Wednesday, December 29, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Snow Geese, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 1, 2010
Morning at Tinley-Tee Tire & Auto Services
This morning I stopped at the tire shop JT's recommended, Tinley-Tee Tire & Auto Services, to see what they recommend to replace the worn rear duallies on the Lazy Daze and to see when they might be able to put them on. They recommended Firestones, had them in stock, quoted me a fair price, and put them right on. There. That's done. Now everything is ship-shape and I'm ready to roll roll roll.
Quick, competent, friendly service. We like it.
Night camp
Boondocked - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.