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A lack of judgement

 On my part. Led to this. We’re in San Diego. I thought it would be a fun way to end the year if we went birding.  We ended our summer trip with 450 species.  Since then, we’ve squeaked up to 458.  We’ve pretty much exhausted the species in the Rio Grande Valley where we live, so I looked around the country (there’s an app for that) to see who has the most birds we haven’t seen yet this year.  Southern California.  Southern California has plenty.  We should be able to get to 475 species.  That’s our new target.  475.  So this trip is all about birding. Except it’s not.  A few days ago, comfortable in the knowledge that the end of our two-year Continuing Professional Education (CPE) reporting cycle was still a year away, I noticed I was getting a lot of advertisement emails about continuing education classes.  I took a look, and sure enough, the reporting cycle ends in 2017, not 2018.  Oops.  It ends in a month!  Time to add up all the courses I’ve taken over the last two years and see how I measure up against the 80 hour requirement.  An all-day seminar in 2016.  Another in 2017.  That’s all I can find.  16 hours satisfied of an 80 hour requirement.  Oh well.  No problem.  I don’t have to arrange to go anywhere to get my classes.  I can take them online.  Well actually, there is one problem with that.  When you show up and sit through a class, that’s all you have to do is sit through a class.  When the class is over, you get credit for being there.  CPE on demand is different.  There are no attendance checks, but there is a test at the end you have to pass to get credit for the course.  That makes all my online CPE more demanding than attending classes in person.  I have to pay a lot of attention, and actually learn something because I have to be able to pass a test at the end. So anyway, we’re going to have to mix in some CPE with our birding efforts.  I’ve done some every day since I realized my mistake.  When we get home from this trip I’ll have two weeks left to finish my education.  I can’t afford to leave it all until we get home and find out I’m overloaded and doing classes on Christmas Day.  I’ll need to keep after it during this trip to make sure the amount remaining is manageable We have a countdown for how many birds we need to see to get to 475 (17.  We’ve seen 458 as of today).  We’ll need a countdown for how many hours remain on the 2017 CPE requirement (49.  I’ve completed 31 as of today).  
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The great Texas Toys for Tots

 Barbecue competition in Raymondville. We went. We’ve never been to one before, so we didn’t know what to expect.  Rich and Carolyn met us there to help us take in the experience. We got to wander around all the teams cooking and see what they were doing.       We got hungry, but no-one was serving food.  They were all busy preparing their food for judging.  Cowboy beans and cowboy bread went early, then fajitas, followed by chicken, ribs, and brisket. Lupe, the guy we were there to see.  His in-laws were there to support him. And his team.  Each guy does a different entry.  Lupe does the chicken. We discovered that if we actually wanted to eat the food, we could sign-up to be judges.  So we did. We judged the finals for fajita meat.  One at a time, take a bite, score the entry, move on to the next entry.  Cleanse the palate as necessary with dill pickles, saltines, and bottled water.  We judged 12 fajita entries each. That went well, and we still had room, so after walking around again, we went back to judge the chicken preliminaries.  That was 15 bites of chicken. Yeah.  A tough assignment. If we stuck around for another two hours it would be time for ribs, but we were pretty full, so we didn’t. We’ve never done this before, but we expect to again.  There are a lot of these competitions.  And now we know enough to call ahead and find out what time each meat is judging.  Next time for me…. Ribs!  Then brisket.