Good weekend

It was a pretty good weekend.

Yesterday Karie, Samantha and I went out to Eisenhower State Park for a hike.  The park was pretty much deserted since the water was off limits.  Due to the really hot summer and the lower water levels the algae in the water is at dangerous levels.  So getting in the water is forbidden.  It wasn't a big deal to us since we had not planned on doing any swimming today.

We hiked around  3 miles and then found an empty campsite to have our lunch.  It wasn't hard to find an empty one so we got to pick a real nice one.  Samantha had the most fun chasing the flies that landed on our food and cooler.

Later that evening, we all went to downtown McKinney to grab some dinner.  We went over to Square Burger, one of our favorite places to eat.  And afterwards we walked around the square.  We eventually ended up at a small park just west of the square.  Samantha ran around for about 30 minutes straight.  She even spent some time chasing a little 2 year old boy around, oh, it's too early to start that.

Today we went out for a walk over to a playground near our house.  Samantha loves the play ground and especially the mulch they put down.  She throws it, moves it, carries it, and hands it to me to hold.  We spent some time going down the slides today.  At first she wasn't that interested until I let her go down herself.  That was a lot of fun and we did that over, and over, and over until I had enough.

On our way back to the house we bumped into a lady walking with a small screech owl on her arm.  I asked her if it was an owl and she said "yes" and come over to talk to us.  It turns out she was trying to determine if the owl could be used with kids and adults as a learning bird.  The owl had been injured so it could no longer fly.  The owl had its eyes almost closed and was making a small cry.  The lady said the noise was his cry, and meant he wasn't happy.  The owl was doing pretty well and seemed to get used to our presence.  However, if the owl cannot get used to people it will be put down since all the stress would not be a very good life for the owl.  I really hope he makes it.  The lady works at the Raptor habitat over by Lake Lavon and said it's open to the public the first Saturday of the month.  We might try to head over there next month and see the little owl.