I wanted to pup up a quick update as we’ve had a couple of wildlife sightings out pack at the pond this week. The weather has been pretty nice…70s to low 80s during the day and 60s at night so we’re able to shift to our preferred A/C off and windows open lifestyle with the arrival of the cooler weather. Don’t know if it is here to stay for the winter or if it’s just a temporary thing but at least for the next few days it’s supposed to be pretty darned nice.

After our trip up north a couple weeks back we’ve been just staying around the house mostly…we had Bingo on Sunday and a couple Date Nights as well as a Wine Dinner at Carabba’s on Saturday…when we brought home a whole pile of food as it was a four course dinner with wine pairings and each course was pretty much a full meal by itself so we just sampled them and packed the rest away to bring home and we had 3 or 4 meals out of the leftovers.

We got our new induction stove delivered right before we left on our trip and Neil really likes it. Works like gas instead of electric with instant on and off of heat, and things don’t stick since the pan doesn’t get overheated.

We picked up his new bike the day after our trip and he really likes it. All carbon frame, disk brakes, and electronic shifting so there’s no cables to ever need replacing and the brakes work a lot better than your older stye wheel rim brakes. It’s kind of a purplish gray paint job…but the model he wanted only comes in that shade. It’s a Giant Defy and has more gears and a nicer feel than his old bike (although a lot of that might be due to the old one being worn out after over 10,000 miles. He’s averaged about 1.5 miles an hour faster than on his old bike with less overall effort…he thinks that’s because the geometry of the frame and gearing fits his physical makeup a bit better than the old one. It was even more expensive than the stove was but it’s probably his last bike unless he eventually has to get a recumbent style because of balance reasons down the road apiece age-wise.

I’m sure you keep seeing the ongoing fighting over in Israel and the Gaza Strip…the progressives are all up in arms in the media and twitterverse demanding an end to the war crimes by Israel and a deescalation of the conflict…and the human kid jumped right onto the bandwagon that it’s all Israel’s fault because they’ve “isolated the Palestinians in an open air prison for decades now…but the real story is a lot more complicated than that.

Yes…Israel annexed Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights from their neighboring countries…in various wars over the years since 1948 that those neighboring countries started and Israel finished. They’re surrounded by people who want every Jew dead and the country returned to it’s “rightful owners” but when you go back and look at actual historical facts you’ll find out a couple of things. First…there has been a Jewish state there for thousands of years…Jerusalem was the capitol and it was recognized as a kingdom (and conquered and released over and over). On the other hand…there has *never* been a Palestinian state…Palestine has always been a term for the general area that was mostly populated by Arabs outside of the Jewish state but there was no country named Palestine. Nonetheless…the progressives have been demanding a “two state solution” ever since the annexation of various lands by Israel in those aforementioned wars that the other guys started. 

Now I’m not going to say that Israel is completely blameless nor have they done everything right…but 20 or 30 years ago the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) which had previously demanded an end to the state of Israel and had a long term skirmish I guess is the best word for it with the Israeli army decided that in the interest of peace they would renounce their end of Israel and Jews demand and have peaceful relations with Israel. As part of this…Israel gave them the Gaza Strip to govern and eventually would probably have allowed it to turn into a Palestinian state. Unfortunately…Hamas and their sponsors in Iran were having none of this and continued near constant attacks across the border into Israel…and based their missile launching sites in residential neighborhoods so that the inevitable response would kill/injure civilians and thus rouse the world’s angst against the “war crimes” of Israel. And it worked as most of the world sees Israel as the aggressor here despite the fact that basing military in civilian neighborhoods is in itself a war crime and firing missiles and rockets into Israeli civilian targets is…again…a war crime.

Then 10 days ago we all saw the terrorist acts carried out against Israel by Hamas…and now they’ve royally pissed off the Israeli government (as opposed to the other long term disdain)…and according to what I see in the news the Israeli man in the street thinks of Oct 6 exactly as the US thinks of 9/11…and at this point Israel has stated they’re going to wipe out Hamas. Given the relative strength of the military forces…they will achieve the goal if they’re willing to accept the cost in lives of both their soldiers and the inevitable civilian casualties because Hamas is going to continue to fight with human shields in front of their troops because committing war crimes is situation normal for them.

It’s gonna be a bloodbath all the way around…and if Iran and Hezbollah get involved then I think they’re also going to get hammered because outside of the US military the Israeli’s are probably about the best in the world as they’ve been almost continually at war for going on 75 years and are surrounded by countries that mostly want to wipe the country and Jews from existence. I’ve seen some rumbling that maybe Iran has nuclear weapons and might use them…and that would be an existence ending mistake for them IMO as it’s generally accepted that Israel has both nuclear weapons and the willingness to do what is necessary to defend their country…which is quite different from the defense resolve that the US has demonstrated repeatedly over the past 50 years by administrations of both parties.

Frankly…I can’t blame the Israeli’s for going in there and doing what they need to do to defend their country, territory, and citizens…and since Hamas chooses to fight dirty…then they deserve everything they’ll get. I hate that innocents will be killed…and a lot of the people living in Gaza don’t support Hamas…but the people living there voted them into power so to some extent they got the government they voted for and while I’m sorry for their problems now…it isn’t Israel’s fault that Hamas is in charge and chooses to engage in terrorist activities from civilian neighborhoods. For Israel to take the high road and not shoot back is foolhardy and will only lead to repeat incursions. Sometimes…you need to hit the other guy with a hammer to get his attention.

As an aside…this is one of the reasons…the hitting them with a hammer thing…that back in the 70s to 90s when a lot of assorted militant groups were taking hostages of foreign citizens like US, French, British, etc…and holding them for ransom or for prisoner swaps with the Israeli government of jailed terrorists. The militant groups kept doing so for a simple reason…it worked. What you never saw after the first time it happened though was for Soviet and then Russian citizens being kidnapped for ransom. The reason for this is that the only time it happened the then Soviet government figured out who did it and bombed the house of the head of that militant group taking him out…along with his family. And Russians were never taken hostage again because the militant groups learned that if you screw around with the Russians they’ll screw you back much harder…and this is what Hamas needs to learn about their tactics over the past decades.

Anyways…enough about that.

The only other interesting thing in the news is the dismissal of the Speaker of the House by the crazies in the Republican Party…and now they’re trying to put one of the crazy members in as Speaker…so far that’s not going real well and I really wish the adult Republicans would talk to the adult Democrats and elect a centrist member of the Republican side as Speaker and then get on about the countries business…but unfortunately the likelihood of common sense, patriotism, and compromise breaking out in Congress is about as high as Neil winning the Tour de France next year…or essentially zero. And with the government set to run out of money again the end of November…and the crazies on both sides insisting on my way or the highway…there isn’t much hope that anything will change. According to most of the media…it’s all the Republican’s fault but just as the situation in the Middle East goes…it’s a lot more complicated than that and crazies on both sides tend to drive the agenda for their party despite being a small minority of the caucus.

Ok…we did have a few wildlife sightings this week.

While Neil was out getting shots of the waders down a bit after he saw them…Connie wandered out to see what he was looking at and spotted this Osprey high in the tree over their head…after seeing the waders he completely missed it.

It must have spotted him because it gave him the stink eye after a bit.

This is the Little Blue Heron and Snowy Egret that originally attracted his attention.

And then yesterday he spotted this gator across the way…he’s not sure if it’s Ragnar or another one because it looks bigger than Ragnar to him. Gators grow all the time of course but this one looks a foot or so longer than previous shots so who knows.

Interesting things found on the net.

We all know about credit ratings and how anything above 750 or whatever is just fine…and the scale goes up to a maximum of 850. Why it’s 850 we have no idea but as part of our banking services we get notified every time it changes and a few weeks back we got notified that it went up 14 points. Neil checked to see what it was now…with no debt ours is normally pretty high…and was surprised to see that ours was 850…he didn’t think anybody could actually get that. No worries though…it’s bad down 10 or 12 points to the range it normally runs in.

Guess we could get a good rate on a mortgage or a car loan except our house is paid off, we don’t want a different one, and we pay cash for cars.

And talking about a bad day…

This is what happens when sharks swim through a shoal of bait fish.

Revenge is being plotted here by Shroedinger’s cat.

Cyas.