Hiking.

This weekend, myself and two friends went hiking down the Creeper Trail. The wild flowers were beginning to come up (spring beauties, hepatica, and we even saw a single trout lily), the weather was gorgeous and much fun was otherwise had. Here's a picture taken by Liz from that trip... If I could only take credit for it. :)

Pirogi!

Elrin is gone for three days. (One day and two half-days, to be exact… but still!)

The 6 hours’ distance does seem to be an insurmountable distance, and neither of us could sleep last night. It’s odd to suddenly have an empty space behind you in a bed, a space that should’ve been filled in with another person.

Well.


Artsiness

Elrin’s off having fun, and I get to stay in, clean, and make artsiness. (The said artsiness mostly takes form of 1. Learning to use a sewing machine (the long-overdue curtain project is looming just over the horizon) and 2. Staying up until 2am to make my first-ever attempt at pirog (pirog/pirogi/basically a type of pie). (The thing took a total of about 4 hours, what with dough rising.)

There is a Russian saying, “perviy blin - komom”, or “first crape will turn out badly”.



As far as appearances go, these are nothing like my grandmothers’ (the best cook I know (possibly rivaled by my mother), who makes veritable works of art in forms varying from blins, to pirogi, to pel’meni, to any other type of nutritious, delicious stuff that I’ve grown up on). Taste-wise, mine didn’t turn out too badly, though! The one on top has apple-and-pie spice filling, and the one on the bottom’s apple, currant, and mint. It took all my willpower at 1:30 AM to not eat all of the latter’s filling raw. T’was –good-.


Birds

Bird-watching’s fallen by the wayside for now, since the birds in question seem to be too busy making nests and glaring at one another (*cough* insectivorous robins *cough*) to possibly be interested in any meager sunflower seeds we have to offer.

Also, OtherKitty killed two wrens in this past week (one- still a baby), and brought them to our back porch to show off. This was sad on multiple levels, as both El and I love birds (especially the small ones), and the cuteness of the cat makes it very hard to scold him. We ended up getting OtherKitty a collar with a bell on it, and for days afterward, the faint jingling could be heard, as the wild beastie romped across the sloping back yard in search for prey. No wrens since then, so –maybe- it’s working.


Hiking

We haven’t done as much hiking last week, mostly because of me being a big baby about the entire cheek pain. (Which, by the way, isn’t hurting much at all today!) What we –did- do was a 30-minute outing onto the Sugar (Creek? Maple?) Hollow wetlands, without the camera, of course.

There were ducks in the wetlands, which were cute. There were also baby ducks in the wetlands, which were cuter. About five of them, along with their mom, were sleeping within five feet of the boardwalk, on some mossy logs.

There was a fair number of turtles out, as well, including a three-foot snapper, taking up most of a sizeable rock. There was another foot-and-a-half long one that slowly inched its way closer and closer to the boardwalk, as we stood and watched it.. I think it wanted a piece of our toes.

These reptiles put you in the mind for a distant, horrifying age, where humans didn’t quite rule the world, and everything and their brother was out to get them.


Plants

Potted plants continue to thrive! Of a particular note is a partly-seed grown/partly friend-given plain green spider plant, which has been putting offshoots with a huge amount of flowers and almost no suckers to speak of.



The flowers last only a day, but every day, I get anywhere from 3 to 10 new ones. Kind of curious how long the plant can keep going like this.

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.

Of living things and categorization.

Birds

Things have been happening! Things that started with “n”, and ended with “uthatches on our birdfeeder”! Humor aside, it’s been a thrill to see something other than mourning doves, cardinals, song sparrows, tufted titmice, and black-capped chickadees on that dastardly thing. Come spring, we might even get a finch or three on it.

Off-feeder, a pair of eastern towhees* was spotted digging tunnels to China at the base of the adjacent brush. Both song sparrows and towhees have this entertaining way of getting to food.. that is, hopping back and forth on one spot while digging into the ground/leaves with their claws. Dirt flies. Leaves and seeds do too, presumably. When there’s snow on the ground, song sparrows can make holes deep enough to almost completely submerge themselves.

An occasional blue jay would also land to graze under the birdfeeder with the mourning doves, but rarely stays long, and never ascends to the actual feeder. No sight of mockingbirds in the past week, but plenty of passing-by ravens.

(*Field guide to the birds of north America, by National Geographic, is what I use for identification. It has yet to fail me.)


Houseplants

Otherkitty’s been eating African violet flowers, which saddens me greatly. It’s not like there’s much protein in them. Spider plant bloomed with a single mildly exciting white flower, with more to come in the nearby future, if the buds surrounding the lonesome offshoot is anything to judge by.

A violet grown from leaf gotten in a plant trade back in Champaign (almost a year ago) is finally showing some buds. The girl told me that it’d flower white with purple edges, which, if true, would be awesome. The only AV around here that’s even close to white is a wine-colored chimera with faint pink stripes in the center of each leaf.


Hiking

Birds seen: ducks, crows, golden-crowned kinglets, cardinals, bluejays.

The mountainous wastelands of Virginia have been buffeted with snowstorm after snowstorm this winter, which made our usually daily hikes uncommon at the very least. We did manage to get out for three hours this past Sunday, which almost, but not quite, made up for it.

The first part of the trail is bordered by pastures, so getting a good look at some farm animals or even an occasional groundhog is a standard deal. This time around, a small herd of rather shaggy horses was grazing a short distance from one of the fences; two of these actually deigned to come up to the fence in response to a meager offering of dry grass. So, we got to scratch some horses behind the ears. Which isn’t earth-shatteringly exciting, but still is rather neat: one doesn’t get to be close to large, domesticated animals on a daily basis.

Having left the pastures behind, we then detoured off the main branch of Creeper Trail into a heart-wrenching climb which lead us up, sideways, and up again, zigzagging up a tree-covered slope, and occasionally sliding down on the outcroppings of gravel. El thought he was going to have a heart attack, then didn’t. On the way up, we’ve noticed a pair of tiny birds with golden-red spots on their heads, which were later identified as kinglets. These things were actually smaller than chickadees; barely the size of golf balls.

Eventually, we ended up at a place where a series of paths converged, and decided to go back, only to find a branching off of the trail which we haven’t noticed before. This branching lead to a marvelous little valley, filled with still-green plants (of what sort, I know not), and a number of sink holes.



Sink holes are just what they sound like, holes in the ground, dipping into some cave. The mountains are riddled with them in some places. A number of old trees with low-lying branches were scattered throughout the clearing, their limbs- coated in moss and lichen. The birds were rather prevalent as well, chittering in the trees, and likely glad to be out of the cold.

We stayed in this sanctuary for a good twenty minutes, before turning back. Sadly, I doubt we’d make it there during the summer, as the number of dry stems indicated that we’d have to tear our way through a veritable jungle of fireweed to make our way across.