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When Casey was here for a visit

We went paddling together. I paddled my traditional kayak. Casey brought this goofy new-fangled thing. It has wheels on top, pedals, and paddle wings underneath that flap back and forth. Hard to imagine any respectable paddler would drive something like that.

Here is how it looked to me most of the day:

I watched from behind, Casey cruising along effortlessly about twice as fast as I could go. What a cool new-fangled thing.

We explored a small bit of the channels and mudflats of the Laguna Madre. Rivers of fish swam right underneath us in the shallow water. Sometimes there were so many fish in such a hurry the water ahead of us was a boiling wave. The birds out there seemed unusually tame, allowing us to glide right by practically within reach.It was a great day.

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eBird

 Until now, I’ve tracked my bird sightings on Thayer birding software.  This software does everything.  It describes the birds, it helps you identify the birds.  There is only one thing it doesn’t do well for me.  Its reporting options are limited.  It keeps track of my life-list for me, and I can extract other information I want from it, but it’s cumbersome to figure out where I am for intermediate measures, like day, week, or year lists. There is an internet option for tracking sightings.  It’s called eBird.  It only does one thing, track sightings, and it does that very well.  Lots of birders track their sightings there.  Not only are the reporting options better, but there is a public benefit to it as well.  All the bird sightings recorded there go into a giant database that is available for ornithologists to use in tracking bird populations.  Seems like a really good idea so I’m going to use that from now on.  It’s a little tedious getting enough of my previous sighting transferred over, but once I get that done, I’ll have much more information at my disposal. And something else.  I’ve gotten about 100 birds put in so far and when I looked through the reporting options I found eBird not only showed the year-lists for the top 100 birders in total and by state, but it gave me a number for my status.  I’m number 8,502.  8,502 with only about 100 birds put in.  I’ll keep entering data as I can and see how I move up.  
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The Cold Front

 Finally made its way this far south.  We woke up to 47 degrees and gale force wind.  Brrr. A good day for on-line shopping and turkey sandwiches.  The weather settled down in the afternoon, so we went out for some errands and to look at birds.  Got a Semi-palmated Plover and a Short-eared Owl flyby.  
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Happy Thanksgiving

 …to all.  A nice weather day here; in the low eighties.  I have to point out that when we got up this morning we were 70 degrees warmer than our kids in Colorado.  A walk on the beach.  Some football on TV. There are great group get-togethers here for Thanksgiving, but this year Judy and I decided to just have a quiet thanksgiving at our house.  We measured, and figured out that the microwave convection oven will hold a 12 pound bird, so we got a fresh one a couple days ago at a local butcher.  Know what happens when you go six or seven years without cooking a turkey at home?  You can’t find the turkey baster.  It probably ended up out in the outside cabinet to service the batteries.  No harm.  We thought our way through the process yesterday, noticed the missing piece, and bought a new one. We’ve never cooked a turkey in a convection oven before.  We expected it to take less time than in a conventional oven, but how much less?  Hard to tell.  You just put the bird in the oven, punch the Compu-cook button, and trust the force.  We made our best guess as to when to start the cooking.  We punched the button.  Nothing.  Nothing happened because the turkey filled up the oven so we had to turn off the turntable.  It was too big to rotate.  Well, it turns out that if your bird can’t rotate, it can’t be cooked on Compu-cook.  No problem; we’ll just override that and tell it to cook manually. Know what else?  If your bird is so big it fills up the oven and almost touches the top, it’s going to cook very weird in the convection oven.  After 90 minutes the top was crispy but the bottom was undercooked.  No problem.  We pulled the meal out of the microwave, flipped it over, and finished cooking it upside down. We were happy we hadn’t invited anyone else over for Thanksgiving.  We’ll consider this a learning experience.  Next time we’ll cook something smaller.  The top part of the turkey was inedible; overcooked.  The bottom part of it was wonderful though.  We just didn’t end up with as much properly cooked turkey as we expected.  There’ll be enough for a turkey sandwich or two tomorrow anyway. Turkey, dressing, cranberries, potatoes, gravy, and homemade pumpkin pie.  Football, good company, nice weather, a comfortable house, and a cozy faux fire.  It was a grand Thanksgiving.