Well, I got some decent news for ya today…

Connie and Neil went down to Corkscrew last Thursday and got some nice shots…its getting to the end of the breeding season but the water at the two Lettuce Lakes is still up enough to  allow the waders to feed and so there was still a decent number available. 

Unfortunately…I don’t have those images for you today since Neil and Connie were overcome by life…but I do have a couple of quick ones he got out by the pond out back that I’ll get to in a bit.

As noted last time…they got last minute tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra and as I reported it was good…but then had a Sarasota Symphony concert last Friday evening. They had shifted to Sunday afternoon matinee performances a few years back because getting back home at 2300 or later is just no fun…but because of her Mastersingers commitments she couldn’t attend on Sunday. We left early, ate dinner at our usual Longhorn Steak House only it was pre instead of post concert…then headed over to the concert hall. We stayed for the opening piece which was a piece by contemporary composer Peter Boyer named Horizons and it was the best modern piece we’ve ever heard. Mostly current composers are into atonal and noise rather than music but Horizons was well worth it. Then it was the Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto which was excellently played by the soloist…and we can now say that we’ve heard an Elton John piece as the extra by a classical musician…it was a jazzed up version of Bennie and the Jets and was actually quite good as well albeit unexpected. None of us were overly enamored by the piece after the intermission…the Brahms 4th Symphony and Connie had an early rehearsal Saturday morning so we left at half time and were home about 2200 or so.

Saturday she was off most of the afternoon for the dress rehearsal of the Mastersingers concert…then on Sunday it was Mass and the concert. Our original pans were to eat on the way home but Neil was feeling poorly all day with stomach issues so we just came home and ate some chicken noodle leftovers…it had Port wine instead of Marsala wine and mushrooms in the sauce and was pretty tasty. Along the way the other day when he was cooking it…he called it Chicken Port…we wondered what the basic difference between Port and Marsala is…turns out that both are sweet, fortified wines (fortified means they add extra alcohol)…but Port is made from white wine grapes and Marsala from red wine grapes. Then they’re both aged in barrels…typically those started as bourbon barrels since bourbon requires new white oak charred barrels which the distillers then sell to the rum producers to age rum and then they sell them to Port, Marsala, and Madeira (another fortified, sweet wine) wine producers and then they probably sell them to somebody else for something. Along the way the barrels soak up some flavors from the bourbon and rum and pass that to the wine.

Today we had left over pork carne asada with peppers and onions in corn tortillas…we had some of that on Saturday and kept the rest for today. And now she’s off to the Mastersingers rehearsal place…no more music for the season but they do have the end of the year annual meeting to go over schedule for next season and assorted admin business stuff. And oh yeah…we had the Lee Country inspector this morning to close out the post work inspection for the permit the HVAC guys had to get to replace our A/C unit last week. Turns out our 10 year old unit needed a new coil. They run $3500 and come with just a year warranty and nothing on the labor so it was better to just replace the entire unit and compressor…we got a Lennox which because of the way the coil is built will solve an ongoing problem we’ve had where the filter which sits at the bottom of the vertical unit gets sucked up into the coil area. The Lennox has a dual sided coil and the sides are much more vertical so that allows a better filter retaining mechanism.

Hopefully…the current stupidity coming out of DC from both sides will stop soon…but I fear that’s pretty much a forlorn hope at this point. 

Hopefully he will get to the Corkscrew images this week. With that though…we did see an old friend out at the pond over the weekend and a never before seen here at our pond critter.

Ragnar…the big gator we see…hasn’t been around in 4 or 5 months but he was out sunning himself the other day on the other side of the pond. He’s a big dude…probably 8 or 9 feet long and is never seen on the house side of the pond. The smaller two come over this side occasionally and Neil’s gotten some photos of them in the past literally 10 feet from our lanai.

Then there was this female Mallard Duck…we’ve been here a bit over 5 years now and this is the first duck we’ve sen.

Hopefully those two will keep ya primed up for more later this week…assuming he gets off his keister and finishes them.

Interesting things found on the net.

I knew New Zealand was sparsely populated but had no idea that 78% of the country had nobody living there…no inhabitants per square kilometer.

We’ve all looked up at one point…well most of us anyway…and beyond the Big and Little Dippers the most recognizable constellation is Orion which has the distinctive 3 stars in a row forming his belt. Those stars are named Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka which was one thing I didn’t know. The second thing I didn’t know about them is how large thy are. As you can see in the shot below…they’re about as much larger percentage wise than our sun as our sun is larger than the Earth. The first is a triple star system, the second a single star, and the third is a sextuplet start system (we knew about binary and tertiary systems but never heard of anything larger than that). Multiple star systems consist of however many stars that orbit each other in some manner with any possible planets beyond that. Because of the strange orbital mechanics involved…it is unlikely that any but a binary system would have stable enough planetary orbits (if they have planets at all) to offer even a capability to support life as we know it. The three stars forming the belt have Arabic derived names and were known to ancient Arabs as Al Niṭhām which means String of Pearls and you can see how that name came about. The three stars are 1200, 1300, and 2000 light years away and only appear in a line due to the vagaries of geometry. Orion itself is the 26th largest of the 88 named constellations…and contains two of the larger known stars…Betelgeuse and Rigel…and the stars in the constellation range from 500 to over 2000 light years away…the sword stars also include the Orion Nebula which is the remains of a supernova.

Here’s what the complete Orion Constellation looks like. Although it…like most constellations…looks like a 2D object…its actually composed of stars at greatly varying distances so  it only looks like what we call Orion when the 3D is compressed into 2D…and if we were elsewhere in the galaxy it would not be recognizable as the pattern is only visible from near our solar system. And that’s probably way more than you ever wanted to know.

Cyas.