thisendoftheswamp

My weight had always been pretty steady – I weight 132 when we got married, and 140 when we celebrated our 25th anniversary – but several years ago, I suddenly started gaining. Ten, twenty, thirty pounds, and then forty! And we had not changed our eating habits at all. Gack! In fact, I was very, very careful stay below 1,200 calories a day, but the scale just didn’t budge.

To top it off, my blood pressure also climbed, but I simply put that down to my excess avoir du pois. My dad’s death was attributable to to hypertension, so this really, really concerned me. My GP put me on medication, but again it didn’t seem to make much difference.

A week ago, I had to look up the one medication both The Squire and I take, and discovered the side effects can include both weigh gain and high blood pressure. All those papers I had gotten from the druggist had simply been tossed into the recycling bin with my ever even glancing at them. As a shirttail member of the medical profession, I, of all people should have know better!

I betook myself to the store and asked the pharmacist if he had a spare copy of the handout for this med, and by the way, how long have I been taking it?

So now I am on a different pill, and hoping that I can drop a few pounds, now that my body is not fighting back. The Squire? He hasn’t had a bit of trouble. No particular weight gain and his B/P is still 171/20.

The fink.

This morning I heard a strange whirring/clicking sound when I went out to fill the birdfeeders. I figured is was some sort of “critter” so I walked very slowly around the corner of the house to investigate.

The heron was crouching by the side of the pond, either talking to himself, or channeling his inner “fish whisperer”.

When he saw me, he rose to his full height and stalked off across the yard to flap down into the stream. He continued to stare at me over the edge of the bank, so I finished my chores and went back inside. I watched from the bedroom window as he came back up and returned to his place at the water’s edge.

Mind you, it’s pretty near impossible to tell one Great Blue Heron from another, but for the last week we have a what seems to be a youngish bird hanging around the yard.

I’ve startled the poor creature several times – and been startled in return – but the last few days I’ve tried to remember to walk slowly when I go out to feed the fish in the evening, and he (?) will flap away a few feet and stay a while. I try to position myself so the line of sight is blocked by a bush, and last night he hung around until I moved again, but even then he only flew down into the stream and “crouched”. He’ll never be anything close to “tame” but somehow he senses that we mean him no harm.

This morning, he was in the driveway and Eddie decided to stalk him. The idiot cat will not bother squirrels or birds, but he’ll practice his skills on a five-foot heron! I took this photo through the living room window, after New Blue decamped to the pond.