Slow Moving

It's been slow going around here since my last post.  I came down with the flu, then our son, then our daughter...their significant others, and so on, and so on until Mr. Tide was the last man standing.

I literally stayed in bed for days, hoping that someone would either shoot me, or that my head would stop feeling as though it was inside a giant vise!

I didn't return emails, so I apologize to those of you who so kindly wrote to me or left comments, but I just couldn't even bring myself to type a few words in return.  Today is the first day I really even felt like a human being again, and I truly can't remember feeling as badly as I have for the past week and a half, for a very long time!  Thankfully I have a wonderful nurse in the form of my husband, who took really good care of me and catered to my every whim.

Now, there is just a bit of a cough lingering, and I'm still easily tired out, but I can live with that, no problemo!

Needless to say, the picture taking has been at a standstill since I came down with my virus, so the swan pics in this post are from a few weeks ago.

The tundra swans were late in arriving this year, by almost 2 months.  We had nearly given up hope that they would come, when one day we looked outside the window and saw a few.  Slowly but surely, over the past 3 or 4 weeks, more have come to join us, even when our creek was frozen over.  They would Jemima Puddle Duck their way from one end of the creek to the other, stopping to feed at any open spot, or sleeping on the huge patches of ice.  It was slow going for them too, but they didn't seem to mind.

In the pictures above, the swans showing a bit of bravado are standing on ice, and giving us their best moves.  Their wings remind me so much of angel wings that I wanted to darken the images and really give them that ethereal, otherworldly appearance, hence the dark and soft feel of these particular pics.

At last count we had 38 swans, including cygnets, gliding along our shores, eating our underwater vegetation, and making a racket after the sun goes down...for reasons we don't yet understand.  We will be sad to see them go when the weather begins to warm, but we are happy they chose to spend another winter with us!

I will be out of pocket for a few days tending to some family/work stuff, but hopefully everything will be back to normal by the end of next week!  I hope you all enjoy your week!