Friday, February 4, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 21, 2011
As luck would have it
This was a brutal storm we're just coming out of and I got lucky. John Farr has a great post today at FarrFeed about his reaction to the crisis up in Taos when the natural gas supply went down and how he and his dear wife coped.
I was reading just yesterday about the wisdom of resilience; the wisdom of having simple, bulletproof, systems in place to deal with the unexpected loss of services and I was feeling pretty smug about my setup. Until I realized while reading John's article this morning that I'd have been in deep doodoo if the electric grid had gone down, that is.
I had enough propane and clothes on hand to keep reasonably warm and to cook but I doubt I could have kept my fresh water tank from freezing - the pump froze a couple of times as it was - without electricity from the grid.
It didn't dawn on me what the frozen pump really meant until it froze. All my water was in the fresh water tank and I had no way to get it out. I didn't even have a jug of water in the fridge! Yikes!
I managed to get the pump thawed, it didn't burst, and all was well. But without electricity from the grid, so I could point a portable electric heater at it, getting that pump running would have been a real challenge.
These system critical moments don't come 'round often enough to keep me fully alert to the state of my systems and the implications of their vulnerabilities. I need to make a few changes around here - I want my smug back.
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Alex Can Think
Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal "debunkers" who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can't do something isn't considered blasphemous.