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Birding

 Mostly it’s about sitting and watching birds; or walking and watching birds.  Sometimes though, it’s about numbers. We have a 600 bird milestone coming up.  Now we have to figure out how to define it.  We have 599 birds on our World life list.  One more bird and we’re there.  That’s not much of a big deal though.  There are over 10,000 species to see worldwide.  We will have seen 6% of them. Most of our birding has been in North America, so we should pick a different measure.  We have 595 birds on our North American life list.  That‘s no big deal either though.  The North American bird list includes Mexico.  There are over 2,000 possible species.  We could probably take one trip through Mexico and double our count. There are about 1,000 species possible in the ABA area; North America excluding Mexico.  There are about 925 species possible in the lower 48.  We should either go to Canada and Alaska, or use the lower 48 count as our measure.  We have 587 species on our lower 48 list. We’ll get to 600.  We just have to figure out when to declare it.  Then we can move on to our next milestone.  
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At Lake Texana

 …earlier in the week. Out on the fishing dock. This little 6 foot gator spotted us. …and came right over to check us out. We had a moment. If we were going to fish… …we were going to have to get anything we caught past him!  
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A friend of ours here in South Texas died

 At 44 years old, the age of our kids, he got cancer in his neck and jaw late last year.  Hard worker, large family, no insurance.  That happens a lot here.  No doctors wanted to see him.  He couldn’t pay enough.  When the Affordable Care Act finally kicked in, he could get insurance even though he already had cancer, and got treatment.  The timing wasn’t good though, the cancer had spread too far before he got help and it got him at the end of July leaving his family without its sole breadwinner.  Judy and I haven’t been able to make it better for them, but we’ve been doing what we can with groceries and moral support. It’s not about us, it’s about them, and other people have helped as much as they can too, but I have to say how proud I am of how much Judy has been there for them.  She has the heart.  It is so sad.  It has been a tough year.  They’re preparing to move back to where family is in South Carolina and face whatever comes next in their lives.  We’ll continue to feel for them.  
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We went to a different dermatologist

 The one we’ve been going to here in the Valley is pretty rough.  He makes thing hurt more than they need to.  This one was better.  She actually used numbing cream on the site before she gave me the injection.  I appreciated that.  Had to get one spot biopsied.  We’ll get the result in a week or so. We finally got to watch the Broncos/Seahawks preseason game from last week.  I’ll that that as a Superbowl rematch.  Yeaa, the Broncos Win!  I’ll take even a preseason win after the Hawks played so well and made the Broncos look so bad in last year’s big game. Found a little tree frog hiding in plain sight at Lake Texana.