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calissaSince my last entry, I have continued to feel a bit out of sorts--a bit grouchy and harassed. I know it will pass eventually and am doing my best to roll with it.
One of the things that has been helping somewhat has been getting outside a little more often. Taking more walks is another one of those vague hopes I have for the new year. The first little section of this article rather expresses how I feel about walks, though I would add that for me it connects me to the natural world at least as much as the human drama (if not more... though I do also feel the human drama is important).
Walks without the dogs tend to be rare things for me. Our dogs insist on being walked at least once a day (usually twice) and it is hard to find the extra time and energy to go out on my own. However, I see more things without the dogs--the birds tend to linger a little longer and I can double back more freely to look at things more closely. Yesterday ended up being one of those times when I managed to get out on my own.
I went down to a nearby creek--though "creek" might be a loose term. Back when the area was urbanised sometime in the seventies, the main creek running through the area was turned into a concrete drainage ditch and dammed in a couple of places to create feature lakes. I suspect this creek suffered the same fate.
The stretch is rather prettier than most. It is mostly earth with a narrow concrete channel at the bottom, instead of the wide, ugly concrete ditches with the sad trickle along the bottom that you usually see in these parts. Because this particular ditch is mostly earth, the grass and trees grow right up close to the water. Debris makes plain the flood mark, though at the moment the creek is fairly shallow, stagnant and green.
Sometimes, when I am walking with the dogs, I hear frogs and I have seen a heron stalking there before. Since I had the luxury of being able to sit on the bank for a little while, I was delighted to see dragonflies chasing each other up and down the length. Magpies foraged for cicadas amongst the bark litter from the eucalypts.
There are photos, of course, though not of the place where I was sitting.
Gumnuts on a eucalypt. The colours in this photo really speak to me of summer.
These are she-oak--also known as Casuarina--seed pods. These form an essential part of the diet of a number of cockatoo species.
I was also going to write about my visit (again) to the National Arboretum this afternoon, but my rambles here have taken me longer than I was expecting and so it will have to wait until tomorrow.
One of the things that has been helping somewhat has been getting outside a little more often. Taking more walks is another one of those vague hopes I have for the new year. The first little section of this article rather expresses how I feel about walks, though I would add that for me it connects me to the natural world at least as much as the human drama (if not more... though I do also feel the human drama is important).
Walks without the dogs tend to be rare things for me. Our dogs insist on being walked at least once a day (usually twice) and it is hard to find the extra time and energy to go out on my own. However, I see more things without the dogs--the birds tend to linger a little longer and I can double back more freely to look at things more closely. Yesterday ended up being one of those times when I managed to get out on my own.
I went down to a nearby creek--though "creek" might be a loose term. Back when the area was urbanised sometime in the seventies, the main creek running through the area was turned into a concrete drainage ditch and dammed in a couple of places to create feature lakes. I suspect this creek suffered the same fate.
The stretch is rather prettier than most. It is mostly earth with a narrow concrete channel at the bottom, instead of the wide, ugly concrete ditches with the sad trickle along the bottom that you usually see in these parts. Because this particular ditch is mostly earth, the grass and trees grow right up close to the water. Debris makes plain the flood mark, though at the moment the creek is fairly shallow, stagnant and green.
Sometimes, when I am walking with the dogs, I hear frogs and I have seen a heron stalking there before. Since I had the luxury of being able to sit on the bank for a little while, I was delighted to see dragonflies chasing each other up and down the length. Magpies foraged for cicadas amongst the bark litter from the eucalypts.
There are photos, of course, though not of the place where I was sitting.
Gumnuts on a eucalypt. The colours in this photo really speak to me of summer.
These are she-oak--also known as Casuarina--seed pods. These form an essential part of the diet of a number of cockatoo species.
I was also going to write about my visit (again) to the National Arboretum this afternoon, but my rambles here have taken me longer than I was expecting and so it will have to wait until tomorrow.
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Date: 2014-01-08 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-01-18 09:28 pm (UTC)