Better Today

I woke up today feeling refreshed.  The combination of chicken soup, tea, decongestants, and rest seemed to do wonders for me.  While I am still congested, I am feeling much much better.  I spent the afternoon on laundry and general house straightening.  The house still isn't all put together from the move, so the straightening is more habitual than productive.  I made sure to not overdo it today and still took the time to just enjoy the day off.  In the evening, I went to the park for a little while for our CSO meeting.  A CSO, or a Citizen Support Organization is a volunteer group that supports the park.  Wekiwa's CSO is the Wekiva Wilderness Trust and they seem to be a motivated group of people.  They chop and sell firewood to raise money while serving our campground visitors.  They maintain and man the nature center at the park.  They hold guided interpretive walks.  They host special events in the park that help to raise money as well as entertain and educate park visitors.  They also serve as an additional source of funding for specific park projects.  I'm sure that I am only touching the surface of the many roles that the Wekiva Wilderness Trust fills, but I am looking forward to learning more about their activities as I work with them more in the future.
After the meeting, I decided to enjoy some of the beautiful warm weather.  I took my camera to the back yard and started looking.  I couldn't pass up another opportunity to photograph the Coral Honeysuckle that grows outside of my home office window.  It is covered in blooms now, its really beautiful.


Growing below the Honeysuckle, I spotted this tiny bluish-purple flower.  It was such a tiny and delicate thing that I had to go in to get my 10X macro lens.  The flowers themselves were no bigger than my pinky fingernail.  The plants that produced them where tiny wisps of grass.  I didn't even see the point at the top of each petal until I saw the photo on the computer.  I poured through my wild flower book and found nothing about them.  I think I need to look into an additional wild flower field guide.


With magnification in mind, I started looking closely at the ground.  I decided to take another photo of these pale purple flowers.  I still don't know what they are, but they are everywhere around the park right now.
Looking at them closely, they remind me of popcorn.


Growing near the purple popcorn flowers, I found these minute little white flowers.  I never would have seen them if I wasn't leaning down for the purple flowers.  I can imagine the equally minuscule flying insect that must visit and pollinate each delicate blossom.


While I was stopping to smell the flowers, I heard something else walking through the leaves in my front yard.  I snuck around the fence just in time to catch this distant photo of a great big Tom Turkey who was strutting his stuff in search of some hens.


Thought of the Day # 78
I know that I have mentioned volunteerism in the parks on the blog before, but it seems to fit so well into today's activities, I thought I might bring it up again.  There are so many ways to volunteer and get involved with your local parks.  You may not have thought that your skills would be useful to a park, but you would be surprised.  People who know the park well or know a lot about a particular subject can be very helpful with park programs, but someone with accounting know-how could be just as important to do the bookkeeping for fundraisers.  Skills in the trades can be very useful with park projects, but web-design or graphic design talents can help maintain a web page, make fliers, or t-shirts.  Simply knowing how to manage people can be a very useful trait when trying to organize an event.  If you want to be more involved with your local park, just ask.  You don't have to fit any particular description to be helpful as a volunteer.