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Mystery bird

 In Bandera, I heard this bird, which sounds to me like a Townsend’s Solitaire.  I walked that direction to find it, but couldn’t.  It eventually flushed but I didn’t get a look at it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofMtVJwZFHc&feature=youtu.be Problem is, there aren’t supposed to be any Townsend’s Solitaires in Bandera County, Texas in October.  They’re pretty much not here at all.  I made an audio tape and converted it to a video so I could save and share it.  (That’s why there isn’t any video in this video, just audio.) The doink, doink, doink call seems unmistakable though.  Meanwhile….We’ve left Bandera.  Now we’re in Choke Canyon State Park, halfway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. 
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Secret Garden

 At Sandpipers, we converted an old junky space into a garden.  So the follow-up question is, “Where did you put the junk you removed so you could create the garden?” Good question.  Moving into the motorhome required a new philosophy about junk.  We were keeping all this stuff just in case we ever needed it again.  For every 100 things we were keeping, we might end up needing one or two some future day; we just didn’t know which one or two that was going to be. We decided it was better to have to replace one thing we had just thrown away than to carry around 99 things we didn’t need.  We committed to recognizing that if we got rid of a bunch of stuff, and then ended up needing something we just gave away, that would not be a sign that we had made a mistake, it would be confirmation that we had done something positive. At Sandpipers, we have something called Angel’s Wagon.  It doesn’t have anything to do with little flying things (angels), it has to do with a guy named Angel who drops off an old cart on Wednesdays, then comes to pick it up and haul it away on Saturday.  No household trash or recyclables, but anything else is fair game.  Construction leftovers, broken lawn furniture, old bicycles, dead barbecues; it’s all good.  Angel does what he wants with what he gets and presumably takes the rest to the dump.  (Although we’ve never checked on the final resting place for what he doesn’t use.  Maybe his yard looks like everybody’s junky spot before they gave it all to him!) We still do have junk, but we’re much more disciplined now about regularly sorting through our unused stuff and getting rid of what we’re not using. 
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Yeaa!

 We got to reconnect with the bus! We drove the Jeep to Pipe Creek this morning to liberate the motorhome from time-out.  The soggy ceiling has been fixed.  They opened up the roof of the slide, drained out all the water, dried it out, sprayed it with a bleach solution, sealed the leak, and put it all back together.  Can’t tell there was ever a problem.  Of course there were a couple other things to fix while they had it. From there we drove the few miles to Bandera.  We’re all set at Jeff and Carol’s for a few days. It’s so nice to have the motorhome back.  We’re not going to jump right back into our summer trip though.  We’ll hang out in South Texas for a while longer before we head north to Colorado.