It’s important to have a varied diet

 

 

So tonight, we had a meal that is varied from anything found in nature!

 

But who doesn’t enjoy a good chilidog and tater tots meal once in a while!

 

 

Oh. Yeah.

 

 

Not 20-25 vision for Judy.  20-15.  Better than 20-20.  What can I say.  I never was that good with numbers…

 

Miss perfect!

 

 

Our lives have been turned upside down.

 

It has been a couple years since I got a new prescription for glasses, so I took care of that.  Judy was with me when we went back to pick them up today.  I tried the glasses on, and they were perfect.  I stood at the line on the floor and read the chart on the wall.  The last line I could make out clearly was for 20-20 vision.  Before I could step away, Judy, from behind me, started reading off the next line on the chart.  What?  My vision has always been better than Judy’s.  I’m the one who reads off street signs before she can make them out.  I’m the one who can still see to drive at night!  Suddenly, since her cataract surgery a couple years ago, she sees better than I do.  My vision is perfect at 20-20.  Judy’s is a little more perfect, at 20-25.

 

I have been reminded of this already, several times since.  There is no indication that I’m going to hear any less of it anytime soon.

 

 

Congressional districts

 

 

I don’t know why, but I got to thinking about congressional districts.  As the populations of each state change, states get allocated more or less votes in congress so that every voter in the country gets equal representation.  With every new census, if the number of representatives changes for a state, the state has to redraw districts so that each district represents roughly the same number of voters.  Don’t want to have a thousand voters in one district getting a representative, and then ten thousand voters in a different district, still getting only one representative.  It all makes sense.

 

It is up to each state to determine how to redraw their districts, but there are guidelines from the National Conference of State Legislatures for redrawing congressional districts fairly.  This is a clip of the major points.

 

 

 

Pick a state at random, like say, Iowa.  It’s a simple rectangular state.  It could easily accommodate the first three concepts listed above of compactness, contiguity, and preservation of counties; and it appears that it does.

 

One might quibble over which counties on the district borders should go with which districts, especially between districts 1 and 4.  Maybe they had to draw that ragged line just to make sure each district had the same number of voters.  Maybe not.  But overall, this map might be in alignment with the guidelines.

 

So how about a look at Texas.

 

All districts are contiguous, that’s cool, but it’s obvious that the map leaves something to be desired in terms of compactness and preservation of county lines.  I’m looking particularly at where we live in Way South Texas.  It could easily be covered by one square or rectangular district.  Instead, it’s divided into three.  There is absolutely no pretense of drawing districts in a way that follows the guidelines of the National Conference of State Legislatures.  District 15, the one we live in, goes 250 miles north, all the way past San Antonio and is only a few miles wide, transecting multiple counties without encompassing them.  It is anything but compact.

 

 

 

Who doesn’t love a good swarm

 

 

 

Buzzing chattering little balls of energy!

 

 

 

 

I’ve done it

 

 

I’ve found the world’s most perfect reusable water bottle.

 

It holds the same amount as a Dasani bottle, 500ml, about 17 ounces.

 

Lightweight.  It is about the same diameter as a Dasani bottle, so it fits in a back pocket.  (One in each back pocket for a longer hike.)  It doesn’t have any plastic flavor like those old Nalgene bottles we used to backpack with.  It is BPA-free, so it shouldn’t poison us.  It’s not made out of metal, so it doesn’t clank against teeth or taste like metal.  It’s not insulated, so we get the most capacity without any wasted space.  It has a nice tight seal on the lid, so it doesn’t spill if it’s knocked over or stored on its side.  The lid pops open at the push of a button and it has a built-in drinking straw.

 

It's everything nature intended a reusable water bottle to be!  We refill it with RO water at the sink, so any new single use Dasani water bottles are a thing of the past at our house.

 

 

Two things

 

 

First, Matt’s saltwater tank is awesome!  Rocks, corals, anemones, crabs, shrimp.  And fish.

 

Here it is in a video.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSGmybf8Pc

 

 

And second, Austin’s high school orchestra is amazing.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ1UiurJnmg

 

At the end, Austin is the kid with glasses in the middle standing up in the violin section on the left.

 

 

What a difference between middle school and high school!

 

 

A walk at Estero Llano Grande State Park

 

 

 

 

The summertime grass is high.

 

 

Spotted a nighthawk perched on a branch.

 

Nicely camouflaged.  You can’t see him very well with the branches in front of him.

 

And a little blue heron camouflaged as a white bird.

 

All the youngster little blues are white and don’t turn that beautiful purple/blue until their second year.  Then they look like this.

 

Judy’s little cactus/succulent garden

 

 

 

It’s starting to bloom!

 

 

Count me skeptical

 

 

The kids tell us that they’re in England and Ireland, but I’m not sure I believe them.

 

 

 

They might be in Disneyland!

 

A Fish story

 

 

Our friend John Steinbaugh, the gray guy in this picture, with a rainbow trout he caught (but probably can’t hold up at arm’s length toward the camera like that.  That’s what the young guy is for.)

 

That’s one heckofa trout!

 

A screen door

 

 

It’s not a dog door.  The dog door is in the wall next to the screen door.  If something really exciting happens on the porch though, the screen door can become a dog door, unhinged at the bottom.  A free-floating screen.  That happened at our house.  All the dogs had to do was blow through the screen door one time and then they could freely go in and out their door or our door any time they wanted.

 

We decided to improve the appearance and have the door re-screened.  To mitigate the risk of another screen door blowout, we put some screen decorations on the door at the appropriate height.

 

The decorations are reminders to anyone charging toward the door at that height, that even though they might not see it in a moment of excitement, there really is something there between them and the outside where the exciting thing is.

 

The decorations make cool shadows on the living room floor in the morning light too.

 

Just for the heck of it, we put one more screen door decoration at an appropriate height, just in case any of the human persons in our house don’t notice that the door is there in a moment of excitement.

 

 

 

Outside the box

 

 

Instead of wondering how they could take an existing car and turn it into an electric car, Aptera wondered how they could create the best, most sustainable, way of getting people from one place to another, regardless of what’s been done before.  They came up with this:

 

 

It’s got the stability of a two-front-wheel trike.  It’s lightweight and has a drag coefficient of almost zero.  Powered by electric motors.  Every horizontal surface covered in solar collector tiles.  Fully enclosed and roomy for two people with plenty of cargo space.  Zippy performance and a 1,000 mile range.  Charge up 40 miles for free every day just by parking (or driving) it outside in the sun.

 

Aptera Motors

 

Yeah.  That’s outside the box.  This may not be a car that all of us want to drive, but a smooth silent runabout for the city, that never has to be gassed up or even plugged in?  That’s worth a look!

 

 

A silhouette of a hummingbird

 

 

 

Perched on a silhouette of a chickadee!

 

 

Who doesn’t love a cloudy day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gross

 

 

An outbreak of house flies in the yard.  Don’t know what causes it, but it happens around this time of year.  It’s annoying.

 

Got an idea, researched online, and put out a fly trap consisting of a hanging two-quart jar with some attractant and water in it that draws the flies in and they can’t get out.  It worked.  It smells terrible, so we had to put it a ways away from the deck, but it works.  After a few weeks we had a pretty good collection of flies floating in there, but then things got weird.  It started collecting faster and faster until it was almost full.  I’ll spare you the photo.  That couldn’t be right because there just weren’t that many flies to collect in the first place.  I realized that not only were flies trapped in the jar and couldn’t get out, they were breeding in the jar before they died and the population was increasing exponentially!

 

Gross!  We now know there is a practical time limit on how long we can leave that fly trap out.  We disposed of the old one and put a fresh one out.

 

 

Brother Bill

 

 

Did I ever confess my confusion about backpacking prep lists?  All those years ago, on our first backpacking trip together in Colorado, we were comparing backpacking lists to make sure we weren’t missing anything.  I saw a tide table on yours.  Tide.  That’s the detergent we’ve always used to wash our clothes.  I immediately went there.  A tide table.  I couldn’t figure out why or how we could bring a table for washing clothes, but I knew you wouldn’t pack anything unnecessarily heavy, so I just waited to see what it turned out to be.

 

It never turned out to be anything on that trip in Colorado.  It wasn’t until a later trip, on the Olympic Peninsula, that I was able to escape that first fatal logic flaw and realize that a tide table didn’t have anything to do with washing clothes; you needed to bring along a tide chart anytime you might be walking along the coast.  Don’t want to get caught out on a spit at the bottom of a cliff during a rising tide.  Not an issue I ever had to consider on my backcountry trips in Colorado.

 

This is fun!

 

 

The kids are in England and Ireland and we’re helping them identify birds.  A virtual birding tour for Judy and me!  The pictures are all forwarded from cellphones so they can be a little scratchy.

 

It looks like most of the ducks are mallards.

 

One that looks like a Swedish Blue.

 

They look like this.

(From the internet.)

 

Canada Goose.  Mute Swan.

 

Rock Pigeon.  (Like ours in the states.)

 

A gull.

 

I’m going to guess an off-season black-headed gull.  That’s not something we see here.

 

A Rook.

Looks like a big Raven.  Definitely don’t see that here.

 

And a White Wagtail.

 

(From the internet.)  Another bird we’ve never seen.