Texas - Day 58 - 65 - in Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill
Thursday, 31 December 2020 - Thursday, 7 January 2021

And Happy New Year to all!  Given the incredible level of trauma we've all been through on so many levels during this past year, I can only hope to the depths of my soul that this new year will be better.  Surely we have nowhere to go but up.

I'd originally made a reservation here for 3 nights, but ended up expanding that twice until I got up to 9 nights total.  I wanted to spend New Year's Eve and Day someplace I knew I could be comfortable, and having stayed here several times last summer, I figured this would work.  And it has. 

Most of the time I can get an internet signal, though it's occasionally a little weak.  But it's there, and I was almost a month behind in posting on this blog.  I write this as much to preserve my own memory as for anyone else, and I wanted to get down my memories of what I'd been seeing before I lost them.

I also felt like I needed to regroup.  I'd been traveling so nearly constantly for more than 3 weeks that I was feeling disoriented.  And besides that, I still had medical appointments that I needed to address.

I had no clear idea of where I'd be going next, and the worsening of the pandemic was making it seem the only sensible choice was to sit very still while this thing raged and to have as little direct contact with other people as possible.  So I opted to sit, at least for a little while.

New Year's
That bad weather I drove through on my way here continued for several days.  We had pouring rain for most of New Year's Day, but I know this area's been well into drought status for many months, and I lived in southeast Alaska and western Washington for too many years to mind rain.  It's lucky I'd asked the dog boarding place to give my puppies baths while they were there, because it meant the wet dog smell was substantially easier to live with.

I made my version of Hoppin' John (sausage, onion, black-eyed peas, rice, tomatoes and Rotel) and had it with champagne.  The two very definitely don't go together, but I wanted some concrete recognition that I'm expecting 2021 to be better than its predecessor, and I wanted the stew to maybe help that along with some good luck.  I wanted to make cornbread to go with it but just didn't want to hang out in the rain getting the ingredients out of the basement storage area.

Somehow I managed to mess up my left ankle, and I have no idea how.  All I know is that some internal screw-up meant I could hardly walk at all without pain.  So between that and the heavy rain, my poor puppies got short-changed on walks for a couple of days.  As I expected, by continuing to try to use it, but not pushing too hard to pretend it was normal, it gradually got better over several days.

Wildlife
We continued to see that one coyote I'd seen our first night - not daily sightings but pretty often.  It showed absolutely no fear of us at all, but instead seemed more curious about the dogs than anything else.  It was a real nuisance, because curiosity was definitely not the reaction the dogs had to the coyote.

There was one time we all saw it heading toward us from quite a ways away.  Part of the time the coyote was trotting along the road, then it would turn into a vacant campsite and trot through the woods, then come back out to the road, then turn back into the bushes - the whole time heading in our direction.  It finally worked its way around behind us, though of course we'd been tracking its progress and turned around to see where it was going, so it wasn't any longer behind us.  And then this coyote had the nerve to come out of the bushes and sit in the driveway of a campsite and just stare at the dogs.  

Meanwhile, I had my hands truly full just trying to control Dexter who was going berserk.  Because the coyote kept moving, I didn't know what direction to walk the dogs in to get away, and anyway I've learned that trying to walk when I'm hanging on to Dexter in his going-crazy mode leaves me really vulnerable to getting tangled up with him and falling down, which then means I can't hang onto him.  So the 3 of us just stayed where we were while this coyote was sashaying around.  As it got closer to us, Dexter got even more frenzied, and I was finally holding him both by the leash and by his collar, while he was standing on his hind legs in his desperate attempts to fling himself at this wild cousin.  By the time it sat down to stare at us, I was furious with that coyote, and just beginning to feel like it was stalking us when it finally melted back into the bushes and left.

Sometimes when we're on our early morning walks, one or both of the dogs react in such a way that I think it's a coyote they've sensed, rather than a rabbit, which we also see sometimes.  One morning, Dexter got excited and I was wondering if we should even keep walking or turn around and go back.  Then I heard several somethings walking through the leaves in the trees around us.  It was an odd, almost creepy, sound because it was quite clearly more than one of whatever it was, and they were definitely moving along through the dead leaves not far at all from where the 3 of us stood.  In the dark.  So at that point I decided to take the dogs back inside.

A short time later, we all quite clearly heard a pack of coyotes howling at the night, so of course Dexter had to bark back at them, at which point they definitely barked back at him, and he barked back at them - it was weird to listen to, this back-and-forth.  I had the impression they could understand each other, though I would have expected them to speak different languages.  After all, all human beings are genetic relatives but don't speak the same language at all.  But hearing all this barking so soon after I'd heard the footsteps in the leaves made me think maybe it was several coyotes we'd heard.

Speaking of languages, I heard 2 birds who seemed to be having a conversation.  One was saying "JimmyJimmyJimmy" and then the other one said "GracieGracieGracie", back and forth over and over.  I guessed that they were the same species of bird and thought it odd that they weren't saying the same thing.  But on other days I heard different words repeated like these 2 were, in tones that sounded like they were still the same species as before.  So is the point the 3-time repetition and the cadence and tonal quality, rather than what they're saying?

I heard chickadees saying "tzzz, tzzz" which is something I didn't know chickadees said.  But these definitely did.

Medical appointments
The root canal guy told me I could get a crown put on as soon as my dentist could fit me in.  But when I called for the appointment, I learned my dentist always takes the 1st 2 weeks of January off, and when he's back works only Tuesdays and Thursdays.  He looks old enough that I'm guessing he's regarding this as semi-retirement, which is certainly reasonable but a nuisance for those (very few) of us who have to make special arrangements to come to town for an appointment.  

So with all that, I couldn't get a crown appointment until January 29th - a full month after the root canal.  A nuisance partly because it means I'll have to plan travel around needing to be in Austin at the end of the month, and partly because I'm already ready to eat nuts again.  Oh well.  At least I have the appointment.

I also had another phone call appointment with my regular doctor.  She'd gotten the results of the blood test and the urine sample and said I'm healthy, which is certainly nice to know.  I always like to hear a doctor say my results from any kind of medical test are normal.  She told me to limit the amount of water I drink because I'd apparently been washing too much sodium out of my system by swigging water too often.  I was absolutely delighted to have a doctor tell me to be sure to keep my sodium levels up, given that I believe salt is one of the 4 basic food groups.

She also told me to get the new pneumonia shot, which she said is substantially better than the previous version, and said I needed to get the 2-shot series for shingles.  I know I had a shot for that some years ago, having had measles when I was a kid and being worried about the torture of shingles my aunt Alice went through.  But I don't remember getting a 2nd shot so am probably not protected like I thought I was.

And she told me that the blood pressure levels I was reporting to her sounded much healthier with this new medication she'd prescribed, and she said it would stabilize in the next couple of months.  I reported one set of readings where I'd gone from 181/93 to 136/81 in the space of 5 minutes, and she asked me if I was under a lot of stress.  Apparently readings like that indicate stress.  One wouldn't think a life like mine would be stressful, but in the last few weeks I've been noticing a knot in my lower back which I know from experience means I'm feeling stressed.

I guessing the entire country is feeling stressed from the political situation, and I have my usual stresses of idiotic dog behavior and where-do-I-go-next-if-anywhere questions.  But it's nice to know that I don't have to count worries about my blood pressure among the stresses.

Plans
When I got that dentist appointment for the end of the month, I decided to board the dogs again while I was back in town.  I don't expect the crown business to be particularly painful, but I thought it'd be a chance for the dogs and me to take a break from each other, give them some time with other dogs, and give me some time to get some cabin cleaning done, which is hard to do with the dogs here.

Going back to the dog boarding place meant I'd need to get them the canine influenza shots, so I called up my vet in Austin, figuring that'd be easier than trying to find a vet here that would take new patients (which many don't do these days).  Well, Ann reminded me that this is a series of 2 shots for each dog, so I'd need to get one this week, and then get the 2nd one when I go back down at the end of the month.  That meant a scramble to find someplace for us to stay overnight, since I wanted to stay here at Cedar Hill a while longer to continue getting caught up but didn't want to go down to Austin and come back all in the same day.

So I'll go down to Austin Friday the 8th and come back Saturday the 9th.  This campsite I keep choosing is still the only one I want, because it's a perfect location for me.  Unfortunately, someone else thought so too, and they've reserved it for the nights of the 14th and 15th, leaving me either to pick another spot or go to a different campground.

The thing is, though, that I'd have to leave this campground anyway because the state parks won't let anyone stay longer than 2 weeks at a stretch.  They'll let you leave for a night and then come back, but you have to be physically gone.  So I decided to go somewhere else for those 2 nights, and then I could stay until it was time to go back down to Austin for my appointment.

The next problem was trying to find someplace to go for those 2 nights.  I could find places that were available on the Thursday, but many campgrounds were packed to the gills on the Friday.  I ended up finding a space at Lake Whitney State Park, which is down south of here near Hillsboro, on the way to Waco.  So we'll stay there on the 14th and 15th, and then I reserved my usual site here from the 16th until the 26th, when we'd go back to Austin.  

It took so long to make those decisions and then make those arrangements that I didn't bother tackling the question of where I'll be going when I leave Austin.  I really want to get back on the road, but with the way the virus seems to be intensifying, and with this new variant that's much more contagious, I don't know where to go. 

Certainly Texas isn't a healthy state to be in - the numbers are shooting up all over the state, including here in the DFW area.  But for me the difference is that I'm already here so I don't need to quarantine as I would in New Mexico, for instance, and being raised here I know the language and the customs and the basic geography so I feel less likely to make a deadly mistake.  It's all definitely scary and uncertain and I decided to put off travel decisions for a while longer.