Thursday, December 30, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Tracks Through Time, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 1, 2010

I'm moved

By the fierce wind. By the dust blown in by the wind. By the cold weather predicted for the next few days. The combination sent me fleeing over to Site 8 for its electric hookups.

I've been boondocking fairly successfully for a few weeks now but this cold dust storm makes boondocking difficult with my setup. I have been heating with an unvented propane catalytic heater. It works quite well as long as I keep a couple of vents open to supply combustion air and exhaust the fumes. Now I've discovered I need to close the vents to keep the choking dust out. To do that I need to run my electric radiant heaters.

Night camp

Site 8 - 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

Five Trillion Spiders

Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69

more...