A bleak week!

In a recent visit to the oasis I discovered something, surely a bear, had demolished my wonderful custom made (by Russ Rogers) water sprinkler. My son is going to rebuild it at some point.

Right now he's working on welding cups to the bear-proof seed feeder ports. Birds are shoveling seed out onto the ground, plus bears can get some out of it. This improvement should save on seed and reduce on unwanted partakers of it. In the next blog I'll post photos of the process. (He's just making the cups now.) Everything is always a work in progress, it seems.

I've been having a rough month between wintry weather and dental stuff. Surely, I'll get teeth next month. Meanwhile, my blood pressure is way too high. I attribute that to not eating apples. All my life I've eaten lots of apples and had low blood pressure until I was around 50. Thereafter, it's been normal until just recently. Now it's like 160 over 100. I'm forcing myself to put apples in the food processor and eating them, even though it makes them brown (think bruised) and yucky. I have a doctor's appointment scheduled for Thursday, Feb 1st. I'm sure I'll get put on BP meds. Also, yesterday I woke up with my foot hurting so bad that I can only limp around painfully. No idea why. (It's not the same foot I had a cracked navicular bone in last year.) No other symptoms. Maybe a pinched nerve in my back or somewhere.

And I have painful sores in my mouth. Last Wednesday was another agonizing dentist visit, as all have been. He made impressions, but they don't just lift off the implants straight up, as the implants are slightly angled. He ended up having to drill through the mold into the implant abutments and unscrew them to get the casting off, only after I could no longer endure the pain. Really injured my mouth, which bled freely as I thought my jaw was being broken. But the dentist assured me it wasn't, and he was right. This too shall pass. At the moment, even eating my diet of mush is painful. So January isn't a great month. Just as well there are no good birds to see. I wouldn't be up to chasing them anyway.

Here's a podcast that talks about birding the oasis last May. I'm really looking forward to spring migration. And teeth. And warm weather. It'll seem like a new lease on life! Time flies by, so it'll be soon!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iCLdLwPbUd5w8YuhArKmX