Steve and Judy's Travels!

When I was younger, I thought of the cost of acquisition as the price of an object.  If I paid a certain price for something, I was done.  Now it was mine.

As I got older though, I gradually realized that the cost of acquisition was only the beginning.  Everything a person buys has a continuing cost.  Houses, cars, bicycles, boats.  Each item has to be maintained, maybe even repaired from time to time.  If nothing else, it takes up space.  It has to be housed.

The real price of an acquisition is what a person pays for it plus all the future costs.  For the future, every acquisition requires an endowment, either in the form of money set aside for its lifetime costs, or more commonly, a share of a continuing income stream for the life of the object.  The more things we own, the more continuing costs we’ve accumulated, the less flexibility we have, and the more dependent we are on that endowment or continuing income stream.

Judy went outside with the dogs and discovered a grasshopper on the deck.  I went out to take a picture,

But before I could get a good shot, the grasshopper flew in the open door to our living room.  We didn’t really want it in the house, but that gave me a better chance for a picture anyway.

I think it’s called an “obscure bird grasshopper”.  Bird grasshoppers tend to fly well and even land in trees if disturbed.  After the kodak moment in the house, we were able to liberate it back into the night.  It flew off in the dark and landed in a tree across the road.

How do we fund roads and bridges?  Gasoline taxes.  Every vehicle that uses roads and bridges pays its share.  Except electric vehicles.  They don’t pay any gasoline taxes.  Uh oh.  Electric vehicles are a necessary component of our response to climate change, but how are they going to pay their share for road use? 

There is no national solution.  It’s a state-by-state issue.  I checked with Colorado.  They have added an annual tax on top of their registration renewal each year for electric cars, for the average amount other cars pay in fuel tax.  Not a perfect solution, people that use their electric cars less than average end up paying more than their share, but Colorado has done something and that’s better than nothing.

Texas has instituted an initial $400 fee for registering an electric vehicle, and an annual $200 fee after that, which is actually punitive because it’s more than the average gasoline powered car pays in fuel taxes.  Whatever.  Even if the system for each state isn’t perfect, at least it’s something.    Some states haven’t done anything at all.  They need to step up.  We don’t want the quality of our infrastructure to suffer because we’ve improved our methods of getting out and about.

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.