Warming Up For A Day

7:07

Swans in Early Morning

Swans

Up Close Just Off our Front Yard

A Sunny Friday Afternoon 

Up at 6:20, listening to Click and Clack.  Right now it's 7:00 and the shoreline has a rosy glow, rising to a light blue...amazing.  The lake has various shades of blue, a tinge of pink, frozen in some parts, open in others.  It's 35º after yesterday's deep freeze of a morning.

No yoga yesterday so I walked Dobbins Woods for about forty five minutes.  It was snow covered, perhaps a inch, the ground frozen, especially the wet areas, which creaked and crunched when I walked over them.  The pines, weighed down by snow, obscured the mostly open views of the leafless woods,  I am always amazed by the amount of dead fall, littering a nature preserve or most woods, often blocking trails, horizontals to the healthy vertical trees.  The forest floor was scarred by occasional animal tracks, rabbits and deer probably, otherwise untouched except for my boot prints.  It was very cold and when the wind picked up, I felt like Shackleton on the South Pole, a bit of hyperbole as he was not in a forest!  It was just cold!  I then went to the Vision Center at Walmart, to have my eyes checked.  When he first asked me to look look the lens and tell him what I could see, all I saw was a blue.  The had the wrong chart!  Fortunately, my eyes seem healthy, have changed very little in three years, so I do not need new glasses.  I liked the optometrist, kind of a dude, dressed in all black, shaved bullet shaped head, youngish, a local who works here and Fredonia, not your average eye specialist.

Dobbins Woods

Dobbins Woods

For lunch, more cauliflower soup and a bagel with salmon spread, then stayed inside, too cold to kayak and read, made up some black bean soup for the weekend, then at 4:00, went to see Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the search for Osama bin Laden.  I, finally, really like a film.  Right from the first moment, I was into the film, hardly realizing I was sitting in a theater, as Kathryn Bigelow, the director, wowed the viewer with her story telling ability.  The first thirty minutes, the most controversial, are uncomfortable as we move from one torture scene to another, the water boarding especially hard to watch.  From these, we move through the phone records and emails and dead ends, some shocking and violent, that eventually lead to Osama's death.  We are in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, other posts, as Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, angers various station agents with her onesidedness, her sticking to the goal of getting Bin Laden.  It takes almost  ten years, as we move through a number of terrorist attacks, the gathering of info until there's enough evidence to suggest that he may be in Pakistan.  The decision to 'go' is by no means a sure thing and the tension of arriving at this momentous point is well done.   Though Obama never appears, we get the drama of making a decision that guarantees nothing, and there's everything to lose.  The last thirty minutes take us, via helicopter, along with the special forces ops who actually make the raid, and it moves very slowly, with no music, just occasional gun fire and blasts to open doors, as the troops methodically move through the compound, eventually finding and killing Bin Laden, bagging him, and bringing him and various hard drives back to base.  A good movie, perhaps great, like The Hurt Locker, the Academy Award Winning film from a few years ago, also directed by Bigelow.  A riveting film by Bigelow, pitch perfect performance by Chastain, it raises lots of questions about torture, about the amount of time and money spent to find Bin Laden.  It makes a good story and, for Maya, it's a sweet end to her obsession.

O, yea, I put together my bicycle trainer, so I am ready to work on my aerobic exercise, to complement my yoga.  Let's see if I join the 95% who end up never using their exercise machine, or the 5% who use it regularly.

Ready to Ride