This puppy is so sweet! She plays so hard, all growling and biting, then lays in her bed, falls asleep at your feet, or asks to get picked up and goes right to sleep in your arms.
She’s so little and light, picking her up is like lifting and cuddling air.
We’re at Arrow Rock State Historical Site
Leaving New York part of the trip map
Leaving New York part of the trip map
Time enough for an afternoon of football and a trip across the Mississippi to look for a cute little sparrow, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow. It looks a lot like a house sparrow but has white cheeks with a black spot in the middle. Twelve individuals were brought from Germany and released in St Louis in 1870. They established a population that never strayed more than 75 miles or so from the original release site; not like house sparrows that were introduced to Brooklyn in 1851 and spread across the entire continent by 1910!
We chose to find the Eurasian Tree Sparrow by driving around a section of St Louis known as Dogtown and watching for bird feeders or House Sparrows. We found a promising yard, staked it out for a little while and found:
Our little bird!
Back at the ranch, we have a view of the Arch.
There is a benefit to traveling east to west. We don’t get stuck under weather systems for days at a time driving along under a cloud. If there is weather coming from the west, we just cross paths with it and drive through.
No rough weather today. A little cold at night though; we woke up to 33 degrees.
Leaving New York part of the trip map
We stopped in Effingham, at Camp Lakewood.
Fits just right!
Keeping up.
Look how rough and tumble Jesse is getting!
Leaving New York part of the trip map
We see a lot of corn.
Not the fresh sweet corn we’re used to seeing in Colorado fields, markets, and roadside stands, but seed corn. Fat ears of corn drying in the sun.
Why does February only have 28 days? The problem is, I was thinking about that while I was asleep last night. I spent the rest of the night trying to work out the logistics of it. There had to be some connection to the number of days in a year and the rotation of the earth and such. I worked out that there are two direct measures we can observe: One year equals one orbit of the earth around the sun. One day equals one rotation of the earth. And what do these two concepts have to do with each other? Nothing. The rotation of the earth has nothing to do with the orbit around the sun. And what is a month or a week? A month is an indirect accumulation of something we know; an invention; a number of days. And a week; what is that? It’s an accumulation of a certain number of days, but they don’t even add up to a month in any consistent way. Then I’d lose the thread and have to start over. It was a long night.
In a more conscious moment today, while I was awake, I thought to google it. The answer is: It’s complicated, and it has nothing to do with measurable phenomena. The Romans came up with a ten-month calendar; March through December. They ignored that blank space in the middle (January and February) because it didn’t have anything to do with crops or harvesting and so was of no interest. Later on, they decided to fill in the blank and added January and February to cover the entire year and make it a Lunar calendar of 355 days. But they didn’t want any even numbers, so the length of the months alternated between 29 and 31 days, leaving one month that had to be adjusted to an even number and February ended up as the unlucky month with 28 days. It didn’t take long for that calendar to fall out of phase with the moon though, so in Julius Caesar’s time, they scrapped the Lunar idea for a Solar calendar of 365 days, and adjusted the number of days in each month to either 30 or 31 which left February still at 28 to make the total right. Now the calendar lines up with the orbit of our planet around the sun (with the occasional leap year).
Better driving weather today.
We stopped for the night in Ohio.
Leaving New York part of the trip map
We’re not covering a lot of miles each day. One tiny little puppy slows down the trip with visits to every rest stop to pee. Don’t want to stress that little bladder. She plays for 20 minutes then falls asleep on whatever she was playing with last.
Every time she wakes up it’s time to go outside again before we let her walk around inside the house.
The timing works out well though because the sound and motion of the bus puts her right to sleep. We put her little bed on the floor between the seats so we’ll be sure to notice when she wakes up and stop to take her out, if she wakes up between rest stops.
