Time Off?

With the Grassland Fair over, we had an off day or two in our schedule...which has changed temporarily. Craig and Evelyn, tone of the other volunteer couples, were going back home for two weeks. They staff the visitor center on weekends. We have been asked to fill in so our schedule is now Friday through Sunday or the next two weeks, plus I agreed to check the quail on Thursday as well.

This Sunday, however, is an off day. I undertook a bit of a construction project though. We have been give access to the trailer next to Speedy until the skunk under the community trailer is dealt with. This trailer is used for temporary housing for researchers and other visitors who spend a short time on the refuge. It has two doors, but no stairs up to the doors which are about two feet off the ground. Someone stacked a couple of concrete blocks on end to create two giant steps to get in. This didn't seem practical.

There were several pallets of narrow concrete blocks in a corner of the outpost, so I took it on myself to build a better temporary set of steps. Gary, one of the local volunteers staying the weekend to help out at the fair, helped me cart them over to the trailer. It now has a three step entrance each step about 12 inches wide and one block high.

The blocks we have are only half-height, so I paired them up turning them on end so there were no holes in the steps. Gary thought this might be a unstable. He headed off to look at some barbed-wire fence on the refuge (He leads a long-term local project to remove the barbed-wire fences within the refuge). When he returned, he unloaded a bunch of full-size block next to the new steps, intended to provide a more stable base.

I'm not exactly sure what to do. They have to be used or removed as it is a rather unsightly pile, but they seem to have dealt with the skunk and we no longer need to use the trailer. I suspect I will get to it tomorrow.

My second project of the day was to install new tubes in the tires of our bicycles. With the problems I had with my first back road ride, I'd ordered heavy-duty "Slime"-filled tubes to replace all of the existing tubes (along with a new pump). Each tire had to come off, the old tube removed, the new one installed, inflated and remounted. Fortunately, we have a 12V air compressor for Speedy and it made inflation a breeze. Still, it took much of the afternoon.

On Monday we made our weekly trip to town. This time it was back to Tucson, still in search of the ideal combination of grocery stores, but first it was a stop at UPS. Over a week ago, I set up a return of a Wi-Fi extender to Amazon, since it didn't work with the Mac. An option was to let UPS pick it up. Supposedly they would supply the label and I just had to leave the package for pickup. This didn't work. It sat in the admin building for a week. I even tried putting it in the outside after-hours delivery box on a day when I knew that UPS was coming (they had another order for us, the tubes). The next morning I found the new package sitting on the outgoing package.

We gave up and found the location of the UPS Customer Service Center in Tucson. It was pretty near the road we take into the city, so we stopped there and left it off. It is now winging its way back to Amazon—finally.

We thought we would try one of the other Whole Foods in the city (It has three). This one was near the university. It was a very small Whole Foods and the parking was tight, but we were finding most of the limited things that we buy there. As we were standing in an aisle, Ellen looked up and saw a familiar face. It took us a bit of time to place it...and it took him a similar time to recognize us. It was a good friend and colleague of our good friend Bob. He is also named Bob. They are both researchers and we have met many times over the years, mostly sailing.

We go to Tucson and meet someone in a Whole Foods who lives in Tucson who we know from sailing in Hull..what are those odds.

After exchanging email addresses and promises to meet soon—he knows good spots to eat and visit, we finish our shopping and head off to the normal supermarket. We decided to go back to the first Fry's we tried on Grant Road. I plug Fry's on Grant Road into the Zumo and off we go. We arrived and nothing looked familiar. Oh...there are two Fry's on Grant Road (a long road) and we picked the other one. A bit of reprogramming and we were off again, this time to the one we shopped at before.

Compared to the others we tried in Tucson, it was quite an improvement, but we think we can do better. We are going to try another Whole Foods/Fry's pair next time. By the time we leave in March, we might have figured this out. It was much easier in Texas; we lucked into a really good H-E-B in Rockport.

By the time we finished at Fry's it was well after lunchtime, so we decided to start back to the refuge, looking for a place to eat along the way. The interstate entrance was quite close to the market so we didn't pass anything in the city. We all the way to Three Points, about halfway back before we turned into Cindy-Lou's for a late lunch. It was the local spot in Three Points (maybe the only spot), but on our way into town we'd always seen lots of cars parked outside. We just had sandwiches and they were okay, nothing special. Their breakfasts looked like they might be good, though.

Today was another off day. We'd thought about driving over to Arivaca  to do some birding, but decided to stay local and bird the headquarters area, the area between the outpost and the visitor center, with at detour over to Triangle Pond, a small created wetland just off the entrance road.

Our birding actually started before we got up, with a pair of Great Horned Owls hooting close by. When we looked out Speedy's skylight windows, we could see the silhouette of an owl perched on the ridge pole of our shade shelter, directly overhead. A good start.

We did the actual start a couple of hours later ad did a 3.5 mile, 3.5 hour stroll seeing many sparrows, many raptors, many meadowlarks and a collection of other birds including seeing the elusive Sora at triangle pond. We were back in time for lunch.

After lunch, Ellen went off to do laundry the newly skunk-free, but not quite odor-free community trailer. I went off to the visitor center to talk to Dan and offer to help him out the next couple of days. The other volunteer couple, Chuck and Betty, went off to Phoenix for two days. They normally work Tuesday-Thursday. This left Dan without help at the VC. We weren't really doing anything the next couple of days, not having planned our getaway, so we thought we might pitch in now...might be helpful later.

I expected this would just be a quick bike ride up and back, but it lasted a bit longer. Dan and Emily had some field work to get done, so I offered to sit in at the VC. I zipped back to Speedy to get my computer to pass the time. This was actually a good move.

Sally, the refuge manager, came into the visitor center looking for a quiet spot to do some work and asked for help. I was happy to help, the visitor center is a very quiet spot on a Tuesday. She was trying to collate monthly rainfall data for the last 30 years. There is a rain gage right next to the headquarters building and daily rainfall and temperature reading are kept on hand-written forms. Sally wanted to extract the monthly and annual totals. I suggested that I could do it directly into a spreadsheet. I took half the forms, and she took the rest. I entered mine directly and then added her hand-tabulated data Unfortunately, about ten years is missing.

I suggested that she might want to use the NOAA weather data from their weather station on the refuge. She had thought of that but had been unable to access it easily. I said I'd give it a try and after a bit of searching was able to find the NOAA database with access and was able to download the available data set, manipulate it a little and send it on to her.

It was a pretty successful afternoon.

As we were preparing for dinner this evening, we heard the owls again. One swooped over Speedy and landed on the outpost fence. We had a good look to end our day...the roast chicken, sweet potatoes and green beans were pretty good, too. Ellen does well in our mini-kitchen.