Back from my travels

I have not been on LJ for about a month because I was traveling so much I did not have the time. I went to Tucson, AZ for the Am. Birding Association meeting July 18-25, then came home, did laundry, discovered that I had left a $370 piece of equipment behind, tried to get it back from the hotel with no success (presumably some employee of the Doubletree in Tucson has a nice new toy) repacked, and headed out to Yellowstone National Park. (I know that is a long run-on sentence. It reflects the way I was feeling.) At Yellowstone I was doing a Service Elderhostel program removing invading aliens (of the plant variety) from several areas of the part to give native species a chance to thrive. IN short, we pulled a LOT of weeds. (We claimed that we worked like dogs, ate like hogs, and slept like logs.) The park is incredibly beautiful, I took something like 350 pictures. Those of you who will see me at cons in the next couple of months will get to see some of them but I promise I will NOT make anybody look at all of them! Actually there are 2 or 3 that just might show up in an art show.


Then this past weekend I went to Sugar Hill, which is a contra dance weekend located at a boy scout camp a few miles south of Bloomington, IN (on Lake Monroe, for anyone who is familiar with Indiana geography.) This was fun, but there was so much (good) food that I gained back the weight I had lost on the Yellowstone trip. Saturday night it rained--hard, for a couple of hours. The rain was badly needed and it lowered the temperature to pleasant levels but I also found puddles on the inside of my tent. This is the second time I have camped out this summer and the second time things have gotten wet. Is there a pattern here?

Finally--Linda, the woman who has been living in my spare room for the past 13 months, has moved out. We spent Monday and Tuesday moving her stuff to her new apartment. Lots of work and last night when I went into the room I discovered she'd forgotten about 3 grocery bags full of stuff. I'll get it to her eventually but since she's in a gated complex where you need a pass to enter and she does not yet have a phone she will have to make the first move.
But I guess my life will be returning to "normal"--whatever that is.