“Terminal Intermediate”

6FPS V4#9: September 12, 2022

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

It’s the Labor Day weekend, and I’m trying to figure out where 2022 has gone. We've been having some heat here, but not terrible, not like the major heat attacks of last year, but we’re losing about 3 minutes a day as we head away from the summer solstice, and I’m honestly ready for grey skies and the cooler, rainy weather again.

I want to thank people who showed interest in my book giveaways last issue. Much appreciated. I’ve sent books to Linda Sewell, Sunny Mar, and a third one is pending someone responding to me email asking for an address.

I will probably do similar things with my next book, and is there interest in my giving away 8x10 prints of some of my images? If so, let me know and I’ll set up something.

The current project here at the homestead is the irrigation. We found that it needed a fair bit of work, and like most things involving craft people, finding good people and then a timeslot in their schedule has taken a while, but as this issue is released to you, they’re here and upgrading the aging controllers, replacing some of the valves, reworking some of the areas with improved sprinkler systems and generally giving a mostly-working-but-aging watering system a big tune up. But once it’s done, hopefully we won’t need to worry about it much for a while…

As I write this, I’ve started considering taking some time and actually going on a trip. Was considering staying at one of the lodges in Olympic NP, but I’m right up against end of season and I think I’ll hold that off for when they re-open. I’m instead considering a trip past some old favorites (Mt. St. Helens, Ridgefield NWR, Newport, Astoria), but we’ll see how it all plays out. If I do this, it’ll be the last week of September or early October, and I have to see how the weather is going to be as we get closer. I’m also going to be really looking at availability of the newer Covid vaccines that have just been approved for my next booster. So this may or may not happen… But I’m at least thinking about it…

The Shop

I haven’t talked about the new woodshop for a bit, mostly because I’ve been slow working on it with other things going on. I’ve been pondering layouts and changes I want to make to get it really functional — plus I have been putting off setting up and aligning the table saw and band saw, partly because the machines are a bit intimidating and I haven’t really needed them yet.

Overall, it’s still a bit of a mess.

The left wall has this big wraparound bench/counter. Unfortunately, I find it too high for my tastes (the old owner seemed to be 6’ ish) and too deep and while I’ve considered options to use parts of it, it’s going to all have to go. Where the window is is wher I want the lathe to go. The thing is one use piece, also, so while I can remove the side wings, the main piece would have to be cut to use partrs of it. I will probably do that, but I’ll have to remove it to do that.

The back wall is covered with pegboard, which I don’t love. It all needs to go. on the left side I’m planning on putting up some high shelving for storage, and on the left, my wood storage racks. on the left back will be where that cabinet and rolling shelves will go, and the machines will all go to the right of the stove. I need to move the dust collector to get the hose away from the stove as well.

The right wall will be the home of the miter saw, and eventually I’ll be building in a set of cabinets to host it and storage/display for tools.

A big challenge is that storage is still a problem, but I’m struggling to find ways to put stuff away without bringing in more storage, which I kind of can’t until I remove the bench and get the high shelving up, which… I struggle with because I’m using the bench to store stuff.

Also, I bought the new camera, and that’s been more of a priority, but mostly, this is slow because I just haven’t wanted to actually go in and start the demo I need to do..

A new visitor

We had a new visitor to the homestead this month!

A black-tailed deer, yearling male just showing the first of his antlers. We’ve also been visited by a female and an older male with 3 point. They’ve been in the neighborhood recently, and seem to enjoy the wild strawberries we’ve planted in some places as ground cover. Here you see him munching happily on some weeds I’ve been really slow to pull, so I’m not complaining…

That said, deer can be a problem for your plantings, but right now, I’m happy to leave them in the “pretty to watch” bucket instead.

Saying Bye-bye to some long-term vendors

This month is when I finally got around to pulling the plug on a couple of long-term vendors I’ve used.

The first is that I’ve finalized my move from Chase bank, which has been my bank for something like 25 years (them having bought the failed Washington Mutual along the way). Long-term readers might remember that back in, oh, 2015 or so I ended up having to take Chase to court to get a ruling about an issue they refused to resolve with my mom’s estate — which came about because of a typo made by someone at Washington Mutual 25 years earlier that nobody caught until we tried to resolve a CD account. Which Chase then refused to do anything reasonable about without a court ruling, which…

At that point I made a decision to at some point drop Chase from my life, but the local branch manager pushed some key buttons to help me get this resolved, and I promised him I’d stay with Chase as long as he was my manager. He eventually rotated to a different branch, and now that I’m in Washington, that promise is no longer in effect — but with the move and Covid, I’ve been in no hurry (in general, with this one exception, I’ve been reasonably happy with Chase in general). I have been consciously shifting some of my vendor relationships more towards smaller/regional firms from big national ones, and this was a good chance to do that. I ended up opening up accounts at Kitsap Credit Union, and in the last week, my last Chase credit card has been closed. I’m waiting for a couple of things to happen with my checking account and it’ll be gone, also.

The other is I’m probably shifting my cell contracts from AT&T to T-Mobile. I started out as a Cingular customer, which AT&T bought, and I honestly forget what my first phones were but this well pre-dates any iPhone. I’ve honestly never loved AT&T, but never hated it either, but during the move when I was on the road here in Washington, I hit a data cap on the service, and that’s when I found out the only way to resolve that was to add in 5G service and change my contracts, which… by the time AT&T was done with me, my monthly bill went up about $50/month. And yeah, I got 5G, but… yeah, I was happy without it.

So my plan has always been to make a shift. I’m not a fan of Verizon (via my days working for Palm’s WebOS reboot), and T-mobile’s plans looked attractive, but I wanted to pick up a SIM and do some testing, especially coverage at the house, before committing, and again, thanks, Covid, going into a store to sort this out wasn’t a priority. And recently, I heard about a new service T-Mobile (and Verizon — but not AT&T) offer, which is using the e-sim for a test drive.

So I’ve signed up for Network Pass, a 30 day, 30 gig 5G data plan from T-Mobile, and it lets me test signal coverage and speeds wherever I got for a while to make sure it’ll work for me. Here at the homestead, we get 5G voice and data fine from both, although the AT&T signal is faster. Still, the T-mobile connections are more than good enough, and if I’ve done the math right, my monthly bill for cell will be cut almost in half with the switch.

Would I recommend anyone leave Chase or AT&T? Nope. If it works for you, great. The big complaint I have with both is endemic with all of these large companies: they don’t really care whether or not you do business with them. You could do WAY worse than Chase (hello Wells Fargo), for instance. But for me, these were two things long on my low priority list that are finally headed to the “done” bucket.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

“Terminal Intermediate”

When I am talking to people and get asked about my birding, I will usually describe myself as a “terminal intermediate” birder. I didn’t make up the term; I borrowed it from a fellow SCVAS volunteer, Peter Hart.

I have been birding pretty seriously for a long time, but at the same time, I bird primarily for the enjoyment of going out and exploring and the challenge of figuring out what I’m seeing and hearing. Unlike many birders, though, I’m not particularly motivated to try to see everything around me, and I rarely chase a specific species and almost never go chasing for a rarity. The thrill of that chase and the size of my life list just aren’t big motivators.

I also am pretty poor at birding by ear, which is one reason I love Cornell’s Merlin app, which does some of that for me now. Given my hearing loss, even if I was motivated to improve this, my abilities are somewhat limited.

So when I’m defining myself as “terminal intermediate”, I’m describing myself in a couple of ways. As an intermediate birder, I’m pretty good at many aspects of birding, but I’d describe myself as “top third” rather than higher up the birding org chart. And by describing myself as “terminal”, I’m noting that I’m pretty happy with where I am and what I’m doing, and I’m not really actively trying to make myself a better birder at this point. I will still study a new species if I’m trying to find it — I finally found my first Harlequin Ducks here in Kitsap the other day, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen them I went back into the guide to validate my ID. It’s just that I don’t see birding as a competitive activity and I don’t feel any strong need to keep pushing my skills forward. I’m happy and comfortable, and that should be good enough.

This has sometimes rubbed some of my fellow birders the wrong way, because there are always going to be people who want to gatekeepers to what a “real” something is, but I usually ignore those people and not let them bother me — except when I find them gatekeeping other, new birders.

I bring this up because I’m working on my next e-book, which is going to be titled Birding 101, and which is, obviously, I hope, aimed at the interested non-birder or new birder. And one of the things I push on there is that birding is those things you find fun and interesting about being out with birds — and that you should do those things, and not worry about the rest.

When I’ve taken newer birders out on group trips or big sits in the past, I often find them feeling uncomfortable and often intimidated, worrying more about “being wrong” — so I always tried to discuss with the groups the idea that birding is what you want it to be, and all this other stuff you tend to hear about — chases and twitches and lists and all that stuff — only matters if it’s part of what makes birding fun.

I think in general we as the birding community over-emphasizes the competitive aspects in how we present birding to outsiders. I think we really push big years more than we do the citizen science we do as part of our birding, for instance. I think we often present our “best birders” as the ones with the biggest lists or having gone to the most places, and I think to non-birders, that makes it seem like those activitities are the things that define what being a birder is.

And in all honesty, those big listers are in most cases our best birders, with the most experience, and the competitive aspects they bring to their birding gives them enjoyment and pushes their skills forward — which is awesome.

But it intimidates people possibly interested in birding as an activity, and so when I’ve worked with those newer birders, I’ve always looked for ways to help them past that intimidation and into exploring what aspects of birding makes them happy. One suggestion I always make is to simply not worry about lists, unless and until you find yourself curious about what you’re doing.

I keep a couple of basic lists: I keep an annual list of what I’ve seen this year. I keep a life list of what I’ve seen since I’ve started tracking what I see. I keep a county list, since right now I’m doing 90+% of my birding inside the county, just because of time and trying to manage how much driving I do to see birds (this will start to change as we move into fall and birds start arriving at the refuges). And I keep a list of my home property, since this place being a good habitat is important to me.

That may seem like a lot of work, but eBird does almost all of the work for me. All I need to do is remember to note what birds I see when I go somewhere (and since I’m lazy, I almost never bother doing that unless I’m specifically birding a location, and even then, when it was poor birding, I might not bother).

Right now, I’m trying to figure out where the good places to bird in the county for shorebirds are, and so far, I’ve more or less failed; I’ve found what I think are good locations, and mostly, I’ve found mallards and canada geese there. A lot of reporting here in the county can be based around private residences (that’s not a complaint, by the way, I do it too here at the homestead) where there isn’t really good access to that area that doesn’t infringe on their privacy. Still, it’s an interesting learning opportunity for me to see where people are reporting things and trying to figure out if I can get there appropriately.

So maybe in some ways I do love the chase, but for me, it’s not the rare species, but learning the area I live in and how best to work within it to do the things I enjoy doing — which is looking at birds, taking pictures of them, and understanding how they fit into the ecology and habitat around us.

If there’s something I miss since the move to Washington, it’s those group outings where I could sit and talk to the new birders and help them find their path forward. That said, I don’t remotely feel I know Kitsap well enough to consider leading anything; I still have a lot of my own learning to do. Which is, in a way, why I’m working on that Birding 101 book as a way to create something that new birders can use to learn how to start their path into being a birder, too.

But the core lesson is pretty simple: if you find you’re enjoying something, do more of it. If you find you aren’t: stop. Don’t let anyone else define what “should” make you happy of what you “should” do to be a “real” birder (or whatever: this is very analogous to how Adam Savage defines who is and isn’t a maker, and I think it’s an important idea to promote out to everyone).

And if and when you find a comfortable niche in whatever you’re doing, it’s okay to decide to just snuggle into that niche and enjoy things. Some people are driven to always be pushing themselves forward and into the new; many of us aren’t. And when you do find that comfort zone: enjoy it and don’t feel guilty. There’s no shame in defining yourself as a “terminal intermediate” — if that’s what makes you happy.

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday. Here are a couple of images I am really happy with that are new to Recent Work

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month let me recommend to you a nice photo book I ran across.

Oregon, My Oregon: Land of Natural Wonders: is a beautiful photo book of that state by the Photo Cascadia crew, a group of about seven regional photographers. The imagery is stunning and really shows off the state well, and I found it a great inspiration, and one of the reasons I found myself thinking about taking the trip I talked about up above. They have a new book coming out soon on Washington called Washington, Evergreen: Land of Natural Wondersand I have pre-ordered it and can’t wait to get my hands on it when it released the end of October.

About 6FPS

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

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