Encounters with an eagle

Russ and I went to a friend's lake cabin in Wisconsin this weekend. It rained (quite hard at times) on both the drive down and the drive home. But it stopped just after we got there, and didn't start again until we were halfway back. Had a great time, and took lots of pictures. Went out on the lake in a pontoon boat three times, and once in a paddle boat. It's a nice quiet no-wake lake. And the friends actually own 2 cabins side-by-side, so Russ and I slept in the guest cabin all by ourselves.

Every day, we saw a bald eagle. The first couple of times, he was flying by and there was no chance for me to get a picture. I tried on one flyover, and couldn't even find him. Saturday evening we were out on the lake watching the sunset and found him in a tree. But it was too dark to get anything but a very blurry picture, especially as I had to use maximum telephoto length. But finally this morning we were just about to give up when he flew over us once more. He landed in a tree and posed magnificently while I took about 20 pics. Here are the best two. You can click on them to see a larger version.





I'll post more photos from the trip in the coming days. (I'm going to try to post more regularly.) Right now, I should head to bed.

Teeth

A couple of weeks ago, the cap on my front tooth chipped. (Yes, I was using my teeth as a tool. Just to open a sugar packet, but still, bad idea.) Now, the history of that cap was not pleasant. The last time it was replaced, I was 21. The dentist took off the temporary cap to match the color, and the pain was excruciating. That was when I fainted, and woke to find the chair reclined far enough for my head to be lower than the rest of my body.

So today when my dentist told me that replacing the temporary cap with a permanent one was the easy part, no novocain needed, I was a trifle... shall we say, concerned. Much to my surprise, it was pretty easy. It took an hour and a half, but much of that time I was calmly reading while the lab was adjusting the tint on the new cap.

It looks great! Matches nicely, with no more dark line around the top. And I love my dentist!

Pedaling to Hawaii

Of all the trips into the wild that I find hard to imagine, setting out in a pedal-boat to cross an ocean has to be the at the top of the "Are you CRAZY?" list. And yet it's been done. Successfully. Both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The author of this book got the idea back in 1991 to circumnavigate the globe using only human power. He enlisted a friend, they scraped up funds and donations to have pedal boat Moksha custom-built, and left Greenwich in July of 1994. Biked to the coast, took the pedal boat across the channel, biked to Portugal, then headed out across the Atlantic. The Atlantic crossing took something like 110 days, October 1994 to February 1995. They used a hand-operated desalination device to get fresh water, and ate lots of freeze-dried food (but were lucky enough to come across a cable boat on Christmas day and have a turkey dinner).

They crossed the US separately on bikes and roller blades. After a long break for repairs, fund raising, and recovering from an accident with a car, they pedaled Moksha from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii in 54 days in the fall of 1998. After that, the author dropped out and his friend carried on alone from Hawaii to the Kiribati islands, then with other people by bike, kayak and pedal boat. The book was published in 2006, but according to the Expedition 360 website, the circumnavigation was finally completed in October 2007.

I find the whole idea just incredible. I would have said impossible, but obviously it wasn't. I can't begin to imagine what would drive a person to take on this kind of a task. It was quite an interesting read.

May Day 2009

Went to see Jason and Gaea in the May Day parade. It was a beautiful day, and I rode up on the light rail, then walked over to the parade route. As Jason told me, it wasn't hard to find them. It's easy to spot 15-foot long stilting pigs.

Gaea and her mom are in the pig in front, and Jason's job is to make sure they have space, since they can't see very well. Gaea controls the pig's tongue, too.


Here are the stilters at the end of the parade.

More photos here.

Afterwards, I walked all around Powderhorn Lake, and finally back to the light rail. So I got a bit of exercise...

More photos

Today Bravo and I took a walk around Lake of the Isles. It's been a while since I walked there. Here's downtown from the south side of the lake:

Here's a guy who has the above as a permanent view, and the wood ducks who were ignoring it.















And finally, when we got home, Bravo played with his own duck for a while, but then decided on a nap.

This is currently his favorite toy. He knows it's called "Duck". He likes me to throw it, and then he pounces on it and makes it quack.

Out of the freezer, into the frying pan

It was very hot when I got home today. Depending on where you looked, it was 86, 89 or even 92. I took Bravo to the dog park, but he wasn't too excited about it. He did not understand why I wanted to walk out in the sun when there was a lot of nice new grass to eat in the shade under the trees. And chasing the ball was kind of fun, but he refused to bring it back to me. If I wanted to go to him (where he was lying down, usually in the shade of a tree) he would happily chase it again. But he preferred that I didn't throw it too far.

Most of all, though, he did not understand why we had gone out to the dog park before he was fed.

Thought I would include a photo of the new 35W bridge. I went down to Nicollet Island and the Stone Arch Bridge on Saturday and took quite a few pics. Maybe I'll post more in the next few days....Behind the bridge, you can see some of the University of Minnesota buildings. Just around the corner from the red brick building on the left was the lab run by one of Russ' colleagues. It got shut down after the bridge collapse, and during the construction. For a while, there was a chance the University could lose a profitable research facility. Fortunately, though, the lab found a new home on the west side of the city.

Headed home

It was almost too dark to get a decent picture, but I like the way it turned out.