Greetings to all of you river enjoyers,

Just in case you are wondering if I have landed back on earth after my incredible river 3/22 Happiness soak: barely! ~ is the answer to that, because all day long tremendous people celebrated the Jane Mio Day with me. Blog readers cheered the day, e-mails offered wonderful ‘Yahoo’ messages, Major Brunner’s Proclamation reading triggered my happy cry, which sprinkled happy tears all over my well rehearsed dignified response and they kept flowing thanks to the heartwarming comments of City Council Member Brown, Cummings, Meyers and Mayor Brunner. My words might have failed me, but my happy tears delivered the message wet and clear: I felt immense honored!! In the afternoon family, friends/neighbors joined the Happiness Street Blitz that had been put together spontaneously by my wonderful neighborhood friends. The result was that I floated above the ground, because I was surrounded by ‘my’ people, who enjoyed having a good time meeting each other, sharing laughter and lively conversations.

My recent river time had 3 volunteer events that included some special moments that I like to share with you. The 3/19 Estuary Project work day had rain forecasted, which is not very inviting to work outside in the dirt. Yet this weather didn’t deter 10 volunteers to show up at 9am in rain gear and work with vim and high spirit on our various tasks. We were thrilled to welcome Rotary Member Peggy Pollard and her UCSC International Student from Mozambique, Naseeba Sidat, who was introduced to planting Calif. Lilac by resident Peter & DST member Ivan. Our river OSPREY dazzled Naseebe by scrubbing its talons in the shallow water right across from us

The second event entailed working with 9 members of a delightful AmeriCorps Team and a DST Member. I was smitten by the 9 members’ interest in the river, their questions about the benefits of their tasks. Robin Lopez, a DST and BEST member, was my right-hand since she is familiar with the restoration tasks. She kept an excellent eye on who needed what help.

Robin is also the one, who discovered the very long gopher snake. We tried to guide it to a safe place, but it wanted to return to its dangerous sun bathing spot. So I just picked it up(much to everybody’s surprise) and relocated the beauty away from the heavy foot traffic path.

Last not least there was the 4/3 BEST Sunday, filled with touching nature incidents. There was Mitch, being totally absorbed by the flight of a butterfly, by a bug crawling up a branch, raising his head to glimpse at a bird. It makes me happy to witness how nature awareness is unfolding for him. You would have been touched to see David tenderly attend to the newly planted vegetation, making sure they were properly berm-ed, flagged, weed free, watering them carefully.

And there was Cheetah, looking for me, because he wanted to show me the GREAT BLUE HERON, hiding in the bushes across the river. It melted my heart to stand next to him and share his glorious, well hidden find, which he spotted because he had tuned into the river environment. I hope these little insights highlighted some of the many touching moments that I treasure dearly ~ fortunate jane chirps
