Numbers

I’ve been thinking about numbers. You might not think that unusual, what with me being an accountant, but it is. Usually, when I think about numbers, I’m thinking about what they represent, not the actual numbers themselves. Thinking about it now, though, I realize I have favorite numbers, and numbers that are clearly not in favor.

I like even numbers. I like numbers to be divisible by two. If they’re divisible by five, even better. Divisible by both is the best.

I discovered this while driving. The cruise control has a digital readout. I don’t have to look at it while I’m driving. I can leave the monitor set on another screen. But if I look at the readout, I find myself wanting it set on an even number, a whole number. I don’t want it set on 60.5, I want it set on 60. I’ll set it on 62, but not 61. Even numbers, or divisible by 5.

Now that I recognize the trend, I notice it in other endeavors, like setting the digital thermostat. I’ll set it on 70 or 72, but no way I’ll set it on 71.

I don’t know why these numbers matter, they just do.

Computers

Weee’re baaack!

Computer meltdown. Got a new one. In the meantime, we’ve moved from Arizona to Santa Fe, done a job there, and headed back up to the front-range. We’re parked at Dakota Ridge in Golden for a week. We have some medical and dental stuff to do, and it’s time for me to finish off last year’s company bookkeeping and maybe even do a tax return.

Sierra vista

Judy has been having trouble the last five years, occasionally looking in the mirror and catching glimpses of her mother. She doesn’t really want to look in the mirror and see her mother.

It just got worse. She looked in the mirror and saw her grandmother.

Sierra vista

The bottom fell out of our weather today. It has been so dry here in the desert, and windy the last couple days, I’ve been hoping for rain to clear things up. We got it, rainy and cold. We’re down to 46 degrees. The good news for us is, we’re still 50 degrees warmer than Becky is at her house in Erie, Colorado right now.

Saw a new bird, the black chinned sparrow. Completely different from the black throated sparrow. Didn't get a picture, so here is one from the internet.

Sierra Vista

Moved to Sierra Vista. Looking for a place to spend a few days.

The weather is good. The wind seems to have moved on.

Pets

The cat exploded in his sleep last night.

No one had gone to bed yet. Sitting around in the evening, email on the computer, television going, cat asleep in the chair next to me. I didn't poke him with a stick. No loud noises. His alarm could only have been internally generated. A momentary night terror perhaps. The result was an immediate explosion from a quietly sleeping cat, to an upright alert frightened animal with wild eyes and claws fully engaged. He never left the chair, just rearranged himself and it. Left some serious claw marks in the leather.

Glad he wasn't in my lap.

Benson

A three-state day. That’s more like it. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. A headwind day. Dust storms at Willcox. Kept going. Stopped at Benson for the night. Wind is still high here, but not so much dust in the air.

Van Horn

Happy Valentine’s Day, all. Nice day on the road today. We’re in the process of leaving Texas. You know how that is, it doesn’t happen just because you decide to do it. You have to be determined to make it out of Texas, and hold that determination for days before it actually happens. So here we are in West Texas. Van Horn. Tomorrow we drive another hundred forty miles to finish the “leaving Texas project”, then on through New Mexico and into Arizona.

New Braunfels

New Braunfels, Texas. A long day, waiting for the motorhome repair shop to do its work. Swapped out the driver and passenger chairs, fixed a couple cabinet latches, and did an oil change. Thirty-two quarts of oil. Separation anxiety for me, staying away while they do their work. Relief when finally reunited with the coach, even at rush hour. Skipped across the top right quadrant of the San Antonio Area, and got north and west of town before dark. Buckhorn RV Resort in Kerrville.

Tomorrow… west on Interstate 10.

San Antonio

We did it. We pried ourselves loose from the beach. Northwest for a hundred fifty miles to San Antonio. A little north from there to New Braunfels. Got here early enough to go check out Landa Park. We heard a rumor there were wood ducks there. We like wood ducks a lot.

Tomorrow morning, Ironhorse RV to have some seats installed.

Port a

Today’s entertainment, a drive down the beach by the jetty. It has been windy the last couple days while the cold front passed through. When the wind blows like that, we get some good sand drifts that build up by the dunes. It’s not okay to drive in the dunes, but if some sand drifts out over the part of the beach you normally drive on, you get to do whatever you want. A sedan and minivan had already accidentally found the deep sand and were not having any fun at all, so we got to use the tow strap and drag them out.

We always carry a tow strap and shovel, in case someone needs help (including us).

A big tanker passed, dolphins playing in the bow wake, while we were parked watching the channel. It looks like most tankers pull into the port of Corpus Christi loaded and leave empty.

Palm trees

The ones planted a couple years ago look like this.

Some years down the road, this place is going to be a palm tree forest. I counted, multiplied, and estimated. I think there are going to be about a thousand palm trees here. A tropical forest.

Palm trees

Judy got to have palm trees planted on our site. Three of them. They're small, they look more like bushes than trees now.

Life on the road

Lost Maples State Park in the Texas Hill Country. It is a wonderful place. An isolated stand of bigtooth maples in steep rugged limestone canyons. Well separated wide-open grassy RV parking. Streams, ponds, hiking trails, forest, birds... It is a wonderful place to be...... and we're not there. We checked the weather forecast. There is an arctic air mass falling down from the north. It's below freezing there at night. We don't want to be below freezing. We stayed on the beach. The front will pass here too, but we'll have the moderating influence of the water. It will stay twenty degrees warmer.

We'll have to leave by Sunday. We have an appointment Monday morning at an RV shop in San Antonio to get our chairs upgraded. Don't want to miss that.

Port a

Life on the road with a digital connection. We've been able to keep in touch with the office, respond to client inquiries, do some promotion, some preparation for the rest of the year, get our calendar all filled with jobs, and even did a webcast. A client asked me to participate in a 90 minute webcast entitled: "Everything you've always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask your auditor." Guess which part I got to play.

A good time was had by all, and people got to talk to an auditor in a non-threatening environment. And good news.... there is no danger we'll get any more clients as a result of the effort. The participants were scattered all across the western United States, with none in our service area, Colorado and New Mexico.

We've been filling up the calendar, and it's getting scary. Most of last year's clients are coming back for 2006, we've already added three new ones, I've proposed on a big job in Snowmass that would take a month, and we wrote a proposal for Colorado Habitat for Humanity to do any of their 26 affiliates that want us....

Maybe my work here is done, and it's time to just go work with clients for a while.

In the meantime, we're moving on. We're leaving the third coast. Tomorrow, Lost Maples State Park in the Hill Country, west of San Antonio.

Birds

New bird! Groove billed ani! We’ve been coming here every January for fifteen years and we’ve never seen him. We just got lucky this trip. We got lucky and a local birder alerted us to a pack of them about forty miles away. We didn’t get the whole pack, but we got one really well.

Fine looking boy, isn't he?

Beach

The view for the beach campers, waves in the wind.

Beach

Beach camping. For free.

Port a

Another Wild Kingdom moment on th weekend. Watching a pack of twenty-five great blue herons scattered about the wandering water in a tall grass wetland, we spotted a red-shouldered hawk standing on a little blue heron carcass. The herons spotted him too. Twenty-five long necks with little heads popped up out of the grass to watch. A ferruginous hawk joined him. The hawks were okay with each other, both standing at the same carcass, but not with the dive-bombing peregrine falcons. A pair of peregrines hassled the ferruginous into leaving. The red-shouldered finally flew away out of sight, lugging the treasure in his talons. The peregrine pair flew back to stand on the sandbar on the salt flats watching the gulls and shorebirds.

Port a

Friends leave. We’ve been here long enough to make friends; other people who stay here long enough too. Charles and Jackie, who had been next to us for a month, left to return to Alabama. Ron and Linda on the other side of Charles and Jackie for a month left to return to Dallas. Jim and Elle, our friends from Colorado, left too. Again.

We met Jim and Elle briefly at Dakota Ridge in Golden last fall. About the end of December, they showed up next to us here at Gulf Waters to check it out. Didn’t take long for them to decide they liked it and buy a lot over on the other pond. Then they left on their prearranged trip south of the border. They had signed up for a two-month RV tour to Belize. After a few weeks here, they drove to Pharr, in South Texas, to meet up with the rest of the group. Meeting the group, they decided they disliked the caravan idea as much as they liked it here. They still wanted the experience, though, so they crossed the border and headed south. They just did it by themselves. After a few days they hooked up with some traveling Canadians. They were having a good time, but their rig was a little too big for those tight Mexican roads. Several road related adventures later, they decided to come back here and regroup: leave the big rig here and go back down in a smaller motorhome to meet up with their Canadian friends and continue the tour.

So they were here again, but now they’re gone too. Again.

Birds

Standing at the edge of the pond, picking out birds for each other and locating them by how far they were from the log one way or another, one of us finally took a closer look at the log......