Planning and playing

We had an appointment this morning with a retirement/financial planner. Thinking about retirement and worrying about having enough money to make ends meet causes me lots of stress but then again meeting with somebody about it causes me lots of stress too. I didn’t get much sleep last night fretting over the meeting. This was just the initial meeting with the follow-up scheduled for next week on the 7th after he has “crunched numbers.”  After the stress of the meeting it was time to play!

I haven’t had work for over two weeks (another stress related to money) and so we decided to get away for a few hours and decompress. We headed to Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area to do some bird watching. I had read in the paper that there was several bald eagles there and wanted to see them if we could. We stopped at the education center and the ranger there told us that the eagles were “way out” and we’d need to go to a different area to view them. We didn’t realize that the different area existed since we’d just walked around the ponds and paths by the center last time we were there. She said that the official count of eagles for this season is at 88.  Before driving out there we watched the herons in the rookery. It was fascinating to watch them. There were about 15 and it was obvious that they were building nests. We hadn’t seen anything on or around the rookery last time we went out there and the ranger said that they had just arrived back about a week ago. Good timing on our part! We hope to go back again when the babies start to hatch.

We saw lots of different birds on the way out to where the eagles were supposed to be. I enjoyed watching the ibis and the  egrets. I took lots of pictures but they didn’t turn out too well since I don’t have a strong enough lens on my camera. Some day I will!  We got to the end of the dirt road and found that there was a walking path. We started walking and walked and walked almost a mile and a half before turning around. I have no idea how long the path is and how far out the eagles were or if they were even there that day. We did see one in a tree while driving to the path, another one flying, and a third one on the ice on the way back out of the area. There was also a large group of pelicans on the water on our way out that weren’t there when we drove in. Overall I think we counted 13 different species of birds spotted so it was a great adventure day.  It was a fairly nice day for January but still cold on our ears and faces or perhaps we would’ve walked further out on the path.  We were getting hungry though and hadn’t thought to bring any food along so decided we’d better head back to civilization.

We stopped at Parkstone in Farmington and had a late lunch and then headed home. I’ve been working on several sewing projects while I haven’t had work so spent the rest of the afternoon/evening in my sewing room.