Author: Steve

We bought this gear when we were in Maui for our twenty-fifth anniversary.  It’s special because of the lime green flippers.  Every day for two weeks, we had a cup of coffee in the condo then headed for the beach.  We were on the towels on the sand until it started to get hot, then we’d go in the water to cool off.  Snorkeling the shore reef in front of us was the way we cooled off in the water.  It was the Pacific Ocean, so eventually we got colder than we wanted to be and headed back to the sand to warm back up again.  I tended to stay in the water longer than Judy each time and it turned out that these green fins were a way she could track where I was and confirm that all was still well.  I wanted to spend as much time as I could underwater and as little time as possible on the surface.  Out there, with other snorkelers also paddling about, those bright green fins were easy for Judy to spot every time I did a flukes-up dive.

We saved them all this time for whenever we went back to Maui.  Well, we went to Maui for our twenty-fifth and again for our thirtieth.  Since then, priorities have changed and those were our only two trips to Maui.  As comfortable as we are now, and as much as we’re enjoying the traveling we’re doing in the van, we’re probably done with Hawaii trips.  There is also a good chance that the rubber might have fatigued a little over these last thirty years.  If we were to get them out to use them, we might find that they had aged out a long time ago anyway as they disintegrated in our hands.

After all these years of not playing racquetball, I’m finally ready to give up the racquetball bag.

I’m not too old to play.  I could still do it.  But there aren’t any racquetball courts within hundreds of miles of here.  And there is that issue of the neck surgery.  With four vertebrae fused together I would be less competitive because I can’t just glance back over my shoulder anymore to track the ball or the other player, but I could still run around and whack the ball and have fun.

I would love that, but that brings me back to the neck thing.  The surgeon warned me that having those vertebrae fused would put an extra strain on the adjacent joints and we’d have to keep an eye on them.  I probably don’t want to put that sort of rotational stress on the part of my neck that still works.

It didn’t take me all these years to recognize that playing racquetball again isn’t a good idea.  It’s more that I didn’t want to acknowledge it so clearly that I would give up the bag and all the gear that goes in it.  Shoes.  Racquets.  Balls.  Gloves.  I’m okay with it now.  The racquetball career is over.  And even without racquetball, I still have plenty on my plate.

Black-crowned.

They’re not everywhere in the world, but they are in some places all over the world.

And yellow-crowned.

Found only in the Americas.  Quite a bit in the Eastern U.S.

Two different species.  That’s a record for us.  First, in the bird blind at Laguna Vista Nature Center, a deeply colored long tailed ocelot walked through the underbrush, without giving us a clear view, but enough to be sure what it was.  Then, later on a trail, still at Laguan Vista, a bobcat popped out.  Long-legged, paler and grayer color, bobbed tail.  I didn’t get a good picture, just this one from his south end.

I learned years ago not to play Sudoku right before bed.  It’s a repetitive thing, and if I get that machine in my head going, and there is nothing else to distract it, the machine just keeps going and going and going; making up imaginary Sudoku patterns and solving them.

Last night’s mistake was to do a round of Spanish on Duolingo right before bed.  Got the machine going again, lying there making up imaginary situations that would accommodate my limited knowledge of Spanish, then coming up with words and phrases that would address them.

Sleep would have been more appropriate.