Running Log
Running time: 23 minutes. Spent five glorious minutes on the W&OD bike trail.
I stopped at the 12.12 minute mark to watch seven young deer watching me. The bike trail crosses a flood plain close to where I run, and Difficult Run was so high with the melting snow that the deer couldn't jump from one bank to the other.
Deer are creatures of habit. Every day they follow the same trail, doing the same things, grazing the same areas. When their paths are blocked, however, their little rodent brains just don't know what to do. They stare at the water dumbly, then me (because I'm watching them), then the water, then the water some more, then head back to the woods and mope. Their collective intelligence is frighteningly low, this group of young deer.
I watch them for a few minutes. The temperature is in the low 40s and I'm sweating in shorts and a tee shirt, but the wildlife along the trail is celebrating spring. Two woodpeckers with bright red tufts atop their heads are going at it on a felled tree branch, their bills jackhammering into the wood. Woodpeckers are amazingly loud when they're doing this.
Watching them is a squirrel in the tree above the woodpeckers. He's got his little body pointing straight down, his claws grabbing the tree trunk firmly. For some reason this motion captivates him, and he doesn't move. Squirrels are the Brownian motion of nature personified, so this squirrel's stillness is a bit intriguing.
Cardinals are also flitting around, the males with their bright red plumage, and the more discreet females in reddish brown.
The Difficult Run is actually running backwards today. This little stream usually runs into the flood plain area, but for some reason today the flood plain must have so much water that the Run's flowing backwards. I've never seen that happen.
It's a glorious day on the bike path. Another 12 minutes to get home, stretch, come inside, log on, compose these words and then jump into the shower...
The phone rings. It's my neighbor Jim. He tells me DSL's available for this neighborhood. WAHEY! How soon can I get rid of this dialup connection and jump to broadband?
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