Seeing without sight

Inconveniently enough, the day I decide to go out to make observations with all my senses sans my eyes also happens to be the day I get my first cold of the semester.  Dagnabbit!  In the way of auditory observations, my place does not have much variation.  The salmon run dam and rushing water are actually very loud and prevent me from hearing any human activity besides the occasional dump truck or other big truck.  Besides the river running along, crows and gulls tend to make up the rest of the noise — the geese, cormorants, and ducks that I saw today weren't too talkative...to me at least.

Cormorants chatting away on their lunch break.

The tastes and smells I experienced were even less diverse.  I brought my lunch with me (artichoke and feta sandwich — yummy!) but besides that, I tasted nothing in the air and honestly didn't want to go licking the foul rocks where so many fowl reside.  As for smells, I couldn't help noticing that I couldn't actually notice anything.  I decided that this winter-summer transition is one of the only times where Burlington actually smells like Burlington.  It isn't the crisp freshness you smell in the winter, not the quite the springy tree-smell of spring, certainly not the BBQ-saturated air of summertime, and not the decaying yet brisk scent of fall — these days are simply Burlington days.  In the way of things I felt, I could only feel cold.  Today it was just under 30º and quite windy by the open river.  The air was cold, the rocks were cold, the water was cold, and the trees were cold.  My hands were so cold that I couldn't really get a good feel for whatever it was I was trying to touch — except this one really cool piece of driftwood.  I saw it from the edge of the river and it looked like it had been tossed around by a good amount of water because it was as smooth as a gourd.

Gourd/tree?  No; just a tree.

Finally, one last photo that I really like because it shows, on a very small level, the raging river and a couple pieces of remaining ice as we slowly transition into spring.