Recovering From Week 1

As I commented on Facebook yesterday, the new administration has been in office for only one week, and what a mess it has been. How much more chaos are we in for in the next four years?

As a followup to my activism in the Women's March last weekend, I have made phone calls and sent emails to Senators and Representatives in Congress, and even wrote to the President at the White House. I have posted my actions on Facebook to encourage others to also take action.

Keeping up with the political news is almost a full time job, so I try to pace myself. I finished several sewing projects and sent them off to two nieces in Massachusetts and another that I am sending to my sister who lives about an hour and a half away. 

We saw two more nominated movies this week, Lion and Arrival.  Lion is a dramatization of a real life story of a little boy who gets lost in Calcutta and eventually is adopted by an Australian couple. Later in life, this boy, now a man, has his memory triggered, and begins an all consuming struggle to locate the remote village he came from and find his family. It is a good movie. If you see it, take tissues. It will make you cry, but they will be happy tears.

After seeing Arrival last night I had to go on line for an explanation of the plot. It was that confusing. Some kind of aliens arrive in twelve locations around the planet Earth. The struggle is to find out why they are here and what they want. Louise, a famous linguist, is selected by the military and the CIA to try to communicate with the aliens that landed in the US.  But the time sequence is all over the place. What we thought were flashbacks might have been Louise actually foreseeing the future. What we thought had happened in her life might not have happened yet. It was baffling. If you have seen it, let me know what you think.

Saturday morning we changed pace a bit. We attended our garden club planning meeting, setting up topics and trips for the year. It was a very pleasant two hours. Then Tom and I grabbed a quick lunch at a Subway shop near the home where we were meeting and then connected up with the north end of the Soos Creek Trail for a destination walk. 

 Much of the trail is through wetlands. Power lines run overhead.

 Other sections are at a bit higher elevation, in the wooded areas along the wetlands.

 There is actually a creek meandering here and there between pools and marshes. 

 We walked for two miles and then stopped to turn around. A meeting of mallards emerged from the marsh to measure us up. Meh! I guess they are used to human intruders. 

 Then we retraced our steps back the two miles to the parking area. 

It was a pleasant change of pace on a mild, almost sunny afternoon. And we didn't talk politics.