A Full-time Life

EGRETS, WE'VE HAD A FEW.... (updated OCTOBER 2011)

FOR WORLD BIRD WEDNESDAY, this repeat post.  A few weeks ago, ourwonderful  host Springman suggested that we consider re-posting bird pictures from before joining WBW.   This post was originally written the summer before we went to Florida for the first time .... and we see lots of egrets there too. 

 

When there's a group of birders, the good spotters give directions by saying things like (for instance) "I have an orchard oriole in the tree at about 3 p.m..."  Or "Do you have the blue heron at the edge of the marsh?"   It really helps beginners like me to know where to focus the binoculars (and to learn what it is that we're seeing).  I  don't know why they always say "I have.." instead of "I see..".  I guess because when you spot the bird, you have added it to your list of birds.

During a winter in Port Aransas Texas, one of the resident experts at Paradise Pond asked me if I had egrets.  I misunderstood her for a minute and ever since then, a certain Frank Sinatra song has run through my head every time I see one of these beautiful birds.  So I thought maybe I'd take the song out of my head and put it in yours.**  (See note below if you need any help.)  

We have actually had quite a few egrets. 

There are cattle egrets in fields along the road in lots of states. (These are the smaller cousins of the family.) When we were in Louisiana, they were in their beautiful breeding plumage.  Louisiana is also where we saw the most Great Egrets that we've ever seen in one place.  This was at Bird Island where the McIlhanely Family pretty much saved the species from extinction. 

   There are even a few of these beautiful birds here on Fern Ridge Lake.  Which is why my head is singing that song again.

   It's harder to get a good picture here, but this is an Oregon egret flying over the marsh at the edge of the Lake.

The ones in Louisiana and Texas posed better for us:

Bird Island

Our RV Park in Fulton TX

 

** "My Way" Lyrics by Paul Anka.

"I've lived a life that's full
I traveled each and every highway
and more much more than this
I did it my way.

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exception
I planned each chartered course
Each careful step along the byway
And more much more than this
I did it my way."

  

 

A CORNBREAD STORY

  Yesterday I baked a perfect pan of cornbread.  Now, normally this would certainly not be blog-worthy news.  But just this one time it really is.  Because earlier in the day, "we" installed our NEW CONVECTION OVEN!  (Click on the posts listed in Food and Drink category on the right to read the whole saga of our microwave troubles.)  This time we have changed brands completely and we have a Sharp.  It fits in the space where the old one was!  It works like it is supposed to!  Life is good!   

We like cornbread and there is a kind of family history to it that we enjoy thinking about while we eat:

Bill's dad was the oldest in a family of nine children, growing up during the Depression.  He told us that cornmeal was a family staple when money was scarce. He remembered that on several birthdays, the cake was a big pan of cornbread with a candle in the middle.  This actually might not be as sad as it sounds, because this grandmother, (who was still alive and healthy well after our children were born) was a wonderful cook -- she worked some in restaurants and scout camps -- probably not too different than cooking for her family had been.  So if anyone could make cornbread into a celebration, she was the one.    My father-in-law still liked to eat it all his life, so I guess it must have been good. 

We like it too -- but not for birthdays!

There's no recipe to accompany this Food post, because I just use the one that's always on the box of cornmeal.  I wish I had Bill's Grandmother's though; I'm sure it was better.

FEATURED WEBLOG

 

Early in July, I had an e-mail message from a very nice guy at TypePad named Jonathon Swain.  He said that our blog had been selected to be featured on TypePad's home page, if we gave permission.  We were tickled to do so.  Today, our blog was listed as a Featured Weblog. 

Thank you TypePad for featuring us.  We plan to keep on traveling and blogging and hope our posts live up to this honor. 

We'd love to have suggestions for places readers think we shouldn't miss in our travels.  Let us know in the comment section or by e-mail (listed at our website:  FullTime-Life.com)

For new readers:  We usually only post once a week.  The rest of the time, we're out doing the things we blog about. 

EATING LOCAL

Blackberries grow wild along every country road (and quite a few city streets) in Lane County.  In August and September, just about everybody picks at least a few handfuls.   These bushes are growing in a sunny spot on the lakeshore just a few yards from our front door.   So for the past couple of weeks we've been eating a bowl of these tasty little anti-oxidants almost every morning. 

One of these days, I'll get serious and pick enough to pop in the freezer for later on when we're somewhere down the road.  The taste always brings back great summer memories!

All kinds of berries do well in this climate.  Those long winter rains we used to get so tired of are good for them.  We've already eaten a few pounds of blueberries (from the "Alvadore gardens").  Strawberries are good here too but we missed their main season, which is in June. 

We've been having a heat-wave -- several days of high 90s weather --very rare for this area.  The heat is making the berries very sweet.  The best berries here were hanging over the water.  It felt good to go wading for them.

GARDENING -- OUR RV WAY

This beautiful garden belongs to our daughter and son-in-law in Alvadore, near Eugene OR.  It's one of our favorite places to hang out. We don't get to see flowers like this too often any more, because usually we're not in the northwest during the Spring.  But in 2007 we were in Oregon in April and the flowers were at their best.  

Some of our family and most of our non-RV friends say that their yard is what they'd miss most if they were houseless like we are.   A few RVers must miss that too because they carry outdoor-friendly houseplants with them.  When they settle in they haul out the plants and then they have their own little garden wherever they are.  We're surprised sometimes at the size and number of plants that appear.  (And it makes me tired just to think about the logistics of packing them all away when it's time to move on down the road.)  

Fern Ridge Shores, where we're staying now, has quite a few semi-permanent residents and many of them have very nice flowers in their yards.  It does add a lot to the park.

But someone has to admire the results of all the hard work.  So we are garden and flower appreciators.  We enjoy the yards that belong to family, old and new friends, and even perfect strangers.  We love to stroll in public parks and gardens.  

We enjoyed all those things when we owned our own house too, but back then every visit to another garden involved, at worst, envy, or at best, trying to learn to emulate the gardener's techniques in order to make our own yard better.  And we always enjoyed the looking and planning a lot more than we did the actual work.

We are retired from all that now and the only thing I still want to learn about flowers is how to take better pictures of them.  I like to practice while I admire other people's yards: 

 

FERN RIDGE LAKE

Our home page (http://www.FullTime-Life.com) says that we became full-time RVers when we began to dread going back to our stick-house.  This is a little bit more of the story of how that transition happened.  We are staying now at Fern Ridge Shores RV Park.  It's the first place we lived as full-timers and it's nice to be back.

By 2002, we'd been traveling quite a lot of the time since we retired but were still maintaining our Springfield house (more-or-less).  We kept kicking around the idea of selling out, but kind of wondering in the back of our minds whether it was the right decision.  Or at least it was in the back of my mind.  I think Bill had his already made up.  For me, when we were on the road I couldn't have been happier, but when we got back home I still enjoyed the house.   Usually when we first got home from a trip, I'd think about selling for a few days and then lose interest and just go back to our normal at-home life.  In a home, by the way, that was much too big for two people and with way too much yard. We still had the same house where we raised four children.  There were rooms we'd hardly even visited for years!

So the story is really about how I made up my mind that selling out was the right thing to do.

One afternoon in 2002 we were heading south on I-5 toward our home in Springfield after having been traveling for several months.  I began to think of the dust and accumulation of papers and so forth that awaited us at the house and literally burst into tears.  Life was so much simpler in the RV and so much more fun.  I did not want to go home!  Or, more accurately, I felt like I was already at home.  So we pulled the trailer off at the next rest-stop, pulled out our RV Bible (the Good Sam Directory of RV Parks) and called the nice people at Fern Ridge Shores, a Park about 20 miles from our house.  We'd looked at the park before because at that time two of our kids and their families lived in western Lane County near here (our daughter andson-in-law still do).  But since it was so close to our house, we never thought we'd stay there.

So we reserved a spot and lived in our RV here at the Lake here for several months while we readied the house for sale.  (The picture is our first RV home when we were here that time.)

Once we weren't living in the house, getting it ready to sell was easy.  We gave a few family heirlooms to the kids, and got the rest of our stuff ready for the obligatory yard sale.  It was easy -- emotionally anyway.  It was a lot of physical work to get rid of most of the accumulation of 40 years.  

We've never missed the house!  It was a good decision for us.  Living out here on this beautiful Lake made it even easier as it reinforced what we already knew from our travels.  At this stage in our life, we don't need so much "stuff" to be happy.  We have everything we need in our traveling home.  In it we can enjoy the beauty of many different areas.  When we are visiting in Lane County,we feel at home  on the Lake.  And we can still enjoy our family and friends just like we did when we lived in Springfield for all those years.   It's nice to be here. 

Here's the website for Fern Ridge Shores:   http://www.fernridgeshores.com.  Danna and Ron, the same couple who managed the park the first time we stayed, are still here and still doing a great job.  They really care about the park and it shows.