Common pauraque

 

 

Usually when I send out pauraque pictures I’m describing where the tail is, but it’s obscured.  Here is a shot with the tail out in the open.

 

 

And here is a head-on shot I don’t usually get.

 

 

 

I was just thinking

 

Mirrors reverse everything.  When I look in a mirror and raise my right hand, it looks like I’m raising my left.  That leaves me with a question:  Why does the mirror only reverse left to right and not top to bottom too?

 

If I lie on my side in front of a mirror and raise my right arm, it still looks like I’m raising my left, so why when I’m standing up, do I still see my head at the top, and not my toes?

 

 

I'm so glad

 

I’m so glad we didn’t have anything invested in this Super Bowl; it didn’t really matter to us who won.  Wow, what a game, but it had to be agonizing for fans of either team.

 

Life is so much simpler when your favorite team is *not* in the Super Bowl.

 

 

We got applauded today

 

It was the simplest little thing.

 

We left the Taco Bell, walked across the parking lot and got in the car.  As I was walking around to my side of the car, I heard this sound.  A woman in the passenger seat of a car waiting at the stoplight on the corner had rolled down her window and was clapping.  Something about us delighted her. Maybe it was that we were holding hands on the way to the car.  Maybe it was that I opened the car door for Judy.

 

I waved back and she gave me a thumbs up.  Judy waved back and the onlooker gave her a thumbs up as they were driving on.  It left us happy that she was so happy.

 

A serendipitous moment; we contributing a moment of joy to her day, and she to ours.

 

An orange-crowned warbler

 

Enjoying nature’s most perfect food.

 

 

 

 

 

Time to go home.

 

2017 January trip

 

We ran out of dog food.

 

We’re back to Sandpipers.

 

 

See that?

 

 

There at the bottom of the bushes.

 

It’s a snake.

 

A tiny tiny tiny little snake.

 

It’s called a Texas long-nosed snake.

 

It’s a harmless little thing.

 

But its nose doesn’t look very long to me.

 

 

Meanwhile,

 

Evening light.

 

We signed up for another night.

 

We have to go to Mars

 

That seems to be the conventional scientific wisdom.  The mission to get to Mars is all over the news now.

 

I totally get the appeal of the challenge; the adventure of it all.  And, it’s something that could be done, even if not all of the technology exists yet, we should be able to develop it in the next few decades.  Yes.  I agree.  We should definitely go to Mars.

 

We need more justification than just that though; that it would be a cool thing to do.  We need reason to spend that much time and money; something that will generate the political will to take on the task of getting us there.  That reason I’ve heard expressed as “Our time on this planet is limited.  Whether we destroy the planet ourselves or we get hit by an asteroid, it’s only a matter of time.  If we want our species to survive, we have to become multi-planetary.”

 

I’m not buying it.  It doesn’t matter what we do, our species is not going to survive.  We’ll live until we blow the planet up, or an asteroid scores a direct hit.  Maybe we last until the earth’s core cools enough in about three and a half billion years to make the planet uninhabitable like Mars is already.  It’s just a matter of time.

 

We could become multi-planetary as a delaying tactic, so we can last longer than the planet earth, but we’ll still run out of time.  As the sun runs out of fuel and becomes a red giant in about five billion years, it will expand, enveloping the current orbit of the earth.  Not much chance of surviving that.  If we become inter-stellar; moving to other planets around other stars in our galaxy, that’s only another delaying tactic.

 

The fabric of time and space continues to expand.  The distance between stars and galaxies increases.  Our knowledge of the Universe is limited by the speed of light.  We only know what we can detect.  Eventually all the stars and galaxies will be so far apart the light from one will never reach another.  We will be alone in the Universe again, with no way to tell if there are any other worlds still out there; nowhere else to migrate to, and if we do survive until then, no-one will ever know.

 

 

We signed up for another night.