Sorry about the delay in completing my overdue blog posts. It took a week plus to pull together a program for the Cincinnati Bird Club presented on March 21. The program was longer than I wanted it to be, about 2 hours, but it is difficult to summarize a whole year of birding to achieve 733 + 2 provisional species, talk about the key highlights and include a lot of the photos. Even though the program was long, it can be streamlined. In spite of the length, I got positive feedback from the attendees. There was a very large crowd of about 47 people present, according to Steve Bobonick. That is a very large crowd for a Cincinnati Bird Club meeting! I am happy the attendees liked it.
After completing the presentation, I have been busy taking care of financial matters related to retirement accounts. I did not have time to complete the necessary steps last year and needed to complete them before April 1, 2014, which I did. Following that was the requirement to pull everything together for Income Taxes, which was completed this week. In addition, a credit card was compromised during the last day of 2013, December 31, my birthday. What a present! However, that last day I did get my number 733 species, Smith's Longspur, which will be the subject of one of my next blog posts. I have taken care of everything needed for the compromised credit card. That was the second time this occurred during my Big Year, and neither were fun adventures!
All of these financial activities required digging through accumulated mail from the past year to be sure that nothing important was overlooked. Fortunately nothing important got thrown away, but a few things were misplaced and took a lot of effort to find. A massive Spring Cleaning is in order, because there was little time between my last day of work on October 31, 2012 and the start of my Big Year on January 1, 2013.
Stay tuned for more about my Big Year.
