Six days

without racquetball ended well. We were home by three o'clock and playing racquetball by four.

Judy and I met up in Reno. She had an uneventful drive up to San Jose where she met up with Mike and Katie and Jack, and Jacob and Yousun. A quick visit and a bassinette later she was on the road to Reno.

My drive west in the motorhome was uneventful as well, until I was almost through Utah. I had a little wind trouble crossing the salt flats. The wind was driving straight south while I was driving straight west. I needed just a little shift in the angle of impact, but the road didn't twitch for fifty miles. Neither did the wind.

I ended up driving on the shoulder between fifteen and twenty miles an hour, sometimes in whiteout conditions from the salt flat being blown across the road, while the awning mechanism tried to shudder and bend and flap itself off.

All the awning mechanism was intact, and locked tightly into place, but the top part which is held in by the spring mechanism in the roller wanted to unroll. After struggling along in the wind for an hour or so, all the mechanism was still there, but the fabric holding it all together was thoroughly shredded. Later that evening, parked for the night in Wendover Nevada, I figured out that a couple strips of duct tape wrapped around the top of the arms would secure the awning closed for the rest of the trip. In fact, if I had thought of it then, I probably could have taped the mechanism shut right during the windstorm and saved the awning fabric. In fact, I might tape it up before the next trip as a preemptive strike.

The weather was no problem the rest of the trip.

In Reno, Judy and I did finally meet up after almost a month apart. Within twenty minutes our reunion turned into a trip to the all-night emergency veterinary clinic to get the foxtail removed that Annie had snuffed up her nose. It was not visible, but the uncontrollable sneezing fit, the blood running from the nostril, and the contorted face were enough to convince us she needed attention. We had to leave her overnight while they put her all the way out to retrieve the deadly burr. The recovery was complete the next morning when we picked her up.

Five days, two thousand miles, all on interstate 80. Overnights in Laramie, Wendover, Reno, Wendover, and Rawlins. Gorgeous drive this time of year. Everybody home for a week. Off this weekend for a motorhome camp trip to Bonnie reservoir out on the Kansas border. Then off the Saturday after that to a conference in Orlando for a week. There is a shuttle launch while we're there, so we'll stay an extra day. Then another extra day for a swim with the dolphins, then home.

Well, that's the news from Louisville.

Update

It's time for Judy to come home. She has been in California for weeks, assisting and advocating.

Some things have gone well. She got Margie all set up with Hospice care. She has been there for lots of doctor's appointments, conversations, and decisions.

Margie has uterine cancer and it is terminal. Hospice should be able to keep her relatively comfortable at home. Judy's Dad has a more aggressive cancer somewhere in the ear/nose/throat system. He can stay at home too, but his situation is worse. It will not be comfortable.

Judy is attending the funeral of our childhood friend Cathy in Long Beach on Saturday, then she is setting out on a completely different tack for awhile. She will drive north to say "hi" to Mike and Katie, play with Jack briefly, and pick up the bassinette. Then she'll head east on Interstate 80.

Meanwhile, I'll load up the motorhome and head west on I-80. We hope to meet up somewhere around Reno, hook the car up to the motorhome, and tow home. We might take a couple extra days to decompress on the way back.

We know another trip to California will be in order soon for Judy, but it will be great to get her back to our life in Colorado for awhile.

S

Weather

I was working in the yard today, getting sunburned on a beautiful 72 degree blue-sky day, when the wind whipped up from the north. It blew so hard I had to go inside to take cover. Ten minutes later, the temperature had dropped 30 degrees, to 42.

Now it is in the thirties, and snowing.

Springtime in the Rockies.

Road signs

We saw the smartest road sign in Nebraska. We could use it in our town.

There is this difficult intersection in Louisville at Rex and Roosevelt. If you pull up, glance both ways, and pull out: you'll pull out in front of someone. There doesn't seem to be any visibility impairment. But there is something about the grade of one street versus the other, or the parked cars on both sides of the street, or the speed the traffic approaches. It is just difficult. There are close-calls everyday.

So we're at a stop sign waiting to pull out onto a four-lane divided highway in a small town in Nebraska. There was a small sign directly under the stop sign on the side street. It said "Look Again".

Weather

Another sure sign of spring....

Our high temperature today is forty degrees lower than the high yesterday... It's snowing.

S

Friday

Things were getting a little calm here, so Judy livened up the action by dropping something really heavy from the back of her van into the yard cart. The yard cart livened up the action by flipping up and smacking her in the head with its handle.

She seemed ok for awhile, but about 8:30 she started getting unusually goofy. We spent a few hours at the "urgent care clinic". Do you have any idea how busy an "urgent care clinic" can be on a Friday night? We got there at 9:30 and the doctor saw her at 11:30. They wanted to watch her for a few hours. About 1:30 we headed to the Boulder Community Hospital emergency room for the CAT scan. Do you have any idea how busy a hospital emergency room can be on a Friday night/Saturday morning?

Judy survived the closed-head injury. They pronounced it to be a concussion with no signs of physical injury inside. We survived the sleep deprivation. We were out of there by 4am. Drove home, had a quick dinner, and got to bed by 5am.

Judy decided to not play her racquetball game on Saturday morning. Judy is gradually returning to her normal charming self, and so am I.

Sandhills

We're back.

Two states, one night in a motel, seven hundred fifty miles, four bald eagles, one flock of white-tailed ptarmigan, one humongous flock of snow geese, and fifty thousand sandhill cranes.

IT WAS WONDERFUL! One of the greatest remaining wildlife spectacles, four hundred thousand sandhill cranes stop over in Kearney to refuel. They spend a few weeks on the ground cleaning up the spilled corn from the fields and sleep at night standing on submerged sandbars in the Platte river. They put on about a pound of body weight each before heading north as far as Canada and Alaska for the summer.

We saw flocks and flocks of cranes feasting in fields as we drove around Saturday afternoon. We positioned ourselves out on the hike/bike bridge at Fort Kearney Recreation Area for the evening arrival. As it got closer to sunset, the sky filled with flocks congregating from all directions for their final staging at the river's edge. Just as it started getting too dark to see clearly, they all did their final swirl in the air for the night to pack together in the water as closely as they could. Our best estimate is that we really saw fifty thousand Sandhill Cranes in the final two hours of the day.

Sandhills talk a lot. They make a sound I'd call a loud "chirrup" noise. Sometimes when they're all doing it at once, some of them degenerate into something close to a Canada Goose "honk". It's a great variety of noise.

So as we're standing on the bridge, watching them arrive from all directions, including right over our heads, we get to hear them from all directions as well; including from the forty thousand already in the river shouting encouragement to the ones remaining in the air. It was a sensory delight.