Back at the ranch, the hurricane hit Mexico, south of Gulf Waters, but we have reports of 20 foot waves, tides up to the dunes, 20 foot waves, and wind gusting to 65 mph.
Video from the pier down by Jetty Beach.
From: Jon McIntyre [mailto:mcintyrebirds@hotmail.com]
Our bird list for Chatfield:
Canada Goose |
Mallard |
American White Pelican |
Double-crested Cormorant |
Great Blue Heron |
Black-crowned Night-Heron |
Turkey Vulture |
Swainson's Hawk |
Red-tailed Hawk |
American Kestrel |
Mourning Dove |
Black-chinned Hummingbird |
Broad-tailed Hummingbird |
Belted Kingfisher |
Downy Woodpecker |
Northern Flicker |
Western Wood-Pewee |
Western Kingbird |
Warbling Vireo |
Black-billed Magpie |
American Crow |
Tree Swallow |
Violet-green Swallow |
Cliff Swallow |
Barn Swallow |
Black-capped Chickadee |
White-breasted Nuthatch |
House Wren |
American Robin |
Gray Catbird |
European Starling |
Cedar Waxwing |
Yellow Warbler |
Yellow-breasted Chat |
Chipping Sparrow |
Vesper Sparrow |
Lark Sparrow |
Song Sparrow |
Red-winged Blackbird |
Western Meadowlark |
Common Grackle |
Brown-headed Cowbird |
Bullock's Oriole |
House Finch |
Lesser Goldfinch |
American Goldfinch |
House Sparrow |
Tomorrow, St Vrain State Park.
The shoulder is so much better Judy can sleep lying down. Most of the time. When the shoulder starts to ache, she has to change positions. We have two different recliners in the living room, and a couch with a nice back to prop up against. She can lie down most of the nights now, but sometimes it still takes the full range of sleeping locations to get her through the night.
She’s always here when I go to sleep. I just never know where I’ll find her in the morning.
Black-bellied Plover.
We’re back in Colorado.
Midway
The birds have been a little different for us here. Ring-necked Pheasant, Brown Thrashers, Dickcissels, Baltimore Orioles, and Red-headed Woodpeckers. Here is our
Ring-necked Pheasant |
Turkey Vulture |
Swainson's Hawk |
Red-tailed Hawk |
American Kestrel |
Killdeer |
Eurasian Collared-Dove |
Mourning Dove |
Red-headed Woodpecker |
Northern Flicker |
Western Kingbird |
Eastern Kingbird |
Horned Lark |
Cliff Swallow |
American Robin |
Northern Mockingbird |
Brown Thrasher |
European Starling |
Dickcissel |
Red-winged Blackbird |
Western Meadowlark |
Common Grackle |
Great-tailed Grackle |
Brown-headed Cowbird |
Baltimore Oriole |
House Finch |
House Sparrow |
We don’t have everything loaded onto the new computer yet, so I have to use the old and new computers side by side for a little longer. I’m used to using two screens, so I catch myself trying to move objects from one screen together when they aren’t actually connected.
We may think of ourselves in static terms; as having certain characteristics or not; of having certain abilities or not. That may not be the case.
I’ve had a realization; something even more profound than figuring out why I have that callus on the tip of my left thumb. When I was a kid, I had calluses just like this on the tips of all four of my left fingers. I played guitar. Now, all these years later, the fingertip calluses are long gone and I have one callus on a digit that never touched a guitar string. A mystery. It’s not painful and doesn’t interfere with my life in any way, but it’s a mystery. Or it was…
I’ve been paying attention to what I do. I figured it out. Since we live and work from the beach, I only wear shorts. Whichever shorts I wear, I only use one belt. The belt is a little odd and requires I hold the buckle at a certain angle when I thread it. Holding the buckle at that angle requires a tiny repetitive pressure right on the tip of that thumb! Mystery solved!
But the more important realization is that not each day is the same. I get this from Sudoku. Judy’s brother-in-law John introduced me to Sudoku. It’s his fault. There is a 9 by 9 grid of squares (divided into 9 blocks of 3x3) with some of the numbers filled in. The challenge is to fill in the numbers in the rest of the squares without duplicating a number in any row, column, or block. Simple. When we got the ITouch for its birding program we discovered we could download a Sudoku program too. The ITouch Sudoku is good. There are four skill levels to choose from for every game. The Easy and Medium levels can be solved every time by applying a few simple logic steps. The Difficult and Extreme levels require more than that. They require cognitive leaps, beyond simple patterns, to solve the game without guessing.
I progressed past the simpler levels of Sudoku to the more challenging ones, then one day I discovered I could solve them all! Extreme Sudoku. No match for me. I mastered the game. But to my surprise, a few days later, I discovered that I got stuck every time I tried a game above the skill level of Medium. My mind was not leaping effortlessly, creating patterns to solutions that day. Since then I’ve found that some days are better than others. Some days the mental acuity is there and some days it is not. Mental acuity is not a constant.
Life is shades of gray. Categories and labels are our shorthand for dealing with life, but no-one is all good or all bad; always smart never stupid. We all have our talents. We all have our shortcomings. And even at that, it all varies from day to day or even moment to moment!
Today we’re comfortable in
Hot this afternoon, then thunderstorm warnings. Tornado warnings. It’s raining. Lightning all around.
Glad to be here.
We left
So here we are, out on the
We’re doing much better than our brother Tom, who is making negative progress right now. He only briefly made it as far north as
Yesterday we saw two golden eagles, one bald eagle, a red-tailed hawk, an American kestrel, and two peregrine falcons.
Claritin for the pollen. Nitroglycerine for the altitude. It worked for a while, but the altitude started wearing me down. At least we think it’s the altitude. There are a number of other possible reasons that might have been making me feel crummy. We considered staying where we were and one-by-one eliminating all the non-fatal possibilities first, then retreating to a lower altitude only if we needed to. We decided to deal with the altitude first instead.
Ridgway is in the 7,000s. Too high. We were going to go to
The plan is to drive east to
The carpet is wet. We have a leak. But it’s not a leak in a place where we have ever had a leak before. Come to think of it, we haven’t had any rain either.
The carpet is wet next to the refrigerator. We have an ice maker in the refrigerator. The plot thickens. I go outside and pull off the outside panel revealing a portion of the rear of the refrigerator. Lots of stuff. I find a tube and follow it, looking for a shut-off. I find a shut-off, but soon figure out that I just shut off the propane to the refrigerator. I find more tubes to follow that really are water tubes. No shut-off. I look at the water manifold in the utility cabinet. There are shut-offs for every single water outlet in the coach…..except the ice-maker. We got out the owner’s manual for the refrigerator. It says if there is a problem with the ice-maker, shut off the water source. Okay.
A little light glimmers in my head. Not a flash of light, but a little tiny glow way deep; from five years ago (five light years?). When we took delivery of the coach, there was a walk-though. A trained technician gave us a tour of every feature of the coach. The morning was devoted to the outside. The afternoon covered the inside. I remember some of the morning session. By the afternoon session I was numb. There was something in the morning session about a secret compartment; a compartment with controls in it in a place where you wouldn’t think to look. Something between the exterior refrigerator panel and the utility cabinet. I took a look. There was a cover on one wall of the slide out drawer cabinet, behind the slide out drawer. I went around to the passenger side of the coach and pulled the storage drawer out that side. I went back to the driver’s side and pulled the now exposed panel cover off the wall. There. The water pump motor, a water filter for the ice maker (We didn’t even remember our ice maker had a water filter hidden away. Must be time to change it!), and a water line valve, clearly labeled “Ice Maker Shutoff”.
We didn’t actually fix anything, but we did manage to stop the bleeding until we can get to someone who does know how to fix the problem. We’ll just have to make-do with a limited ice supply until then.
Sunday. Jeff and
Saturday morning when I started the coach, the engine batteries sounded weak. That night, when we stopped, I could smell the batteries out back. There are six batteries; four for the house and two for the engine. The house batteries have been changed. They’re only a couple years old. The batteries for the engine are original. I think they’re shot. The alternator charged them all day while we were driving and they were steaming when we stopped. We found a shop that will have a look at it on Monday. We’ll hope all we need is new batteries and nothing else got cooked in the process.
We must have adjusted to the time difference. Now that we’re working our way back east, we didn’t wake up before the alarm.
We got a dozen birds in the campground. Robins, blackbirds, orioles, swallows nighthawks, doves, finches, sparrows, phoebes, kingbirds, meadowlarks. The usual suspects.
This afternoon, the sun came out.
(You can’t see Jeff and Carol in this picture. I took it after they left.)
We’ve been in the hundreds every day. We haven’t had an overnight low of less than 80 degrees in weeks. We drive for one day and arrive with temperature in the 50s. Cold and drizzly. Lows in the 30s. What a difference a day makes!
Friday. The temperature broke out of the hundreds and we had comfortable 85 degree day today. Good for checking out of the hotel. Back to the rig. It’s good to be home. The Oasis RV Resort was a much nicer place to leave the motorhome than at the parking lot at Circus Circus like we’ve done before.
Move back in. Ready the rig for our next mission. One more visit with Jake. Judy made a home-cooked dinner for us. Delightful kid.
Earlier this week, while we were outside the Bellagio on The Strip to watch the fountain go off from ground level, we met Captain Jack Sparrow walking by on the sidewalk. Got an Aye, Captain Graybeard from him.
No new birds to add to the list. We’re stuck at four.
Tomorrow morning, we’re out of here.
It was a good place to be, and we came away with a good plan. We need to upgrade some equipment and software. We can improve how we monitor the workflow so we always know what’s where. We can better integrate the technical tools we use so it takes less time to use them.
We know what to do to improve the process. Now, all we have to do is hang on to the vision and execute. That’s always the biggest challenge, not coming up with a plan when that’s the only thing going on, but executing the plan when everything else is going on all around us.
Wednesday. Next generation accounting firm, A view from the future, Technology futures. The end of the conference at noon. Ken and I stay for two more days for our annual meeting. We talk about what ideas to implement; how we improve, and what direction we point for the future.
