The
Great Backyard Bird Count. (The backyard now being every place on the
planet.)
8,257
species reported. That’s out of about 10,000 known species. Pretty
good percentage for a four-day effort.
e World Once Again Showed-up for the Birds...and Each other.
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I
was having a conversation with a person on the phone and needed to upload a
document to her while we were talking. I had already previously uploaded
several. At the conclusion, she apologized for my having to go through
that.
Problem?
Uploading documents?
“Well,”
she answered, “people… (slight pause) of your generation
sometimes have trouble with computers.” She never called me old.
She didn’t use terms like elderly, senior, or geriatric; she just politely
referred to “my generation.” I thought that was sweet.
…about prison inmates. …and babies.
Prison inmates; the worst
of the worst, right? They’ve all done bad things, some of them terrible,
unthinkable things. That’s who I’m thinking about, the incorrigible that
have to be locked away. How did they get like that?
We all started out as
babies, the most innocent of innocents. We’re not born with evil stares
and bad intent. We’re born helpless and dependent, with giggles and
smiles as we stumble about. Everybody starts out like that. How do
some of us get from giggles and smiles and innocence to doing terrible things?
Sure, nature versus
nurture, but is that all there is? And none of us are just one
thing. We’re not entirely the worst thing we’ve ever done, nor the
best. But these complicated human beings. We all turn out so
different, and maybe we all, no matter how we turn out, wonder why everyone
else is so different.
(Never
mind the gold car in the driveway. Temporary car shuffle with a
neighbor.)
When
we got the Tesla on Wednesday, it didn’t come with the correct charging
cable. Carvana agreed that wasn’t right and put one in the mail to us
from San Antonio. It should get here Monday. In the meantime, we
bought an adapter and used the cable that came with the car to charge it up
some at home. That’s okay. We needed a couple days to study up on
what we can control and how to do it. We’re very comfortable driving it;
starting, stopping, turning and such. Just figured out the adaptive
cruise control yesterday. Once we set it while we’re driving it does
everything until we touch the brake or turn it off, even to a full stop in
traffic at a light, then back up to speed when the light turns green and
traffic moves again.
Today’s
adventure was to drive to a supercharger in McAllen to confirm we know how that
works, in case we ever need to stop at a supercharger. The closest one to
our house is 20 miles away. The car navigated us there. We backed
into an open spot, plugged in the cord, and the car and the charger talked to
each other. After 20 minutes, when they were done, our credit card was
automatically charged, it’s in our Tesla account, and we had 200 miles of
range. (We only requested to be charged up from 20% battery to 80%.
It cost us $9. It would have cost less than that for the same amount of
charge at home.) Unplug and drive away. Seamless. The
standard household outlet at home will add about 60 miles a day to our
range. That’s more than we need for errands around town and driveabouts,
so we keep it plugged in when we’re not driving it and over the course of a few
days we’ll be topped off at 100%. That should be about 270 miles in the
tank. The older Teslas were advised to only charge to 80% for normal usage
around town, and then charge to 100% before a trip. Our newer model
recommends we just let it go to 100% any time we have the opportunity.
Tomorrow’s
challenge will be operating the lane control feature, autosteer, which along
with adaptive cruise control will do almost all the highway driving we
need. The adaptive cruise puts us at the appropriate speed for each road
while keeping a safe distance from any vehicles around us. The autosteer
will keep us well centered in the lane for as long as we’re on that road.
Not fully self-driving, that costs extra, but impressive driver assist as-is.
This
is a very smooth car and very different from anything we’ve ever had
before. And strange but true, this wasn’t spendy. Buying a 3 year
old Tesla (with 17,000 miles) didn’t cost us any more than buying the Maza did
13 years ago!
It
grows this big.
I
give it a good whack back each year so it can have a fresh start each
spring. I thought I’d give it a break this year and only cut it back to
waist high.
It
didn’t appreciate the consideration. It only wants to grow back right
from the ground.
I
had to get out the loppers and remove more dead stuff. Now it won’t take
long for the rest of the old stalks to disappear inside the new growth.
The
Esperanza is looking happy with these warm days and cool nights.
Even
Mighty Mouse is going for it.
But
he still needs a tomato tower around him to make sure no lawn mowers
accidentally mistake him for a weed.
A
law school student in Florida wrote a paper espousing an unpopular belief; that
our original constitution, when it said “We the people…”, only meant white
people. From there, the paper went on to describe how everything should
be now, based on that interpretation. Apparently, the paper won an award,
not because it was right, but because it was well written. There is
outrage that a paper with that premise could win an award, even if it got a
good grade. An interesting debate: Should a person be recognized for
writing something disagreeable if they do a good job writing it? So many
threads to pull on there.
All
these years, and it still won’t break so we can replace it. Well, after
13 years we finally gave up and traded it in for a newer used car.
We
found what we wanted on Carvana, and they offered us a fair trade on the Mazda,
so we took it.
A
2023 Model 3.
It
looks good in our driveway.
