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Frying pan

A fast drive home from Rawlins. Two-hundred fifty miles in four hours.
Fast for a motorhome. We drove straight home with good reason. Had to get
there in time to leave for a fishing trip. We got Rags the cat back before we left West Yellowstone. He was quiet.
Subdued almost. Maybe he wore his voice box out. He didn’t cry in the car
at all. We took him to the motorhome. He got to see his house and his dog.
He stayed happy. And quiet. While we were at Pebble Creek Campground in Yellowstone, we ran into an
interesting lady. A person we didn’t know, ran the battery down in her van
and needed a jump. It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to
birding. She is a birder. She is a world birder. She expects to be in the
Guinness Book of World Records soon. She intends to see birds representing
every family in the taxonomical classification for all the birds in the
entire world. She has been working on this project for years. She is at
195. She thinks in another year, with a trip to Uganda, a trip to
Madagascar, and another to South America, she’ll have the entire 215
families. Meanwhile, she was stopping at Yellowstone to do some volunteer
work with wolves before moving on. We got back to Louisville at noon. Had a three-hour layover, then Ken,
Brian and I headed out to the Frying Pan, over on the Western Slope, to fish
for a couple days. Another guy trip. No cats invited.

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Yellowstone

Off we go towards home. Back through the Park. Through the strobe light
torture of a lodgepole pine forest on a clear mountain morning. Quickly
through the Grand Tetons. Out of the parks through Dubois, Burris,
Crowheart and Lander. The weathered white cliffs and towers of west-central
Wyoming give way to red. When we reach Lander, we’re back to home altitude.
All we have to do now is not gain any more altitude than we lose the rest of
the way. Lander is the first Wyoming town lately that has a population
greater than its elevation. We crossed the continental divide in the Park at 8,200 feet. Then we
crossed it again at 8,300 feet. Later we crossed it at 7,900 feet. Again
at 9,600 feet. Again at 6,700 into the Great Divide Basin. From there,
water doesn’t flow to the Atlantic or the Pacific. It doesn’t go anywhere
from there. Just before Rawlins, we cross it for the last time at 7,100
feet, and stop for the night.
We’re covering fifteen hundred miles on this trip to Yellowstone and back.
That last swing we took around the western slope of Colorado involved 475
miles spread out over two weeks. Not much of a travel schedule. I commute
more than that from Louisville to the office for two weeks. We did an interesting job this last trip. A nonprofit organization. They
have been in existence for four years. Their financial statements say they
have lost about a hundred thousand dollars a year. Add up all their assets
and subtract all their liabilities now, and they have four hundred thousand
dollars of negative equity. Not a pretty picture. But talk to them, and that’s not the picture the conversation paints.
They’re running a project that will liquidate soon. They capitalized the
original land purchase and associated costs up front, but since then, they
have been expensing costs they will be reimbursed for at the completion of
the project. When I pulled those costs out of their income statements for
the last four years, and capitalized them too, their financial statements
looked completely different. Now they have a small positive equity, and
look downright respectable. Now their financial statements match their
story. In Durango, I found an organization that told me they had been losing money
the last couple years and they didn’t know why. They were concerned they
might have to close. It turns out they had recognized a bunch of contract
income several years ago they hadn’t actually earned yet. Now to show when
they spend it, they had to show losses. I restated the prior years, and
income pretty much matches with their expenses each year. Now their
financial statements match what really happens. They don’t have to talk
about closing. They are doing just fine. Nonprofit organizations have to watch out for every dollar they spend. They
save a few thousand dollars by not having an audit, or they pay for an audit
from a local company that lacks experience with nonprofit organizations, and
they end up running their organizations based on information that isn’t
true. It’s too bad that has to happen. I like it when we can help.

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Yellowstone

Do you think trumpeter swans ever trumpet?
I’m looking for some help with amps. Maybe my brother Tom can help me out
here. Do I have the electricity formula right? Volts x amps = watts? If we run a 120 watt appliance that runs on 120 volts, house current, it
requires 1 amp? If we run that same 120 watt fan through the inverter at 12
volts, does that mean it requires 10 amps of 12 volt power? We use 10 times
as many amps when we run something through the inverter? Our electric coffee maker draws about 10 amps at 120 volts. If we run it on
the inverter, it draws 100 amp hours. It takes fifteen minutes to brew.
Did we just use 25 amps out of our batteries? We have four six-volt
batteries strung together for house power when we’re not plugged in. I’m
told they equate to about 500 amps of 12 volt usable storage. The battery indicator lights in the instrument panel are of no help in
determining how much battery we have left. They always read “good”. The
best indicator is when I turn the inverter on to run the coffee maker and
there is not enough electricity to run it. We still have some electrons
left, but this is a warning that we’re getting low. We need a better
indicator. I want an ammeter plugged into the line somehow so I can push a
button and get a readout of how many amps are left in storage. Mechanics
can do that with a battery tester, can’t they? Couldn’t a meter be wired
into the system somehow?
Did I tell you, we figured out how to find the rest stops on the co-pilot?
There is a command to increase the level of detail shown. On the broader
scale we had been using, they just didn’t show. There isn’t much guidance
on how to use this navigator. You just have to know. Oh. And another thing. GPS can tell you exactly where you are. It can
also tell you exactly how high you are. Judy found the screen that has the
altimeter. Of course, locking on to your location from a number of
different satellites, you can also lock on to your exact elevation as well.