Time

This post is an indulgence.  Time is not on my side for blogging right now - neither for posting nor for reading other folks' blogs.  The volunteer naturalist class timetable has been somewhat intense.  We have two 4-hour classes per week, plus the travel time for me to most classes is 2 hours round-trip, making it more like 6-hour classes!  We don't have homework, per se, but we are expected to read certain materials ahead of time to familiarize ourselves with the topic du jour.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving every minute of it, and I'm learning lots, and the people are great (both classmates and instructors) - but the schedule is hectic compared to the more laid back timetable I'm used to functioning on.

Here are some photos from our most recent class about aquatic life at Clear Creek Metro Park.  The creek, as its name implies, is clear, indeed!

Preparing to do stream quality monitoring (SQM)

Checking out what's in the net.

Coming together after splitting into 2 groups, we review what kinds of critters we pulled from the creek. All were released safely back into Clear Creek.
There are lots of things that I'm missing right now.  Writing, taking photos, blogging... quiet observation of the simplest things, like watching the birds in the trees, or looking for my favorite wildflowers, like this one:

Blue-eyed Grass
I hope to be back to a more steady blogging schedule in late June, but until then, posts here and visits to your blogs will be sporadic.
Oh, by the way, our Phoebe's have decided that it's time to build a new nest. The nest that the young ones just fledged from has been used for at least 4 broods, so I imagine it's getting kind of shaggy and dirty. The new nest is still on the same side of the house, about 10 inches away from the old one, but farther away from the box where the camera is mounted, so the motion-detection function is not working as reliably right now.

Book extravaganza!!

There's nothing like a good book. I will admit that I am a bit of a book hoarder. Our bookshelves are full of a variety of books, both fiction and non-fiction, but there are two subjects that dominate the non-fiction shelves: cookbooks and "outdoors" books. The outdoors books cover gardening, homesteading and home building, most of the Foxfire series, field guides of all sorts, and natural history and nature-related books.

I love the public library, and I have no problem borrowing books from it, but some books I feel I must just own. Books I think I might need to reference at some point. Books I think or know I would want to write in. Books that I will read over and over. You get the picture.


Needless to say, I was very excited when my most recent Amazon order arrived bearing more books for my collection. I had had my eye on one of them for a few months, but those wily folks at Amazon and their "Customers who bought this item also bought" list showed me a few other books that piqued my interest. I mean, The Singing Life of Birds - how could I pass that up?

The problem is, I've got a bazillion other books that I've purchased in the last 6-8 months along the same lines that I still haven't finished, or even started for that matter. Last Child in the Woods (Richard Louv). Silent Spring (Rachel Carson). Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats (N.B. Davies). One book I did manage to finish recently is Scott Weidensaul's Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding. The book taught me a lot and made me reflect more deeply on the different aspects of the growing hobby of birding.


When it comes down to it, these books are in my personal library to help me increase my knowledge base, be it of the natural world or in the kitchen. If I can interpret a habitat and know what grows there and why and who benefits from the flora, or if I can know what to use as a substitution when I run out of milk for that muffin I'm making, then those books made a difference. In their own way they opened up my world view just a little bit more.

What about you - what are you reading these days? What's your favorite work of fiction? Non-fiction? How many books do you own that are still waiting to be read? (Please tell me I'm not alone in this situation!)