I hit a wall last night. Two hours walking in the desert topped by
almost 100 windy miles on the bike made me tired. So tired I was trying to fall asleep with my
hands on the keyboard. Popped my eyes
open at one point to find that I’d typed about six lines of the letter s.
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Woke in the middle of the night to a strange sound. At first I thought Kim’s sleep machine had
gone wonky but soon realized it was rain…not a little sprinkle either. It was a serious rain. And as I lay there listening, waiting for
sleep to reclaim me, I heard another distant noise…it could have been a truck
out on the highway but I’m voting for thunder.
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I’m
not as quick as Kim is to wash the bikes; a shiny bike isn’t a prerequisite for
me to take a ride. I mentioned the other
day that I needed to wash Zeus and Kim had the gall to ask, “Oh, you can see
that, can you?” Ha!Ha! Very funny!
Yesterday I went into Eloy to wash the bike before riding the Tom Mix
Loop. Got back to camp and it was still
looking clean and shiny.
Well, I’m sure all of the desert flora and fauna were grateful for the
rain last night but I was a more than a little dismayed at how nasty Zeus
looked this morning…I just washed him! The
car wash will be the first stop next time I take a ride.
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How many hours would it take for one of the water pumps down the road to
fill an Olympic size pool? This is the
question we answered on our walk today because Kim had a need to know. So he did the came up with the equations
while I used the calculator.
Thanks to Google we knew that the capacity of an Olympic swimming pool is 660,000 gallons. Then by stopping at a pump he verified that it was pumping 1,350 gallons per minute. So he told me to
Okay,
so when we were doing all this while walking I wasn’t working through the story
problem I was just pushing buttons on the calculator; it made sense to me at
that time. But when I got back to camp and wrote it down I was struggling with
his process. So I went about it a
different way: multiply 1350 gallons/minute by 60 to get how many gallons an
hour…81,000. Then divide 660,000 by
81,000 to figure out how long it would take to fill the pool… 8.14 hours. Same answer but a different approach.
It occurs to me that our different ways of solving this math problem yet
arriving at the same answer is akin to a lot of Kim n Karen discussions. We generally come at an issue differently so it
takes a little longer for us to realize that we might actually be talking about
the same thing. We are the poster
children for “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”. 😎
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I had mentioned to Kim that I wanted to take the truck down by the hawk
nest, set the camera on the hood using the little tripod and sit in the truck
using my phone as a remote for the camera to hopefully get pictures of the
hawks on the nest. He thought that a
sturdier tripod was a better way to go so today it was on the list when we went
to Coolidge.
The
hawk flew off the nest when I stopped the truck so I put the tripod a short
distance out in the desert/field, set up the wi-fi access point and then sit in
the truck watching for their return, my finger poised to hit the shutter on my
phone. I saw one of them circling a time
or two but it stayed a distance away from the nest. I took pictures of the empty nest just playing
around while I waited, waited, waited.
Finally after more than a half hour one landed on the nearby telephone
pole. “Yippee! That’s right…check out the
danger situation first then just go to the nest. Come on, go to the nest.” I was watching out the window for the
slightest hint that it was going to fly so I could hit the phone’s shutter
button when I realized the wi-fi connection was gone. “Oh,
great, the camera battery died!” At
that point my set-up was useless so I
quietly got out of the truck, walked to the camera, changed the battery and
still got a picture of the hawk on the pole before it flew off. Good thing I wasn’t a danger.
When I looked at the pictures on my computer to check the quality I was
surprised to see that there was a hawk on
the nest the whole time. It was hunkered
down so only the top of its head was visible.
And from inside the truck, because of distance and shadows, I thought
that little bump was just part of the cactus. Mission accomplished even if I didn’t
know it at the time.
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Today’s 40 Days of Lent challenge was to work out and pray. Hmmm...at the same time? When I think of working out it usually involves a gym and weights but that’s not happening here. So we counted our daily 3 mile walk as a work out and I prayed before, during and after. 😊
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