White Meat & Scramble

SNOWBIRDS: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT!
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That statement was on a sticker on the back window of a PT Cruiser in the parking lot at the grocery store. Don’t ask me what message the sticker is supposed to convey: I have no idea. I like it, though, made me laugh out loud. I’m extremely dubious about the quality of said meat, suspect it’s dry, tough and stringy, doubt that I’ll try it.
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SCRAMBLE
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One of the LHC golf courses has a Sunday AM scramble for couples during the winter months and we participate when we’re in town. For you non-golfers, a scramble involves 2-4 players (4 most often) with each player taking his/her next stroke from the same location - the ‘best ball’ location of the prior shot. Does the way I explained that make sense? If not, ask any golfer for clarification, google it, whatever. Oh yeah, one other thing: there’s a rule that a foursome must use a minimum of 2 drives per player, regardless of how great or how lousy those drives may be. That rule helps level the playing field considerably.
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The Sunday scramble group has a Christmas day tradition: The Fruitcake Scramble. We’re signed up for it. The morning will be spent playing 9 holes of golf, followed by a gift swap-lunch at a local restaurant. They no longer exchange fruitcakes but they actually did back in the day. I’ll not miss the fruitcake, already have all the patio paver bricks I need. As you may have guessed, these scramblers are retired folks and mostly the other white meat - from all over the northern US and Canada. I don’t know if the lunch is a buffet or we order off the menu; in either case, white meat will probably be a popular option - bunch of doggone cannibals!
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Merry Christmas y’all!

Rain in the desert.

It's supposed to rain 1/2" during the day today, another 1/2" tonight and possibly another inch tomorrow.  If that forecast is accurate, historical record averages for Dec/Jan (0.59" and 1.05" respectively) will be inundated.  That means we'll have sunny weather from day after tomorrow through Jan 31st, right?  Works for me. 

This is only our second real rainfall since returning to LHC in late September.  Rain doesn't soak in or puddle much here.  Mostly, it runs down the washes and the streets and ultimately, into the lake.  The residential area of LHC is akin to one side of a football stadium, sloping down to the lake and causing the rain runoff to move along right smartly

The runoff picks up tons of sand, gravel and rocks from the washes and deposits them on the streets - job security for the city road crews who spend the next several days scraping and sweeping the deposits back into the washes.  A good rain is also a overtime windfall for city police cuz they need to be out and about, monitoring and shutting down as needed, those streets that are crossed by major washes.  There are numerous wash-crossed streets and the flows on some are several feet deep and quite swift; drive into one of those and your trip to Walmart turns into a ride to the lake, baby!  You won't actually get to the lake either, will get hung up at some culvert or whatever - but you'll have one hell of a ride while it lasts.

Jan is our wettest month historically, Feb & Mar are next, respectively at 0.9" and 0.86"; August comes in at number 4, with 0.67".  I'd guess that there are about 6 heavy, shut-down-the-streets type rainfalls per year.   Our elderly neighbor ladies are joining us for dinner tonight so we can all watch the deluge together.

Quail

Quail are the most abundant bird species in these parts. They’re all over the place and you hear their chirps all day every day, a very pleasant form of background music. Come sundown they all fly up into the trees to roost, safe from marauding coyotes.

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Trish read up on quail, learned that they post a sentry on a high point like a fence or rock to sound an alarm if there’s danger to the covey as they forage for seeds on the ground. This raises all sorts of questions in my ever-curious mind:

1. Who appoints the sentry?

2. Is there a covey committee or birdie board that decides whose turn it is to pull duty, how long the shifts last and so on? If so, are the committee/board members elected? How often are elections held, who is eligible to vote, are there term limits?

3. Could be that birds have benevolent dictatorships rather than democracies; in what manner then is the head bird determined?

4. Maybe it’s a just a volunteer position and after a few hours the on-duty bird cheeps the message, “Hey, I’m starving here! It’s time for a new sentry. Dan, get your fat ass over here!”

5. What if Dan responds with, “Pluck you, Quentin. I just found a really good mess of seeds, my favorites, gonna snarf ‘em up.” Who does Quentin complain to? Is there a grievance committee? A union?

6. Is this a males-only position or do females pull guard duty also?

7. May gay birds be guards if they don’t ask and don’t tell?

8. If the sentry falls asleep and a cat nails one of the grazing birds, is the guilty birdie punished? In what manner?

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Does anyone out there speak Quail?

Mecca Campground in the Salton Sea Recreation Area, CA

Ever heard of Salton Sea? I hadn’t until a couple years back when I was poring over a CA map and stumbled upon it; I wondered why it was called a sea and if it was a sea how could it be in the middle of the desert and from whence cometh the name Salton. Turns out, it’s called a sea because the water is very salty. The name Salton still throws me, thought at first it was named after a person, the famous fur trapper/guide Ralph Salton perhaps. But no such person ever existed. Salton isn’t a word. Why not Salty or just plain Salt - or Saline or Briny? Nobody seems to know where Salton came from.
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In 1905 a dike that was part of the Imperial Valley irrigation project was breached and for several months, the Colorado River poured through the breach, into what was then called the Salton Sink. The resultant ‘sea’ is 10 miles wide and 35 miles long, the largest lake in CA. It’s a bird watcher’s paradise (and thanks to Sonny Bono, a refuge) with over 400 species hanging out at various times during the year. At the moment, gulls, plovers and pelicans are the most numerous species.
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Eons ago, the Gulf of California extended to this area. More recently, some 2000 years ago, it was a huge fresh water lake with 10000 Native Americans living on its shores. The lake dried up and stayed that way for hundreds of years, finally refilled as mentioned above. Salton Sea is 30% saltier than the ocean and becoming more so because there’s no fresh water circulating through it; many species of fish are threatened by the increasing salinity. When the fish go, the birds that feed on them will go away also.
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To the east are the Chocolate Mountains and the Chocolate Mt Gunnery Range; one wonders what kind of guns they fire there - M&M cannons, chocolate kiss rifles? That taj mahal tent set up was next door to us, belongs to a family group that spends several days at the campground every Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving & Dirt. Santee, CA

About 2 years ago, my son Tod and his wife, Char, bought a fixer upper house in Santee and spent the next four months renovating it. They, along with my other son Adam, stripped it down to the studs and did it right: new wiring, plumbing, wallboard, the whole 9 yards. And they did the finish work right too, textured walls and ceilings, attractive moldings and a great selection of warm colors on the walls. Nice!
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The house is on a cul de sac in a quiet residential area and has a fantastic view of the city and surrounding mountains from the rear of the house, see pix. It’s oriented such that the back patio is sunny most of the day and that felt really good because a cold snap came through while we were there, frost on the cars both nights.  That green stuff in front of the house is low maintenance grass - astroturf or whatever they call it these days.
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There were about a dozen of us there for the holiday, the aforesaid plus other members of Char’s family. Fantastic food! We watched some of the parade, some football, topped it off with the annual Punkin Chunkin competition. I really enjoy the creativity, goofiness and just plain fun-loving folks involved in that event. You gotta be a little crazy to spend $50-100K and hundreds of hours building a machine that’s used for 10 minutes one day a year, and no payback except bragging rights. It’s a good kind of crazy though, helps offset all the sick and violent craziness that’s a staple of the nightly news. Good on ‘em, say I.
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En route to (and from) Santee, we drove through desert recreation areas populated with thousands of boondocking RVers with their off-road toys: dune buggies, dirt bikes, Jeeps, ATVs of all kinds. Off-roading is very popular in the SW but holds no attraction for me. Every summer of my teenage years was spent off-roading, pulling all kinds of machinery behind tractors, getting fried by the sun, ending the day totally filthy - eyes, ears, nose and mouth full of grit - and clothing that stood up all by itself. Oh yeah, those were the days!

T-Bird Travel

Like a zillion other Americans, we’ll be traveling at Thanksgiving, taking the EDGE to places unseen via roads untraveled. Santee, CA, near San Diego, is where my two sons, Tod and Adam, live and we’ll be joining them for the feast. We’ll drive over the day before, spend a couple nights in Santee then another 2-3 at a campground either on the Salton Sea or the Colorado River.
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This will be our first EDGE trip since returning from our 4-month summer odyssey in late September. We’ve done a few modifications to the trailer since returning, including the replacement of the noisy but wimpy el cheapo bathroom ceiling fan with a large, quiet and reversible Fantastic Fan/Vent. It has 3 speeds, it blows, it sucks, it’s freakin fantastic!
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And, we removed the bathroom door and replaced it with a curtain. The door opened inward, taking up most of the small bathroom floor area and banging into the sink and blocking access to the closet that contains most of our clothing. It was a pain in the butt in more ways than one. True, a curtain doesn’t allow for much privacy but in reality neither did the door; it had 1’ gaps at top and bottom.
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A person who is hugely embarrassed by the sounds of normal body functions shouldn’t buy a travel trailer – or else be prepared to sing/whistle/stomp their feet to cover the noise. Hey, at my age just being able to produce said sounds is a major accomplishment - even, one might say - wait for it …… a truly moving experience. It’s something to celebrate rather than denigrate. Holler woo-hoo and break out the champagne!

MAYAN RUINS FOUND IN LAKE HAVASU CITY!!!

Local resident discovers ruins while doing yard work.

Expansive excavations and digs anticipated in near future! Archeologists from all over the world are expected to start pouring into the area in the next few days.

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Okay, enough hype and BS. A few posts back I commented on the terraces in front of the house. The middle terrace was a blank canvas until a few days ago when I decided to put some of the leftover paving materials there, and to try to make something attractive with them. Attractive or not, here’s the end result. Eat your heart out. We’re looking for an appropriate piece of metal sculpture for the middle terrace, a stallion maybe?
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We recorded the Country Music Awards on the DVR so we could watch them at our leisure, sans commercials. Trish is an avid country fan and I enjoy it also although classic rock is still my favorite. One thing about the CMAs disturbs me greatly: the attire. Looking out at the audience you see many bright splashes of color in a sea of black – black as in formalwear, bright color splashes as in $10000 gowns. What happened to denim and boots and leather vests and those silly-ass western cut shirts with pearly snaps? Granted, several of the male performers wore hats and boots with their designer suits but others were bare headed and a few were even wearing knit watch caps. Good grief, knit watch caps! It would have made Gene Autry puke.
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And the women: I want ‘em in skin tight jeans and western shirts with the top 5 buttons undone. Instead they’re bundled up in these stupid gowns that contain a couple hundred yards of cloth and have a 8’-12’ diameter. Is there a woman in there somewhere? It’s just not right.
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Another thing: what makes a song or group ‘country’? Mostly there’s little doubt cuz the lyrics refer to trucks, tractors, hay, barns, floozies and two-timers, and the voices have that classic, often mournful, southern drawl/western twang. Some of the CMA nominees had none of that and I’m wondering, who defined this as country anyway – and what were they smoking at the time? The sound is soft rock and the lyrics contain no reference to pickups whatsoever. Which one of you faithful readers can shed light on this mystery?