Steve and Judy's Travels!

  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.    

  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.    

  Eighty degrees yesterday.  A cooler windy blustery day today.   We have this spinner on the roof (an anemometer) that controls the retraction mechanism for our patio awning.  Any wind over a preset amount, about 15 mph, triggers the awning to retract before a bigger wind blows it off.  That’s a common problem with patio awnings; the wind comes up when you’re not there and destroys your awning.  Usually we can tell when the wind velocity gets above 20 mph, because we get a buzzing sound from the spinner on the roof, but not this time.  No buzz.  We had the mobile repair guy check it out while he was fixing some other stuff and he found that the bushings were worn and replaced the spinner.  We’re not perfectly silent in the wind.  We can still hear and feel it, but it’s one level quieter inside the coach now.   The annual property owners meeting today.  That was not real fun.  Turns out we have issues.  And attorneys.   Hard to ride the Trikke in the wind (upwind), but I’m getting better at it.  Nice to have that for an exercise option even on windy days now.   Got a flock of six great egrets flying over the RV Park this afternoon.   Got a great view of Venus and the moon together last night.   A Wilson’s snipe came to visit our yard.    

  The brown thrasher.  Saw him earlier this winter.  

  The wood thrush taking a bath at Paradise Pond.  I’m told this is the third U.S. record of a wood thrush in winter.