Author: Steve

It’s a mess because we’re emptying out the cupboards and packing up anything that’s loose.  We’re doing that to get out of the way of the workers who are going to fix everything up for us.  They’re fixing everything up because the bottom of the cabinets and the floor in front of the sink are saturated, because there was a water leak, because there was a hole in the PEX flexible plumbing, because a mouse or rat chewed on it while we were gone, because the skirting around the base of the house wasn’t perfectly sealed and the varmint got in.  Don’t know why he chewed the plumbing.  We’ve had mice before and none of them ever chewed through the plumbing.  I guess that’s his personal superpower.

While we had the skirting around the house open to let the water dry out another possum got in, so Donald the pest control guy came out and set a trap.  Here is the possum playing possum.

…but I digress.

That’s a big section of floor that has to be repaired and replaced so we’re just doing all the floor in the whole house and it will all match.  We can’t just pull out one section of cabinet and replace it with a dry one, like the insurance company is limiting its coverage to, so we’ll upgrade the cabinets while we’re at it.  We needed to anyway.  The cabinets are trailer furniture; pressed wood with a paper layer to look like wood.  The paper was peeling.  (We’ve been here fifteen years already.)

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.