20 minutes in another world!

Have you ever heard the phrase "Take time to stop and smell the roses"?  Well, why stop at the roses?  Let's face it, we all have very busy, hectic lives which leaves us hardly any time left to enjoy the "other world" around us.  I am 100% guilty of this.  Between work, school, family, and other responsibilities, there is barely enough time to sleep.  How am I supposed to make more time to explore a whole new world?  Well, it's time for a change!  Today I decided to spend 20 minutes of my lunch hour out in the "backyard" at work.  Yes, I am fortunate to have an area behind our building that has grass, trees, and picnic tables, but I have to admit, I have never really taken advantage of it.

I began at 12:15pm on Tuesday, February 28th.  I had to bring a blanket to sit on because it rained all day on Monday and the grass was still wet.  The first thing I noticed are the ants.  There are a ton of them.  I'm not sure why, but it seems that ants are much more visible right after it rains.  Next, I look up at the lemon tree we have and I notice a hummingbird looking for food.  We used to have a hummingbird feeder in that tree but one of the stray cats that live in the yard knocked it down a few weeks ago.  I guess we should put the feeder back up, we wouldn't want anyone to go hungry.  This hummingbird was beautiful, and I had never seen one quite like it.  It's head was bright red.  I wish I had my cell phone with me so I could take a picture of it, but since we are not allowed to have our phones on us during work, I had left it in my car.  I decided to look up "red headed hummingbirds" on the internet when I got back from lunch and I found out that it was most likely a Male Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna).  The web-site I credit for giving me this information and picture is:
http://biologybiozine.com

Here is the picture similar to what I saw:

Isn't it beautiful?

Next, I decided to close my eyes for a few moments and just listen.  Aside from the usual sounds of big rig trucks driving by (I work across the street from the DMV that gives truck drivers licenses) I heard several birds chirping.  I wasn't able to see the birds when I opened my eyes so they must have been hiding in trees, but they were sure loud.  I also heard a couple of dogs barking from the lot next to us.  They are very friendly Rottweiler dogs, but they are also very good guard dogs.  The last thing I heard was someone from the front office paging me for a phone call, and at that moment I knew that my 20 minutes in another world was over.  However, you better believe that I will be spending many more lunches exploring that new world I found today.  You should give it a try yourself, it really is an eye-opening experience.  It doesn't matter if you are out in a park or in the middle of an industrial area like I was, you can always bet you will see some form of life that you never really saw before.

P.S. This is a satellite view of my work that I got from http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl