Steve and Judy's Travels!

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You’ll go down in history

Okay.  It was a happy ending for Rudolph, and Santa got what he needed.  But what about all the other reindeer?  They were terrible people to begin with.  They teased Rudolph for being different and wouldn’t play with him, and Santa apparently didn’t intervene.  Then when the reindeer discovered that the boss liked Rudolph because he was useful, the suck-ups decided that Rudolph was a hero.  Did Rudolph change?  No.  Did Santa?  No.  What about all the other reindeer that were jerks?

Well, the story is set to nice jingly music.

We get to see lots of woodpeckers at home, but not the red-headed, so it’s special when we find him.  Often, woodpeckers just look like this:

A silhouette in crummy light and we can’t make out much detail.

However, last trip to East Texas, we were able to get a better look with better lighting and got this:

A red-headed woodpecker (center frame) shining in the sun!

Way cool.

At 2:30 every afternoon, she gets a cookie.  She remembers, and if we forget, she reminds us.  This afternoon at 1:30, she reminded us.  We tried to explain the logic of switching time from standard to daylight and back, but she wasn’t buying it.  We decided she needed to go cold turkey with the time change like we do and just suck it up.

She didn’t.  At 1:40 we gave up and she got her cookie.

They’re not all the same.

Loblolly Pines.  They’re all over the Southern U.S.  They have medium length needles, maybe 7 inches, in bundles of three.  They look like this:

Longleaf Pines, living in roughly the same range as Loblolly, have incredibly long needles.  If you haven’t spent time in the south, you may have never seen pine needles like this:

Roughly 15 inches long, also in bundles of three.

Here is a baby longleaf.  It looks like a clump of grass.

Big Tree.

A particularly large Live Oak at Goose Island.

There are only estimates of the age.  No-one is going to drill a bore hole in it to count the rings.  Best guesses range from 1,000 to 2,000 years, so that tree was already ancient when the first Europeans arrived in North America.