Tuesday

My last 2 posts have been written on Tuesdays, (quite unintentionally) so I figured I should write one today to keep up the trend, even though I missed last Tuesday.

I was here...

....doing this...

I also did lots of other things like ride a tandem bike around Mackinac Island, look for petoskey stones in Petoskey, MI, and hike a million miles up and down zillion foot tall dunes to Lake Michigan, which was a billion degrees below zero when I stuck my foot in. It was a lot of fun, but I was happy to get back home to the land where it's 90+ with a relative humidity of 3000% in June (not the lucky-to-get-up-to-75 weather I experienced for a week), where people say y'all instead of yous guys, and where sweet tea is a staple. Honestly, other than the accent and the weather (and of course the lack of good drinks) Michigan is a lot like Mississippi. Lots of farms, lots of cows, lots of country stations on the radio.

Making the transition back to work from being on vacation wasn't so bad either. I went into work yesterday, was asked to work the weekend shift at the Walmart branch of the bank, and told I could take Tuesday and Wednesday off. Off for a week, work a day, off for 2 more days. I can dig it.

I had all kinds of plans for today. I was going to get up and walk with my dad as usual, do some cleaning, go to Hobby Lobby because I have a crafty thing in mind and need supplies, and spend the rest of the day working on my still splotchy leg tan from the beach. However, my alarm didn't go off (or perhaps I turned it off without realizing it) so I wasn't up at 5 to go walking, and as a result, I am still in my p.j.s at 10:00. Oh well, there's always tomorrow, which I probably won't blog about because it's not Tuesday.

Noise

As my dad and I were out walking yesterday morning, he said something about how wrong people are to assume that living out in the country would be quiet. I hadn't really been paying attention to the noise around me before that, but I perked up and started listening. It is loud! There might not be the sounds of steady streams of cars rushing past, horns blowing, and people yelling, but there are roosters crowing, dogs barking at the crowing roosters, birds chirping, frogs croaking, crickets...cricketing.

This morning as we set out, I started listening again. You can hear roosters coming from every direction. I would like to see a map pointing out every house with chickens within a 5 mile radius. I bet there would be a big circle right around our house. Imagine the Ring of Fire, only the Pacific plate is my yard, and the volcanoes are chickens. (Now there's an interesting mental image...)

In addition to the usual critters this morning, we also heard our friendly, neighborhood lion. The Mobile Zoo is right down the road, and every so often, I suppose when it's feeding time, you can hear, or rather feel, the lion roar. It's kind of like the bass at a concert, only in my front yard at 5 am.

Anyway, I suppose if you truly want quiet, even living in the middle of nowhere won't always do the trick. Life just has a way of being noisy. My advice to those in pursuit of silence: find a library.