My walk

   It doesn't take much to entertain me.  Really, it doesn't.  I know people will think I am kind of weird but I love to take a basket of laundry that looks like this:

    And make it turn into this:

  And then I like to...wait for it..... wait for it.  I like to iron the clothes in the basket.  Woohoo!  Okay, maybe I don't love to fold and iron clothes, but I really don't hate it either as I don't have to think about it while I think about something I would rather be doing.  Did you get that?

   This has nothing whatsoever to do with what I want to blog about today.  Two years ago I began an odyssey that turned me into a much thinner, healthier person with better balance and the ability to wear a pair of jeans.  I read online about the 10,000 steps program.  A doctor discovered that if a person would walk 10,000 steps a day, he/she would be healthy.  I liked to walk, but never paid much attention to how far I went.  10,000 steps is suppose to be about five miles.  I thought, "I can do that."  Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.  I started out walking 3 or 4 thousand steps a day.  I was determined to reach that 10,000 step goal.  I walked in the sun, in the rain, in cold weather and warm.  I roamed all over our neighborhood, met the neighbors and the neighbors' dogs.  People would stop to talk to me and tell me they liked seeing me walk with my dogs.  I celebrated when I finally reached 10,000 steps.   When I start my walk I have three ways I can go.

   I can go this way: 

  Or this way:

   Or this way.  Depending on how I feel I pick my direction and start out.

  I go past this concrete plant or cee-ment plant as I like to call it.  Remember the movie, "Mosquito Coast" starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren where this family moves to central or South American and builds an ice making plant in the middle of the rain forest and eventually end up freeze drying two bad guys that cross them?  You don't?  It was a really good  movie and this plant makes the same kind of sounds theirs did.  It sounds weird when I am back there by myself.  Kind of freaks me out.

  Here are all the cement mixers or as I like to call them cee-ment mixers all in a row.  In busy times they are all lined up to get filled up with concrete and take it to a job site.  Today is their day off.    By the way, I am made fun of by my son-in-law for saying cee-ment.   He is from the Adirondack area and I use to call it Ad-iron-dak until he set me straight.  Really, that is how I said it.  No one ever told me any different and that is how it looked like it sounded to me.  Of course I also read mature as rhyming with nature when I was younger, but I am way off the subject now.  That is how my mind works, sorry.

  Here are the dump trucks or as I like to call them, dumb trucks....okay, I'm just getting silly now.  It's late and this blog is getting much too long and I'm not done yet.  These dump trucks go to the gravel pit that is across the road from us and bring sand to the concrete plant and gravel to other job sites.  This past couple of years they have all worked overtime while our city was putting in a new four lane road through town.  I have to watch out for all these truckers and they watch out for me.   We all wave to each other and they try not to squash me and I try not to get squashed and everything works out okay.

  See this big pile of dirt?  You don't?  Then you may need glasses.  Anyway, behind this pile of dirt is a lake.  We use to walk back here years ago through meadows and by streams, but when the gravel pit went in they all went away.  As the gravel pit grew, so did the lake.  We hope that one day it will become a recreation area with paths and  fishing areas after the gravel pit goes away.  It's only 500 steps from our house.  Wouldn't that be great having a lake so close to our house?  It would be for us.  The gravel pit is building high dirt walls all around the lake.  I'm going to climb one of the hills one day and see what's going on over on the other side. 

  This little tree has survived the dirt hill making so far.  I am rooting for it to make it and not have dirt dumped on it.    Alot of trees have been bulldozed down, but, hey, there's a lake.

   Years ago a family lived in this little house.  It now belongs to the gravel pit and is an office now, I think.  Alot of things disappeared when the gravel pit went in.  This is just a short part of my walk and I will be showing you more later.  It's getting late, the Oscars are almost over and I must go.  Bye.