Coots and Spies

 

This morning after a very long Palm Sunday Mass and a normal length brunch, Travalon and I went to the Square so I could take a picture for the secret club I'm in. Our homework this month was to take a selfie with our penguin in front of the most whimsical place in our own town, so I naturally thought of the statue of the stick figure sitting on the wall. It actually worked on the first take:

Then Travalon and I went for a walk along the Lakeshore Path. We saw so many coots!

They look like little ducks (or bathtub toys), but they are actually more closely related to chickens. They have feet like chickens when they get out of the water and run around, but unfortunately we didn't see any do that today. We also saw a ton of gulls.

We saw a bufflehead and some other types of ducks swimming with the coots, but those photos didn't turn out as well. Here is an example - I believe it's an American wigeon.

And guess what else we saw? Remember when we saw the mysterious boardwalk with the wall and towers over in the marsh? And then it turned out to be the Hoofers pier? Now it's over by Picnic Point.

And we saw a bunch of the food delivery robots awaiting orders. I'm not sure why something that is basically a cooler on wheels is TOTES ADORBS, but they really are.

Here is a view of the water tower not far from our house as viewed from across the lake.

And here is a view of Maple Bluff, where the rich people live, from across the lake.

On our way back, we saw some of the food delivery robots set off on their missions. SQUEE!

This is a view of the downtown skyline from near Picnic Point.

Here is a video that Travalon made of the little food delivery robots setting off.

As you can see, it was a beautiful, sunny day, but it was also extremely windy. We saw the MedFlight helicopter take off, and I really feared for them, flying in this wind. Then we went home, and I joined my family Zoom meeting and then my Irish class, also over Zoom. We had to try to describe what we had done this weekend in Irish, and I mentioned that I got an appointment for the vaccine because I had a secret phone number, and Travalon got the vaccine at Walgreen's because he had a secret code number from his job, and also that he had been taking pictures of birds and that I had taken the selfie with the stick figure on the wall for my secret club. One of the other women in the class said, "I don't know, everything Famous does is secret, and she takes a lot of photos. I think she's a spy!" That sounds far more exciting than my real job of being a low-level civil servant, so I'll let them keep thinking it...

Famous Hat