Steve and Judy's Travels!

A driveabout with our heads out the window.

We drove on slow roads so the wind wouldn’t make Henry have to get down out of the window.

And a walk in a puppy park.

It was really interesting.

Don’t know how many more of these he gets.  He has lost so much weight his harness just hangs on him.  No more eating again.  He is still in good spirits, making the most of it.  He chased his ball in the house and brought it back three times today.  Judy is still mostly in the recliner at night, recovering from the knee surgery.  We all sleep on chairs and the couch in the front room.

A blackpoll warbler just passing through on migration.

You can see by the range map they don’t spend much time in places we can see them in the U.S.

It looks like this gray catbird didn’t like seeing him though.  Here the warbler is, getting chased.

Little insect eggs on stilts.  The insects lay them on the underside of leaves and things.  These are on the bottom of the compost tumbler drum.  I turned them up to photograph them, so really they are upside down in the picture.

I wrote about them a couple years ago, but now I couldn’t remember what they were, so I had to resort to google once more.  I figure if I can’t remember, you can’t either, so here they are again.  Green Lacewing eggs.  They’re a beneficial garden insect.  They eat destructive insects like aphids.  Laying their eggs on filaments like these, the voracious larvae will be less likely to feed on each other as soon as they hatch.

The adults look like this:

(Not my picture.)

Cool, huh?

Duolingo is a language tool.  It’s also a game.  It is meant to keep you engaged so while playing the game for points and rewards, one also learns a bit of language.  Each Monday, people are grouped into batches of 30 by the order they log on and do their first lesson.  That’s the competition for the week.  Finish in the top five and advance to the next level.  Finish in the bottom five and get demoted one level.  Get promoted enough times and end up in the top level, the Diamond League.  From there, you can’t get promoted any higher, so they offer recognition for finishing in the top three.  Duolingo tells everyone you know that you finished in the top three and they send back congratulations.

So every week, I do my Spanish each day, and near the end of the week I pay attention to where I am and if there is a shot at finishing in the top three.  If I think there is a chance, I wait until just one hour, or maybe two, before the end of the week’s count on Sunday, and I blast out as many points as I can, as fast as I can, to finish top three.  Recognition.

Last week, it was there.  I was about number 7, lurking.  Number one and number two were well out of reach, but if the other ones in front of me weren’t paying attention, I had a shot.  I was well back, so two hours before closing, I went for it.  I cruised past everyone else in front of me, but number three was watching and started accumulating points as well.  After an hour I checked the scores.  I was still behind number three, but number three wasn’t accumulating points as fast as I was, so I kept on.  I closed and closed, hunted down number three, and with four minutes to go I passed him and finished with that number three spot.  Success!

Then I started to wonder what I had done.  Somebody worked as hard as they could for two hours, trying to stay ahead but watching me get closer and closer, nothing more they could do, and losing out right at the finish.  Who was I playing against?  Whose heart did I just take?  It could have been anyone.  Duolingo is kind of structured as a kid’s game.  Oh no.  Did I just hunt down and crush some thirteen-year-old kid, dashing her hopes of being Spanish queen for the day?  Am I relishing my victory over a bunch of schoolkids?  I looked up the name of the person I passed.  Looks like a dude.  Carlos.  I checked out his status.  He’s been doing this for a couple years.  He’s got a lot of points.  Nevermind.  He can take it.

Sometimes we get this.

A veritable plethora of buntings!