A couple days alone

I'm beginning to lose track of time....   Now that I am almost retired, and go long stretches of time without having to go into work, I begin to lose touch with what day of the week it is.  It is a wonderful feeling that I have never experienced before.  My life has been on such a hectic pace for so many years, that this is really refreshing.  I just finished up a stretch of eight days off work.

The weather was really mild for the first couple of days off and that's when I went out on the recent day trips with my camera.  I'm glad I took advantage of that nice weather as it quickly came to an end.  I also spent some time down in my darkroom and processed a bunch of film.  I'm just in the midst of scanning all those negatives and will have a number of new images to share in the coming days.

At the end of my time off I headed out to the cottage in Nordegg for a couple of days.  None of the girls felt like coming along so I went by myself.  When I arrived I pulled my truck into the driveway, shut off the engine, opened the door and stepped outside.  I was stunned by the silence.  There was a couple of inches of fresh snow that acted like a muffler and dampened any sound.  None of the neighbors were out, there was no traffic on the highway, and not even a puff of wind.  The silence was deafening... so much so that you could have heard a mouse fart.

I didn't really do anything for those couple of days.  Just kept the fire going, and got the cottage cozy and warm.  Shortly after arriving a deer walked up to the window and stared at me.  She was a big doe that I recognized and was a regular visitor.  She looked at me knowingly, expecting that I would put out some oats for her.  When I didn't immediately get to it, she just laid down under a big spruce, about 50 feet from my bay window.  After a while I got around to getting outside and dumped half a sack of oats out in the feeder for her.  She scampered away a little when I went outside, but never stayed more than about 50 feet away from me.  Even before I got back into the cottage she was already into that pile of oats.  It wasn't long before a few others joined her.

I hung up some framed portraits of the girls.  I shot these about 3-1/2 years ago with my view camera, and Margarit framed them together into an antique frame.  I found a spot on the landing of our stairway to hang it up.  I also put out a second bird feeder, and filled it with seed.

Other than that I just played guitar, watched some DVD's and enjoyed the solitude.  On Remembrance Day I made my way back to the city as I had to return to the office for a day on November 12th.