Making a site a home & small victories

Emma and I were up by 6:30 today, and as soon as I hopped out of bed, I revved up the furnace. It was a toasty 68* inside in short order. After breakfast, we went on a half hour walk and explored some of the territory surrounding our site. Peggy and Paul, two of the other volunteers, were picking me up at 9:00 for a driving tour of some of the refuge. Connie and Chris, another new volunteer couple, were with us also. We got the low down on the maintenance area and headed out for Warbler Vista. This refuge is still in the acquisition stage with scattered parcels of land owned by the refuge and plans to acquire surrounding acreage to tie it all together.

Warbler Vista has foot trails that weave through the forest which is prime Golden-cheeked Warbler habitat. The warblers are not here yet, but will begin to arrive early in March. One of the main goals of this refuge is to maintain and acquire suitable nesting habitat for this endangered specie. We gathered our tools from the back of the vehicle, and headed out to do trail maintenance on a couple of the trails. Trail maintenance consists of raking leaves off of the trail, removing tree roots that walkers could catch their feet on, and eliminating any rocks that might cause a person to twist their ankles. We cleaned up about a mile and a half of trail and also worked on stabilizing several benches on the trails that were put there by an Eagle Scout project. That took up the morning.

After lunch, I had to go to town to get some groceries and buy some wine. I ended up going to Cedar Park which is about 15 miles away. In that community, I found a place to order some wine, and was able to get a haircut at Wal-Mart. For a change, I wasn't scalped! ;) I also did my grocery shopping there and headed back to camp.

After unloading the groceries and taking Emma out for a walk, I resumed my work on making this site a home for the next three months. I relocated the DISH and was finally successful in finding the satellites, connected the water hose, and brought out my table so I could set up my gas grill. I also took the tomato plant that has been residing in my shower and put it on the table. Last summer I had a tomato plant and just put it outside the motorhome. The local rabbits had a feast on it the first night and destroyed it, so I'm a little wiser now and put it up above their reach.

I think it was in December that I bought a new lawn chair that is a rocker. Since the sites here are not paved, it's a little difficult to rock on rocks! I found two short sections of 2X4's and put them under the chair. Yahoo! Now I can rock to my heart's content. This is the most comfortable lawn chair that I've ever sat in.

So, my three small victories today were the rocker, the DISH, and getting a decent haircut. What more could a person ask for?

Thanks for stopping by....talk to you later, Judy