And the Texas Firebush

 

 

 

The orange, red, and yellow colors are attractive to hummingbirds.  The long tubular flowers, that never open any more than this, are not available to anyone else, but perfectly suited to hummingbirds.

 

For comparison

 

 

Here is a native yellow Esperanza.  Also known as a yellow bell.

 

 

Same big trumpet shaped flowers.

 

 

And, bonus, a big black carpenter bee.  A good pollinator.

 

 

Pretty much solitary.  They don’t live in hives like honeybees.  They make their nest holes in exposed wood.  That’s why they’re called carpenter bees.  Not a problem unless the exposed wood happens to be on your house.

 

Esperanza flowers are usually yellow

 

 

The ones in our yard are orange.

 

 

 

 

Turnabout

 

 

I read a news story about a group of software engineers who, targeted by a cost cutting measure, got laid off and replaced by an AI agent.  They got together and wrote an AI package intended to replace a CEO.  Open source.  Free access for anyone to evaluate or upgrade.  “A senior advisor with Harvard MBA level knowledge.”  It’s an assemblage of eight different AI roles for strategy, finance, human resources, operations, marketing, product, and communications, all operating in concert.

 

AI can’t write this.  It takes skilled experienced software engineers to accomplish such an involved task.  A turnabout indeed.

 

 

Windmills

 

 

 

We passed a windmill museum out on the plains in Limon, Colorado.  I’ve always admired windmills, but I never really thought about how they would have evolved over the years.  There are a whole bunch of different ones:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read all the signs and studied all the windmills.  I didn’t come away an expert.  I still can’t tell one from another even with the help of the narrative for each.

 

Elaborate

 

A tent trailer.  That folds out and out and out.  I don’t know what all it does, but it’s got stuff everywhere!

 

 

 

In that last picture it even looks like an inverter box and maybe battery backup, processing electricity like they’re off grid (but they’re also plugged in).

 

We’ve been discovered

 

 

Every trip report I send out gets archived on a blog site.  It’s not a blog with much of a readership; I just like saving a record of what I’ve said over the years.  Every week I get a report of the traffic there.  Most weeks are in the range of 100 pages or so; sometimes more if somebody discovers it and reads through a lot of pages, but that’s only occasionally.

 

For the last few weeks though, our traffic has been looking more like this:

 

 

Ten thousand views?  I don’t know why, for the last month, the traffic has been this crazy.  I don’t think it’s because I’ve suddenly gotten this interesting.  I suspect we’ve been discovered (attacked), by bots.  But come to think of it, why even would bots be this interested?  Surely they have something better to do with their time than visit me ten thousand times.