Gratitude Journal

One of the things I’ve learned through meditation is to “set the intention” for my day, first thing in the morning. I find it gives me a better frame of mind throughout the day. Today’s intention is to “be present” and to stay in the moment, so I can fully experience the company of others.

After a frustrating morning, my day is going better after going out to find birds to count for the “Global Big Day” event. I didn’t find too many, but it was nice to sit in the sun for a while.

At dusk, we were in the front yard chatting with Scott, when we heard chittering in the pine trees. When we looked, we saw them running around the tree trunks and sailing from tree to tree.

We spied a Clapper Rail wading along the shoreline, probing for food among the mangroves.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I liked the double-doors. But now I do, because we have it arranged well, and we can see everything in the fridge, which will help us use the things in there instead of having them get pushed to the back and going bad. Woohoo!

After encountering mass with the 25 foot snake and then having the entire house stopped up, we bought a 50 foot snake to try more cleaning. We ran the new snake, then put the hose up the outside access port and turned on the water full blast, and out came all this stuff in a mad rush. All seems to be well again after taking a shower and doing a load of wet towels, which came from the toilet seal getting broken when we tried to plunge the blockage. Whew! What a day.

When we got under the sink to snake the drain, we found standing water, and determined it was coming from the seal around the drain. So we upgraded to nice stainless steel instead of plastic. Yay!! Grateful to Rachel as well, for providing plumber’s putty.

We’re doing a 21 day meditation program for “Miraculous Relationships.”

The weather has been so nice!

It must be strange for people to suddenly have to change all their routines. Luckily, we do not.

They came down from New York with their two teenagers, and we had fun while they were here, even though it was cold.

We found a very large Florida Woods cockroach on our walk, and I picked it up. It was very docile and allowed us to handle it for several minutes, and I think at least several people felt less squeamish about them after the encounter.

We’re always tweaking things. Now we have 16 informational boards for people to look at (made from recycled cardboard boxes), and I made a chalkboard to label and display the fluorescent collection.

Trav got a night vision scope for his birthday, which should be very interesting during the walks. We gave it a little test run last night and it’s really neat. It takes pictures and video. Now to find some critters to observe!

For the past month, I’ve been stumped by a programming issue where I couldn’t get any error message or figure out the trouble. But today I fixed it, and it’s a huge load off my mind.

We saw three dolphins, some manatees, a few turtles, and lots of birds on our four mile, two hour trip.

This morning I had a very vivid dream that I failed my current 30 day sober challenge. Trav was so disappointed and I felt horrible. I was so happy and relieved when I woke up!!