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
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