Steve and Judy's Travels!

  Spring break was quick and easy this year.  The park stayed full; we’ve been pretty much full since the middle of January.  The character of the park changes dramatically during spring break though.  By spring break, the winter Texans have started leaving, and they’re replaced mostly by travel trailers with young families; parents with their own kids.  Short-term friendly neighbors instead of long-term friendly neighbors.  For two weeks the streets are filled with bicycles, skateboards, and scooters.  It’s a lively change from the rest of the winter.  I like it.  I take my scooter out and play with the kids.   During Spring Break, we stay off the parts of the beach that are filled with spring breakers getting drunk.  It takes a little more time to drive through town.  It can take two or three cycles to get through the first stop light in town (there are only three stop lights), instead of the normal one time, but that’s certainly manageable.  The ferry line can be long, but we can check the ferry-cam before we decide to go.   Warm weather now.  80s and 60s every day in the 10 day forecast, except for two days the highs will only be in the 70s.  A steady breeze from the southeast.   Remember last year’s Big Day with Jon?  170 birds.  Pretty good.  Jon is putting together this year’s plan.  We’ll start earlier and end later.  We’ll get more than 170.   A quick trip to Paradise Pond tonight before dark got some good birds.  White eyed vireo, blue-gray gnatcatcher, northern parula, common yellowthroat, hooded warbler, lincoln’s sparrow, indigo bunting.  An early wave of the mass migration still to come.   Can you spot the gray catbird in this picture?    

  Saturday, our friends Ron and Linda moved into the site they just bought next door to us.  Ron is the guy we get to claim as our oldest living friend.   Judy and I drove down to Riviera Sunday, and birded from there over to Baffin Bay and north.  It was a nice sixty-five bird day.  The highlight for us was a flock of common ground doves.  Got spragues pipits and scissortail flycatchers too.   Monday, a follow-up visit with the leg doctor.  We’re healing well.  For the first time he didn’t have to cut out any new black stuff.  We may really be past the infection.  Still on antibiotics indefinitely though.  Whistling ducks in our pond.  A long billed dowitcher.  A couple snipe.  We have hummingbirds again.   Louisiana Waterthrush at Paradise Pond.  The weather is great.    

  Wet to dry bandaging.  It sounds so benign.   It isn’t.   Remember when I remarked that this whole thing with my leg wasn’t very painful?  Well, the nature of the game has changed.  We’re in the process of re-growing skin where, for awhile, there was none.  We want to grow new skin from the bottom up and the sides in.  We can’t let it just scab over.  We need to keep it open.   Wet to dry bandaging involves packing wet gauze into the wound, and wrapping it in place with breathable bandaging.  As the gauze dries out, and the wound simultaneously heals, a scab forms.  The gauze packed into the wound becomes part of that scab.  Then the gauze is ripped out, ripping off any scab, down to the new fresh skin, and new gauze packed in its place.  Wet to dry bandaging just doesn’t describe the sensation.  Packing and dressing sounds a little more ominous, but still; entirely inadequate.  Maybe we should call it ripping and stripping.  That comes a little closer to reality.   Have you seen the chest waxing scene in the movie Forty Year Old Virgin?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4UgkNnbNVc.  That’s me, twice a day, every day (as I get better).    

  So the rain gauge conclusion is that it doesn’t matter if the rain is coming straight down or at an angle.  Up to a point, the rain gauge will measure the correct amount of rain.  If you go back to my earlier visualization, that we’re sampling a tube of air and raindrops above the top of the rain gauge, maybe instead of imagining tilting that tube and slicing it off diagonally, we should just imagine the drops coming down at an angle inside a tube that is vertical.  Then, for every drop of rain that blows away and escapes the rain gauge, another drop of rain will be blown in and be captured by the rain gauge.   Of course, if there is a strong wind, and the rain is blowing sideways over the top of the rain gauge, you could get plenty wet, without any rain ending up in the gauge. Unlike a rain gauge, we collect rain from any direction.   Then again, I particularly enjoy the thought that a good wind vortex might actually pull some water from the gauge, resulting in negative rain!  

  Morning light.