Today I am thankful for...
the luxury to play. So many people in this world do not have the ability/resources/time/money/access to disappear into a Winter wonderland. We had two really great ski adventures this weekend. On Friday evening we took two fellow students from my husband's MBA program into the local gamelands. Neither of them had cross country skied before and they were really excited to try it. The one student had actually bid on this outing as a "date" with my husband for a Valentine's Day fundraiser and my husband had promised him a great sunset and "stars shining in inky blackness". Luckily Mother Nature helped him make good on that promise! The sun was just starting to go down over the horizon when we started, turning the sky a palette of red, orange, and pink as we watched it lower and disappear in front of us through the trees. The little babe then made the first spotting of the moon, which was just the sliver of a crescent in the sky, with a planet shining beside it to the left. (I'm pretty sure it was Venus.) A little bit later we saw Jupiter shining all alone in the Eastern sky. By the time we were skiing with our headlights on across a wide open field, the sky was dark blue and full of stars.
Both of the students admitted that they were a bit nervous about being in the woods after dark and the one asked my husband if he was navigating by the stars. Flattering, but no. He told her that he was actually using trees as markers and that impressed her just as much! Because we're in the woods so often, we just know where to go. It was interesting to think about it from their eyes - to them it looked like we were randomly skiing through the big dark woods, without a house or road in sight.
On Saturday we got another 3 inches of fresh snow, so we headed out early on Sunday morning. The temp was actually "warm" in the low twenties and it was perfect. Since that might have been our last long ski of the season, we decided to be adventurous and take some new trails. We saw a ton of deer tracks, fox or coyote, and another track that we hadn't seen before. We even saw the wing prints of either an owl or hawk, similar to this. It was right at the end of a set of small mammal tracks, probably an unlucky mouse. I had decided that I wasn't going to get my camera out again, so I didn't photograph it, so you'll just have to settle for my husband's fancy ski moves and a cute Corgi. Birkie loves racing down the hill in front of him and then falls in line behind him at the bottom.
What are you thankful for today?
I encourage everyone to share what they are thankful for.