Finally getting better adjusted to the time change. I think it helps that I’m not as tired as I was on the drive out here. When I go to bed, I sleep. That sure wasn’t the case last week. The respiratory shit is down to a somewhat stuffy head and the occasional cough. So thankful that I can breathe when I go to bed and that I’m not waking up with eye goo anymore. Little things mean a lot.
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This morning, I had an 11 a.m. Zoom meeting for a committee I’m on at
church. Had plans on getting my walk early
enough so I could shower before I got on camera. Neither the walk nor the shower happened because
some Night Light paperwork got in the way, and I had to spend some time attending
to it.
Kim is
the point person for the Night Light shelter, which is an arm of Safe Haven
Ministries. It’s an overnight men’s
shelter that operates from beginning of November to the end of March and its
purpose is to give homeless men a safe, warm place to sleep, a place to shower,
do their wash, and eat a good meal before heading out to wherever it is that
they spend the day. Volunteers make the
shelter happen…each night there are two volunteers scheduled to stay at the
shelter with the ‘guests’; I do the scheduling of those volunteers. This
morning was spent cleaning up a scheduling snag that had me growling like Roy
Kent (Ted Lasso). Only I don’t do it as
well as Roy does. Maybe his growl has so
much resonance because he has so much body hair. 😏
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Zoom meeting was over by 12:30 Arizona time. My plan beyond that was to ride Zeus into
Coolidge and pick up some more groceries.
We have been incredibly bad at buying groceries so far this year, which has
necessitated far too many trips to Coolidge for food items. Just need to get
the cupboards and fridge stocked so we have ingredients for a complete meal. The
other side of that coin though, is needing to remember that when we’re camper
living, we have limited space for storage. Extra trips to town aren’t
unreasonable. We don’t always need to go
to Coolidge because there is the IGA store in Eloy; but in general, we know
that Eloy is best for piggy cookies and fruit; Coolidge is best for all other
food.
Riding to Coolidge on the bike to get groceries quickly became impractical
as the list I was making got longer. So,
we jumped in the truck and about a mile down the road, realized that we made
the list but forgot to bring it. We did a quick rundown of the list from
memory, then went up and down every aisle at Safeway, trying to remember what we
had talked about. Except the pet food and
baby care aisles, no need to go down those.
Walked out of the store a little poorer than when we walked in, but I
feel good that now we have food…enough for a couple of days’ worth of complete
meals. And since it’s Wednesday, we made
a stop at Eloy for some piggy cookies. Lots of piggys in the house! Life is good!!
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Hey, I wonder if I’m skilled enough to put a star tattoo on White Flower’s
little penguin butt? Taking a break
right now to give it whirl. Update: Took about a half hour but White
Flower now has a star tattoo on her butt. 😎
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The hummingbirds are going crazy out at the feeders. Five or six at a time, zooming through the
tree in our yard, either drinking in harmony or chasing each other away from
the feeders. They fly so fast that I wonder how they can see where they’re
going…how do they avoid crashing into the tree branches? I turned to Google and found that I am not
the only person who has pondered this subject. Found a couple of websites that
referenced ‘a Canadian study’ and detailed how they went about it. Each article contained the same information.
Hummingbirds have a unique collision
avoidance system built into their brains that allows them to perform high-speed
aerobatics in safety.
The super-agile birds,
whose wings beat up to 70 times a second, can hover,
fly backwards, and whizz through dense
vegetation at more than 50 kilometres per hour.
How they manage to avoid potentially fatal
crashes has remained a mystery until now. Researchers in Canada conducted
a series of experiments which showed that the birds process visual information
differently from other animals.
As they dart and dive at speed, they judge
distance from the way looming objects appear to get bigger, and vice versa.
The study/experiments involved a tunnel with nectar at one end and a
perch at the other, cameras, and images projected on the sides of the tunnel. The researchers changed the images on the
tunnels as the hummers flew from end to end. They filmed the birds’ responses
and made some conclusions. I read a lot of information about the way humans and
insects process the distance of objects in their vision field and how hummingbirds
do it differently. A lot of information
to wade through. This is the best
summation of all that I read about how hummingbirds avoid crashing:
They gauge the size of the objects in front
of them and use that information to steer their movements, allowing them
to make split-second decisions and avoid collisions. And they do all this at crazy fast
speeds. Amazing!
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We have a little desert hare hanging around our yard. Today at Safeway, Kim came at me carrying a
bag of carrots and said that they were for the bunny. So, there is a little pile of carrots out by
the bushes and tomorrow check to see if any have been nibbled on. If so, I think a cell cam should be located
at the corner of the camper to get some bunny action, if possible.
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No birds on the seed-ring feeder that we’ve seen but doves were
underneath it today scarfing up whatever had fallen off it. I’d rather see the cardinals.
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Kim had hopes for a clear sky tonight, but the clouds keep rolling in. He’s gone out several times to check…his
mount/scope/camera has the ability to be programmed to take images, park itself
back in home position and then shut down. It can even be programmed to start
taking images at a certain time, but I don’t think Kim has dabbled in that
much. Anyway, no using the scope tonight
because of clouds.
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