Steve and Judy's Travels!

Now it’s April, and we’re at 4,219, 280, 40, 138.  Miles, birds, hours, counties.

Uh-oh.  We’ve fallen off the bird pace.  We’re only at 220 birds for the year.  With just 275 days and 280 bird species remaining, now we need more than 1 new bird a day for the rest of the year to make it to 500.  No problem though.  It’s April.  Migration.  We’ll get a lot of new birds in April.  Then in May and after, we’ll be traveling.  Moving every day should expose us to lots of new birds.

We’re getting excited about the Alaska trip.  We had friends over; three couples who went to Alaska last summer, and two couples plus us who are going to Alaska this summer.  It was a wonderful long evening of asking questions and sharing trip stories.  We’ve got lots of good notes.

All I need to do for continuing education hours is average about half a day a month for the rest of the year.  All I have to do is stay focused.

No way we’ll get any new counties in Texas with day-trips from here; all the counties we still need are far away from where we are now.  Starting in May though, we’ll draw a new line across Texas.  We’ll drive through as few counties we’ve already been to as we can.  We won’t get all the rest of the counties in Texas anytime soon, but we should be able to do some damage to that number in May.

Pinto beans.  Ham hock.  Vegetable stock.  Chopped onions.  Bacon chunks.  Cumin and pepper.  Salt.  Chopped jalapeno.  Minced garlic.  Diced tomato.

Charro beans!

Served with pulled pork from the smoker.

And Cholula.

Enough for leftovers.

Click.

Harris’s Hawk

What dinner dish do these ingredients add up to?

Judy had a good follow-up check-up.  She got the big bandages off.  Her shoulder is healing up nicely.

Lots of entry points for the shoulder arthroscopy, plus a vertical incision in the top of her shoulder to get the lipoma (stitches pictures on request).  No inflammation.  No swelling.  The stitches stay in another week.

She has been cleared to take her arm out of the sling several times a day, but no active movement.  She can do the arm dangle; lean over and let the arm hang.  She can move her torso enough to cause the arm to swing a little.  Passive movement only.  That’s it for the next five weeks.  No other rehab until then.  After that, we’ll work to restore her range of motion, but still, it will be passive movement only until further notice.

All that aside, she is doing great and feeling great.  She seems to be caught up on her rest and is out and about accompanying me on errands and doing more around the house.  It’s her left arm in the sling.  She can do a lot with her right arm.