Slow Motion Swimming - November 23

Well - I missed two days of writing.  I have been in a complete anxiety fog.  New covid restrictions just came out and I have no idea how that will affect the Lab.  All I can do is try to stay positive and keep moving forward.  We have to survive this virus.  That anxiety has completely buried me. 

But I have found a pond that has a lot of muskrats in it and that presented a new challenge to me.  I want to video muskrats underwater. This not an easy task because muskrats are extremely fast swimmers.  They have to be.  There are so many predators that would catch them if they were slow but they can easily out swim a mink, snapping turtle, or even a large bass.  But this makes for a very difficult video to capture.

Muskrat Leaving Its Burrow on Day 2

So I spent 3 afternoons last week trying to capture a muskrat underwater and each day I got a little better at it.  The first day, all I got were fish.  The second day, my camera was too close to the underwater entrance of the muskrat burrow but I did capture one going in and out.  The third day was better.  I set my GoPro up outside the burrow with a 16mm wide angle lens on it (it is a digital lens) and I captured the muskrat going in and out several times.  The trouble is that they swim way to fast for it to be an interesting video (less than one second in the frame) so I had to slow it down.  I got the video I wanted but all it makes me want to do is go back again and again to get different angles and perspectives.  Muskrats are fascinating!

So what does this all mean?  All my writing that I have been doing lately (I am not publishing it right now - it is painful but necessary as I heal) is exactly what I learned about muskrats.  It is all happening extremely fast - too fast for me.  Yes, it is a part of my healing but it is all way too fast.  Things at the Lab are happening too fast as well.  I CANNOT KEEP UP!  Everything is passing me like a muskrat underwater - way too fast to be of any use.  But I am capturing it all - now I just need to slow it down to make it useful.  I have slowed down the muskrat to just 10 percent of its normal speed.  I need to make lists of the anxiety in my world and slow it down.  This can be done and it will allow me to see the world at a pace that I can react to and catch that damn muskrat.