Enjoying our time at home

We're enjoying the brief respite from our travels. One of the pictures is of the Anniversary Pond we built in August of 1999 as a mutual gift. The other is of some "treasures" from our recent trip to AZ. The pond is the most enjoyable home project we're ever done. As we dug the hole, we piled the dirt so it would become the base for the waterfall. Over the years we've brought odds & ends home from our travels to decorate the pond area. There are pieces of driftwood, assorted sticks & stones,floats from fishing nets we collected in our kayaking days, a conch shell from the Keys, a lobster buoy from Maine, statues, on & on. We enjoy trying to recall just where this & that came from. Mostly we can't but we enjoy the memories just the same.

After the hurricanes of 2004 & 2005, the lake across the street overflowed into the street. Catfish from the lake made their way into the pond. At other times we've found a Carolina Water Snake and the odd turtle. We used to keep tropical fish in the pond but the herons kept eating them. At $5/fish, that became a very expensive lunch for the birds so we gave up on the fish except for minnows from the lake.
The Anniversary Pond serves as the neighborhood watering hole & bathing place for the birds. Just today, we saw hummingbirds at the feeder, Blue Jays, Painted Buntings, Ring Neck and Rock Doves, Woodpeckers, Cardinals and were serenaded by a Mockingbird. Between the water supply & the bird seed we put out, our yard is very popular with the neighborhood critters.

Next Sunday we are going to the Southeast Lazy Daze GTG. Looking forward to catching up with our friends. The attendance is smaller this year then in the past. The people coordinating the GTG chose a date in April well after all the Lazy Daze snowbirds from the Northeast Group had headed home. A date in mid-March is much better from an attendance perspective.

A Lazy Daze friend, Ted Houghton, has, over the years, amassed a huge database of POI's covering public campgrounds. The list can be downloaded into GPS systems. I have free time, so I'm helping Ted ferret through the different states looking for public campgrounds to add. It's tedious, but fun, work. I've probably provided Ted with 50 or so, additions to his list so far. I can only imagine how many thousands of hours Ted has invested in this project. I'm concentrating on the states where we'll be traveling this summer.


My mother has a doctors appointment on May 15. We'll likely take off after that. Not sure exactly where to, but somewhere we've never been.