FALL!!!

Okay, it isn’t fall like fall at home, but it is finally starting to be fall.  It is Sunday… that means it is time for our walk… home to Walmart (today we bought alcohol and 2 inch gauze pads and a plastic container to house them in… for my up coming weekly MTX injection ritual  and Edge for my guys to shave with.

The walk was great.  It was pretty humid by the time we made it back home, but it was good.

They are paving the road that they are widening… traffic over the next couple days is going to be miserable getting in and out of the housing area.  I’m so looking forward to them getting at least this part of it finished.  It will be great when the whole project is done, but just being able to get out of the side roads at less than a 45 degree angle will be an incredible relief.

When we walked out that way, it was still barely light out and not quite cool, but way cooler than the last few walks have been.  My shoes, I notice, are less tight across my toes.  I keep trying really hard to NOT think that the injections are already making a difference… but yesterday and today both I noticed that my shoes are not as tight… and this morning I braced myself for my feet to hurt and not bend right when I got out of bed… and while they were a little ouchy… it was closer to a 2 than a 6 and it didn’t seem to last very long compared to most days lately.

It was a cloudy walk the whole way.  Great… no glaring sun… no real need for the hat or necessarily the sunglasses… but both stainless steel bottles of water end up being used, which is good.

At the park (roughly 1/3 the way through the walk… where I usually make a pit stop at the port-a-potty) I noticed that there was a wonderful addition to the walk… BIRDS!!! There was a chorus of birdsong and it was wonderful.  I stood in the knee high grass at the edge of the parking lot listening to the birds (NOT grackles… totally just song birds).  It is something that I hate about summer, birds don’t really sing so much.

On the back home swing back through the park, it was obvious that they hadn’t cut the grass in the park for a couple weeks.  The dads and kids (a weird combination but one that was great to see today) playing disk golf had a hard time finding the frisbees and in a few cases the kids, the younger ones were probably… 2 years old… in the high grass.  I was walking through the park trying to figure out what was going on… they never let the grass get this long… then we came on a pile of waterlogged tree branches.

DUH…

They have been cleaning up the park after Hermine came through.  They had started to cut around where the playgrounds are and where the people most often hang out to fish around the lake… they just hadn’t gotten around to cutting all of it yet.

The water is back, everywhere we’ve been walking lately, to normal water levels.  Even the flood prevention ponds that they stick in some places are back to grassy bowls.  The biggest remnants… the obvious ones, anyway, is the washed away dirt in a lot of places… and the grass that has taken off growing since the rain and the warm (not quite so hot) weather has descended.

Donuts on the way home joined the walk the last mile.

Graces 3

1. Birdsong

2. Peanut, our Bichon, laying with her head on my foot

3. Cloudy day cutting down the glare

4. Ice Water

5. A hot bath (thank you Adam, for showering earlier than usual… that meant I had EXTRA hot water to bath in to wash off the sweatiness from the walk).