Sixteen Pheasant

From two to four PM today, David and I briskly walked around heretofore unexplored-by-us sections of Windsor Great Park. What with 5,000 acres of it, we still haven't quite covered it all in the 17 months we've lived here. Apparently, "Over 2,000 species of beetle have been recorded therein. It is "part of a vast Norman hunting chase, set in [...] the Surrey and Berkshire countryside stretching from Windsor Castle in the north to Ascot in the south."

We didn't see any deer today, but we did see sixteen pheasant, mostly in ones and twos, but also a group of nine, walking across a field.

The wind whipped, the clouds were steadfast, and we were exceedingly glad of our winter coats and hat/hood. On our hands, we wore our Glovers until the middle hands got too warm. We had to switch sides, and eventually abandon them altogether. That shared body heat sure does steam things up. See, there's a single mitten each for the outside hands, and one joint mitten for the inside hands that you can hold skin-to-skin and still be protected from the cold and wind. Available in red glovers or charcoal glovers. All the other websites in the world that I could find mock them as nauseating, but I love them! And my husband apparently is secure enough in his manhood to wear them with me when it is cold enough.

My parents used to take a lot of long walks together, just the two of them, and now I know why:
- the kids, after a certain age, just don't want to come
- the parents don't want to hear the kids arguing about going or complaining once along
- the parents can go farther and faster alone
- the parents can have serious, uninterrupted talk about their relationship and future plans
- the kids get old enough to leave happily on their own
- it's a way for the parents with sedentary lifestyles to get exercise, which the kids already get in other ways