A Few Thoughts About the Blog

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CONTINUING THOUGHTS ON RETIREMENT

I think my favorite thing about retirement, so far, is being able to sleep late. I have never been a morning person so when I was getting up at 5:15 to get ready and go to work, it was really hard. But now I am able to sleep as long as I want to, and also stay up later (since I can sleep-in the next morning). I am really enjoying this, more than I thought I would. Of course, sleeping late now amounts to around 6:00 or 7:00, which to some people isn't very late. But it is later than 5:15, so I'll take it!

Another good thing about retirement is that I now have the time to do more baking. I love to cook, but have never been much of a baker because to me baking meant cookies and pies and cakes. Now I have discovered baking bread! As Martha Stewart would say "It's a good thing." I did some baking when I started working part-time, but sometimes doing a bread recipe takes most of the day, what with the rising of the dough and all that. There is something really satisfying about taking a few simple ingredients like flour, yeast, water and salt, and turning it into a wonderful-smelling loaf of bread. And the eating part isn't bad, either. I intent to get into making homemade pasta, too. I have done this before, but I need to do more of it now that I have the time. Maybe even make some homemade pastry, which I hardly ever have because it is so labor intensive (and calorie-laden). But I sure do love it, and my friends back East know why. It is a true Southern delicacy! For those of you who don't know what this dish is, it is what a lot of people call "dumplings". In the Northeast, I think they call it "slicks". So there are many names for it, but where I came from, it was called "pastry".

So far, we haven't been able to do any traveling. The extent of our traveling has been to the grocery store and back. There has been snow on the ground since before Christmas, and the last couple of weeks it seems like it snowed every day. But the temperatures are warming up a bit for the upcoming week, so maybe we can get out and go down to the Greenway and take a walk.

The Greenway is a nature path around Yakima that is fabulous! We walked it on a regular basis when we first moved here (and weren't working yet). The pathway is paved and there are multiple entrances and parking areas, so you can access it from various places around town. This is the best for birding that I have found around Yakima. From walking on the Greenway, we have been able to see many bald eagles. I do believe this is my favorite bird in this area, although we don't see them in the summer because they go over to the Westside of the mountains to vacation. There does not seem to be nearly as many songbirds in our area as we had in Lumberton, probably due to the dry conditions. That's the funny thing, even though it snows a lot here, it is still very, very dry. So, whenever we see a bird that is not a sparrow or house finch, we get excited. I saw a Golden-Crowned Kinglet flitting around in the snow the other day and I just about had a fit! We used to see the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet in Lumberton all the time, but the species here is the Golden-Crowned, and I have rarely seen it since we moved here. But we keep looking for interesting birds anyway.

Here is a picture of our flamingos, named Fanti and Mingo, enjoying the snow in our back yard!

That's it for this week. Check back again next Wednesday for more. Until then, Happy Birding!