I saw an advertisement for those packages that you rip open to expose the interior to air so it heats up to warm your hands or other body parts as desired. Really?
The FAQs say the innards are all natural and biodegradable. I don’t know about the packaging but I am going to say it probably isn’t readily biodegradable. Even if it is, what the hell ever happened to gloves and mittens?
I went to Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) today with the intention of bicycling the Washington Ditch Trail to Lake Drummond, which is about 9 miles round trip, having lunch and returning. Unfortunately I got in about 2.5 miles where I reached part of the trail that was very low, grassy, and muddy. The water on both sides of the trail was very high and had obviously washed over the trail often this spring. I didn’t look forward to doing, on my hybrid bike, 4 miles of mud and soggy grass so I turned back.
I ended up going over to the Park HQ to see if they had updated their stock of T-shirts since the birding events there two weeks ago but they had not done so. While there I walked the short trail that I was introduced to when taking walk with a group lead by a woman who worked at Black Water NWR in Maryland. Thanks to that experience, I was able to locate two Northern Flickers, three or more Red-headed Woodpeckers gadding about, and a lone Screech Owl. I saw and heard either a Eastern Phoebe or a Peewee…I can’t remember what the song was now. I heard a Bobwhite but could never locate it. Thanks to a couple I talked to there I heard a Yellow-billed Cuckoo and then saw one but didn’t realize it until I looked it up later in my bird book which I had left at home.
This couple commented about the fact that I was bravely wearing shorts in snake country. They had heard and seen earlier, in the day, a five foot Timber Rattler when they were setting up to take a picture from their car. The guy had a couple of interesting stories about snake encounters including one in which a friend of his had gotten a Timber Rattler caught up in the spokes of his bicycle while riding in Great Dismal and one about a friend of his shooting holes in his boat while trying to subdue a Water Moccasin.
Unfortunately, I returned home on the east side of the refuge and that ended up taking me almost two hours and forty minutes which, after the only twenty-five minute drive down, there made for an awful lot of driving to get in about an hour of exercise and recreation.
I got a six-pack of Sweetwater Brewery 420 Extra Pale Ale on the weekend, much to my chagrin. I am choking them down one day at a time. The label says the beer is a West Coast style pale ale with a strong hoppy finish. I beg to differ. This is one of the blandest pale ales I have ever had. In fact I might refer to it as the Coors Light of micro-brews. How appropriate that it is brewed in Georgia…redneck central.
I had a dream last night that I was trapped in a tree by a beaver. Do I need to say more? Damn! Fucking beaver had some serious claws. Is that normal?
Legislation, proposed by Virginia’s right-wing nut bag governor and passed by Virginia’s apparently right-wing nut bag Assembly, that includes removing our 17.5% gas tax, not changed for 25 years, and replacing it with a 0.8% sales tax increase makes no sense to me, probably because I am not a right-wing nut bag. This is just redistribution of wealth to the wealthy and cannot help with Virginia’s transportation infrastructure problems nor can it help to reduce consumption of gas or vehicle created pollutants.
Read more here about the current state of the legislation:
Va. lawmakers give McDonnell partial win on transportation at session midpoint
Below is my letter to my representatives asking them please to not let this legislation pass:
Please don’t let this legislation pass. I think about all the poor people who ride buses because they can’t afford cars. Their environmental and consumptive impact is minimal thereby reducing long term costs to our environment and infrastructure. They are the least likely to benefit from no gas tax and most likely to be negatively impacted by an increase in the sales tax.
On the flip side, those in the upper middle class and higher who can afford to and are more likely to buy and drive unneeded gas hogs including SUV’s and sports cars will certainly benefit from no gas tax. They will then contribute less to minimizing the economic impact of pollutant spewing gas hogs and the degradation of our transportation infrastructure. Lastly, since they have more disposable income, the impact of a 0.8% increase in the sales taxes is much less likely to impact their personal finances.
Seems silly after all these years. Here are some comments:
Super Bowl: Why The NFL Should Play The Game On a Saturday, Bob Warja, (Senior Writer) on January 27, 2010
I am not spending a lot of time on this now. I used DuckDuckGo and Google to search for “why is the super bowl always on Sunday. The previous three links had better responses than I generally found. ESPN and the NFL did not chime in. Most response seem to think that since Sunday was NFL football day it was only natural that the Super Bowl should be held on Sunday also, no matter the consequences of the next day being a work day for many people.
I know a lot of people don’t believe that the earth is warming and, if they do, they don’t believe the warming is caused by humans, or gaseous cud-chewing quadrupeds for that matter. I am not going to argue either case though I believe in both of them. I will just state the facts.
It is January 30th. I live in the mid-Atlantic states outside of Washington, DC. I am showing 71 degrees on the thermometer on my balcony at 1620. My heat is off, sliding glass door to the balcony has been open since last night, and the thermostat in my apartment reads 76 degrees. Something doesn’t seem right in the world to me.
Today I got my first recliner….a Lazy Boy loveseat. Why did I wait so long! Oh the comfort I have missed for so many years. Oops, so comfortable I just nodded off for a minute!
That’s not what you think. Just a spot the temperature hit on the way up and down in Centreville, VA, today. I think I saw near 80 degrees on my balcony thermometer before I went to work at shortly after 1100 today. I went to work in an American Embassy Burma golf shirt that a bud gave me. First chance I got to wear it and it was on 4 December. WTF?
When I came home today, I spent over three and a half hours getting my Christmas cards and notes ready for printing. Doh! Why? One of those things I am committed to doing? Or should I be committed?
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I recall now that this was seafood dinner night at the hotel because it was also the late afternoon tour of the Lycian ruins at Kaunos led by Rami who is the hotel general manager. I was puzzled that he would lead the tour, which left at 1600 and returned at about 1830, on a big dinner night. I guess he trusts his staff and, from what I saw, he should. As it was, dinner at the hotel, served poolside, usually did not start until 1930 or 2000 when the sun had dipped enough behind the mountains to provide for a cooler dining experience. By “cooler” dining experience, I don’t mean anything related to prison food….
By Thursday, I was tired of walking from my days in Istanbul and trips back and forth to town in Dalyan. My daily routine turned into getting up for breakfast by the pool, hanging out by the pool reading and listening to music, drinking at the pool bar, eating lunch and, when on the schedule, dinner, by the pool, and swimming in the pool. After 8 days of being on the go, I was ready to chill and enjoying it…by the pool.
My second to last real adventure of the trip was going to the ruins. We boarded the hotel boat at about 1600 to head to town and beyond where we docked and walked to the ruins. The days seemed to be getting hotter as they went by and this day was no different. The walk was quite warm but interesting because we were out in the country surrounded by pomegranate trees and watermelon plants. As in other very hot countries I have visited, like Thailand, you just get in the habit of walking slowly to try to keep the sweat factor to a minimum.
The ruins were quite interesting as were the views from them. To the south were the remnants of a good sized fortress way up on the top of a hill. To the southwest on a smaller hill were the remnants of another fortress. Far off to the west was Iztuzu beach and the river delta spreading out before it. The ruins consisted of Roman baths, a temple, a market square, a church, and an amphitheater. It was apparent that there was still much work to do to unearth more of the ruins and try to reconstruct them.
There was not that much walking involved but what with me being so out of shape, my knee acting up, and the heat, after the tour, I was ready to get back down to the boat, on the river, and headed back to the hotel. I was looking forward to a shower and dinner.
I was not disappointed with the seafood dinner which included Blue crab, shrimp, calamari, and whole fish such as Sea Bream. Sadly, after all that food, it was all I could do to drag myself to the bar to join some of the family in an after dinner raki, the anisette flavored national drink. But I managed. One has to keep up the routine….