happy Earth Day!

Despite gloom and doom in the weather forecast, we actually enjoyed a delightfully sunny day until the very end. Which gave us plenty of opportunity to spend the majority of the day outdoors. The kids really wanted to "do" something to celebrate Earth Day, so we grabbed some bags and headed up the state forest road to pick up whatever trash we could find.


J checks out a plastic piece of something. Kiri stands by, in case it's something he'll let her carry around, or better yet, something edible. It was at times challenging to grab the trash before she did!





Zoo Boy adds a strip of plastic flagging to his bag. We grabbed quite a haul, mostly bottles, cans and cigarette butts, but amongst the more unusual items were a winter glove, a hand towel, a metal grate, and a burner plate from a stove. Zoo Boy thought this was a pretty cool thing to do, and treated it like a scavenger hunt, complaining when I had more junk than he did in his bag. I told him that he was more than welcome to all of my garbage!






Our mission didn't stop us from observing a bit of wildlife, including this slug (what he was doing in the middle of the dry road, I have no idea), a dead garter snake (I guess it was run over), a variety of chipmunks and song birds, and our friend the otter, whom we've been seeing daily at the frog pond ever since he first appeared. He's gotten a lot more used to us and doesn't swim in for a closer look anymore, which is a bit of a bummer, but he's still fun to watch at a distance. Oh, and someone apparently has dumped a cat out there, we see her occasionally as well. She won't approach us, and I'm not sure if would if we didn't have a dog with us (because we always do), but I'll probably go out there this weekend in the early morning and see if I can catch her before a coyote or fisher does. She'd fair much better in our barnyard than in those woods.

We also kept an eye out for wildflowers, and were delighted to find this adorable little Violet growing right in the road! Bluets abounded as well on the roadside.

Of course, there was also still plenty of time for playing!

The kids asked if we could plant a tree. I considered it, I'd really like to put in a couple of apple trees, but I haven't quite decided where they should go. So we went to the local nursery and checked out all the trees and shrubs and flowers, and came home with this cute little plant with blue flowers instead of a tree. We planted it (and another plant we bought) this afternoon before it started raining.

Then we hung out around the yard until the rain started. (Well, J and I did, anyway. Zoo Boy stayed out for almost another hour after the rain began, silly kid.) Here J rides his bike in the driveway while dark clouds fill in behind him.

Zoo Boy takes a break from practicing on his new bike to pet Cosmo, one of our ancient barn cats, while the first drops begin to fall.

I hope everyone was able to get out and appreciate the world they live in today!