Downtrodden, but not totally dejected...

Boy, have I been having a difficult time staying positive lately. I have felt incredibly downtrodden and dejected. I think a lot of this negativity has to do with being more physically limited of late. This getting old stuff is not fun, and I'm not even that old;-)  I also think that I have been depriving myself of outdoor time as well (nature-deficit disorder), and that leads to sadness and irritability. Now that my arm is improving, I have started to venture outdoors more, and my mood has perked up slightly, which is a good thing...'cause I have been a very difficult person to live with (nothing new, but worse than usual.)

Today, instead of driving for an hour to get to the beach, we took the pups for a walk in our neighborhood, and then headed out onto the pond. As soon as my feet touched the snow-covered, icy surface some of my worries melted away.

And the longer we were out, the more my mood elevated. Snow does that for me... We walked across the pond to check out the newly renovated "old" beaver lodge.

Beaver lodge photo taken on Sept. 28, 2016

It is so much taller than it was this summer. 

And, we were pleased to see the open water next to the lodge, which means that the beavers are still alive and are maintaining the hole to enter and exit the lodge area.

This stick marks one of the beaver traps. The traps are supposed to be checked for beavers and removed.
I hope this happens before I begin the boating season or there will be a trap with a dead beaver in it
at the bottom of the pond.

The reason I say that some of the beavers are still alive is that there seem to be traps on either side of the lodge, so there are probably two beavers that have been drowned in the underwater traps. Since I know that there were a minimum of 4 beavers living in the pond at the beginning of winter, that leaves at least 2+ beavers to continue maintaining the lodges.

I just had to measure up to the beaver lodge. It is the largest one on Caesar Pond. By the way, the outdoor temp. was about 48F while we were on the ice.

Check out the tracks all around the lodge. None of the tracks were distinct, but  I am assuming that some of them belong to the beavers.

We were going to check out one of the other lodges, but there are numerous springs near it and we didn't want to chance falling through the ice. So, we slushed our way home from the lodge, via the north end of the pond. As we walked southward, it became quite chilly with the wind in our faces. We had to bundle up and walk as quickly as we could to stay "warm". The snow had softened considerably, and it was super slushy underfoot. We kept punching down into the slush which made for a difficult, but satisfying journey home.