Steve and Judy's Travels!

Here is our empty boring beach.

Monday. Back to work, but not a bad place to work. Warmer still. Barefoot.
Know how, when you eat Mexican food out, and they put that tray of chips and
a dish of salsa in front of you, and you start dipping and eating, and your
mouth starts burning? And then, to stop the burning, you can stop and wait,
or chew on some ice chips, or you can take another bite of the stuff that
made your mouth burn in the first place, and it feels better momentarily,
until it starts to burn again? You can stop eating and wait for the burning
to stop, or you can eat some more, but the longer you eat it the longer it
takes to stop burning. You’re pretty much stuck eating chips like crazy
until your food arrives. Why do you suppose that is? Why is it that the
stuff that made your mouth burn in the first place is the stuff you can put
in it for relief? We had Mexican last night.

Rags beat up a dog today. Some neighbors wanted to come by and meet our
mellow cat. They brought their miniature dachshund. He got a little pushy
with Rags, and suddenly Rags was slapping him about a hundred times a
second. The dog started screaming, but Rags didn’t stop. He just kept
slapping him. He didn’t stop until Judy went over and picked him up. No
blood. The claws never came out. The dog got picked up too, but he never
quit shaking the rest of the time he was here. We may have a problem with Judy’s blood pressure. It’s high enough to
medicate when we’re in Colorado. She keeps it around 120 over 80. We find
her blood pressure seems to be related to altitude. Here we are at sea
level and it’s 86 over 50. I think that measurement reflects “just barely”
on the “are you alive or not” chart. We may cut back on the medication a
little while we’re here. We tried out the new version of Judy’s copilot navigator system on the
laptop this trip. Big improvement. A 3-D view of the road ahead. Much
better perspective. Improved routing through cities as well. It’s good fun
to have along. I have a follow-up report on fishing rods and waders. Remember at the end
of the summer, I finished with two thirds of a really nice fly rod, and
gore-tex waders with a leak in one leg? I wrote letters for each. We boxed
up each wounded fishing necessity, enclosed letters begging for mercy, and
shipped them back to their respective manufacturers. Results: Before we
left on this trip, we received in the mail, a brand new pair of gore-tex
waders from Remington, and a brand new three-piece four-weight flyrod from
Scott. Fantastic. My fishing arsenal is restored, ready for next summer. It was time to upgrade our cellphones before this trip, so we did. Loaded
the new software, plugged the phone into the laptop, and tried the new
cellphone internet hookup. It worked first try. This will make a good
backup connection for when we don’t have WiFi, and until we get a data dish,
as long as we’re within range of a cellphone tower. This internet connect
stuff is working better all the time. Better weather today. Calm. Sunny. Good run on the beach. Didn’t do
anything else. Oh yeah. Drank some coffee. Watched some birds. Watched
some football. Took a couple walks. Don’t know where the day went. Happy Sunday.

Thank you all for your contributions to the “name the lakeside road sign”
effort. The contest was won early and convincingly by brother Tom with:
Don’t drive dunk!
Thank you brother Tom.