Just killing time

Clicking the pics could separate the men from the boys..... But if you can't tell by now you're probably pretty hopeless.

New Mexico sunset

I went to Walmart this morning so that I could stock up on a few things. I didn't want to run out of something important while living out in the sticks for a little while. I'm looking forward to living out in the sticks; I don't want to have to drive 15 miles back into town if I don't have to.

I don't know how long I will stay there; it probably depends on how much I can find to do. But I'm figuring on at least three days and maybe more.

I don't know about where y'all are living, but here in New Mexico, most folks are still wearing a mask, much more so than in Arizona, where it seems like most people weren't wearing a mask. Since the United States is kind of like 50 different countries that make a lot of their own rules, I think it would be interesting to see some comparisons between the states on who is doing better and who is doing worse and what steps they have taken to make it better or worse.

Just like I talked about last year when dealing with the Bat flu. I felt better if I could compare what was going on by looking at the death rate caused by the bat flu more so than looking at hospitalizations, or Covid cases, because comparing the population to the Covid death rate made things not look quite as bad.

So at the moment, comparing New Mexico to Arizona, which of course are side-by-side, Arizona has a population of 7,500,000. Covid cases are about 900 per day. People hospitalized with Covid is around 20. And the Covid death rate on 19 April was 0.

New Mexico has a population of about 2 million, and their Covid cases are about 300.    there are roughly 113 Covid patients in the hospital, and the death rate is approximately 4 per day.

So is continuing to wear masks helping? Or is it hurting? No one seems to know. But there doesn't seem to be a tremendous amount of difference between those two states.

Now, if you want someplace you really should stay away from, how about New York City? 8.3 million population. About 17,000 confirmed Covid patients, this very moment. 1500 people hospitalized. 326 people dead on average this week.

New York City has about a million people more than the state of Arizona, but that doesn't explain death rates in the single digits for Arizona and in the hundreds for New York City. And I have to ask myself, even without the Bat flu... Who, in their right mind, would want to live in a place like that?

                                                 Theboondork

This is the American White Pelican, or as I like to call it Pelecanus erythrorhynchos. And I only like to call it that because it makes me sound intelligent. These pelicans are easily distinguished from normal Pelicans because they have two left feet, and are so big they eat the Giant New Mexican Hummingbirds for a snack.

These Pelicans are wading around in the Rio Grande, but there too far away for me to get a decent picture. I need to be able to get down to the river where there at, and more importantly get back up again.

      Gambel's Quail ? Parakeets ? I know they're not Penguins because we only have the giant Emperor Penguins around here that are so big they eat the large American White Pelicans like Popcorn.

You may wonder, or not, how a bunch of Emperor Penguins come to live in New Mexico, and here's what happened over a million years ago.

The Emperor Penguins lived at the South Pole but they could only do their mating dance called the Boogaloo at the North Pole, so every year Emperor Penguins would glue Pterodactyl feathers to their stubby little wings with a hot glue gun and fly to the other side of the world to dance their little hearts out for a month or two.

But this one herd of Penguins took a shortcut and flew across the New Mexico desert, and before you know it the hot glue had melted, feathers were flying everywhere, and hundreds of Emperor Penguins unceremoniously dropped into Elephant Butte reservoir, needless to say they made quite a splash.

Stuck here without enough Pterodactyl feathers to get away again, they've made their home in this desert environment, and as long as they have giant American White Pelicans to feast on, their perfectly happy boondocking at Elephant Butte.