No way! It's way too nice to leave. Let me drive home on a rainy day. We're staying.
It was a busy morning too. It started with the osprey. Osprey out the front window and coffee. He circled, circled, circled, forty feet high, then dove for the kill. He didn't crash headlong into the water like the tern. He crashed talons first into the water. A respectable splash, he's a big bird. A brief struggle to get airborne, and the fish dropped off just above the surface. It was a big fish. A big fish with an osprey story to tell now, supported by the badge of courage on his flanks. We got twenty minutes of osprey fishing. Meanwhile, those goldeneyes drifted by again. Fishing. But wait! One of them doesn't look right. Out come the binocs again. He's not a cormorant, Not a loon. The loon is drifting way out at the edge of our binocular range, but you can just see the flashes of white from his throat. Yesterday, while on the kayak, he called to me. Or at me. When I spotted him from the boat, he wasn't very far away. I paddled his direction. I waited for him to dive, then paddled right over to where he had gone under and coasted, waiting to see where he came back up. He rose about fifty feet away, called once and dove again. He came up a lot farther away the next time.
So back to our duck that wasn't exactly a duck. He was not a cormorant, not a loon, not a grebe. It was a merganser. We're used to seeing mergansers once in a while. They have a distinctive head, different from a duck, but this one didn't look quite like the common mergansers we normally see. This was a red breasted merganser. Not a new bird for us, but an unusual one. Common mergansers don't like to winter in salt water. Red breasted do.
To identify birds, we usually start with what he looks like. More and more now, though, we find we hear a bird, then go look for him. The sound he makes at least tells us which direction to look. Sometimes the sound tells you what type of bird you're looking for, so you have a better idea where to look. Sometimes you know exactly which bird you're looking for because you recognize the sound exactly. Yesterday, I passed the marsh habitat where the clapper rails are. We've seen several there. It took me a long time to spot the rail that was calling. I didn't have any binoculars with me because I wasn't birding, I was running. The sound was check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Without interruption. Finally I spotted the bird. It looked just like a clapper rail. But it wasn't. It was a King Rail. The first we have seen this trip. They look just the same, the only way you can tell them apart is by the call.
Anyway, we're watching the osprey, the goldeneyes, the merganser, and the dolphin. What is a dolphin doing in this water? We paddled all over the bay yesterday, and kept bumping into the bottom. Our kayaks draw three inches of water. Once we even had to get out and walk the boats back off the oyster bed and into water deep enough to float them again. There must be channels two or three feet deep out there, and he was better at finding them than we were. We'd see the baitfish start flying all over the place, and look through our field glasses for the disturbance in the water where the dolphin was. He'd get into a pack of them and thrash about, causing quite a commotion, and probably getting lots to eat.
I love the baitfish. They're shaped kind of like trout, but a little rounder at the head. Every kayak trip is escorted by leaping baitfish ten or twelve inches long, splashing all over the place. Fish we'd love to catch from the river at home.
So there is no way we could have left today, anyway, what with all the birds and dolphins, and excitement out the window.
We found a roadside fruit market that is keeping us stocked with goodies. Today we wanted some fresh meat, so we located the meat market. That provided an opportunity for some
I told him I was wondering which part of the cow they came from, if you could imagine a cow standing right there. Was it an arm or a leg, or what? He volunteered: "Boy. You need a lesson in Cow 101." That was the funny part, but you have to read it in a
We had an electrical mystery today. I decided to try again to look my best, and got the hair dryer out. If I don't use the hair dryer, my hair looks like I've been on the beach. So I fired up the hair dryer. Judy had the coffee maker on. Everything stopped. It's not really much of a problem. We have ground fault interruption outlets, one on either side of the motorhome. They control all the 120 volt outlets. Half each. You press the reset button, and everything works again. I checked the one for the left side. It reset. I checked the one for the right side. It wouldn't reset. We flipped all the breaker switches in the bedroom. Nothing helped. I must have fried the outlet, and now nothing on that side of the motorhome would work until I replaced it. Is there very much connected through that side of the motorhome? Let's see: the satellite dish, the television, the coffee maker, the washing machine, the microwave, the bedroom fan, and the hair dryer. We decided it was worth fixing. A call to an RV repair guy, a trip to the hardware store, a purchase of multiple outlets to make sure we got the right one, and the trip back to the motorhome. As I was messing with the new outlet in the store, I realized the new outlet was acting just like the old one that was supposed to be burned out. It wouldn't work properly until it had power supplied to it. When we got back I explored the motorhome for more switches. I found one in the left rear outside corner of the coach that looked promising. I threw the switch, but it didn't help. In fact, by this time, I had thrown so many switches, nothing would help. Everything was screwed up. So I disconnected the shore power entirely, let everything reset, and started over. Everything worked! Nothing needed replacing! That last switch did it. Hey, this electricity stuff isn't that hard at all.
