It's Cold Outside!

It was cold today.  Hah!  We're such wimps when it's less than ideal here.  In between rain showers, we drove up A mountain to look at the weather.  There's water in the Santa Cruz river.  Look at the brown line at the bottom of the picture.  That's the river with water in it.

Rain.

More rain.

I took this driving back down A mountain.  There is sun on the mountains out in the distance.

Overall, it was a dark and dreary day with wind and rain.  Since there can be no blog post without the hummingbirds, here they are in all of their puffed up glory.  They were cold, as well.  They puff to conserve body heat.

I don't know why the border on this picture is so wide.  Picasa is messing with me.  I did the border three times, and it refuses to look like the other two.  Computers!  Software!  It's all the work of the devil.  That would include cell phones as well.

This guy spent the day scanning the skies, driving off the competition, and eating.

I have to tell you, when the weather is bad, and someone is on crutches, it makes for a long day.  If either of us is ever seriously damaged, we'll probably have to buy a house.  Just getting out for a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond was an effort.  It'll be back in the 70's in 5 days or so.  I'm looking forward to sitting on the patio in the morning again.

A Windows 10 Test

This is a test.  I put Windows 10 on my Acer netbook to see how much I didn't like it.  It's ok.  Then I started reading about other bloggers being unable to load photos to Blogspot.  So, I'm doing an end to end usability test of moving a photo off the camera card, into Picasa and then up to here.   I did notice that Picasa is somewhat different on Windows 10.  OK, enough test!  This keyboard is driving me crazy.

Verizon and the Birds

My original idea for this post was to tell you about our problem with Verizon.  Then I thought that would be too boring, because it has been ongoing for four months.  Thus, we'll be having more hummingbird pictures!  Yaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!  It's overcast today, so the light wasn't bright enough to use a really fast shutter speed, so they're not as crisp as I had hoped.

There was a lot of checking over the shoulder (do birds have shoulders?) this morning.  This guy is looking a little ragged.  Note the fuzz on the beak and the fluffy legs.

This is a female, checking over her shoulder.

The interloper also looks like a female.

I was a split second too late to get the whole battle here.

Later the male came back and was badgered by a female.

He looks over his shoulder and shrugs.

Back to eating.

Surprisingly, the female landed on another perch and the two of them shared the feeder.  We have not seen that behavior before.

Back to Verizon.  The contact list on Jim's phone has been repeatedly damaged by Verizon applying updates.  The contact list back up file on the cloud was corrupted back in September.  Yesterday we discovered that their fix for that was to delete the backup.  Thanks, Verizon.  Anyway, yesterday we started losing the call log.  So, I called Tier two technical support.  This is what I learned from that encounter.  When the tech has you download the repair/update software from your phone, to your pc, you must understand what the word repair means.  You'd think repair would mean "fix the broken software."  Nope, it means do a factory reset and delete all the photos and text messages.  I have no idea if this will fix the problem, but I'm fairly cheesed off that there was no mention of deleting all of those files before doing the "repair."  So, keep this in mind if Verizon ever wants to repair your phone.

That's it, that's all I've got.

Weather and Birds

What's shaking in your part of the world?  Tucson has been a good place to be, climatologically speaking.  The end of the good run of weather is nigh, but not here yet.
I've been able to get some work out of Jim.  Here we see him grilling chicken thighs.  Since it's too dangerous to be roaming around on crutches in the dark, we're making food late afternoon for later.  I just do not have the knack with the grill that he does.

I swiped this from the KOMO website. The GPNW is just getting inundated with rain.  Everywhere is flooding.  This is an RV park in Puyallup, WA that has been flooded out. The water rescue people had to come and remove the residents.  The rescue was complicated by live power pedestals in the park.  This is just tragic.  It's a poor area, many of these people just lost everything.  The ones who can make it out will have a tough time finding anywhere to be in the area.  The Carnation Valley is under water, so I'm certain their RV park is flooding, too.  Small towns have water running down Main Street. It's just amazing how much rain the whole region has received.

Jim and I are having another news blackout.  I just can't take anymore statements being made by certain of our political candidates.  In order to combat the negativity in the ether, I shall unleash the force of more hummingbird pictures.

They are so pretty when they're pink.

Check out the trail he's leaving while in flight.

From his perch in the palm tree, he looks right.

He scans the skies for the competition.

He launches and chases off a would be feeder interloper.

We are so incredibly boring!  It's hard to think of anything to write about.  Jim gets his cast off in a week; that will provide us with more blog fodder.  Until then, I got nothing!

More Birds

Greetings from the Recovery RV.  We have zippity doo-dah all to report.   Bird people - I have a question.  Is this a girl or a boy?  Google says that the females may have a few pink feathers on the face, but I can't tell what this one is.

 This is definitely a girl.  She's very tiny.

Boy.  This may be the one we call Fuzzy Butt.  He has the cute hummer hiney.

In the real world, the Export Import Bank has been reinstated.  Yay!  Now US industry can compete with companies in countries that offer financing.  This is good for major manufacturing.  It costs the tax payers nothing, and preserves manufacturing payrolls.
Jim's been finding ways to entertain himself while he waits.  FlightAware is one of the websites he frequents.  You can see who is arriving, who is departing, who owns the planes.  If you're an airplane person, this is fun to watch.  I enjoy the Misery Map of late and delayed flights.
Other than this paltry offering, I got nothing!

Ears, Birds and the Bees

I saw the Tucson ENT yesterday.  It was sort of a good news, bad news report.  The hole in the eardrum is still there, but it's very tiny, 0.5 mm in size.  Dr. P believes that water intrusions into the middle ear, and subsequent infections, are not likely.  The hole is so small that surface tension should prevent water from getting across the ear drum.  It does continue to prohibit activities like paddle boarding, kayaking or free diving for pearls at depths of 100 feet.
This was my hearing test in July.  The lower line is the left ear, and the change in hearing was fairly shocking.  After the original perforation in 2010, my left ear's line was just slightly below the right ear's line.

This was done yesterday.  It's better than it was before surgery, but it still tails off at 4000 hertz.  It's not a terrible hearing loss, but I was hoping for more improvement.  The nerve is still in good shape, and this loss is well treated by a hearing aid. 

Here are pictures of the bee and the bird.  The bees here are Africanized hybrids.  They can be vicious little buggers.  When we sit out on the patio a few are always buzzing around.  Bees make me nervous.

There is the always darling hummingbird.

What does one say about today's mass shooting in San Bernardino?  We're both sad and have headaches.  It's just another tragic day for our society.