Post Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was small and quiet this year around.  

We went walking along the paths east of the Willamette river on Sunday.  Mark wanted to get outside, and it seemed like a good time to take pictures of various aquatic animals.

The first animals we saw were a bunch of turtles on a log.  The log was anchored to the middle of the pond.  The sun was playing hind-and-seek with the clouds, but was out long enough to coax the turtles into basking.  The camera's autofocus focused on the log or something, so most of my turtle shots came out blurry -- the farther away from a subject I zoom in on, the shallower the plane of focus -- and the camera has a penchant for focusing on stray twigs instead of birds or flowers.

Mark hoped that we'd see beavers, but we didn't even see a nutria.  There were lots of ducks and geese.  Then Mark pointed out an egret fishing along the shore.  

I took a few shots, but most of them were also out of focus.  Later, I took some pictures of Mark and The Child from across a body of water; the camera outlined their faces, which supposedly means that's where it was focused, but the very long shots I got were blurry.  It's not entirely the camera's fault:  at that distance having a tripod to shoot with helps to cut down on burrs from a shaky photographer. 

Eventually, we happened along a heron and a bald eagle.   The eagle was backlit by the sun, but you can tell it's a bald eagle in the pictures.  

On the gym front:  I managed to get to the gym both last Friday, this Monday, and Wednesday.  The usually elliptical and free-weight stuff.  

On the cat front:  Cicero got into a scrap with something and has bite marks on his tail.  The puncture marks are doing the usual gross cat inflamed lump thing, and I've been applying a hot compress to it (when he lets me).  He seems to be on the mend.