When I returned home, Janet and I took Dawn on another walk and then I continued walking. The temperature was in the mid seventies, so I just wore a t-shirt and shorts. This was a huge mistake. About halfway through my walk, the cold front everyone has been talking about finally blew through town and the temperature almost instantly dropped twenty degrees. I've never experienced such a sudden temperature change. The wind picked up as well. I was freezing for the remainder of my walk. It felt like a long three miles.
Luckily the most interesting part of the walk occurred before the cold front arrived. I saw the Bald Eagle again. I'm pretty sure you only see the male eagle during these rare sightings. The female eagle is still sitting on her nest, hidden away in the forest somewhere. I don't know if the eggs have hatched yet. I think this makes five times I've seen the eagle since the pair arrived in Dallas. I also saw both Muscovy Ducks. Today there were about a mile apart. I always thought this pair was inseparable, but they haven't been getting along lately.
I usually have a cold drink when I return from my long walk. Not today. I was freezing. I asked Janet if we had any hot chocolate and it turns out we do. I fixed a big mug of hot chocolate and gradually warmed up. When I saw how cold it is going to get tonight I went outside and set all the faucets on drip. The greenhouse is in such dilapidated shape that when I went inside to adjust the greenhouse faucet, the door fell apart. I had to hammer the thing back together so I could close it again. Janet and I would both like to just tear the greenhouse down and put up a carport there. Our street has gotten so busy in recent years that it's almost impossible to get out of the driveway on a busy day. Moving the cars to the back would be a good idea.
I finally worked up my nerve to begin experimenting with the new star tracker. I read the instructions several times, inserted the Micro SD card in the proper slot, and charged the battery with my new USB-C charger. That's as far as I got. The next step would be to format the SD card and update the firmware. Since it was almost time for dinner at this point, I decided to wait until tomorrow to do anything further. A lot can go wrong when you try to update the firmware on a new device.
I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. It's supposed to be 22 degrees at sunrise. We've got plenty of warm coats, but I'm not sure Dawn will want to walk with these type of temperatures. Every winter I cross my fingers and hope that the furnace doesn't go out. It's happened before and it can be pretty miserable. A power outage during freezing weather isn't fun either. One Winter we had a four day power outage after an ice storm and it got so cold in the house that we had to go stay in a hotel. Sure hope that never happens again.
Anything could happen in 2022, but I'm going to try and remain optimistic. Everyone seems to be in a panic about the Omicron variant, but few people seem to be getting very sick. A lot of people didn't even know they were infected until they had to take a mandatory Covid test to travel. Maybe if everyone catches Omicron, we will finally reach the herd immunity everyone's been waiting for. I hope so. I'm not sure if we'll be taking Dawn on her Sunday outing tomorrow. It all depends on the weather.
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