The sun is shining brightly on a cool and breezy mid winter’s morning coffee muses.

Being the procrastinator that I am, laundry day is always Tuesday in my house, not the traditional Monday. So my Tuesday morning start is always a bit later than other days of the week. This morning that was a good thing. When I looked at the temperature outside before sun up, it was reading 37°, by the time I decided to make my way out for my morning muses the sun had warmed the back porch up into the fifties.

It’s pretty quiet out, the main sound is the sighing of the wind in the pines. Well that and the occasional birdsong.

I just looked at the long range forecast… The prognosticators are foretelling of rain showers on my birthday. I’ll have to keep an eye on the forecast as we get closer to the day. Rainy #BirthdayRoadTrips are not that pleasant. They haven’t happened that often, but when they do, I come away with very few images.

Yesterday afternoon I saw smoke rising to the south. They must have finally managed to do a prescribed burn in the wildlife refuge. It’s always a magnificent sight seeing the billowing clouds of smoke rising and knowing it’s a managed burn and not a disaster in the making.

The blue jays are being quite raucous this morning. Between their jay call and their squeaky gate call, they are making a whole lot of noise. And they are scattered throughout the thirty or fourth acres I can hear…

I remember as a young adult being amazed at the distance even normal sounds would carry in a quiet location. In south Texas, on my grandfather’s ranch, I would sit of an afternoon in what we called the windmill stand. It was a deer stand built on top is a windmill tower that sat on top of the highest hill on the ranch. Sitting up there you could see, and here, the highway traffic three miles away. You could also see everything for miles and miles in every direction except west… to the west was an even taller hill.

Sitting up there as the day would come to an end and the deer would wander out on the wheat fields around you was always a great way to end a day. The sun setting over the hill to the west as the green fields at my feet filled up with a hundred or more deer. Or, on some days, it would be hundreds of sandhill cranes that would settle in an the deer would stay in the brush. That was my first experience with sandhills. And to this day they still thrill me when I see them.

Cups been empty for a while… Time to move in and get busy…