Feeding the Monster

     As Bud Wilkinson, the legendary football coach at Oklahoma, once said, "When you have created a monster, you have to feed it."  Feeding a "travel blog" when you're not traveling sometimes feels like that.  Most, if not all, good blog posts start with a few good pictures.  I made a couple of false starts in the past week; now I'll attempt to turn them into an enjoyable post.  One morning I was up early enough to see the sunrise quickly evolving in the east, so I snapped a couple of pleasant shots before firing up the coffee maker.

     To me there are a couple of notable aspects to that sequence: first, only a few seconds separate the three pictures, and second, the roofline forming the horizon is Cindy's.  Nice, but not enough to make a blog.
     A few days later, well after sunrise, I spotted what I thought was the head of a"our" bald eagle in one of his favorite roosting spots.  I grabbed the camera and headed out only to see one of the immature eagles swooping over the water.  I went to maximum zoom and actually succeeded in keeping him in the viewfinder for several random shots as I hoped for the best.  That done, I looked up at the bald eagle.  The telephoto lens revealed that the flash of white that was still there was the fractured end of a freshly broken branch.  Oh, well.  At least there was the big ole 'gator across the pond and an egret practically at my feet.  Before I discovered that my eagle was only a branch, I thought that the fact that I could have all four of those different wildlife shots taken in our back yard within a span of two minutes might be the basis for a blog.  Alas, the first shots of the real eagle were unusable.  He was moving.  I was moving, and the camera was on telephoto.  That's a recipe for blurry, useless pictures.  So all I had left were the two below.

     Finally, along came some wildlife pictures to save the day.