The first annual Gulf Waters Barbecue Cook-Off. Guys chose up sides and created teams. Each team split off to cook their meat. Some teams cooperated and shared space on traditional facilities.
Sunday
We finished the Port Aransas tour with Matt yesterday. We took him to the other birding site in town, the birding center (at the water treatment plant), and we took him to the dump (to do some recycling). Today we had to let him go back to Colorado. Mostly we just hung around the patio and the beach. Matt got to meet all the people while he was here, and he made friends with the pond turtles as well. He got one to come all the way up out of the water.
Friday
Picked up Matt from the airport yesterday. This is so cool. Our daughter visited us here on the island in December. Now our son is here for the weekend in March. The Corpus Christi Airport is simple. It’s not like DIA in Denver. Departures are on the lower level. Arrivals on the upper level. You go up the escalator and there is the concourse. The gates are numbered; one through six. You don’t really even need a gate number. From the top of the escalator you can see every gate. Checking the screen for arrivals to see if his flight was on time, every single flight for the day was on one screen. Every single flight for the day was also from Dallas or Houston. That’s it. No checked bags. An easy walk out. Here’s how small the airport is: from the top of the escalator to go back down to ground level, you can look out the window into the parking lot and see the car. No train. No shuttle required. No sir. Not like DIA in Denver. We’re showing Matt the sights. We drove down the beach. We drove past Horace Caldwell Pier and watched porpoises and sea turtles at the ship channel. We showed him black skimmers at Jetty Beach. We’ve been to the marina park, the ferry landing, Paradise Pond, and dinner at Juan’s. Coffee on the patio this morning. A walk on the beach. He can do this.
Tuesday
The world’s most perfect weather day. Mid seventies. Blue sky. A light breeze off the water. Got the internet dish retracted. A week ago, in a windstorm, we tried to put it down to protect it, but it didn’t go down right. It lost its calibration and only rotated part of the way around before it tried to do the jackknife routine, folding up on the roof. The problem was it only did a half jackknife. Then it tried to fold itself diagonally into the roof until it stalled and stuck in that position. Got to do something about that. Can’t drive the coach with the dish part way up. Today, with some help from tech support, driving the dish with computer commands from my desk, we got it to fold down properly. Now, at least, we’ll be able to drive somewhere to get it fixed when it’s time. Hard to describe what I’m doing at work. Keeping up with current jobs. Working on promotion for future jobs. Looking forward a few years to what we want to be doing and where and how we want to be doing it. The Denver Office will always do the same stuff; audits, reviews, and 990 tax forms for nonprofit organizations. The mobile/digital part of the practice, the part I do, changes every year. I’m looking for a little more stability and clarity than that now. Been working on it for months. Don’t have it yet. I’ll get it though. Got the hermit thrush and the wood thrush at the same time at the pond tonight.
Sunday
Fifty eared grebes in the surf. A sandwich tern at jetty beach. The first of the season for us. White tailed hawk. Barn swallow. Orange crowned warbler from the window. Paradise Pond robins, catbirds, mockingbirds, cardinals, a plethora of yellow-rumps. A hermit thrush. A brown thrasher. A great kiskadee. Didn’t get the winter wren. Still want it.