Foodless Friday: On Dating and Birdwatching

Five years ago I was living in my parents basement for the summer... working and getting ready to start college again in the fall after taking a couple of years off. I was considering moving out during the summer to work in the same town that I would be attending classes in, but had not been able to find a job there. My parent's house is 6.5 miles away from a town of about 5500 people. In the previous 4 years I had grown use to living in a city and had grown to love it so moving back to such a small place was hard. I ended up staying the whole summer living with my parents.

Why? I met a guy who asked me on a date...

This is us yesterday. Same place where we went on our first date... 5 years later. However this platform we are standing on is new. Since I am living at the same place where I lived 5 years ago - yep my parent's basement... waiting on a thesis to be completed and to hear back from the jobs we've applied for, we've decided to relive our dating lives. Starting with yesterday, we went on our first date again (same day May 27th) - birdwatching at a wildlife refuge.

This is the bird that took us about 30 minutes to identify five years ago - we were both VERY new to the whole birding thing... and we thought we may have found a new species of duck at this refuge after only seeing one of them. Then we saw them EVERYWHERE! Yep, they are an abundant species.

This is an American Coot. The best way to identify them is by their feet - they have very distinguishable feet - but usually they are in the water so you never see them! We now laugh about how it took us so long to name this bird and smile at each other whenever we see them.

Yesterday we identified about 18 different birds. We did not get pictures of all of them, but here are some pictures that we did get:

For those of you that want to identify these birds, I numbered them 1-9 - however picture 5 has two different birds in it (You can click on the photo above to see it larger). If you leave a comment identifying the birds, I won't post it until Monday when I label all of the birds shown above. I hope you all have fun identifying these birds.

Funny story - five years ago on this date, I got a sunburn on my face because I forgot to put sunscreen on... same thing yesterday! My fave is just a tad red today. I guess five years has not made me any wiser!

Have a happy Friday! I'm taking off now.