I’ve been blogging so little lately, I bet one or two folks may have even noticed. I do feel somewhat guilty about it…like sort of a slacker, I guess. Well, I will try to get back into my writing groove.

Try? What a lot of BS. You don’t TRY – you either DO something, or you DON’T, right? So I shall.

Tracy and I had already set 4:30 as our time to meet in the Granny White parking lot. At 4:05, Kelly calls to ask if I can hike in 15 minutes. I’ve been trying to get the three of us together for a while now, but with Kelly’s travel schedule and Tracy’s Senior Account Excecutive-ship, it’s not easy. But it happened today. But not TODAY today….know what I mean? ?

It was yet another wonderful dusk hike at Radnor Lake: beautiful, peaceful, a virtual meditation, actually. Towards the end of this dusk hike – around 8:15, I suppose– a woman approached me (shocking, I know!) and asked if I were me. I was quite pleased to tell her that I am indeed me.

I was excited when I realized that it was Patti P., an avid hiker and knockaround biologist I met on the trails several weeks ago, back around the time of the Canada Goose nest discovery and video. We have not talked in a while, so we had lots of Radnor Lake animal sighting information to exchange. She has figured out when and where to see otters regularly — and in these same areas, the occasional beaver is also seen.

By this time, it was well into dusk so I could not get any photos worth showing.

She showed me a beaver lodge that was active last year. I believe Patti said she’d not seen any action at this particular place this season. I had never seen a beaver structure like this. It was actually not much to look at; it appeared to be a small stretch of Radnor Lake shoreline where lots of sticks had washed up and/or accumulated at water’s edge. Interesting.

She said she had seen only one snake this year, so I was happy to take advantage of yet another opportunity to gloat about my recent, unusually frequent, close-proximity reptile sightings. She really dug this; she and her zoologist father have an affinity for reptiles. I was thinking, Well, maybe, just maybe, my temporary status as reptile magnet would last through this evening and she’d get to double her snake sightings for the year.

On our way back from the otter and beaver area along Otter Creek road, we saw our snake: yet another gray rat snake — the fourth in the last few weeks, the third in only two weeks. I was a little slow with the camera and we did not capture it very well digitally, or at all physically. It slithered off into the poison ivy, safe from the marauding amateur herpetologists.

Tracy and I have been friends for a while, and a few months ago — early fall or so, when the weather was still very pleasant for hiking — we tried to find a convenient time to meet at Radnor, but we couldn’t. Winter came, and we sort of let the whole “hey, let’s go hiking” thing fall by the wayside.

But Twitter helped us connect today! I am fairly new to Twitter; I signed up about a month ago and finally got around to letting Twitter farm my Gmail and Hotmail accounts for other Twitter members on Tuesday. It found 8 or 10 friends and gave me the option to add everyone else from my Gmail contacts who were not members.

Tracy V. was one of those friends, and she immediately joined upon receiving the standard invitation email. She noticed my hiking Twitter — I had Twittered only 20 minutes before that I was going hiking at Radnor Lake today. Tracy then Twittered that she wanted to hike at Radnor Lake today, too — so that’s how we ended up hiking on this beautiful day (Tuesday, March 11, 2008).

We met in the Granny White parking lot at 5pm and hiked the South Cove trail and the Lake Trail, so we went up just one of the two big hills. It was a great hike; we had a lot to catch up on, so we chattered away the whole time.

Our deer count was 7. We’ll hike again soon, I am sure.

It had been raining off and on most of the morning, but there seemed to be quite a few breaks in the precipitation; so the hike was not necessarily jeopardized, especially given Jim’s adventurous inclinations. A quick viewing of the current Nashville radar revealed spotty showers would continue throughout the morning. I called Jim to feel him out and he said he was preparing for the hike. Well, I wasn’t about to wuss out; we cemented our 9am Radnor event.

I arrived at the Granny White parking lot at 9am, and I knew Jim would arrive momentarily after he dropped of his youngest at kindergarten – my alma mater, Otter Creek. As I drove past, I briefly recalled being the only one in my 1971 kinderclass who cried when a severe thunderstorm hit, and sitting in the teacher’s lap as she rocked and read stories to us. (I wonder when I became such a huge fan of inclement weather; it must have been after kindergarten.) I passed a few moments by reading a few entries in my current spiritual journal.

Jim arrived soon after the rain started again. We pulled on our hoods and met each other halfway in the parking lot. I noticed the rain drops beading and bouncing off his high-quality, all-weather attire and felt a twinge of envy as the rain falling onto me was absorbed into my cap. He suggested – and I quickly concurred – that we go grab a cup o’joe in lieu of hiking.

I followed Jim in the heavier and heavier rain to Portland Brew for a taste of the northwest – a bold taste. There were quite a few brew aficionados there already, but we handily snagged a table. There were so many brewsters there I was forced to park next door, and the possibility of being towed haunted me a bit throughout our tarriance.

After the first sip, I became an instant Portland Brew fan (one among many): the coffee is bold, the mugs are big, the clientele is hip, and the Internet connection is free. In fact, there were more people using their laptops here than at the Green Hills Starbucks (yelp) I have been frequenting on recent mornings; I will certainly use Portland Brew as an office in the very near future.

Our stopover was so engaging that my car tow haunting receded as much as it possibly could have. Jim Arnett and I have not talked – I mean, really talked – in quite some time, and it was wonderful catching up. We spoke of books, spirituality, ecology, spiritual ecology, politics, residential construction, Brown’s Creek, Otter Creek, mutual friends, and other miscellany.

Ah, books. Jimbo, as I affectionately called Jim back in the day, told me about two books he’d read recently which sounded interesting. The two authors come from identical ilk (identical to Jim and me, that is: Tennessee churches of Christ), making them almost instantly relevant, and have written cutting-edge (from a church of Christ perspective, that is) books about the application of this brand of Christianity to America’s current socio-political environment, or something along those lines.

Author Wendell Berry (about WB) came up in our absorbing conversation as well; I told Jim I’d recently purchased Berry’s A Place on Earth but had not read it yet. The only Berry book we’ve both read is Jayber Crow, and we lavished praise upon it as it deserves.

By the time we left, we’d set up a book exchange and dinner at his family’s Dale Avenue residence on an evening yet to be determined. Later in the day, his wife Danna had settled on a date and extended an invitation via email, which I excitedly accepted. All that remains is for me to carefully document and forward to Danna my dietary demands for next Thursday evening.