Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

Looking good.

 

A little wet for harvest.  Hope it dries out in time.

 

 

The flooded house from a couple weeks ago

 

…is now less so.

 

 

Not exactly high and dry, but much better, and the boat has been retired.

 

 

We don’t go out much this year.  We record birds we see from the deck, but we’ve made no effort to go out and identify all the birds we can, like we usually do.  Thinking about it today, I looked up our progress on eBird.  Middle of August, we’re at 164 species for the year.  This time last year we were at 411.

 

Wood storks are only here in the Valley in the summer.  We decided to drive to Tiocano Lake, not far, and see if we could spot one before they leave in the fall.  Success.  We found one off in the distance with some roseate spoonbills.

 

 

 

I can hear just fine.  Plenty of volume.  I can listen to music.  I can hear the news.  But put dialog in a movie with action and sound effects and I can’t pick out the dialog!  We tried a couple different soundbars a few years ago.  They changed the sound from one mode to another, but none helped clarify the dialog.  We turn up the sound to make the conversation louder, but that turns everything up and blows us out of the room.  We can put on headphones, and that helps, but that isolates us from each other.  We need a soundbar with a dialog mode that clarifies the sound range that includes speech and turns down everything else.

 

Oh.  Wait.  I just googled “clarify dialog soundbar”.  There are a bunch of them now.  I wonder which is best…

 

 

How do we put that number in perspective?

 

Here in The Valley, one small part of Texas, we’re losing 40 people a day, that didn’t otherwise need to die now.  40 people.  That’s the equivalent of a very bad mass shooting.  Every day.  For weeks and months.  Right here, in this little community around us.  I submit that our response would be completely different if these deaths were from mass shootings every day, yet the number of people is the same, regardless the cause.  And either way, it didn’t need to happen.

 

Our current national death toll from Coronavirus of over 1,000 people a day, every day, is the equivalent of a September 11^th attack every three days.