Randy’s Blog

Last summer I wrote about some new trails we explored, which included the Long Prairie Trail. That's become one of our favorite trails to ride; we've gone there a couple of times so far this summer. It runs east/west for 15 miles. At the western edge, when the Long Prairie Trail ends, the Stone Bridge Trail begins. A couple weeks ago we rode a portion of that trail for the first time, and we really enjoyed it. There were several noteworthy things from the ride.

Turkeys

First up, are turkeys! There were a couple of turkeys out for a stroll on the trail. As we rode by, they quickly moved off the road and into the bushes. I tried to take some pictures, but they mostly turned out blurry. This zoomed-in photo is the best I could get:

Kind of fun!

Deer

Next, we saw a couple of deer on the trail, well ahead of us. One of them had very impressive antlers! We stopped to watch them from a distance, and they watched us back, suspiciously. When I took out my phone, they started to run away down the trail and then into the woods. Here's another zoomed-in photo, which is the best I could get:

We rode a bit further ahead, and then stopped again because we could still see them through the trees. From the glimpse that I got, they looked enormous! A few seconds later they ran further into the woods, out of sight. I wish I could have gotten a better picture, because they were much larger deer than I'm used to seeing. The photo above doesn't do them justice.

I think we were really lucky to see them, too, because other bikers appeared a minute later. They would have scared off the deer had we not done so first. Anyway, it was very cool!

Stone Bridge

Finally, the trail took us over a stone bridge, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

After we rode across it, we parked our bikes and went down a very steep and twisty walkway. Here's the view from halfway down the walkway, looking towards the bottom and then looking up towards the trail:

 At the bottom was an observation platform, with a display stand that had lots of history of the bridge and the area. Here's the bridge as it is now, and what it used to look like back when the trail was a railway:

After returning to our bikes, we rode back to our car and drove home. It was a fun trip!

A few days ago my trail cam recorded a family of raccoons marching through our back yard in the wee hours of the morning. It was kind of cute:

Last night, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. I saw a mama duck watching a bunch of little ducklings frolic about in the water. It, too, was kind of cute. So I took a picture, but as soon as I pulled my phone out the mama duck turned around to look at me, so the final picture wasn't as cute as I'd hoped:

Several weeks ago, while on a walk around our neighborhood, Wendy spotted an unusually large fish in the pond by our house. I recorded this video of it:

Several blog posts ago (here), I posted a video of a fox jumping over our neighbor's fence. Since then we've gotten 2 more videos of that happening. Here they are:

Finally, a month or two ago I went out for a walk shortly after it stopped raining. Walking down our driveway, I was startled by a splash in front of me, and then I saw this big toad:

Those are the notable wildlife encounters I've had recently. Haven't seen any big turtles so far this year, but one of our neighbors said they saw one sitting in our driveway early in the morning about a month ago.

Saturday morning Wendy and I went on our first trail ride of the season.

It was sunny and warm, with highs in the 80s. Great bike riding weather. Instead of getting on the trail close to McHenry and riding north, we drove north, got on the trail, and rode south. The advantage to this is that we get the hard part -- a long, gradual uphill climb -- out of the way first. Then we have a much easier and more enjoyable ride when we turn around and head back.

Distance: 6.03 miles

One of the nice things about working from home is being able to go on a bike ride around the neighborhood during lunch. Thanks to those rides, my season total is at 43 miles (last year my total was 205 miles).

Saturday evening, a little after 10pm, I made some tea (mango ginger, delicious!). While it was steeping, I stepped out on the deck to look at the stars. After a couple of minutes, I noticed what I thought was a plane flying overhead. But then I saw another one behind it, and then another, and another... and I quickly realized it was a chain of Starlink satellites that just happened to be flying overhead right then! I yelled to Wendy to come look. We stood and watched as dozens of them slowly flew by. They were easily visible, as bright as any of the stars. Three or four would be evenly spaced, followed by a slightly larger gap, and then another three or four evenly spaced. I would guess we saw about 50 of them total; we lost count around 30 or so. It was kind of a crazy sight, but cool.

We looked up more information about them afterwards. A new batch of Starlink satellites was launched on May 15; that's probably what we saw. They stay in a chain formation for a while, but over time they spread out to their own orbits. The satellites are owned by SpaceX (Elon Musk's company) and are used to provide Internet access.

And finally, as of today it has been 2 weeks since my second dose of the vaccine, so I am now fully vaccinated!

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon - a modern term for UFOs). They interviewed Navy pilots who have seen strange craft, and they showed declassified video of those objects. The Pentagon confirmed the videos show craft that they can't identify. Here's a link to the segment:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-05-16/

Note that there are 3 separate videos on the page. Each is worth watching. I've been asked what my thoughts are, so this blog post is my answer.

Some random thoughts:

It was a really interesting segment. Kudos to the pilots for coming forward, especially considering all the ridicule they faced immediately after their encounter. Government acknowledgement of these things has to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any. Another video was released last weekend; it shows a UAP flying along the ocean surface and diving into the water. I'm hopeful that all of this results in even more evidence being released and that it allows the topic to be discussed openly and intelligently in public.

At the same time, it's frustrating. UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. We should be much farther along than this. The government program referenced in the segment, AATIP, was started around 2007 and had a budget of $22 million dollars. That's pocket change. There have got to be much deeper programs within the government (more likely military) with infinitely more money that have been studying this since the beginning. The military isn't stupid; if there's any chance of gaining an advantage by studying these objects and potentially reverse engineering them, they would do it in a heart beat. So the 60 Minutes program is surface-level disclosure. I would bet there's still a deeper level to go. But you have to start somewhere.

Some even stranger thoughts:

The 60 Minutes program focused on pilots who saw something strange flying through the sky. Let's not forget that for decades people have reported encountering occupants of those flying objects, and have communicated with them! If any answers are going to be found to this puzzle, it will most likely be from studying those people and that communication.

I said earlier that UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. I think it's more likely they are as old as humanity, given that similar descriptions are found in folklore, fairy tales, myths, and ancient and religious texts. So what are they? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that they're beings from another planet. But every culture that encounters these things interprets them differently, according to their cultural beliefs. It's unlikely that our culture is the one that finally gets it right.

Here's one non-extraterrestrial hypothesis (I think I read this theory in the book The Super Natural): In the far future, humanity hits an evolutionary dead end. So they travel into the past to nudge us down a slightly different evolutionary road. Thus, humanity is evolving both forwards in time and backwards in time.

But here's another idea, one that I really like: Just as fish have no idea what's happening on land, humans have no idea what's happening on some other aspect of the Earth. It might turn out that humans aren't even the most evolved species on the planet, because we haven't realized what "the planet" fully means.

Of course, I might be wrong about everything in this post, so take it all with a grain or two of salt.

Last night's videos from the trail cam were the most exciting so far! It recorded 8 videos throughout the night and early morning: 1 of a raccoon and 7 of a fox, including one where the fox jumps over the neighbor's fence!

Each video is roughly 10 seconds long. I've combined them chronologically into one file so it's easier to view. Here's a breakdown of the action:

0:00 (7:18pm): Fox trots across the yard
0:10 (8:01pm): Raccoon appears
0:20 (9:01pm): Fox runs near the fence
0:30 (4:04am): Fox seems very interested in what's behind the fence
0:38 (4:20am): Fox runs through the yard with something in its mouth! (I hope it's a chipmunk)
0:47 (4:59am): Daylight, and the fox jumps over the fence!
0:57 (5:04am): Fox runs through the yard to the right.
1:07 (5:05am): Fox comes from the left, pauses, and heads to the fence

Here's the video:

I hope we get more excitement like this in the future!

Here's the latest on our backyard animal sightings, thanks to my new trail cam:

First up are two videos of an opossum:

I went down a small rabbit hole (opossum hole?) while writing this post trying to figure out whether I should use "possum" or "opossum" and whether to use "a" or "an" in front of "opossum". I read articles from mentalfloss, grammarly, and english.stackexchange.com before deciding on "an opossum".

Fortunately, a fox has no such confusion. It's the next animal on this brief tour:

And finally, a coyote... I think?

That's the end of the tour. No skunks or raccoons yet, but I'm sure they're out there.

Several years ago I wrote this blog post about a book of word-search puzzles I bought at Sam's. I've still got it, and for the past week I've been solving a puzzle each day. Last night I worked on a puzzle where each word in the list started and ended with the same letter. At one point I found the word SPANK, which was not on the word list. Eventually I realized that spelled backwards it formed the beginning of the word KNAPSACK, which was on the word list. I had never realized that KNAPSACK contained SPANK in reverse.

Which got me thinking, what other words contain words spelled backwards? I looked online to see what I could find, but all the search results were focused on palindromes (words that read the same backward and forward, like "madam") and semordnilaps (words that spell a different word when reversed, like "war" and "raw"). But that wasn't quite what I was looking for. So I did what any nerd would do: I wrote a computer program to figure it out. My Linux system came with a standard dictionary of around 100,000 words, so I used that since it was readily available.

Reading through the results, I was struck by how funny some of the combinations were. Below is a list of some of the more notable ones. The first word on each line contains the second word spelled backwards.

adrenals => nerd
aerobic => bore
alright => girl
anemone => omen
benevolence => love
whorehouse => hero    (I can't stop singing this to the tune of "Juke Box Hero")

Episcopalians => snail
amoral => aroma
asparagus => sugar
cardiovascular => avoid
chestnuts => stunt
cognate => tango
cohesion => noise
deviant => naive
drowsy => sword
herons => snore
knapsack => spank   (proof that my program worked!)
lameness => enema
lightning => ninth
matrons => snort
muffins => sniff
myriad => dairy
nightlife => filth
revolt => lover
spacecraft => farce
strafe => farts
televangelist => navel
vegetarian => irate
weightlifter => filth

Tylenol => lonely
dairymaid => myriad
drawers => reward
excitement => emetic    (I had to look up emetic -- it means inducing vomiting!)
explained => denial
partner => entrap
werewolf => flower

phenomena => anemone

sensuousness => sensuous

I can't get over that last example. What are the odds that the word "sensuousness" contains "sensuous" spelled backwards!

Anyway, this was my idea of a fun Friday night.

We had many more video recordings last night! Most of them were of rabbits. This one is notable because all you can see are two glowing, darting eyes in the distance:

I thought it was kind of creepy at first, until I realized they were rabbits. Later videos showed them more clearly, but I'll skip those and get right to the good one:

We think it's a fox. What do you think?

My patience is starting to pay off! For several weeks my new trail cam recorded absolutely nothing. But the past few days, things have started happening!

First, the mount: I wasn't sure what to mount the trail cam to, so originally I strapped it to a wooden board and leaned the board against the side of the house. That worked fine, until we had several very windy days, and the board kept blowing over. I did some research on the internet, where I discovered many creative and unique ways to mount a trail cam. In the end, though, I decided to buy a special mount just for trail cams that can be pushed into the ground to anchor it. There's a small screw at the top to attach the camera. So far it's been great:

And now, the videos! As the weeks ticked by and nothing was recorded, I started wondering if the trail cam might not be sensitive enough. I figured if there were animals crossing our yard, they would probably be small, and cross on the far side of the yard, by the fence. Well, ask and ye shall receive, because a few days later the camera recorded a squirrel running across right by the fence:

As videos go, it's not too exciting, but I was glad to have proof that the camera works as expected.

Then a few days after that, we got a video of a bunny in the middle of the night. When Wendy saw it, she said she hoped we'd eventually get to see videos of other animals, like coyotes. Once again, ask and ye shall receive, because last night we recorded two animals! One was another bunny:

And the other was... a coyote? Or a dog? Anyone care to offer their opinion?

Regardless, I'm happy the trail cam has started to record animals. I can't believe I didn't think of doing this years ago!

Finally, continuing the theme of ask and ye shall receive, I hope we get videos that show how so much bird food got knocked out of the feeder. And I hope we get videos of Sasquatch.

For the past 9 years, every time we heard a random creak on the stairs, we would look up and see Mr. Gordon going up or coming down the stairs. For the past month, every time we hear a random creak, we instinctively look up. But there's no one there. Do we have a ghost cat? Or just creaky stairs?

***

I haven't mentioned the bird feeder in a while. A couple weeks ago I noticed something strange: a quarter of the food in the bird feeder disappeared over night, but there was a pile of bird food on the ground underneath it that wasn't there the day before. How did it get there? Did some animal come along and shake it out? This happened several times over the course of a week. So a few days ago I bought a small motion-activated/night-vision trail cam, set it up in the backyard, and configured it to record only at night. Two nights later, the level of food in the feeder hasn't changed and the camera has not recorded a single thing.

I must channel my inner Sonny Crockett, and be patient.

Truth be told, I'm really hoping it's a sasquatch!