In case you’re wondering

 

 

The dogs are awake sometimes as well.

 

 

Nothing else on my mind

 

 

 

I guess I’ll send out more pictures of sleeping puppies until something else occurs to me.

 

 

Oh, I passed another kidney stone.  That should do it.  There was only one more left in my kidney.  I should be good for several more years now.

 

 

I need to get out more

 

 

 

So does Henry.

 

Where this week’s eggs are from

 

 

Meadowlark Farm

 

 

https://vitalfarms.com/farm/meadowlark/

 

Not many chickens in this shot.  Nice pasture though.

 

Did you watch that Broncos game last night?

 

 

Their final preseason game.  Sure, it was our 2s against their 2s, but the coaches called the right personnel packages, formations, and plays.  The players executed.  41-0 over the Rams.  The Broncos are going to the Super Bowl!

 

 

Robotic lawnmowers

 

 

Turns out there are plenty available on Amazon.

 

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=robot+lawnmower&crid=JCX4DHJ8XTVF&sprefix=robot+lawnmower%2Caps%2C148&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

 

They just haven’t been adopted in my neighborhood, so I haven’t seen them yet!

 

 

This seems like the most popular one.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/15201-20-Automatic-Bluetooth-Boundary-quietest/dp/B08LNQT5KW/ref=sr_1_4?crid=JCX4DHJ8XTVF&keywords=robot%2Blawnmower&qid=1692914227&sprefix=robot%2Blawnmower%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-4&th=1

 

 

This looks like the coolest and most expensive one.  $3,000.  Eek!

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/EF-ECOFLOW-Boundaries-Auto-Route-Water-Resistant/dp/B0C7BX2N6D/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1RJ3BCJS13PME&keywords=ecoflow%2Bblade%2Brobotic%2Blawn%2Bmower&qid=1692982120&sprefix=ecoflow%2Bblade%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-4&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.ac2169a1-b668-44b9-8bd0-5ec63b24bcb5&th=1

 

 

Morning light

 

 

 

 

What if

 

 

What if my self-propelled electric lawnmower didn’t have a big handle to push it with, but had a controller box with a joystick instead?  Why are we walking back and forth across the yard with something that is already providing its own propulsion?  Is it because nobody has figured out how to steer something, or switch it from forward to reverse, without being in it, on it, or next to it?  I don’t think so.  Why aren’t we all in lounge chairs driving the mower with a remote-control stick?  Or why can’t a lawnmower learn our yard like a Roomba learns our living room and just mow by itself?  “Honey, I’m going to go mow the lawn.  Oh, nevermind, the Yardba already got it.”

 

Finally

 

 

After two months of triple digits.  Today a temperature in the high eighties.  Overcast.  Almost rainy.

 

Our air conditioning kept up.

 

A new thing

 

We bought some eggs.  We saw an opportunity to buy eggs from happy chickens that get to roam free versus eggs produced from chickens in cages so we went for it.  Printed on the egg carton was a link to a video showing the chickens at the farm our eggs came from.

 

https://vitalfarms.com/farm/helms-holler/

 

How smart was that!  They put up a video of the very chickens that laid our eggs grazing in their pasture!

 

The video isn’t a livestream, that wouldn’t make sense from rural locations, but it is a 360 degree view we can turn through.  Sure, these eggs are a little pricier, and in the grand scheme of things probably don’t provide a giant difference in nutrition, but who wouldn’t want the baby mamas of their breakfast eggs to live this happy and free?

 

This is a White-lined Sphinx Moth

 

 

I think.

 

That would be a kind of Hummingbird Moth; they feed on nectar.  They fly and hover just like a hummingbird, but they’re much smaller.

 

It was there, wedged between the door and the door frame of the Jeep when I opened the door in the morning.  He was very tolerant of our activity while we got stuff in and out of the car.  I had to scare him off on purpose before I could close the door for fear of smushing him.

 

Nice rodent!

 

 

 

A California Ground Squirrel, in fact.  We saw it in Oregon.

 

 

I had a disturbing dream

 

 

Disturbing and interesting.

 

I’m with another guy, but I don’t know him.  We were walking through a shabby part of town; what town I have no idea.  We were stopping and looking at stuff in thrift stores.  At one particular store, I was looking the other way when I heard the shopkeeper say “So this is how it’s going to be.”  I didn’t understand what he meant.  I turned and looked to see that the three of us were aligned in a straight line, him in the middle with a table of stuff between him and me, and the other guy behind him.  The shopkeeper said “So which of you is it going to be?”  I still didn’t understand.  Then the other guy began the assault.  Up to that point, I had no idea what was going to happen.  I was surprised and shaken by the violence.  That dream was disturbing.  I’m not trying to analyze it.  I don’t think dreams, especially bad dreams, really mean anything, they just are.  I wouldn’t even be describing this dream, except that I need it to set the scene for the interesting part.

 

The interesting part, and what struck me right away, even while I was still dreaming, was that the shopkeeper figured it out so fast.  This was a dream coming from my head and he figured out what was going to happen way before I did.  I’m dreaming him.  He should only know what I know.  How could he know before I did, and not just by a little, not just a moment, not a split second, but by a lot?  He saw it coming and I never did.

 

 

 

Politics

 

 

I’ve figured it out.  I’ve been puzzled by politics for years now.  How can we all be looking at the same information yet be so far apart in our understanding.  Well today the pieces came together.  I heard politicians and analysts talking on the radio and they all agreed that if Trump gets elected to be president again, that will be the end of our democracy.  We won’t have our country anymore.  Well, that triggered a recollection.  Years ago, when Obama got elected, Judy and I were out for an evening walk at Gulf Waters and stopped to visit with a person we didn’t know at the time.  We were both shocked when we heard him say we were never going to get our country back again.  We didn’t know it was gone, but he was apoplectic so we knew something must have happened.  We had to think about it and talk about it for a while until we made the connection that for some, our country was gone right at the moment a black man got elected as president. 

 

I can be pretty smart sometimes, and I’ve thought this through.  I’ve put two and two together.  If Trump regains the presidency, we’ll never get our country back.  When Obama got elected, we’ll never get our country back.  What this all means?  Trump is black!

 

 

Economics

 

 

When I was younger, I thought of the cost of acquisition as the price of an object.  If I paid a certain price for something, I was done.  Now it was mine.

 

As I got older though, I gradually realized that the cost of acquisition was only the beginning.  Everything a person buys has a continuing cost.  Houses, cars, bicycles, boats.  Each item has to be maintained, maybe even repaired from time to time.  If nothing else, it takes up space.  It has to be housed.

 

The real price of an acquisition is what a person pays for it plus all the future costs.  For the future, every acquisition requires an endowment, either in the form of money set aside for its lifetime costs, or more commonly, a share of a continuing income stream for the life of the object.  The more things we own, the more continuing costs we’ve accumulated, the less flexibility we have, and the more dependent we are on that endowment or continuing income stream.

 

 

Had a bug thing last night

 

 

Judy went outside with the dogs and discovered a grasshopper on the deck.  I went out to take a picture,

 

But before I could get a good shot, the grasshopper flew in the open door to our living room.  We didn’t really want it in the house, but that gave me a better chance for a picture anyway.

 

I think it’s called an “obscure bird grasshopper”.  Bird grasshoppers tend to fly well and even land in trees if disturbed.  After the kodak moment in the house, we were able to liberate it back into the night.  It flew off in the dark and landed in a tree across the road.

 

Roads and bridges

 

 

How do we fund roads and bridges?  Gasoline taxes.  Every vehicle that uses roads and bridges pays its share.  Except electric vehicles.  They don’t pay any gasoline taxes.  Uh oh.  Electric vehicles are a necessary component of our response to climate change, but how are they going to pay their share for road use? 

 

There is no national solution.  It's a state-by-state issue.  I checked with Colorado.  They have added an annual tax on top of their registration renewal each year for electric cars, for the average amount other cars pay in fuel tax.  Not a perfect solution, people that use their electric cars less than average end up paying more than their share, but Colorado has done something and that’s better than nothing.

 

Texas has instituted an initial $400 fee for registering an electric vehicle, and an annual $200 fee after that, which is actually punitive because it’s more than the average gasoline powered car pays in fuel taxes.  Whatever.  Even if the system for each state isn’t perfect, at least it’s something.    Some states haven’t done anything at all.  They need to step up.  We don’t want the quality of our infrastructure to suffer because we’ve improved our methods of getting out and about.

 

From when we were in Colorado

 

 

You can put guards on utility poles to discourage birds from roosting or nesting there.

 

 

But nesting ospreys are not easily dissuaded.

 

 

Trimmed the Texas Firebush

 

 

 

It got a little big while we were gone.  Now we can just get around it to get to the thicket.  There are still plenty of flowers left for the hummingbirds.  I could have trimmed it more, but I didn’t have any more room for the clippings in the compost tumblers.

 

In this heat and humidity, it won’t take long for this batch to cook down.  Then I can smooth out something else.  Maybe the orange Esperanza.

 

 

Solar energy

 

 

Rooftop solar collectors seem like such a good idea.  They generate the electricity right where it’s going to be used.  They don’t require any additional land use.  They’re disbursed, so they’re resilient to natural disasters and local weather events.  And if they generate more than the house needs, they can feed the excess back into the grid.

 

What I wonder about though is that there seems to be a limit for how many to put on a roof, that limit being meant to cover the average energy use of each house installing them.  I recognize that not everyone can afford the up-front costs to install solar panels, but my thought is that if we have such a wonderful way to generate electricity, why would we want to limit it?  For those that can afford it, encourage them to install as many panels as they want.  Let them feed excess power back into the grid so the utility company doesn’t have to generate as much with oil and gas.  If the energy grid can’t support the privately generated amount, update the grid.  If the utility fee structure can’t support privately generated electricity, update the fee structure.  Incentivize private citizens to generate more than they need and take advantage of it instead of building more power plants!

 

Burning questions

 

 

At RV dump stations there is a hole in the middle to dump gray water or black water.  There is a freshwater hose there in the middle to wash away any spillage.  Then, out at the ends of the dump island, there are spigots of fresh water that are deemed safe.

 

The hose in the middle is labeled as non-potable. 

 

This is what the spigot at the end of the island looks like.

 

Contaminated water and safe water.  Of course, we only want to fill up our tanks with safe water.  But then I had to start wondering about how different is the water, really, from these two different sources.  Do we really think that there is plumbing for two different kinds of water underneath every RV dump station; treated water and untreated water?  I don’t think so.  That’s way too much work; too much infrastructure.

 

Here is what I think.  Each outlet is delivering water from the exact same source.  The danger of the middle hose is that it might get contaminated by people using it to rinse out dump hoses, so they label the water from that spigot as non-potable.  I don’t know if this explanation is true or not, but it answers my burning question, and I can move on.

 

Javi the groomer came today

 

 

It’s a mobile service.  It all happens in his grooming van in our driveway, one dog at a time.

 

Jesse before.

 

 

And after.

 

Henry before.

 

And after.

 

They were a little funky from our camping travels.  Now we’re all fresh and clean again!

 

A nice house in Becky and Brian’s neighborhood

 

 

 

I just like the way it looks.

 

 

Accounting Professor

 

 

I was a young guy.  Maybe 25.  Don was a young guy too then.  Maybe 35.  Don turned out to be my favorite accounting instructor, in fact my favorite professor in any subject ever.  A charismatic interesting guy.  I could hang with him in his office outside of class and talk with him about accounting, or anything else.  We ended up friends.

 

Well, we stayed in touch.  And all these years later we still get together to catch up.  Wouldn’t it be fun if we had a picture together back then.  Well, we have a picture of us now.  Me and my favorite accounting professor.

 

 

 

Home again

 

 

 

Denver to Edinburg.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Edinburg,+TX/@32.2523919,-103.7287224,5.27z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8665a2223e8635c3:0x89ef181150dac144!8m2!3d26.3017374!4d-98.1633432!16zL20vMDEwM2I1?entry=ttu

 

It’s good to be here.

 

 

Jesse with her face over the air conditioning vent.

 

San Antonio

 

 

A longer day today.  Now we’re close to home.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.2313582,-103.1073206,5.27z?entry=ttu

 

Stopped at Ballinger City Park for lunch.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ballinger,+TX+76821/@31.6166289,-98.9046538,7.27z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8657a65604bd0d57:0xfcc1f013088e95c9!8m2!3d31.7382062!4d-99.9473077!16zL20vMDEwODk2?entry=ttu

 

 

 

San Antonio KOA.

 

Another camping cabin.  Looks a lot like last night’s in Lubbock.

 

Identical floor plan.  A little newer.  A little brighter.

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t matter where it is to the dogs.