Challenge answer

 

Pinto beans.  Ham hock.  Vegetable stock.  Chopped onions.  Bacon chunks.  Cumin and pepper.  Salt.  Chopped jalapeno.  Minced garlic.  Diced tomato.

 

Charro beans!

 

Served with pulled pork from the smoker.

 

And Cholula.

 

Enough for leftovers.

 

Tonight’s challenge

 

 

What dinner dish do these ingredients add up to?

 

Friday

 

Birch Hill, a nordic ski center.  That made for nice summertime walking trails.  One section was set up as a frisbee golf course.

 

Efficient.  I don’t think those two uses will conflict.

 

The hole for disc golf is defined by a chainstar.  Hit the chains with the frisbee and they suck all the momentum out of it and it falls into the tray.

 

I’ve never played frisbee golf so I thought it would be interesting to take a look.  We ended up walking every hole through the forest and I started playing them in my head.  Most were par 3.  There were four par 4s.  I could see the setup and throws that needed to be made.  I left too long a putt for one and bogeyed the hole.  One I birdied.  Overall, par.  I’d have to say I played one fine round of golf for my first try ever.  Next time I’ll have to try it with a disc!

 

Brown Creeper.

 

They can be hard to pick out against the bark.

 

They fly down to the base of a tree then quietly work their way up until it’s time to fly down to the base of the next tree.  It’s easier when they silhouette against the sky behind.

 

 

 

Flap

 

Click.

 

Harris’s Hawk

 

 

Update

 

Judy had a good follow-up check-up.  She got the big bandages off.  Her shoulder is healing up nicely.

 

Lots of entry points for the shoulder arthroscopy, plus a vertical incision in the top of her shoulder to get the lipoma (stitches pictures on request).  No inflammation.  No swelling.  The stitches stay in another week.

 

She has been cleared to take her arm out of the sling several times a day, but no active movement.  She can do the arm dangle; lean over and let the arm hang.  She can move her torso enough to cause the arm to swing a little.  Passive movement only.  That’s it for the next five weeks.  No other rehab until then.  After that, we’ll work to restore her range of motion, but still, it will be passive movement only until further notice.

 

All that aside, she is doing great and feeling great.  She seems to be caught up on her rest and is out and about accompanying me on errands and doing more around the house.  It’s her left arm in the sling.  She can do a lot with her right arm.

 

Chupacabra

 

It’s a legendary creature found in the Americas.

 

It’s reputed to suck the blood out of goats at night.

 

I think I photographed one.

 

 

Red-winged blackbirds

 

Sometimes we get more of them at the feeder than we need.

 

But they can sure provide an explosion of color when they get all puffed up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Judy and Henry

 

Watching a wildlife video on the iPad.

 

 

Can you find

 

…the face of this forest creature?

 

 

It’s a little dirty.

 

 

A nine-banded armadillo.

Update

 

Day three post-surgery.

 

Shoulder surgery is tough.  It’s a painful recovery.  Having made it through the first two days though, Judy is noticeably better today.  Better enough to get out of the recliner and be restless a little.  Better enough to go out for a walk around the neighborhood.

 

We’re led to believe that sleep, ice, and painkillers are the best medicines at this point.  Whatever sleep Judy is not getting at night, she’s making up for as she naps herself through the day.  We’ve got various gel-packs of ice to alternate on her shoulder.  Sleep, ice, and painkillers.  Narcotics are out because Judy doesn’t do well with them, so her painkiller of choice is Advil.  Five more days to the follow-up with the doctor next Thursday.  The bandages should come off and the stitches should come out.  He’ll tell us then when we can start physical therapy.

 

 

Universal Single-payer Healthcare!

 

I’m for it!

 

Who wouldn’t like that; healthcare for all?  What?  The employees who like their employer provided healthcare and don’t want to give it up?  Oh.  Who else?  The taxpayers who will be asked to pay more to support healthcare for all?  Anyone else?  Oh, all the people who work in the health insurance industry that don’t want to get put out of work?  And the doctors who don’t like the Medicare level of payment for services versus the private pay?  And the hospitals whose entire cost structure is built on getting more from private pay than from Medicare?  Okay, so there are a few issues.

 

There are so many reasons for not going to single payer, or healthcare for all, but isn’t it unconscionable to maintain that some people in our country can get medical insurance and others can’t; to continue to deny an entire segment of our population affordable access to healthcare?  We have to take the opposite approach.  We throw out all the objections; all the reasons why we can’t do universal healthcare and start with the commitment that we *can*.  We are not the only country that has faced this issue; we’re just the only developed nation that hasn’t found its own solution.

 

 

Houses in the mist

It may seem that the forest is empty and you’re the only one there,

…but if you sit quietly, patiently, wait and watch, the houses will appear.

 

 

 

Eastern Screech-owl

 

In plain sight.

.

.

.

.

.

I was just walking along in the woods.

.

.

.

.

.

No idea there was a screech-owl box there.

.

.

.

.

.

With a motionless owl.

Just having a snooze in the middle of the day.

 

Before and after

 

 

The two pictures kind of look the same.

 

Except in one she has a sling and is a little loopier, and in less pain, than in the other.

 

We’re having a comfortable evening and today’s anesthesia is gradually wearing off.  The story might be a little different tomorrow as the implanted painkillers wear off too.  The surgeon did a lot.  The cuff was torn in two pieces.  He sewed them back together, then gave them two new attachment points on the bone.  He fixed an inflamed bursa and tendon.  He cleaned up some arthritis.  He removed a bone spur.  He excised a lipoma.  Originally, he thought the lump on top of her shoulder might be a lipoma, but it didn’t show up as a lipoma on the MRI, so he had to conclude it must be something else; but when he got inside it just looked like a lipoma so he took it out.  He thought a biceps tendon might need repairing or cutting, but it didn’t because it was already gone.  It must have been clipped off in a previous surgery.  It’s one of those situations where you have two different tendons doing the same thing and you only really need one.  Just like John Elway.  We thought it was a catastrophe when, in the middle of his career, he blew a tendon in his throwing arm, but it was the same tendon as this.  They never repaired it and it had no effect on his throwing motion, so from that lesson we can expect that Judy’s throwing motion won’t change at all.

 

I’ve been thinking

 

It started with forests.  Forests, specifically healthy old-growth forests, appear static.  Trees grow.  Trees fall.  New ones take their place.  The undergrowth ebbs and flows with the seasons.  Fire might damage some sections, but over time, the damage heals and the forest regenerates.  Forests are living breathing things, but on the human scale of time, it seems to us they don't change.  The overall composition stays the same.

 

But on a broader scale, forests do change.  Over centuries or millennia, the make-up of the forest might change; the mix of species can evolve.  The entire forest might migrate upslope or down, north or south on a grand scale with changes in climate.  It's just a matter of perspective.  Everything that seems like it never changes actually does, if we consider a wider time-scale than we're used to.  Mountains rise and fall in a hundred million years.  Rivers flow and canyons grow.  Forests, plants, and animals march their way across the planet.  Look at our understanding of the evolution of humans.  They didn't start equally all over the planet.  So far as we know now, our most ancient ancestors appeared in Africa.  They migrated north.  They retreated.  They migrated again.  From these waves of migrations, new species evolved independently in southern Europe and Asia that had never been to Africa.  The migrations continued and modern humans eventually made it across oceans to major islands, and all the way to North America, then south through the Americas until they could go no further.  This happened in fits and starts, in ebbs and flows, over a hundred thousand years.  To any individual observer, at any time in essentially all of human history, it might appear that the status quo, the climate, the mix of plants and animals in the environment, the range of human habitation, never changed; but over a broader scale the change never let up.

 

Everything we know migrates and colonizes.  Plants and animals.  Civilizations.  People and tribes migrated, invaded, withdrew, and returned.  Languages spread and evolved.  Religions spread and evolved.  If we had been present in our current incarnation, observing all these changes over all our history, could we have stopped any of it at any point?  Could we have looked at the world as it was at a moment of time and said "This is just right.  This is the way it should be and should always be."?

 

So here we are today.   We've drawn a line and called it our border.  We stand with arms outstretched, determined to arrest the assault of shifting tectonic plates; the advancement of mountain ranges, rivers, and canyons; the slow-motion migrations of forests, plants, and animals; the movement of any other human, religion, or language.  We are determined.  They shall not pass.

 

Just saying…

 

No reason

 

Just because I like this picture.

 

It’s a willow over a pond, viewed from a deck.  Close to our house.

 

The guardrail does its job

 

It looked like things had gone terribly wrong for the little car; it crashed.

 

There is was, up against the guardrail at a totally wrong attitude, at the edge of the bridge, waiting to get towed away.  (We don’t know who it was that crashed; this is just a situation I came upon while out for a walk.) 

 

Later, from a different angle, it became clear that as bad as the situation seemed at first look, the crashed car would have had it much worse if the guardrail had not given its all to protect it from a much worse fate.

 

Off in the distance

 

A white duck with a dark head.

 

We don’t know any white ducks with dark heads, so we looked closer.

 

It’s a bird grooming.  He’s rolled over to scratch his belly like a sea otter.

 

And flap his wings when he’s right-side-up.

 

 

It’s a common loon.

 

 

Our first of the year.

Laughing gulls

 

With a lot to say.

 

 

Or laugh about.

 

 

I didn’t take a video, so you’ll just have to use your imagination for the raucous calls.  Or look at this video (that’s not mine):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS3HSguQNM8

 

It has been a long time coming

 

But I’m starting to like fish.

 

Judy has been cooking tilapia.  The other night she made this baked cod, sautéed shrimp, Judy’s rice (with tomato and green onion), and homemade tartar sauce.

Yum.

 

Bo and Colleen fed us grilled salmon and we liked it so much we got the recipe.  It has been a long time coming, but now I look forward to our fish food.

 

 

 

 

Who doesn’t love a Wood Duck?

 

 

Usually you have to take pictures from far away.

 

Not this time, though.

 

He just got right up and posed.

 

 

Mr. and Mrs.