Tag: birds

On the road to recovery

The surgery went well, and I now have 3 fused vertebrae in my lower back.  I had actually broken 2 of the 4 screws and bent one of the two plates that were in there, so no wonder things weren’t right.

My old hardware.
My old hardware.

There were a few cardiac complications that resulted in me a) passing out a lot, and b) being moved to a general hospital from the orthopedic one so that a variety of specialists could figure it out–final guess, side effects of anesthesia & painkillers.  It stopped & I got released before Christmas, which we spent in the Residence Inn.  One of the housekeepers at the hospital had brought me a tiny tree with lights, and told me to take it home, so we had that.

They wanted me to walk as much as possible.  My leg pain vanished right away, but my back hurt from the surgery, so it was a challenge at first.  I was using a walker, so it pretty much meant flat and paved.  I walked up and down the hall in the hotel for a few days, but that was boring, so we ventured to something called the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch, which is a municipal park/nature preserve with a bunch of ponds, some paved trails around one of them, and many birds.  I never got past the pond closest to the parking lot (taking the walker onto unpaved trails was not  really working and they could use a few more benches ) but I worked up to being able to circle the entire pond before we left.

Paved trail at the Water Ranch.
Paved trail at the Water Ranch.
Evening visit to the Water Ranch.
Evening visit to the Water Ranch.
Turtle on a log at the Water Ranch.
Turtle on a log at the Water Ranch.
Ducks at the Water Ranch
Ducks at the Water Ranch
Cactus
Cactus

We returned to Alaska at the beginning of the year, after the doctor gave me the OK to travel.  I spent a couple of weeks just recuperating, and then began doing a bit of work from home.  I’ve been going in to the office (thanks to Sean Gunnells & the others from UMIAQ Science Logistics for shoveling the handicap ramp so I could get into the building) and am pretty well back to full-time.

In the meantime, I’ve submitted two major proposals (one archaeology and one not), several smaller ones for non-archaeology science support work, reviewed a chapter, gotten the AJA Recent Research Notes column out, checked the galleys of an article Glenn & I wrote, got grabbed by UMIAQ’s marketing person to do an interview with a TV crew who were up here trying to see the first sunrise of the year (of course it was cloudy), and even managed to get some lab work done.

Tuesday I am off to Fairbanks for the Alaska Anthropological Association meetings, where I am doing a 2-minute talk and a paper.  It’ll be the first time I’ve driven much more than the 5 minutes back and forth to the office since surgery, and the first time I’ve traveled by myself.  Hopefully all goes well.  Looks like there are some interesting papers and I should see some old friends.

Finally, some snow! And birds at the feeder…

The Town of Ballston, where my mother lives, has been fairly lucky as far as snow this winter.  They’ve gotten some, but haven’t really been hammered.  As a result, it was a white Christmas, but only just, and the snow was getting a bit worn-looking.  The storm that has been creating havoc in the eastern US for several days was expected to miss entirely, but by Christmas it was tracking close to the coast, and so we did get some after Christmas snow.  It was a pretty decent nor’easter along the coast, but we just got outer snow bands, for a total of about 5-6″ overnight.  The trees were all snow-covered, and the bare patches and dirty spots disappeared, making everything clean & bright and new when I went out to get the paper (Paper delivery!  Something we don’t have in Barrow.  We can’t even get paper sent to the stores, apparently.  And the newspapers wonder why readership is declining…).  It’s hard not to feel optimistic when one goes out after a snow storm is over.  The winds weren’t too bad here, although we did get enough gusts to take much of the snow off the evergreens over the course of the day.

The other thing was that the snow covered many of the plants, so the seed eating birds were looking for something else, and found the seed bell we’d gotten them for Christmas.  We had a pair of cardinals, juncos, a blue jay, and tufted titmice and chickadees.  Only the latter two stuck around until I got my camera out.

Action at the seed bell.
Tufted titmouse.
Chickadee

As far as I could see, there were no deformed bills in the bunch, unlike the situation in Alaska, where they are becoming alarmingly frequent.