Scattered Thoughts . . .

While I was sitting on the couch this evening, some movement caught my eye out our living room window in the road right outside our house. As I looked more carefully out the window, I could have sworn I saw a good sized Black Bear. I wasn't completely sure it was a bear since I only saw the rear half of the bear before he disappeared in our neighbor's yard.  Since there are quite a few kids who wander around this trailer park throughout the evening and early nightfall, I wanted to make sure I was seeing things clearly so I jumped up and quickly headed outside. Within a few feet of the house, I stopped in my tracks as a rather  big Black Bear was slowly sauntering toward me. He also stopped, looked up at me, and then turned into our neighbor's yard across the street. It was clear he wanted to avoid human contact and that is a good thing but I still had some concerns about a bear wandering through the streets in our little neighborhood. We continued to watch for the bear

I wrote about this briefly a couple of weeks ago and included a couple of photos but I just put together a more cohesive set of photos today so I'll write about it again. On our first morning at the lake house this year, Sheila and I were sitting in the living room. The file info embedded in each photo shows that it was just after 5am (although, I thought it was two hours later but Sheila disagrees) ... it was dreary... rather dark... but the lake was illuminated by reflecting the brighter sky.  We were sitting there having some morning coffee... Sheila comfortable on the couch while I sat at my desk beside the couch. My desk overlooks the lake and I noticed something floating in the water directly out in front of our house but halfway across the lake. This is a good distance and it is very unusual to see debris in the lake so it caught my eye immediately. I pointed and asked Sheila, "what is that in the water?" At first, I thought it was just a big log floating wit