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Wednesday

 Great progress on the deck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdCxAxcA540&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7qBvOu8AU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL And the day’s result:  Pretty soon they can work on the deck in the shade!  Off to Choke Canyon in the motorhome tomorrow for a visit with Janis and Brian.  We’ve planned to get together with them, but stiffed them on the last three scheduled visits.  Life keeps getting in the way of our plans.  We’re determined this time.  It’s only 2 or 3 hours away.  Judy will stay here and supervise the deck, then join us on the weekend.  
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Recycling

 We support and participate.  We applaud the effort.  I want it to work.  But before we throw a bottle or can in the bin, what do we do with it?  We don’t want the recycle bin to smell like old food or get full of bees, so we rinse out the container.  Over and over, every container, a rinse.  Clean water is a resource too.  It’s not free or unlimited.  I have to wonder how this all balances out; the use of precious resources to preserve precious resources. I stand in front of the sink with a finished jar of peanut butter in my hand.  What is the cost/benefit of recycling that plastic container if it takes me 5 minutes of hot water to rinse it out?  Today’s progress:  
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Yeaa

 The sutures are out from the sides of our faces.  It feels better already.  I’ll be able to sleep on my left side again.  There aren’t that many possible positions to sleep in.  Take away one of those, and it makes a noticeable difference. If you remember, they took slices out of the left side of each of our faces right in front of the ear.  That provided the skin for the round skin graft we each needed on our noses.  They pulled the edges of that slice back together with stitches.  Kind of like a face lift (or pull), but only on one side.  In terms of nip-tuck, we just got the nip. It will be another week before we address the stitches in our noses, but they each seem to be healing just fine.  In the meantime, I got hit with the liquid nitrogen can again.  Compared to the lidocaine shots to the nose in preparation for surgery though, the liquid nitrogen hits are a pleasure. Today’s progress on the deck:  
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Sunday

 Exciting morning.  Having late coffee on the patio, at 9:30, we got a hawk liftoff.  The Turkey Vultures were first.  A few Turkey Vultures rising from the thorn forest outside the resort; not that remarkable.  But they kept rising; more and more vultures.  10, 15, 25 rising on a morning thermal.  That’s unusual.  That’s a migration. Then the Swainson’s Hawks came up from the agricultural fields to the north of us.  More hawks than vultures.  After ten minutes we had 50 Turnkey Vultures and 75 Swainson’s Hawks in the sky.  They rose on the thermal and drifted south right over us as they got higher and higher.  We got a half hour hawk show! We didn’t get our own picture of it, but here is one I clipped from the web.  This is what it looked like. Earlier this morning, Judy and I had been talking about how often we stay in state parks and wake up every morning right in a wildlife refuge.  We were comparing that to waking up here, which is not a wildlife refuge but is special in its own right.  We sit outside in the mornings and listen to Curve-billed Thrashers and Great Kiskakees announce the day, and now we get this: a close-up view of a hawk migration!  Tomorrow morning’s excitement, back to the doctor to get some of our stitches out.  
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Meanwhile

 Back at Laguna Atascosa.  A touch of fall A pretty cool bug on a Turk’s Cap. A Loggerhead Shrike And a Great Blue Heron, find perching on Yuccas to their liking.