Nordic Walking, Wind, and Birds

A few days ago I mentioned that we'd ordered walking poles so that we could begin Nordic Walking. Our poles can be seen at Leki.com. They are the ones pictured on the Nordic Walking page. The poles were delivered yesterday afternoon, and we tried them out right away. This style of walking calls for the poles to be held slightly behind your body while swinging your arms; not out in front. It's not hard to do, and it provides a good overall workout.

This morning, I got up and walked the dogs as usual. Then, when Jim got his eyes open, we went out on our Nordic walk. I can definitely feel my arm muscles working, which is a good thing.

After our walk, Jim loaded up the laundry while I cleaned up the place a bit. He took the laundry to a local laundromat and did 6 loads. He said he doesn't mind doing it since I do most of the cleaning and cooking. What a guy!

The weather was a little better today, but this wind can die down just anytime now. I really don't remember it being this windy here, it seems like this is pretty unusual. We don't like snow, but we also can do without this relentless wind. We've spent the afternoon rockin and rollin with the wind gusts.


This afternoon we drove down I-25 to a truck stop that has a pretty good restaurant. We each ordered Mexican dishes, and neither one of us ate all of our meals. It was good, but we're trying to cut back on our portions.

Back home, we relaxed and watched the bird show at the feeder. The last couple of days we've had a big grackle visiting and I wanted to try to get a picture. They're very skittish, so it was hard to catch it with the camera. At one point, it was busy grabbing seed and Mr. BJ was standing on the couch watching it. He jumped at it when it flew off, as if he could catch it.

We're also seeing some territorial manuevering for feeder rights. We have finches, sparrows and grackles visiting now, and they don't play well together.

This is the grackle scrunching up to get into the feeder.

And the sparrows:

We're hoping for a little better weather coming up, but it's still a great life!