Dislocation

No, not me or some refugee metaphor, but my camera lens. Let me 'splain.

Tuesday Seattle got the Summer tease: 70 degree weather, sun, balminess. Oh yeah. No job hunting on that day, priorities shift to building fitness! Fitness by walking along the lakes and waterways, hiking the trials in and near my fair burg.

I sometimes walk in the biggest (longest?) wetland in the city proper. It's this fine mess of weeds, scrub and moss that sits on channel leading into Lake Washington. There's always ducks, coots, grebes, uh, birds hanging around. Random turtles. Many of the trees are labeled which is great. I'm not sure if I could now distinguish between the European Silver-Tongued Birch and the presumably American Sandpaper Birch, but I'm well on my way to being able to identify a birch.

So the dislocation: the waterfowl are occasionally friendly and probably hungry. The current thinking is don't feed them. I don't know why but they look hungry and I feel bad about it. That sadness doesn't prevent me from looking well-fed and encouraging them to think that food might fall from me at anytime. That caused them to come up close.

This gal jumped right out of the water to coax food out of me via feathery charm. Once she committed, her shiny partner jumped up as well.

It's not the greatest photo, there are a couple better. But I did want to show the cool blue chevron on his wing. After the stones with the racing stripes and this, I've concluded that Nature is at least as colorful as NASCAR and able to turn in any direction.

Maybe it was the threat of those dull angry hungry bills that made me slip and throw my camera into the water! No, that didn't happen because I dutifully use the wrist loop which saved the day. The camera does not, however, come with airbags. When it hit the deck, its lens got dislocated. It looked like a fighter with a broken nose, down for the count. Didn't help that the batteries were low either.

I'll spare you the gory details as I relocated the lens, brought it home, juiced it up and tested it out. I can tell you that it seems to be working fine. Here's one for the road.