Steve and Judy's Travels!

Football is a stupid game. I hate football. The Broncos were kind enough to lose in their first playoff game, so now we won’t be subjected to any more football torture until next season.Still here in South Texas. The weather was warm. Then it got cold and rainy. Then it got warm again.I got everything done on the website I wanted to do for now. Next we send out a round of flyers to nonprofit organizations, the ones who are not yet clients, inviting them to take a look at it. I get to watch the statcounter and see what kind of response we get. A more direct measure is the number of new phone calls we get, but it will be fun to watch the first returns.

Poor baby Alex. He ate a piece of cashew and swelled up, so Matt and Kari
took him in for allergy testing. He is severely allergic to tree nuts and
mangos. I’m guessing mangoes would be easy to avoid, but how do you avoid tree nuts?
He’s only mildly allergic to peanuts, but has to totally avoid tree nuts. Sounds like a tough assignment for Matt and Kari.

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.