If I Ever Get the Time...

I think that most of us have projects in the back of our heads, and they begin with "If I ever get the time, I would like to...".  Teri and I have figured out that it is unlikely that we'll ever again have the amount of free, uncommitted time that we have now, with the COVID-19 keeping us off of the road and close to our "sometimes" home in Medina, Texas.

Not only was our March trip to Colombia cancelled, but our plans for volunteering this summer in Michigan are currently on hold as well. We would have been on the road in early April, but for now we're staying put and seeing how things develop.

Teri has been crocheting like a mad woman, and we both continue to work on studying birds for our (now scheduled for October) Colombia birding trip, as well as working on our Spanish language learning.

We are learning Spanish through a website called Duolingo. I came across it when a bird guide we know announced that he was learning German on it. We've dabbled with Spanish classes here and there, but our nomadic lifestyle makes it difficult to commit to on-site language classes. Duolingo has been just the ticket for us. I started about three years ago and Teri picked it up a year later. I am about half-way through the English-to-Spanish class, and there is so much to learn. Even with that amount of content and effort getting "fluent" is a long journey.

After three years I felt like I had a lot of vocabulary and grammer, but lacked the ability to practice with a native Spanish speaker. Then I came across iTalki which is another web-based site that allows students to find teachers in their chosen language, and do face-to-face Skype type lessons. I'm am working three days a week with a young woman from Mexico City who is a part-time language teacher and we are practicing conversation along with some more advanced vocabulary. It has been a great help and I feel more comfortable with the concept of actually having a conversation. She is patient, that's for sure...

Another "If I Ever Get the Time..." project has been trying to get our lifetime bird list organized. Decades ago we started using a computer program called Avisys to track our bird sightings, i.e. what species, where, when, etc. Between us getting lazy about keeping it up and the program itself becoming unsupported due to the death of the author, those records are incomplete and not current.  In the meantime, we've also been using a world-wide on-line program called eBird to record bird sightings from various volunteer gigs and some of our international trips, but again not consistently.  I have been saying for years that "If I Ever Get the Time... I'd like to get all of our Avisys records migrated over to eBird and try to get everything in that one place.".  Well, there is no time like the present, and with week after week of free time, I've started getting it done. Between Avisys, trip journals, shoe-boxes full of paper checklists, and photographs, I am trying to get up to date and current so we can know what we've seen, and where, and try to keep up from now on.

From the screen-shot above you can see that we're currently at 1,234 species seen.  I think that number will be closer to 1,500 when all is done and entered, but that is just a guess.

Throw in a few home repair projects, RV repair projects, and even some engineering consulting work, and we're staying busy and relatively sane.  Not exactly how we planned to spend our Spring, but we are safe and comfortable and happy.

We hope that all of our friends are safe and well, and we look forward to getting back to "life as usual" soon(ish)!