This is what they looked like to some of us. Brother Bill and family (including mom).
Brother Tom and family.
The sixties looked young and thin, I think.
Brother Tom and family. The sixties looked young and thin, I think. Solar power
Solar powerI love solar power. It generates electricity with no moving parts (if you don’t count the electrons). For our purposes, it is an unlimited resource. Problem is, when the sun is not shining, solar is not producing electricity, and it is expensive to store electricity for when you need it later. Battery technology is coming along nicely (think Tesla), but it is still very expensive and not practical on the scale of a power grid. So solar is only part of our energy solution. We need vastly better battery technology to store electricity, or…… We need a better grid. Look at it this way. Solar will produce electricity in one location for maybe 8 hours a day. We can extend that by three hours or so by feeding solar electricity into the grid in New York to be used in California while it is still dark there, and vice-versa. We don’t need better battery technology, we need a bigger grid. When it’s dark in the U.S. the sun is shining somewhere else. When the sun is too low in the northern hemisphere in the winter, it is just right in the southern hemisphere. We need a global solution; a global power grid! We don’t need to store solar energy overnight, we just need to move it efficiently from where it is light to where it is dark! A global consortium. Everybody plays that wants to. Pay for what you take out; get paid for what you put in. Problem solved. You’re welcome.
There are two rare birds in the Valley
Got a great look at the juvenile Northern Jacana at Estero Llano Grande State Park.
Check out those mongo feet!
He can walk on lily pads without sinking.
Got a look from very far away of the Collared Plover at the playa in Hargill.
396 species for the year. Now we need four more rare birds in the Valley…
Check out those mongo feet! He can walk on lily pads without sinking. Got a look from very far away of the Collared Plover at the playa in Hargill. 396 species for the year. Now we need four more rare birds in the Valley… Danger
Graphic x-rays with screws in my neck follow......If you’re squeamish about such stuff, don’t scroll down...... I didn’t do my job well. The surgeon did his job. He fused four vertebrae together in my neck and screwed them all to a steel plate.
My job was to heal. Of the three fusions, only the top one took. The x-rays show the third vertebra down has moved and shifted a little. The fourth vertebra has moved a lot. Check out the bottom two screws. They’re both totally bent!
No surprise. My neck hasn’t felt right all along. The surgeon says he can fix it with two more operations. He’ll take out the steel plate and some of the lower bone grafts and start over on the ones that didn’t work. He’ll fuse everything from the front again and screw another plate on. Then for the second operation, he’ll go in from the back of the neck and put in some steel rods and screws to hold everything in place for sure. That ought to do it. The procedure will take a little longer, two to five days in the hospital, and the recovery will take a little longer. Three months in the rack; maybe a year of recovery altogether. We look forward to that adventure in a month or so.
My job was to heal. Of the three fusions, only the top one took. The x-rays show the third vertebra down has moved and shifted a little. The fourth vertebra has moved a lot. Check out the bottom two screws. They’re both totally bent! No surprise. My neck hasn’t felt right all along. The surgeon says he can fix it with two more operations. He’ll take out the steel plate and some of the lower bone grafts and start over on the ones that didn’t work. He’ll fuse everything from the front again and screw another plate on. Then for the second operation, he’ll go in from the back of the neck and put in some steel rods and screws to hold everything in place for sure. That ought to do it. The procedure will take a little longer, two to five days in the hospital, and the recovery will take a little longer. Three months in the rack; maybe a year of recovery altogether. We look forward to that adventure in a month or so. The Beaver has landed
We’re home at Sandpipers. 2015 summer trip map Five months. Nine and a half thousand miles. Eleven states. A family reunion. Kids and Grandkids. Friends. State Parks. Federal and National parks. A niece we’d never met. A cousin we hadn’t seen in twenty years. We stayed at sixty-one different places. We stopped at five different dog washes and two groomers. We got rain, at least some, every day for our first month on the road. All through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado. Rain. Then none. No rain for the next four months while we went from Colorado to the California coast, up the Oregon coast, to the Washington coast, back and forth inland Oregon and Washington, then back down through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. No rain. The whole Pacific Northwest was dry. (It has since gotten wet again.) The birding was good. When we left Texas, we had 289 birds on our quest to identify 400 species each year. (Last year we got 401.) On our trip north, we gathered in eastern kingbird, black-capped chickadee, harris’s sparrow and lark bunting. In Colorado we picked up broad-tailed hummingbird, spotted towhee, mountain bluebird, and western bluebird. By the time we left Colorado we had 316 species. In the Pacific Northwest we got band-tailed pigeon, brandt’s cormorant, black oystercatcher, red-necked grebe, and purple finch. By the time we got back to Colorado on our return trip, we had 378 birds. We continued to pick up new birds on the trip south, juniper titmouse, townsend’s solitaire, prairie falcon, scaled quail, gambel’s quail. Now we’re home, with 394 birds. Only six more and we’ll be at 400! Of course they won’t come so fast now that we’re not traveling through different habitats each day. We’ll need some rarities. There has been a northern jacana reported at one of the birding spots nearby. Maybe it will still be there tomorrow and we can pop over and get it. Judy was awesome. She did all the heavy lifting. She hooked and unhooked all the utilities at each stop. She hooked and unhooked the towcar every time. She carried all the groceries. She did most of the driving in the car. I did all the heavy watching, and rested my neck. It was a great trip. And it’s great to be home.