Natural and Unnatural States

During my walk yesterday, I saw a fox.  At first I thought I was seeing a cat, and I wondered when Lutheridge had a cat of its own.  Then I realized it was bigger than a cat.  I had a moment where I thought it might be a bobcat, but I realized I was back to the basic question:  Coyote or fox?  I quickly decided on a fox because the creature was small and more like a cat than a dog.  I think of coyotes as more dog-like.

You might wonder what the big deal is--after all, our new house is close to 600 acres of undeveloped land.  And I saw foxes on my morning walks in South Florida.  But when I walk at Lutheridge, I'm expecting to see bears or turkeys.  It was cool to see a different animal than the ones that everyone else has been seeing/photographing.

I did spend some time thinking about natural settings and unnatural ones.  In a way, the fox has a great set up, with so much forested land nearby.  But there's also fairly high density development nearby; there's nowhere at camp where I escape the thrum of nearby traffic.  It's a vastly different situation from when I was a child.  In the 70's, if you forgot a rain poncho, you did without for the week of camp.

In some ways, that fox sighting was the highlight of my day.  Later in the morning, we decided to go to get our drivers licenses.  We didn't have an appointment.  I tried to make one online, and the soonest available was November.  To be honest, I thought something was wrong with the website.

We decided to go to Hendersonville instead of Asheville because we thought it would be less crowded.  That might be so, but the line didn't move any faster.  We waited for an hour, and the line didn't really move at all.  There were 8 people ahead of us, and it was already 11 a.m.  We decided to come back much earlier on Tuesday and to clear out the whole day for the task.

I thought about going to Wells Fargo to see if I could make any headway in the fraud issue that my South Florida church is still trying to resolve, but I just couldn't face that task yesterday.  My spouse did get a haircut, and we had a good lunch.  We ordered a screened canopy so that my spouse will have a place to smoke on the deck when it rains.  When we tried to put it up, I was reminded of why I am glad that I will be living at seminary housing when he does home repairs.  In many ways, we have never worked well together on those projects, and I'm tired of trying.

At least now I have a right hand and arm that is not as functional as it once was--we can blame my inability on that.  It makes me feel slightly less incompetent.  

We went to bed extremely early last night--I fully expected to be awake for the day at 1 a.m.  Instead, I slept through the night, through the rainstorm that made me wonder if I should get up to check on things, but instead, I rolled over and kept sleeping.  I slept right through until 4:30, one of my normal wake up times.  

I've decided to forgive myself for all that I did not get done yesterday, and to be happy about getting over 9 hours of sleep, a most unnatural state for me.