking lot of one restaurant, there’s actually a patch that’s slowly but surely taking over a parking space. Like perfumy mold on steroids, it creeps onward, inch by purple inch


Animals

Basement cat was again caught attacking ceiling cat. Since the basement cat is declawed, all that she was doing was batting up an ineffectual storm. The Ceiling cat sat on his favorite footstool, and looked down at her with mild interest. He was probably wondering why these harmless, playful gestures were accompanied by howls of outrage.

To reiterate, the Ceiling cat has done nothing to deserve this treatment.


Hiking

On Sunday, I had a chance to visit with a friend from a neighboring town (we shall call the friend in question Mina, for the sake of aliases). Her and her husband own a sizeable farm, edged sideways up the wooded slopes of Appalachians. There is much pasture, and a good chunk of absolutely gorgeous (not to mention sharply angled) woodland.

The views from the upper pastures were to die-for, with crests of the mountains spanning half of the horizon, and only an occasional sign of human habitation. Within the forest, oaks and pines mixed with tulip trees and an occasional cedar; some of these provided support for wild grapes and poison ivy (I’ve never before seen a poison ivy trunk that was as thick as my arm. Those things are scary), as well as what I later identified as catbrier . Hollies and rhododendron occupied lower tiers, along with something that may or may not have been low-bush blueberries. An occasional multiflora rose, a problem even all the way out here, made its presence ‘felt’.

There’s a fair amount of wildlife in those parts. While we saw only a few birds and the neighbor’s dog (who decided to follow us for miles at an end), there were some signs of deer damage (especially on Mina’s recently planted bushes). A ripped-up rotting tree we’ve found halfway up the slope was likely a sign of bear attention. Of course, there were also cows. One can’t have a pasture without cows. Or, how shall we say it… cow by-products.

The outing was threaded with local human interest stories, and an entertaining venture all around, that is, besides being the most challenging 3 hours of hiking that I’ve done, up to date.