A Bird!

Along with a bunch of new  words - bus, mess, snack (ack), bike, yuck, yummy! (ummy!), draw (daw) - Sam's most recent thing is to put "a" in front of everything. A bird. A bus. A baby. A snack. A mess. A mama. A daddo. A bike. Very cute and fun, and certainly better than putting "my" in front of everything :-)

I actually had penciled in some speed work for this morning, you know, something like a pace or "steady state" run, which is yes, actual speed work to me! Hard to believe I used to be a sprinter in college, isn't it? Guess all the repeats I ran back then didn't endear themselves to me :-) Ha. But anyway, Sam is in the midst of some sort of interrupted sleep pattern these days, and so I am not sleeping well at all. This morning I felt tired. Exhausted. Low energy. There was no zip in my legs. I wasn't dumb enough to think I should go ahead and try my planned workout, so I just decided getting out for a 5 mile run would be enough. To keep things interesting, I headed out on the Mt. Ararat trails to Highland Green, ran the Heath loop, down the back dirt road to the powerlines and back home. The Garmin beeped 5.0 miles just as I was turning into our walkway. Perfect.

And while the run wasn't exactly snappy, it did bring with it some neat bird sightings. A brilliant red Cardinal singing in the brush. Chickadees and phoebes calling. A pair of Canada Geese honking in the Heath. A pair of Mallard flying over. A good, long glimpse at what I am pretty sure was a male Common Yellowthroat. I can't think of any other birds with a distinctive black mask like that (and no, it wasn't just a male goldfinch). Neat! A bird, a bird, a new bird for my list :-)