Steve and Judy's Travels!

You can put guards on utility poles to discourage birds from roosting or nesting there.

But nesting ospreys are not easily dissuaded.

It got a little big while we were gone.  Now we can just get around it to get to the thicket.  There are still plenty of flowers left for the hummingbirds.  I could have trimmed it more, but I didn’t have any more room for the clippings in the compost tumblers.

In this heat and humidity, it won’t take long for this batch to cook down.  Then I can smooth out something else.  Maybe the orange Esperanza.

Rooftop solar collectors seem like such a good idea.  They generate the electricity right where it’s going to be used.  They don’t require any additional land use.  They’re disbursed, so they’re resilient to natural disasters and local weather events.  And if they generate more than the house needs, they can feed the excess back into the grid.

What I wonder about though is that there seems to be a limit for how many to put on a roof, that limit being meant to cover the average energy use of each house installing them.  I recognize that not everyone can afford the up-front costs to install solar panels, but my thought is that if we have such a wonderful way to generate electricity, why would we want to limit it?  For those that can afford it, encourage them to install as many panels as they want.  Let them feed excess power back into the grid so the utility company doesn’t have to generate as much with oil and gas.  If the energy grid can’t support the privately generated amount, update the grid.  If the utility fee structure can’t support privately generated electricity, update the fee structure.  Incentivize private citizens to generate more than they need and take advantage of it instead of building more power plants!

At RV dump stations there is a hole in the middle to dump gray water or black water.  There is a freshwater hose there in the middle to wash away any spillage.  Then, out at the ends of the dump island, there are spigots of fresh water that are deemed safe.

The hose in the middle is labeled as non-potable. 

This is what the spigot at the end of the island looks like.

Contaminated water and safe water.  Of course, we only want to fill up our tanks with safe water.  But then I had to start wondering about how different is the water, really, from these two different sources.  Do we really think that there is plumbing for two different kinds of water underneath every RV dump station; treated water and untreated water?  I don’t think so.  That’s way too much work; too much infrastructure.

Here is what I think.  Each outlet is delivering water from the exact same source.  The danger of the middle hose is that it might get contaminated by people using it to rinse out dump hoses, so they label the water from that spigot as non-potable.  I don’t know if this explanation is true or not, but it answers my burning question, and I can move on.

It’s a mobile service.  It all happens in his grooming van in our driveway, one dog at a time.

Jesse before.

And after.

Henry before.

And after.

They were a little funky from our camping travels.  Now we’re all fresh and clean again!