Date: 09/04/07
My day started out in the way it almost always does -- feed the cats, clean the litter boxes (we'll skip that part) and head to my office and the computer. As a writer, and as someone involved in a number of other writing-related activities -- I spend the majority of my time at this computer... but not today. It's Easter and Russ and I have our own tradition of heading to wildlife areas for the day.
Date: 09/04/07
Our first stop is a small pond about a mile away from the house. It's early in the morning and the water is still frozen. Watching the Canada geese slide across it (and occasionally fall through) turns out to be a lot of fun. It's warming up fast enough that the ice is melting quickly, so they're in no danger.
Date: 09/04/07
The pond isn't completely taken over by the geese, though. There's also at least one lovely mallard and several coots.
Date: 09/04/07
Driving through Sioux City (across the bridge and into another state), we take a detour through downtown and get some shots of a few of the really lovely architectural features that many people don't seem to notice here. This griffin is one of a pair flanking the entry into the City Hall Building.
Date: 09/04/07
This gorgeous façade is part of the Woodbury County Courthouse, which is listed in the National Registry of Historic Buildings. It was constructed between 1916-1918, and was the largest structure ever completed in the architectural style of the Chicago's Prairie School. It's still a functioning courthouse, and there's 1919 WWI-era mural work inside.
Date: 09/04/07
This is the Badgerow Building with more interesting façade, built in the art deco style (1933), this time capped with Native American figures. My husband, Russ, had an office here for a while, and it was like something out of a Raymond Chandler book. Really great! The building is also in the National Register of Historic Places, but it's currently in legal limbo, repossessed for back taxes and red tagged.
Date: 09/04/07
And this is the old Central High School building, now turned into apartments. I went to school here. I even had a typing class in the top room of the far left turret. The building is generally known as The Castle on the Hill. It was an interesting school, with stairways everywhere, and halls that didn't always seem to go where you thought they would!
Date: 09/04/07
Our initial plans for the day were thwarted when both the Nature Center and Stone Park turned out to be closed. So we threw caution to the wind and drove about seventy miles to one of my favorite spots, the De Soto National Wildlife Refuge on the Iowa/Nebraska border. This turns out to be a wonderful choice. There's hardly anyone around, and the birds are wonderfully cooperative, including this gorgeous pheasant. I only recently learned that pheasants aren't native to North America. They were introduced as game birds, first by Benjamin Franklin's son-in-law, and later (and more successfully) in Oregon in 1882. They're now a ubiquitous part of the Midwest where I live.
Date: 09/04/07
The real find of the day, though, was the flock of White Pelicans. These are very large birds and they look totally white when resting in the water with their wings folded. Their huge orange beaks make them easy to identify, though!
Date: 09/04/07
When Lewis and Clark made their historic journey through this part of the land, they reached an area of the Missouri River covered in white feathers. They had no idea what birds could have left them behind. Then they found the pelicans, a type of bird they'd never seen before.
Date: 09/04/07
There used to be huge flocks of them, but -- like many other things -- they are sadly reduced. Pelicans sometimes hunt fish cooperatively -- they form long lines, beating their wings against the water and driving the fish to shallow areas where they can all catch and feed.
Date: 09/04/07
The smaller, black birds are cormorants. They migrate through this area with the pelicans. The pelicans did have a breeding colony about 100 miles from this refuge, but the building of a new bridge across the marshes unsettled them, and last I looked they were still not fully recovered.
Date: 09/04/07
These are teals, which are a pretty common type of waterfowl around here. They're some of the earliest of the birds to show up -- though the Canada geese often winter here, despite the cold and snow.
Date: 09/04/07
This is a cormorant. They migrate through this area on their way to better locations. They're better known in the eastern half of the United States then they are here. I've only seen them during migrations.
Date: 09/04/07
We drove back home and took a quick run over to Sioux City again to take this picture. It's a statue of Lewis and Clark and Seaman, the dog that traveled with them across country and back. It's a great statue, but every time I see it -- I can't help myself -- I think of it as Elvis, Napoleon, and Lewis and Clark's dog.
Date: 09/04/07
And finally it's back over the Missouri River and into Nebraska once again, and heading home. We only live a few more blocks away. We live on the Nebraska side, but both Iowa and South Dakota are just over the river.
Date: 09/04/07
As you can tell, some of the kitty-guys were just overwhelmed with joy that we're home. This is Lady Jane Pudge'ums, the mackerel tabby, who is sixteen years old, and Edmond Black Kitty, who will be a year old in about ten days.
Date: 09/04/07
This is a collage of all the kitty guys, who are really an important part of my life. There's always at least a couple of them in the office when I work, and a couple of them even sleep with us, especially in the cold winter. All of these cats, except the oldest (Lady Jane) were strays -- though Lady Jane was born to a stray we had taken in. The ones in the boxes are Lady Jane and Willow, the two girls. The pretend Siamese is Wind, the black and white in the middle is Pip and then 'the boys' at the bottom -- Edmond Black Kitty on the left and Zaphod's Just a Cat on the right. These two were abandoned kittens, barely a couple days old when we took them in. You can see pictures of them growing up here.
Date: 09/04/07
I headed into my office to get some work done. The picture on my computer is Tea with Mr. Mouse, a piece I did with computer graphic programs. This is more like my regular day, which would have been horribly boring for anyone watching in from the outside. Writing, even in the age of Internet, is a solitary profession, and since most of the exciting stuff goes on inside the writer's head. I write every single day -- mostly because I love it. Tonight I made some progress on my new novel, looked over the writer's site I run (fmwriters.com), checked on my art gallery at ArtZone, read comments on a story I have up just for fun (http://zettestorybook.blogspot.com/) -- and noticed it was already getting dark!
Date: 09/04/07
So we drove off to the western edge of town so I could get some sunset pictures. We do this quite often -- it's one of the great joys of living in a small town. During the summer we sometimes watch thunderstorms moving in from here, and there's almost always a spectacular sunset!
Date: 09/04/07
Finally a quick stop at the pond where we started, where I caught a little more of the sunset. This is one of the best reasons to live in this area. We have beautiful weather, at least for photography. I could have stood it a little warmer today, but it's better than it could have been -- the forecast is for snow on Tuesday!
Date: 09/04/07
I'll close with a final picture of the pond with ducks, geese and coots settling in for the night. It was difficult to pick a mere twenty-four pictures out the several hundred that I took today. I hope you enjoyed them! (By the way, I use a Sony DSC-H1 digital camera. I'm always interested in what others are using, so I thought I would add information about my own!).
