The happy family

 

 

Black-bellied Whistling Ducks.

 

 

I want to go to Mexico

 

Once in a while we get vagrant birds that cross the Rio Grande into Texas, and we have that brief opportunity to see them.  The place they are coming from is a mountain range not too far south of the border.  A long day-trip or a short camping trip into Mexico would open up a vastly different, more-tropical birding experience for us.

 

But we can’t go to Mexico.  Too much violence.  Drug cartels killing people.  We can’t justify the risk just to see a few birds.  There is a war on drugs going on.  I don’t actually know anything about the war on drugs, but that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion about it, so here is:

 

I think there are people who will use drugs.  There are people who will sell drugs.  The people who are going to use drugs will, regardless of the cost, and the people who will sell them will find a way.  The more difficult we make that transaction, the more money will change hands, the more profit will be made, and the more collateral damage there will be on either side of the equation.

 

How much damage do the drug users do to get the money to buy their drugs?  It’s a giant multiple of the money they actually spend on drugs.  And how many lives are lost?  In Mexico alone there are over 1,000 drug trafficking related deaths every month.  1,000 deaths, and those are not just people involved in the drug trade.  There are a lot of innocent men, women, and children in that number.  That’s over 50,000 deaths just in Mexico in the last 5 years, and the problem is much bigger than Mexico and the U.S.  It’s all over Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

 

What if we simplify it; decriminalize it?  Take desperation and exorbitant profit out of the equation.  Forget the war on drugs.  Let people buy and sell them.  They’re going to do it anyway.  Make the reason for the drug cartels go away.  Make the violence go away.  Make all the property damage go away.  Spend some money on education, prevention, and rehab.  We don’t have to abandon the drug users just because we don’t criminalize them.  Educate, prevent, rehabilitate, and allow for some personal responsibility.  There might be a downside to decriminalizing drugs, but can it be worse than the downside of continuing what we’re doing?

 

Then Judy and I can go to Mexico.

 

 

 

 

 

I got profiled

 

I don’t mind.  It’s happened before.

 

Last time it was the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.  They did a story on us in 2007 for their magazine.  They wanted to chronicle our wandering CPA ways.

This time it’s the Colorado Society of Certified Public Accountants.  They chose me for a member profile in their magazine.  We’re still not doing things the way they’re normally done.  We’re farther down the road now, so the story has evolved.

 

We did the interview last week and had a fun rambling conversation.  If that visit results in a coherent story, it will go in the July/August 2012 issue.  “An unconventional guy finding his way in a profession known for its convention.” is the tag line.

 

 

Looking back

 

We had a good wildflower spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indy 500

 

Nice smooth race.  Nice new cars; a new design.  A few wrecks, but nothing tragic.  Mostly it was about racing.  With identical cars now, nobody ran away with it.  Nobody could stay out front for long either.  With evenly matched cars it was all about lead changes.  Sometimes the lead changed every lap.

 

I do miss the intrigue of the old days.  Different cars.  Different chassis.  Different kinds of engines.  There was room for secrecy and sneak-attacks like Andy Granatelli’s STP gas turbine car surprise back in 1967.  Remember that?  He developed it in secret.  He stuck an aircraft engine in a redesigned Indy car and competed against all the conventional cars.  Took the field by surprise.  Took the entire establishment by surprise.  He led 172 of the 200 laps.  He would have won easily, but a $6 bearing broke in the rear-end before he could finish.  By the next season they had updated the rules to eliminate his advantage.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRr-DGO2sOw

 

Now they’re going 220mph plus and they have to keep changing the rules to keep the cars from going faster.  In the early days they allowed engine displacement of 7,400cc’s.  Now it’s all the way down to 2,200.

 

Judy made us a nice picnic lunch so I didn’t have to get up, and I got to watch the race with my son in Colorado.  We texted back and forth through it.  Altogether a good time.

 

 

It's fun to go to nurseries here

 

They tend to look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A vast selection of tropical and sub-tropical plants.

 

We got one of these, a Mediterranean Fan Palm.

 

Migration

 

Eastern Kingbirds

 

It takes weeks for them to all pass through.  We see 20 or 30 a day during the height of the migration.