I got bitten by a dog today. That hasn't happened since I was in college, and that dog was mighty feeble.
Today, I was riding my bike through a campground and a largish dog came out barking aggressively. It then ran around the bike and bit my leg. The bite didn't penetrate my pants, but it sure bloodied my leg. The dog was considering a second go, and I was going to punch it in the snoot, but the owners of the dog got it to come back to camp. I don't know if they even realized it had bitten me, and didn't feel like making any big deal out of it, so I just left. A bit later, I took a closer look at my leg and found that the blood had run all the way to my sock. It looked kind of gruesome, but I continued on my ride...which probably didn't help, before returning to my camp to wash my leg and the bloody pant leg.
My dad used to work claims for Allstate before he became an agency owner, and he told me the worst claim (that the person survived) he ever worked was a dog bit claim.
Dogs can be unpredictable. This dog was not. It was clearly being defensive, but I was still surprised that it bit me. I thought it was all bark. Had I realized it was going to bite me, I would have raised my foot and let it bite my shoe. I doubt I would have really felt that, as my shoes are pretty tough.
Any large animal that gets near your face can do damage. I almost got knocked out on two different occasions by a very friendly Doberman. While friendly, it was a tank with a head like a battering ram, and it happened to jump up as I leaned down. The dog seemed none the worse for the collision, but both times it was a heck of a blow to me.
I'm rooting for the Artemis II to go well. But honestly I don't know what the benefit will be to go to the moon or even Mars. Until there is a breakthrough in propulsion, where does this lead?
It is by far one of the best fictional books I have ever read.
Have you ever read Rendezvous With Rama? That was a good one. MANY years later, two sequels were written, and they shouldn't have been. The first book did not make humans the center of the universe. The sequels "corrected" that.
I'm rooting for the Artemis II to go well. But honestly I don't know what the benefit will be to go to the moon or even Mars. Until there is a breakthrough in propulsion, where does this lead?
Still, it's pretty cool and hope all goes well.
I'd like to see it go well, too. There is no benefit to getting to either one that I can see. Perhaps if we found rare earth metals in the asteroid belt, or on the moon, though neither one seems at all likely. I'm not sure whether rare earth metals would get concentrated enough to bother mining without some kind of tectonic/volcanic/erosional process to gather them into more or less one place. Without that, a race to either the moon or Mars just seems to be about bragging rights.
I have not. It's available on Hoopla as an audiobook, but only in German. There's the e-book, but I have to do audiobooks so I can "read" while I do my nightly walk.
I'll look somewhere else, usually the internet archive has a pretty good collection.
Perhaps if we found rare earth metals in the asteroid belt, or on the moon, though neither one seems at all likely.
The moon seems doable. The asteroid belt, not so much. That's a 3 - 6yr round trip. If it could be done robotically then perhaps.
If we created some type of artificial gravity I guess we could send humans. People will do strange things. Sailors use to go on 2yr whaling missions.
Fun fact:
The longest continuous, non-stop, and unresupplied sea voyage in history was completed by American sailor Reid Stowe, who spent 1,152 days at sea. Departing on April 21, 2007, and returning on June 17, 2010, his journey, nicknamed "1,000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey,"
Last edited by Zvoni; Tomorrow at 31:69 PM.
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One System to rule them all, One Code to find them,
One IDE to bring them all, and to the Framework bind them,
in the Land of Redmond, where the Windows lie
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People call me crazy because i'm jumping out of perfectly fine airplanes.
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Code is like a joke: If you have to explain it, it's bad
Friend of mine is thinking about a trip to the Florida Keys. Is the end of April a good time of the year???
It has its good points. The temperature in the Keys tends to be kind of the same all year, with the exception of a month in the middle of winter. The rest of the year stays about the same due to the small islands surrounded by a warm, shallow, sea. That would be towards the end of the dry season and before hurricane season starts, so that would be fairly good. The dry season doesn't matter so much in the Keys, though, because mosquito control will be in place anyways.
The final issue is the crowds. I haven't been there in a couple decades, but last time I was there, I noted that the crowds are utterly horrific pretty nearly all year. I expect that it is mostly worse, by now. The one positive note is that the drawbridge was replaced on the channel at the start of Key Largo. When that bridge went up, it could cause a traffic jam that might last for the rest of the day. I believe it is just a high bridge, now, so that issue is removed. Still, April is probably slightly better than other times. Horrific, but slightly less horrific.
The crowds of people aren't bad, but the traffic can be overwhelming, since there is only one highway. There are actually TWO roads getting into the Keys, which lots of people not recognizing that Card Sound Road is a good alternative. There were times when that drawbridge would open on a holiday weekend, and people could be sitting still for a couple hours, not because the bridge was up all that long, but because the traffic took that long to get moving again. The first cars would move, then the next, and so on, but the stoppage would be so long that people would set up chairs to wait with a view of the long, straight, stoppage.
Unfortunately, once you get through Tavernier, the two lane divided highway (two lanes in each direction) necks down to a single lane highway with a suicide lane in the middle. The last time I was there, it appeared impossible to make a left turn onto that highway, as there was simply NO break in traffic. That was pretty crazy. It may be even worse, now. It certainly made travel both slow and annoying.
Overall, I wasn't a big fan of the Keys. There were only two things to do down there: fishing and drinking. I don't drink, but the fishing is the best in this country.
There was an amazing abundance of life when I was down there. Unfortunately, the mosquito spraying was changed from diesel and malathion at low altitude to something else. I had heard it was malathion delivered from higher altitude, but whatever it was, lots of the more notable animals died off. Spiders may not be everybody's favorite, but the golden orb weaver spiders down there was pretty amazing...and now they appear to be gone.
On the other hand, if a person can find any accessible piece of waterfront and possibly any standing groves of trees, there is much to see. Groves of trees may not be all that appealing, though, because the mosquito spraying is not totally effective. Without that spraying, it is likely that very few people would visit the Keys. For most of the year, the numbers of mosquitos in the Everglades is pretty insane. There's a "mosquito meter" down in Flamingo, at the tip of mainland Florida. It's like those Smoky The Bear fire danger signs, but for mosquitos. It goes up to "hysterical", which is where it is most of the year. When it's at hysterical...well, they don't mean funny, they mean that you will lose your mind. The Keys were like that before the mosquito spraying. I've heard stories...
They're not big drinkers but mainly like to site see, go out to eat and listen to live music. They've driven across country more than once. They would like to see all 50 states.
I think we had the coldest night of the last winter just last week. Today and tomorrow will be in the 80s, the rest of the week will be in the 50s. It's all over the board. So far, this is already the ninth wettest April on record for Idaho, with storms yet to come. It's all rain, though, some basins are in single digit percent of normal snowpacks.
We're all over the map. 80's one day then 60's the next. Which is fairly normal for this time of year. Had some really big thunder storms roll through last week. Got some hail. That's about as close as we get to snow.
I leave the week after next, but I won't go quietly. First will be a couple days of training (Amtrak, specifically), then I start the actual ride. I'll be carrying a computer, and this will be such a leisurely ride that I expect to be stopping by routinely.
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so I used dot dev: 
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
