Catching Up

Last things first. It's 9 pm tonight May 17 and as I stumble up the ramp to the front door after making  a dozen trips to the curb with stuff for tomorrow morning's bulk garbage collection, my phone blares out Stars and Stripes Forever - my ringtone for my youngest sister. Odd, we just talked yesterday. She tells me our oldest sister's house has burned to the ground. And plays voicemail from one of our nephews saying sis is unhurt, and can stay with them for as long as she needs - they have a guest room with a bathroom.

As youngest sister and I are talking, she gets a text from middle sister that nephew checked out the house, the roof is gone but most of the contents are okay. Yay!. I get the same text. Turns out a tree near the house caught fire and set the roof ablaze.

What's unique about all this is the house which burned is in Israel, and has been big sister's home since the 70's. Nephew lives in Israel, youngest sister is in WA State on the Olympic Peninsula and middle sister lives near Baltimore. And I'm in Las Vegas.

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Okay then.

Catching up. Yesterday (Saturday) I got up on time, got in the car around 10:15, and was at the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve by 10:30. After a couple of minutes of ant-social distancing, the manager let me into a front room/gift shop where an attractive woman of a certain age checked me in, which was just my name and whether I was from LV or Henderson. There was a set of 4 bee hives stacked on the left side, the bottom two were occupied but no bees in the top 2. Then I was pointed to the back door, which I exited, expecting a small viewing platform with people looking at and photographing birds.

Instead, I saw this:


And that's just one of 5 "ponds" of about the same size.

It's an oasis. In the Mohave Desert.

Long story short, I walked around 4 of the 5 ponds, on one long path, and it took 2 hours. By the end of the walk it was 96°. I got my Vitamin D dose for the year. There were benches about every 10 feet, which my sciatica was very happy for.  The scenery is stunning. There are cacti of all sorts, lots of pollinator flowering trees, but not a lot of birds. Ducks included Grebes, mallards,  mud hens and the dreaded Canada Geese and their offspring.

Early on there were dragonflies


Toward the end, when I was expecting red-wing blackbirds, this guy showed up:



Lots of great photos, find them on Flickr.

Home a little before 1, I was pooped. PNB&J on oat nut bread for lunch. Watched some streamers fishing and storm chasing. 4 pm I hit a wall and took a nap. Woke up around 5:30, watched some Tivo, dinner was a salad with sardines and tuna. Fruit in whipped cream for dessert.

Downloaded the photos from the camera, then puzzled out how to reduce them in size for Flickr. Found a new feature in Photoshop - conditional resizing. It lets you build separate commands for portrait and landscape images so it doesn't make your resized photos all the same dimensions. A neat hack. Uploaded the pix to Flickr and placed them on the map. Minor miracle, every photo was correctly geotagged.

Delivered was a box of 100 nail-in picture hangers with nails.

Streamed 7:30-8:30. One chatter.

Tired of the soft slippers, bit the bullet and ordered Birkenstocks. Way too expensive, but they were my go-to slippers for decades.

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Today - Sunday

Up at 8 or 8:30, the usual morning routine. Several streamers to flip between.

TMZ and NFL Live on Tivo. The pre-roll ads are gone but not the annoying ads for Tivo streaming $ervices in the Guide. :-(

Ironed all the Hawaiian shirts. It took 2 shifts.

Little by little I went through the stack of boxes in the hall. These mostly had paper goods from the printer stand, and assorted items I was okay with tossing. After salvaging the best stuff, two boxes got staged in the front room. All my Toastmaster trophies were in one of them. Very old, no value to me anymore. And as promised, overturned the last large box, which turned out to mostly just have empty boxes. There was a router which was suspect, but I filled the box back with things to throw away and wheeled it to the front room.

Streamed from 7:30-8:30, several chatters, mostly from the UK.

Time to do the deed. Little by little wheeled or carried a lot of stuff out to the curb. It's quite a pile. Remembered the CPAP, the old sleep number pump, the allegedly inflatable sleeping roll I tried to use my first night in the house. And a stack of empty boxes which I thought my letters from Thailand would go in, but it only took 2 of the 6. And a lot more stuff. Every time I came back, Spook was blocking the door. She loves camping out by the screen door when the main door is open. Tonight she was slow to take the hint.

There is more to throw out, but most of it will be recycled. I have, for example, way too many copies of most of my calendars.

I did manage to salvage the mounted photos from my last art show. 

Plans for tomorrow:
Watch for the bulk garbage collection. When they are gone, wheel the regular bins out to the curb.
There is a (probably final) 90 Day Fiancé on the Tivo. I am hoping for two break-ups. I expect one which broke to get fixed. I expect the lesbians will be history, which is sad because the wild Australian girl with the two-tone hair deserves happiness. Her American lover, not so much.

I may order take-out from the quaint little Thai place. I adored their mango/sticky rice.

basfa zoom meeting at 8. Probably will not stream.