We’ve overcome a fundamental law of physics. We called a guy out to look at our Hydrohot system in the bus. Hydrohot is the thing that provides all the heat and hot water. It had been misbehaving intermittently, which, according to a fundamental law of physics, is an absolute guarantee that it won’t misbehave while the repairman is present. After taking everything apart, cleaning and realigning, and putting it back together, he declared that there wasn’t really anything wrong to fix, it probably just needed the maintenance he just performed. As he was walking away though, Hydrohot made an inappropriate sound which provided enough information to send him in a particular direction and he ended up determining that there was a photosensor that needed replacing. All the hot water and hot air we’ve needed since. (We don’t really need hot water and hot air in the bus right now because we’re in the house, but it’s nice to know it’ll be there when next we need it.) My conclusion? We just beat physics!
Spanish
We’re so close to our southern border that Spanish is a more common language than English. Billboards are not always bilingual; sometimes they’re only in Spanish. The population of our county is 90% Hispanic. It seems silly to live here and not speak Spanish. Studying languages other than English hasn’t gone well for me in the past though. I studied French for two years in high school and pretty much nothing stuck. (Although “studied” might be an overstatement. I attended classes.) I started a German class once in college, but quickly figured out that I needed to drop German and focus on all my other classes, or drop all my other classes and focus on German. I moved on with no foreign language. We’ve got Rosetta Stone and Babbel for Spanish on the computer. I’ve looked at them both off and on for the last year or two, always meaning to do more. I’m still not very good at coming up with words on my own now, but I’ve gotten better at recognizing written language. I can decipher most billboards and at least have an idea what they’re about. The current problem is consistency. I look at the language programs when I have time, then I get busy and forget. Rosetta Stone and Babbel are both based on spaced repetition. I’m a great fan of spaced repetition; it served me well in college, so I think I’ll take another stab at a foreign language; although since Spanish is the predominant language here it hardly seems foreign. I don’t want to stop everything else and just study a language, so I’ve decided to do at least *some* Spanish on the computer every day for a year and see how far that gets me. We’ll see if language learning programs and consistency can overpower my lack of aptitude. And as a bonus, there won’t be any shortage of people to practice on here.
This is not a cumulus cloud
It’s a smoke cloud from a sugar cane field.
When it’s time to harvest a patch of cane, they start by burning it. That gets rid of the unproductive vegetation, and gives them a lot less mass to sort through to get to the sugar-laden stalks. It just takes a few hours for a patch of cane to burn, then the sky clears, and the workers go on with the harvest. Plants
Some of our outside plants thrived in the cold wet weather we’ve had for the last few weeks.
But after the freeze, some of them not so much…
But after the freeze, some of them not so much… For the last three weeks of 2017
We did everything we could to get one more year-bird. We searched The Valley. We drove to Houston. We drove to Salineno. Couldn’t get one no matter what we did. We finished the year one shy of my predicted count. Today we’re out birding at Falcon State Park, a hundred miles away, starting off a new year-list, and we get a text from Jon. There is a long-eared owl at Edinburg Scenic Wetlands, five miles from our house. Long Eared owls *never* come to the tip of Texas. So two hours later, we’re standing on a trail, looking past a cactus, into a small tree, and there is a perched long-eared owl. A walk-up lifer! He wasn’t out in the open, but we could see enough for a positive I.D.
Birding is a funny thing.
Birding is a funny thing.