living life locally

✅It's back to reality after enjoying an amazing escape to Lake Louise!  Reality means getting out the door early the next morning to capture photos of the Full Wolf Moon.  This is the year where I want to make every effort possible to witness the full moon each month.  I shared my mooning plans in this blog post.  Technically, it was full Thursday night. I took these two photos Friday morning roughly around 4:30am.  It was overcast when I first looked out from my deck, but a few minutes later the clouds were gone.  

✅Reality also meant getting back to Bowness to skate!  The Full Wolf Moon was still up when I arrived but I had to be quick on my blades to find the right spot to take a photo before it dropped lower behind the trees.  When I got home and downloaded my photos, was when I saw a fraction of the moon was reflecting in the freshly flooded ice surface. 

the moon meeting the trees

Do you see what I etched?  The ice in this location had been swept but not flooded.  It took a few laps to get it defined enough to show up in a photo.  It measures about ten feet by ten feet.  About thirty minutes later, the groomer drove over it washing it away! I will make more another day. 

I enjoy skating so much and I like the health benefits (mentally & physically) that come with this activity.  I also enjoy adding other fun ideas to make it even more enjoyable.  The above design is one of those ideas, yet it's this shadow that catches my eye and leaves me laughing.

My hope is to skate again in the coming days.  The forecast for each day is sunshine with close to double digits celsius above freezing and not going very low over night.  Those are not good temperatures for ideal ice surfaces. I will be monitoring the reports.   

✅Getting back to reality also means paying a visit to the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary.  I half expected to see more birds than I did figuring they may be confused with the warm weather and come back sooner rather than later.  That could still play out over the next few days.  

The Full Wolf Moon was no longer full by now but it still was worthy of capturing a photo this morning.  The pinkish hues surrounding it seemed to make it glow brighter.  While you would never see a wolf at the Sanctuary, you very likely would see coyotes but that was not the case today.  I have seen and heard coyotes howling but not when there was a full moon. 

There is not much snow locally, the ground is brown and what snow there is, is dull looking also.  It was a nice treat to find this area looking like this, clean white snow.  Most of the paths and trails here are ice or slush.  

Black-Capped Chickadee

White-Breasted Nuthatch

Male House Finch

I will keep trying to make weekly visits to The Sanctuary always with hopes of seeing something out of the ordinary but if all I hear are the Chickadees dee-dee-deeing then my heart will still sing too!