I got up early Saturday morning.I first fired up my computer, and composed a song on the Sawcutter 2.0 synthesizer. The song is called "Quietly". My music now tends to be quiet, melodic and simple.
At 7 a.m., I set up a google+ video hangout with my sister, who lives in Alabama. We had a very nice visit. I hope that my wife and I can host her children this Summer.
After a restorative bowl of raisin bran, I went to Trinity Trail to do some walking. I entered just below Highland Park. The trail was passable but a little muddy. I cut my hike fairly short, and returned to my car by walking on the road. I did see some purple thistles in bloom, which are among my favorite flowers.
Then I went to Oak Point Park in Plano, where the parking lot abuts fields of flowers. I took pictures of a house finch, a northern cardinal and of western kingbirds there, as well as a butterfly on a wildflower.I liked the numerous eastern primrose and firewheel flowers in bloom.
Then I headed to Bethany Lakes Park in Allen. I came upon a green heron staring at a tree.
Green herons do not usually stand on the lawn and stare at trees. They are usually shy
predators of the wetland areas Here's what this heron looked like:
I watched him for a moment and took his picture, until he flew off. Then I saw a huge Texas rat snake climbing the tree, and understood what had caught the heron's attention. It was a huge Texas rat snake nimbly scaling the tree.
I wondered if the heron's nest was in the tree, but decided it was probably not. The heron could easily have attacked the snake, and I imagine would have done so had a nest needed protecting. I think instead this smallish heron was wondering if this biggish snake could be
a late breakfast morsel. The snake, meanwhile, headed on up the tree. Here it is in the top:
In the afternoon, I went to Great Clips in Plano to get a haircut. They could not find my information by name, though I had been there before, so I filled out my name and address on a card. I am still not sure why I need to be google-able for a haircut.
The man who did my haircut did an exquisite job. The haircut was only 14 dollars, though I did give a 5 dollar tip. Now I have really short hair, which I prefer. I remember when haircuts were 2 dollars and 50 cents,a home-made drug-store milkshake was 25 cents, coca-cola in glass bottles was 10 cents and a milky way candy bar was 5 cents.
In the late afternoon we went to Mimi's for an early supper. My wife proved to be friends with our waitress, who told us about her imminent move to Las Vegas. For those entering retirement, it is probably a good time to move there, since real estate is so inexpensive, particularly compared to California (the waitress' home state). I had roast chicken,but I wish I had had the grilled sole.
We then went to Men's Warehouse to pick up the three suits I bought Two of them required a minor further alteration on where the pants "break" on the dress shoes. We waited and the store tailor did the job in 20 minutes.
We saw the movie "Mud" last night. This Arkansas movie is set in southeastern Arkansas, in the Mississippi River delta country a good bit different than the pine forests I grew up in some sixty miles away. The movie was good overall, 9/10ths "Stand by Me" and 1/10th a Tarantino film. Indeed, I could imagine the pitch session for the film using just those words. I like it when the actors and actresses approach regionally appropriate accents. I also liked that one of the kids' characters was named Neckbone. I grew up with kids with names like Tiger, Stony and Cloud, and kids aren't often named colorful things these days. When I was a kid, some grown men were called Dub, but this nickname is almost extinct now. Reese Witherspoon can play poor southerners like nobody's business. The movie is set (and filmed) in DeWitt,but had almost no African-American actors or extras. This is odd, since 20 percent of that town is African-American.Still, I recommend the film.
This morning I tried to figure out how to create a .rar with my Linux tools. I finally succeeded in using the command line version of 7-zip to create a 7s file and then used an on-line tool to convert to .rar. I made a submission of my song in the resulting zip file to as compilation album being assembled.
Today I plan to go to church, and then get a nice walk or bicycle ride in.