Bird-zilla

I ride in a short road trip twice a week past wetlands that have an ever-changing, seasonal  population of birds.

First trip this week, I noticed that there were no hawks in the air, and few waterfowl on the ponds.

A quarter mile north came the answer: a bald eagle perched atop a utility pole, surveying potential lunch menus.

Gorgeous animal, but I'd rather have egrets and ibis.

I'm less enamored of Big Baldies after a too-short visit to Alaska, with its flocks of bald air rats.

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That enlarging wet spot around this block's electric transformer turned out to be oil, not lawn sprinkler run-off, so today NV Energy crews and men in trucks showing other logos swapped the leaker out. Shovels, chain saw for tree roots, two huge trucks with hydraulic cranes. And our power was out only 1.5 hours.

The working-man show was free.

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It's always something

Interstate 80 east of Reno-Sparks in the Truckee River canyon is a moving banquet of oddities.

Yesterday morning, out the kitchen window, I saw a tire bouncing in the westbound lanes.

Yes, a tire, all by itself. Blue sky visible through the center. It bounced tractor-trailer high, then lower twice more before it disappeared in (rough estimate) four seconds.

While I wrapped my mind around that, I realized there was a metal framework stopped on the freeway, whatever it was attached to hidden by the guard rail.

Trucks and cars slowed down for five minutes, but did not bunch up or stop.

Little over an hour later, a flat-bed tow truck stopped ahead of the framework. A truck with a camper shell holding the framework, maybe a canoe rack, was hauled onto the flat-bed and off it went.

I'm glad the bouncing tire didn't cause a disaster. But it would have been cool to watch, from a distance.

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My laptop's home. The display on the monitor is finally close to what I'm used to. My cheap-o Word won't run, so I downloaded Pages, free. My cheap-o Quicken won't run so I bought a subscription for a year to the cheapest offered.  I immediately ran into a High Sierra bug ... it would not  open the Quicken .DGM, until after a full restart.

Congrats to the evil genius who thought up making people pay every month or year for software we used to be able to buy and own forever. Or, until the OS changed.

Bastard.

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