A busy but successful day in the Sunshine State.  We awoke early.  Mom and Dad Woods said good-by to Mary Helen, then Anne and I took her to the airport for a return to New York.  Leaving her there, we stopped at the Six-Mile Cypress Preserve to walk about the swamp on boadwalks.  It was cold.  We put on jacket and gloves. 

We were the first to go down the trail and found it quiet.  Still, we found three new year-birds, green heron, black-crowned night-heron, and common yellowthroat.  The planertrees and red maples are already in full leaf, but the cypresses remain bare and stark.  A few blossoms of arrowhead emerged from the dark water.  The swamp was lovely.

Our stay was short, two hours.  We made a quick stop at the post office before returning to the condominium.  We found time to jog before making lunch.  It had become warm and we were sweating when we finished.  Anne prepared little sandwiches, cottage cheese, and fruit for all of us. 

In the afternoon we joined Mom and Dad in making phone calls and then worked to install a bird song recording package into an ipod.  The ipod has been a useful birding device in recent years, but my ipod died.  Anne had an old one from before she purchased an itouch.  We had the software, but the loading was an adventure.  It took more than an hour to load the bird song cd's and run the program.  Finally, mission seemed to be accomplished. 

My lovely daughter had given me a new set of speakers, and they made the lovely sounds of birds.  I was done, but noticing that the ipod needed charging, I plugged it into the computer again.  This evening, "charged" was indicated and I turned off itunes and prepared to eject.  Then I noticed that there was no icon for the device which now indicated "connected - eject." 

Not knowing how to eject something that wasn't shown, I simply unplugged it.  Now the device was frozen.  After a panic, I found an on-line suggestion that worked.  Hold in menu and center button at same time for several seconds.  Everything seems to be OK.  Ah, the anxiety of the 21st century. 

Dinner was grand, spaghetti.  The evening is mild.  Our first warm evening of the year.  The palms sway in the breeze.

Meanwhile, word from PA is good.  My Dad is comfortable with Mom at Autumn House.  She had a tooth pulled today and missed a spahetti dinner there.  Too bad.  We follow their progress from here now.