Scattered Thunderstorms!

We escaped the promised afternoon thunderstorms, but they rolled in tonight with a vengeance. The electricity keeps flickering off and back on, which means the TIVO resets. The DirecTV feed disappeared during the NewsHour, but came back on half an hour later. We are camped in a large pine forest, and we’re beginning to think that there must be Texas sized pine cones pelting down on us. These storms aren't scattering away from us as fast as we'd like.

Fortunately it was quite pleasant earlier in the day. On our morning walk we managed to capture images of a couple of butterflies. Some others fluttered by without having their pictures taken.

I took this shot of a black and blue butterfly with my Droid (no zoom), and the critter wouldn't spread its wings and pose. It did flutter around us for quite a while.

Ken took this shot of a tiny tan butterfly that looked for all the world like a dried leaf on the roadway.

We have lots more neighbors, many of whom have brought boats along. Some of the boats are apparently for fishing, but others look like speedboats. One features a huge 220 hp outboard motor. All of the first come sites are full now with weekend campers, and the odor of campfires was drifting through the campground earlier.

We decided to get the bikes down, which we haven’t done for a while. It’s been a long while since we rode in even mildly hilly terrain, and our legs let us know that they were unaccustomed to the effort. We managed only a couple of miles in twenty minutes pedaling around the campground before we decided to call it a day and ride again tomorrow (if the rain decides to abate). We're hoping that our leg muscles will stop complaining and get stronger quickly.

We had leftover black bean and yellow squash stew for lunch. Ken commented that it was a good thing that it tastes so good, because he finds it visually unappealing. I said it looked pretty much like stew to me. He countered that the stew he ate as a child featured large chunks of meat.

For supper we had penne with sundried tomato pesto sauce and mushrooms, green beans, brown bread, and our usual salad. We are beginning to run out of produce—the grocery list features a long litany of salad items.

Our network has been so slow today as to be mostly almost nonexistent. We spent some time organizing photos that I had accumulated but not moved to our primary photo collection, including the photos I took in DC and Portland. I’ve been holding off publishing a couple of days of the blog from the Portland visit until I get the photos set to go in it.