Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

Judy got her second eye surgery on Monday.  This lens replacement seems to be healing up even faster than the first one.  Her vision is already very good for just the day after surgery.  Today, we got our second Covid shots.  We feel a little off, but not really bad.  So far so good.  Maybe we’ll take the rest of the week off.  No more “seconds”.

 

We don’t know how completing the vaccination protocol will change our lives.  We will still have a 1 in 20 chance of catching the virus, but even if we do, we should be less likely to get a really serious case.  This level of immunity doesn’t mean we can’t still carry and transmit the virus though.  Respecting the health of others, we will continue to mask, distance, and avoid crowded indoor spaces.

 

 

…to the accompaniment of the thumping sound of a toy ball dropping from about six inches high and hitting the floor.  Over and over.  My little white shadow drops the ball every two or three of my steps.  If I stop and stand, the ball doesn’t make that distinctive thumping sound, it lands on my foot and rolls away instead; excited puppy giving chase.

 

Fetch.  It’s a great game.  It has to be played every day, and it never gets old.  I pick the ball up, throw it, and off she goes at full-speed whichever direction the ball goes.  If she doesn’t see which way it goes, then the game turns into hide and seek the ball.  She’s very good at that game too.

 

 

 

 

It’s a hearing aid controller.  She can turn the volume on her hearing aids up or down and can change the mode to fit the circumstance.  If we’re out in the woods looking for birds, she’ll use a different setting than when we’re in a noisy restaurant.  (Not that we’ve been in a noisy restaurant lately.)  The controller has a clip on the back so she can hang it on a pocket, hem, or collar on her shirt so it will always be handy.

 

And it is always handy.  Except when it’s not.

 

Weeks ago, when we were staying at the campground at Falcon State Park, on a particular day, we went lots of places and did lots of things.  That night we couldn’t find her hearing aid controller.  We looked everywhere in the bus, Jeep, and yard.  The next day we drove around to some of the places we had been the day before.  One of those places was Salineno, down by the river, where we had been birding for the seedeater.  Judy looked all around on the ground where we had been parked the day before.  Nothing.  We were chatting with a couple we had met there, and Judy mentioned her dilemma.  The woman she was talking to said she had noticed something earlier that she didn’t recognize.  It was hanging in a tree right next to where Judy had been looking on the ground.  Judy went to investigate, and sure enough, someone unknown to us had found the controller where the Jeep had been parked and hung it in the tree right next to that spot so whoever lost it could find it and it wouldn’t have been run over in the meantime.

 

Nice somebodies.  Somebody to find it and protect it.  Somebody to notice it and point it out to us.  Lucky us!

 

 

 

…about highways.

 

Highways seem so permanent.  But they’re not.  Sure, short-term they don’t move much, but over longer time-spans, they change like the tracks of streams finding the path of least resistance.  Take Route 66.  That famous Highway was a single road connecting Chicago to Los Angeles with a distance in 1926 of almost 2,500 miles.  As a continuous marked highway it’s gone now, replaced by the interstate highway system, but over the years it was in service, the road didn’t always follow the exact same route.  There were a number of improvements and realignments over the years.  One realignment in New Mexico entirely bypassed Santa Fe!  By the 1960s its length had been reduced to 2,278 miles.

 

Where I’m going with this train of thought relates to current day highways.  Modern roads are marked with mile-markers; ascending numbers from west to east and south to north, by state.  Your position on the highway can be identified by mile-markers.  Freeway exits are identified by their mile-marker.  So what happens when a modern road suffers an “improvement”?  Maybe a city is bypassed.  Maybe part of a road is washed out or falls off the side of a mountain and a better route is determined for the rebuild.  What if a few miles are knocked off a route?  Or added?  What does that do to all our location codes?  If the fix is between mile-markers 50 and 75, and knocks 5 miles off the trip, what happens to mile marker 90 or 100?  Does the highway just skip five miles on its markers and leave the exit numbers the same?  Or does exit number 80 become exit 75?  Changing everything would be impractical because every single exit number and mileage sign downstream of the mileage change would have to be replaced.  But if they leave all the signage the same, all the following mile markers wouldn’t be true!

 

We’re home at Sandpipers.  Big week next week.  Judy gets the other eyeball surgery before dawn on Monday.  Tuesday we get the day-after follow-up appointment and from there go straight to get our second Covid shots.

 

 

 

Nice color.

 

I thought it might be a Cayauga Duck, a specific domestic breed.  It’s the right color, but the bill is wrong, so probably just another flavor of domestic mallard.  That’s what most of the ducks we see in parks are, some version of domestic mallard.

 

Here is another bird worth a second look.  Snoozing, so we can’t see the whole thing, but I think I recognize it.

 

Yes!  Another mute swan.  Didn’t see that one coming.