Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

Which one?  That’s the question we always have to ask unless someone is so specific as to answer the question before we ask it.  When we already had a Washington, District of Columbia, why would we name a state Washington as well?  If we’re telling someone about Nebraska, all we have to say is Nebraska and we’re done.  If we say Washington, then we have to say Washington, the state, not Washington, D.C., or vice versa. 

 

Not an efficient use of language.

 

 

The refrain wandered into my head.  “Son you’re going to drive me to drinkin if you don’t quit drivin that hot rod Lincoln.  So I googled it.

 

Commander Cody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl038GkYhjU

A blast from the past.  Music from our teenage years.  That was fun. 

 

And several other versions out there, the most disconnected being:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2_Kp_q786g

This one with a charming recognizable guitar trip down memory lane in the middle of it.

 

 

 

We saw lots of them in Central and West Texas.

(Not my photo.)

 

Water is pumped up the center, goes through the pipe, and comes out the sprinklers.  I get that.  Each section, from the pivot point out, covers an increasingly larger area as it goes around in a circle, so the nozzles on each section need to be sized accordingly; increasingly larger as they get farther from the center source.  I get that too.  The part I have to keep thinking about is the locomotion.  You’ve got maybe ten sections for total length of a quarter mile or so.  The trolleys for each section move in a circle around a pivot point, tracing paths for ten different concentric circles.  Since every circle represents a different distance to complete one lap, I want to know how each trolley happens to do that without messing up the entire apparatus.

 

That quarter mile long pipe of water can’t be so rigid that all one has to do is power the outside trolley and the other ones will follow along.  Each one has to be powered.  The last trolley on the end will have to travel the longest distance, so that one can run constantly.  All the other trolleys have to be geared down just right to run constantly, or they all run the same speed and go intermittently, every one on a slightly different schedule.  Couldn’t count on every trolley running just like it should and never getting bogged down, so the solution has to be that each one runs intermittently.  But how do they know to do that; when to run and when to shut off?  Wires?  Lasers?  What’s the trigger?

 

Wikipedia to the rescue.  There are angle sensors at each joint for each section.  The outer wheels move at a constant slow speed.  When an angle sensor at a joint determines that a section is getting left behind, it triggers the electric motor to drive the wheels on that section until the angle sensor feels like it’s caught up and shuts off the motor.  Each section starts and stops independently, and the whole length of the sprinkler moves in an undulating manner, something like a sidewinder snake, always in nearly a straight line, but never completely straight if you sight along it.

 

Now my mind can be at ease about that.

 

 

What’s the deal with Mercury?

 

Our resolution:  We’re buying a different kind of tuna.  The larger the predator, the more accumulated mercury it consumes and retains.  We’ve been eating albacore tuna.  That’s the biggest one.  We’ve switched to “Chunk Light Tuna”.  Skipjack tuna.  It’s a smaller fish and only has about a third the mercury of albacore.

 

Now that we’re “tuna conscious”, sometimes we eat tuna salad, sometimes we eat chicken salad prepared just the same but with different meat.  (The chicken salad isn’t quite as satisfying, but it’s a reasonable substitute.  And since chickens aren’t apex predators, I don’t think we have to worry about any mercury accumulation in them.)  So that’s our solution.  Chicken salad, tuna salad with skipjack tuna, we don’t eat it every day, and we don’t worry about it when we do.

 

 

 

 

It’s a toxic heavy metal.  A neurotoxin.  It gets in the ocean and attaches to dissolved organic matter like decomposing plants and animals.  Microorganisms and minnows ingest the decomposing plants and animals and accumulate mercury.  Bigger critters eat the smaller critters.  Mercury is cumulative.  The top predator fish have in their systems all the mercury from all the smaller critters they’ve eaten; a dramatically larger amount of mercury than what’s naturally in the surrounding environment.

 

Too much mercury is bad for us so we should limit our mercury consumption.  Our primary mercury source is seafood.  The worst fish we can eat is a large predator fish like tuna.  I love tuna.  Freshly grilled tuna.  Baked tuna.  Tuna right out of the can.  Tuna salad.  Tuna salad sandwich on buttered toast.  A scoop of tuna salad in a sliced avocado.  Grilled tuna salad sandwich with cheese.  Tuna casserole.  I love tuna!  Grew up on it.

 

I googled how often we should eat the kind of tuna Judy and I eat, to minimize our risk of overexposure to mercury.  Google said one serving every nine days.  What?  I’d rather eat it every day.  Is tuna primarily a danger to the development of young minds and bodies?  For me, that ship has already sailed.  Sitting in class, not paying attention to the instructor, but playing with the mercury drops one of the kids got by breaking a thermometer; liquid beads of room-temperature molten metal rolling about on a piece of paper, fascinating.  Not only that, but if you get it on your fingers and massage it onto the surface of a dime, that dime will shine brighter than it ever did when it was new!  Do you suppose I’ve absorbed at least my fair share of mercury?  Yeah.  That ship has already sailed.  Without a lifeboat.  Whatever damage could be done to my development has already been well done.

 

Is there a danger of excess mercury consumption for a senior citizen?  If I eat too much tuna now, will I suddenly go senile (quicker), or suffer some other life altering malady?  I don’t know.  If there is no immediate danger, beyond whatever damage is already done, I sure would love to have at least one serving of tuna salad waiting for me in the fridge every day for the rest of my life.  What is one to do?

 

 

 

2,800 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $4.5 million seized at the U.S./Canada border last month.  What?  How does that happen?  Haven’t they heard, marijuana is legal in like half the states in the Union?  How is it that it still has any street value at all?

 

I guess old habits are hard to break.