Off to Washington DC

Today I go To DC for another 3 days. I hope to be able to drum up more business for my employer, it is hard work, I work a Home & Garden Show, mostly for 12 hour days, and that is just the time on the floor, 99% of the time I am on my feet (The 1% is time spent on the toilet and sitting down to reach under the table for brochures!) Then there is the time going from Hotel to Show & back. I eat breakfast before the show and dinner AFTER! That's after 10pm. The rest of the time I put my leads together, make a few phone calls, watch the news, and wish I were home at my Lake with my Wife.
It's not so bad, you get to meet and talk to a lot of people, make some appointments, look at the pretty girls - there are usually a lot of those - give gifts to kids, that's fun, talk to the surrounding booth people when it's slow. The worst part is not being at home with Julia and missing the sunsets over the Lake, as I've said before there are only 365 of them a year and I hate to miss any of them. Before the show today I have to go to Annapolis as I am appealing the property tax assesment on this house. So I gotta go. See ya later.

More on the birds of The Lake

This morning - Tuesday - we awoke to a dull cloudy day. But the birds were fascinating, the first sighting was immediate - two Great Blue Herons by the bulkhead, shortly thereafter another one landed on the pier and then took off again. The Ospreys were very busy, Julia saw three of them catch fish while I was making our early morning 'cuppa'. Back in the bedroom, our ideal viewing site as there are 10 floor to ceiling windows plus the glass door to the deck (or what we hope will be the deck one day!) and the two small windows on the other wall, I soon saw the three Ospreys and then another two, for a total of 5 Ospreys, they like to perch high up in the trees close to the Lake, then they take off and soar across the Lake stopping frequently to hover, then they move on and hover again, finally diving, but usually pulling up before actually hitting the water. Eventually they continue and hit the water sometimes coming up with a fish and sometimes not. The Cormorants are still there, but while using the binoculars to look at the Swan (there are two swans but as we are only seeing one most of the time now, we think the other must be on a nest) I spotted another batch of Cormorants too numerous to count, I estimated 50, this in addition to the batch of 20 that I had seen earlier! I wonder how many Ospreys there are around the Lake as the ones that I am seeing are just close to us. There could be more on the other side of the Lake.

Birds at the Lake

We woke up this morning to see a mass of Cormorants on the Lake, there must have been 50 of them. The Lake is only about 40 acres, so we are concerned about the fish population. Until today there had only been a half dozen or so of these Double Tufted Cormorants, although I had seen 19 the day before and 9 the day before that. I e-mailed AACo and got a reply from Ranger Adam. He seems to think that they are recovering their numbers, apparently their numbers had gone down drastically and they were almost endangered in this area. He feels that most of them are just passing through, but some may stay in the area. He also said not to worry about the fish, if it gets too hard to catch the fish because the birds have reduced their numbers too much the Cormorants will move on to somewhere else.
We also counted 8 Great Blue Herons, which is unprecedented. We have seen two of them a number of times (We named them Harry & Harriet) and three a couple of times but that is the most, until today. We could hardly believe it, there could even have been more because we can only see about 2/3 of the lake and some of the areas we can see are as much as a 1/4 mile away which makes a Great Blue Heron hard to see against the background of grasses, bushes and trees. Adam, the Ranger tells me that they are migrating too, so they may have stopped by for a snack before going on!

Follow up to last blog.

A few more thoughts on Money= Work or Work=Money, other non-workers, or people who don't produce any wealth for the country only take it, are polititions, overpaid athletes, overpaid entertainers. Oprah Winfrey for example makes around 100 million dollars a year - or as much as two thousand five hundred average workers, but all she does is stand in front of a camera and talk. She is doing what she likes to do, for $100,000,000 a year, why should she get so much money? Some one else drives a bus around DC for $40,000 a year. Oprah would probably rather do her job for $100,000,000 than drive that bus for $100,000,000. But why should she make that much money? She would rather do what she does for $40,000 than drive the bus for $40,000. The point is that what she does is of no more use to society as a whole and maybe less use, than the bus driver or the steelmaker. Everyone does something and there does not seem to me to be any reason why one person should be paid a thousand times or more what another person is paid. In fact we seem to enjoy paying some people huge amounts of money to do very little. Tiger Woods plays golf for tens of millions of dollars a year, why? I'm sure that the steelworker who makes $40,000 a year would rather play golf for $40,000 ayear. And I'm sure Tiger Woods would rather play golf for $40,000 a year than make steel for $40,000 ayear. All these overpaid jobs only take money from the people who do useful work. OK it may be useful for Julia Roberts to make a movie to entetain us, but why should she be paid 1,000 times as much as the woman who makes shampoo for her hair? I'm sure Julia Roberts has a job that she likes more than one where she would make shampoo, why should she be paid so much to do that job? Why should she not make the same as the shampoo maker? Her job, Julia's, is doubtless more pleasant than the shampoo makers, she has a nice environment, plenty of rest, easy work (for her - it would be hard for other people, but lots of jobs would be hard for her) Why should we not do work that we are good at and make somewhere around the same money? Pumping ceptic tanks pays very little compared to playing golf or being a movie star or a basketball player, but why should that be? Every one of those movie stars and golf players and polititians and CEO's would rather be doing what they are doing than pumping septic tanks - even if every job paid the same! Would you choose to pump septic over playing golf if they both paid the same?

Here's a thought - if the government can spend it's way out of the current economic problem, can we? To follow in the footsteps of what the Govt is doing all we have to do is get a bunch of credit cards and spend spend spend, once we have spent enough we should be OK again, right?
No, I didn't think so.

It seems to me that "Money" is actually WORK, the only way that money is created is by someone doing work. This means that it is the working man who creates the wealth of a country. In a small society, most would work, it would be necessary to have a few doing certain things that the workers couldn't do, such as keeping the books, organising things, watching etc. A long time ago those duties were probably done by the people who were too old or infirm to do anything else. The workers supported them, by donating a small portion of their earnings. It worked. But as we "progressed" more and more people wanted to be supported by the others and not do "work". This is where things started to go wrong, we have too many people supervising, too many people doing nothing to create wealth - just taking it from the others - such as lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, etc, they don't make anything, like bakers, toolmakers, farmers, manufacturers, etc. They just take, it will work up to a point, but when too many are just taking from the ones who are working and not actually doing any WORK themselves and creating wealth, at some point it becomes unsustainable. Just my my poor opinion.

News from The Lake

Today I saw at least 19 Cormorants on the pond, will the lake be able to sustain this many Cormorants? In addition Julia saw 3 Osprey - all had caught fish. The usual Canada Geese and Ducks were very much in eveidence.