Home again, sneezing

I went to Gainesville, Florida, to visit friends and came home with a sore throat and head cold. Damn!

When I say Gainesville, I really mean Lesbianville, as my old dear friend and her partner are lesbians, as are their friends. This time we did a lot of socializing: a birthday party, a lesbian variety show, a bird tour on a boat, a sweet coffee shop where friends gather, and we even flirted with a young kook of a waitress in a nice Italian restaurant.

The last time I visited I was a little jumpy about my marriage and fantasizing about some female action on the side. So, this time my friend had prepared the ground for me to hook up with one of her single friends. That was sweet, but I'm not in the mood for a fling any longer. Things are going so well with my guy that I'm finding great comfort in loyalty. Will it last?

I bought myself a nice, lightweight pair of binoculars before the bird trip. It's an investment in my back-to-nature movement, along with all the work to get my legs strong enough to really hike again. I learned to tell a few species of shorebirds apart, but the highpoint was a small flock of white pelicans. I had no idea the white ones are so huge! When they went airborne in synchrony, slow and graceful, I swooned with pleasure at the sight.

The plovers and sandpipers and other brown speckled things were like reading fine print, another category of pleasure but less glorious. We didn't see anything rare or even unusual. The guide said the tide was unusually high & early and the birds weren't where he usually finds them. (I thought tides were utterly predictable, so was he putting one over on us?) He said it was his worst bird tour ever, but I'm so out of practice I didn't notice. We had a great time zooming and pausing around this little key on the Gulf coast whose name I've already forgotten.

Now I'm allowing myself to be grumpy and lazy with my little head cold.