MES

Who knew there was such a thing as Musical Ear Syndrome?

 

MES is a form of auditory hallucination, but one that doesn’t require an underlying psychosis.  (It’s not voices.)  We all know about tinnitus, that steady background noise that seems to increase with age.  People with hearing loss are more prone to tinnitus and it can get louder and more distracting as the hearing loss gets more profound.  A special few, go beyond tinnitus to musical ear syndrome.  MES is not an earworm.  It’s not a memory of a catchy tune or limerick that keeps going round and round.  Sometimes with hearing loss, as the world goes quieter, the brain starts to fill in the blanks.  It makes its own music.  Judy is one of those special few.  For her, it started out as stringed instruments, like classical music.  It wasn’t a particular song.  She doesn’t have a great repertoire of classical music in her head to draw from.  It was just random stringed instruments.

 

It’s not too bad during the day, while there are other distractions.  As the world gets quieter at night however, the music gets louder and louder to the point of distraction.  It interferes with sleep.  Sleep deprivation and incessant sound.  Isn’t that how prisoners of war are tortured?  Or maybe that’s how to get rid of pigeons at the shopping mall.

 

Whatever, there are coping mechanisms to get through the night.  We have a headband with little bluetooth speakers in it that Judy can wear and listen to counter programming while she falls asleep.  Meditation music or massage music.  Something with patterns to it.  We read that for most people the MES phenomenon eventually just goes away, and now, several weeks into the experience, it seems to be getting better for Judy.

 

Amazing but true

 

 

Amazing but true

A few months ago, we switched me to gluten-free and overall, it has been a positive experience.  One of the early compromises though was to give up real bread for the fakey gluten free stuff.  I don’t need a lot of bread for sandwiches and such, so no big deal.  Working at home I can just have dinner leftovers for lunch every day.  I do need toast to dunk in my coffee in the morning though.  That’s a critical part of the start of every day.

 

So there is the compromise.  Gluten free bread for toast.  We found some that didn’t taste terrible, so we went with “good enough” and the breakfast tradition continued.  Now, here comes the amazing but true part.  We were getting low on gluten-free so I decided to treat myself one day last week.  I made my own toast and coffee with the real Nature’s Own whole grain bread that Judy still eats.  I dunked it.  I ate it.  Yech!  After this much time eating the gluten free stuff, I preferred the flavor and texture of coffee-dunked toast made with my Canyon Bakehouse gluten free!

 

I think I need a new job title

 

My current responsibility at the CPA firm is to talk with potential clients and work up fees and proposals for new jobs.  We don’t spend any time describing specific titles or job descriptions, but if we did, mine would probably be “Pricer”, or “Practice Promoter”. 

 We’ve done okay with client retention and getting new jobs; enough so that as it stands right now, our calendar is completely filled for December year-end jobs.  The best I can do for the remainder of the year, for December year-end jobs, is turn business away, tactfully.  Getting paid for not getting work.  That feels different.  Who gets paid for not doing something?  I know.  New job title.  “Mob Boss”!

Blackbirds

 

 

They’re still here.

 I’m afraid to put out any food.  I think I hear Alfred Hitchcock music…

Queen Butterfly

 

 

Not to be confused with the Monarch butterfly.

(Not my photo)

 

The Monarch doesn’t have any white spots on the orange wing part.

Oops

 

I wasn’t paying enough attention.  I saw a solo Oriole and called it an Altamira Oriole which is not uncommon here.  In reality, it’s a Hooded Oriole which is smaller than an Altamira and less common here.  Busted.

 

Altamira Oriole.

 

Hooded Oriole.

 

My bad.

 

An Altamira Oriole (Belatedly reidentified as a hooded oriole)

 

 

…pretending he’s a hummingbird. 

 

Drinking nectar from a feeder.

 

 

It’s a tropical and sub-tropical bird.

 

It doesn’t eat birdseed.  It likes insects, fruit, and nectar.

 

Huisache trees in bloom

 

Native to Texas.

 

Fragrant as a lilac.

 

A black swallowtail butterfly in our yard

 

 

 

 

At the grain silos

 

 

A thousand red-winged blackbirds.  A thousand brown-headed cowbirds.  Flowing back and forth.

 

One yellow-headed blackbird.

 

Buried in the branches.

Looking good in Orange

 

 

Wilson.  Number 3.  Currently the hottest selling Jersey in the NFL.

 Go Broncos!

 

 

The Vernal Equinox

 

Sunday, March 20, 2022.  The end of winter.  The beginning of spring.  Days and nights of equal length.  Well, not exactly on that last one.  There is a point in time where the amount of light and dark are the same, but that’s not the equinox, that’s the equilux.  We don’t talk about the equilux.  It doesn’t get any respect.

 

The vernal equinox is when the sun appears overhead directly over the equator, so it would seem that that would make day and night exactly the same length, but that point in time, the equinox, marks when the center of the sun is directly over the equator.  There is more to the sun than just the center, so even when the center of the sun is still below the horizon, the outer edge of the sun is already peeking above it.  Same for sunset.  Even after the center of the sun is below the horizon, the trailing edge of the sun is still visible, so we still have sunlight.  On either equinox, vernal and autumnal, at our latitude, daylight is about eight minutes longer than dark.  There is also a thing about the light of the sun being diffracted through our atmosphere and appearing before it is really actually there, but let’s focus on one thing at a time.

A day in the life

 

…of a northern cardinal.  The pictures I sent out a couple days ago were of a female northern cardinal.

 

Here is a male.

 

Quietly partaking of some seed.

 

A rival for the goodies arrives.  The cardinal goes on high alert.

 

The rival (a red-winged blackbird) launches an attack to drive the food competitor away.

 

No success.  The cardinal continues to eat.

 

 

The blackbird relocates to neutral ground.

 

 

Relative status settled.

And sparrows

Sparrows kind of all look alike.  There are a whole bunch of different species though.  They’re all about the same size.  They’re all little brown birds.  Most of the ones we see in cities look like this.  House Sparrows.

 

Male and female.  Note the clear breast of each and the dark face of the male.

 They’re often in flocks.

 

And here is something a little different visiting our feeder.  A lincoln’s sparrow.

 

A finely streaked breast.  A cresty head when he’s in that kind of mood.  And a buffy jawline.

 

He’ll come to a feeder around other birds, but otherwise more solitary than house sparrows.

Northern Cardinal

I haven’t sent out any bird pictures lately, so here is a female northern cardinal at our feeder.

 

 

 

 

We’re not feeding much right now because there are so many red-winged blackbirds they overwhelm our yard any time we put food out.  I think in a few days or weeks, the blackbirds will move on, and we can feed the regulars again.

 

Looking forward to the hummingbird migration in April.

 

Changing times

 

When we lived in the rig, it was our house.  Then we bought a house in the Valley and the bus became our great indulgence, a second home, a way to wander in great comfort.

 

The big motorhome is not that expensive to travel in; it’s comparable to airfare, hotels, and rental cars.  It’s getting old enough now that upkeep is a problem though.  It’s costing too much to keep it on the road.  So, after all these years, it’s time for a change.  We’re not going to get rid of the bus, just travel less in it on the premise that if we use it less, it should cost less to maintain.

 

We’ll try the fly/hotel/rental car visits with the kids this year and see how that works out.

 

F1

 

The first Formula One race of the season is next Sunday in Bahrain!  Practice on Friday, qualifying on Saturday, and race day Sunday.  Almost all the F1 races are on the other side of the planet, so they go on our DVR in the middle of the night, and they’re there when we wake up the next morning.  A far cry from the old days when we had to set the alarm before dawn for “Breakfast at Wimbledon”.  Meanwhile, we’re binging all the episodes of Race to Survive on Netflix to get us there.

 

The races do come our way later in the year.  Two races in the U.S. this time.  A new track around the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami in May, and The Circuit of the Americas in Austin in October before they go to Mexico then Brazil.  The Austin track has some nice terrain built into it.  The track in Miami will be as flat as the rest of South Florida.

The whining continues

 

I enjoy the outdoors.  I feel in touch with the forests and fields; the rhythm of the days and seasons.  Noon is when the sun is directly overhead, not when it is overhead somewhere else a thousand miles to the east!

 

Happy Daylight Saving Time

  

Did we really just save an hour of daylight?  I call B.S.

 

In spite of the B.S., we think we have successfully adjusted all our clocks forward, except for the one in my head.  Time will tell if we also adjusted any clocks forward that didn’t need to be adjusted.

Anhinga in motion

  

He stuck the landing.

 

The snake bird.  When he swims, from a distance he looks like a water snake.

 

If you haven’t seen one before, that’s because it’s a southern bird.

Bullets and bombs

 

So the dance isn’t as delicate as I first observed.  It’s more serious.  Russian access to banking has been curtailed.  Russian oil has at least been partially embargoed.  As western companies withdraw, modern conveniences like fast food brands, banking, and the value of their currency, are evaporating for Russia’s citizens.  Sanctions continue to escalate.  A unified West is taking this Ukraine invasion seriously.  Not seriously enough to go to WWIII, but enough to send a message.

 

So I wonder.  Will this message be effective?  Can sanctions stop bullets and bombs?  Perhaps they can trash a currency or an economy.  Sanctions might not be fast acting enough to save Ukraine, but if Russia wants to remain a world player in the long-term, it’s going to have to work its way back into the world economy over time, or figure out how to go it alone without engaging the west.  Can sanctions stop bombs and bullets?  Certainly not in a day or a week, and that totally sucks for Ukraine and all the people there, but if it turns out an invading country destroys its own well-being for generations to come in the process, the next time a country wants to be an unprovoked aggressor it might have to weigh the risk to its own survival that would entail.  Maybe economic sanctions can’t stop these bullets and bombs in Ukraine, but if the sanctions are persistent, they might right now be stopping future bullets and bombs.

 

Answer to yesterday’s challenge

 

 

It’s a Gulf Fritillary!  This is what it looks like on top.

(Not my photo.)

 

Kind of like a Monarch, only different.  Who knew a fritillary was a thing?  Well actually, one person.  Not counting me.  I had to look it up.