Steve and Judy's Travels!

Know what? It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a quiet campground or not, or even how late at night it is, if you reach over the steering wheel to get something off the dash and you accidentally lean on the horn button, even though you’ve dumped the air tanks for the suspension and the key is off, there is plenty of air left to fire the air horn.

I hesitated before I sent the long description of binoculars and cameras and how they work, but I knew that if I blew the technical details, my friend Dave Menough, who sold me those cool birding binoculars would be there to back me up. I could have asked him to explain it to me again before embarassing myself, but why do that? So, forget what I said before. Here is the real explanation:“You are correct is saying that the 8 is the power, i.e. what you are looking at will be 8 times larger or appear to be 8 times closer. The other number, and here is where the nitpicking comes in, is the diameter of the objective lens, the lens closest to the object you are viewing, in millimeters. When dividing the power into the objective lens diameter one arrives at the size of the exit pupil. For instance, an 8X40 binocular would have a 5 mm exit pupil. The exit pupil can be described as the beam of light leaving the binocular end conveying information to the brain. Five mm is optimal, as one’s eye pupil is about 5 mm under most conditions. Anything larger is wasted and results in unwanted weight. Anything smaller may not deliver all of the information the brain can handle.”I had part of it right. They’re called binoculars. Right?

A page from Brother Bill’s trip book. Warm sweet oranges right off the tree outside our door.A few more interesting birds:Great kiskadee. One.Lesser goldfinches. Flocks.Golden fronted woodpecker in the campground.Anhinga. Like a cormorant, but snakelike neck and head. They can swim with their entire body underwater so just that snakelike head and neck shows. Loch Ness cormorants. We’ve seen them in Florida, but never in Texas.More pied billed grebes. Flocks. They don’t flock, but flocks.More least grebes. Same as above.Common ground doves. Tiny cute little things. About the size of the smallest shorebirds.Inca doves. Almost as tiny as the ground doves.Vermillion flycatcher.A sandhill crane flyby.And, David Menough, are you listening? Tropical Kingbird. A Tropical Kingbird. Number 334 on our life list.And… and, we got the kingfisher trifecta. The grand slam of kingfishers. All three, ringed, belted, and green, all in one day. All at the same place, in fact. How cool is that?I have to explain that David Menough is a bird person. In fact, he is such a bird person he has a weekly radio show called “bird talk”. So here we are in South Texas, sending bird reports back to see if we’ve seen anything he hasn’t seen. He hasn’t let us know if we’ve struck a nerve yet.
The sore knee really liked the sand. Our beach was flat, of course, but not steep either, so there wasn’t any lateral torque on the joints. Even better, I could run barefoot. Nice hard packed level sand. Without the rotating weight of shoes, running feels supercharged. Each shoe doesn’t weigh much, but multiply a few ounces by a few thousand repetitions, and that’s a lot of weight saved.Speaking of weight, one of the things that didn’t come along when we moved into the motorhome was the bathroom scale. We’ll have to guess at how our weight is doing. We’ll have to monitor our weight by paying attention to whether we have to keep buying longer belts or not. So far, the belts still fit.

The continuing saga of professional certification in New Mexico has hit an all-time high.Here is the deal. I want to offer my services in New Mexico as well as Colorado. I checked with New Mexico and found out the rules. The education requirement in Colorado for initial certification is not the same as the education requirement in New Mexico for initial certification, so I have to apply to the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) for a determination of substantial equivalency. That can be provided by a division of NASBA called CredentialNet. If they grant me that, I can take it to New Mexico to document that I meet the New Mexico standards for the practice of public accountancy.Now a disinterested person could determine that I meet the substantial equivalency requirements in about five seconds, because by rule, I’m grandfathered in. The education requirements have only been in place for a few years. But, we have a bureaucracy in place, so I submitted my ten page application along with individual letters signed by me that CredentialNet could send out to independently confirm my classes and grades at all three schools I attended in the sixties and seventies, my exam scores on the CPA exam in the seventies, the fact that I passed an AICPA ethics exam in 1974, the current status of my certificates in Colorado and Washington, and a certificate of experience.I waited six weeks.Nothing.I contacted CredentialNet and found they were waiting for transcripts from Long Beach State College. I appealed. Since, on this transcript, we would find that I attended one summer course, for an elective that would satisfy the Associates Degree requirements for Long Beach City College in 1968, and that I got an A, could we just consider this one transcript irrelevant and move on? To my surprise, we did. We moved right on to the certification of experience. My certificate of experience has to be signed by my immediate supervisor. For seventeen years I have not had an immediate supervisor other than Judy. I had to sign my own. I told them this when I filled out the form. I told them this again when the independent confirmation arrived in the mail and I signed it. When they processed my file, they discovered it.But not all was lost. This problem too could be resolved. All I had to do is provide more documentation. I scanned the required document. I sent it to them electronically. Nothing. I confirmed they got it. They didn’t. I sent it to them again asking that they please confirm they got it. The response I got, indicating they still didn’t get it, still had the attachment. I double clicked the attachment. It opened.We found a fax machine and faxed the document to them. They received the fax.Yesterday, they made their determination. The process was complete and notification would be going out to the state the next day. I’m so happy to get this resolved. Let me quote to you the notification I got:“Thank you! We have received all documents needed to complete your file. I should send word to the Arkansas State Board by tomorrow.”

……….Arkansas?……….Arkansas?!?!?
Well we’ve done it. I am now deemed substantially equivalent. In Arkansas. I guess now all I have to do is look at a map and figure out where Arkansas is.

Update. Eighty degrees warmer.
—–Original Message—–
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 10:00 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: texas Weather report. We’re currently seventy degrees warmer than our family back home in
Colorado.