Hello Everybody,                                29 April 2007

I am back at my brother Lee's in Colorado, catching up on truck
fixing and book ordering from half.com and amazon.com, and the
myriad little projects that accumulate when I am on the road. The
jerking and snapping of the Posi-traction front differential, which was
installed 18 months ago to replace my broken factory differential, 
finally got so bad I couldn't stand it any more, so I decided to spend
the bucks to replace it back to the factory specifications; the next
day after my decision, I lost 4WD on the front axle, apparently from a
broken left front drive axle, probably caused by (or at least
aggravated by) the miserable Posi. More bucks - - the axle lists for
$600 but a used one is available for 'only' $200. The differential is
around $500, plus $300 labor. I also discovered that the clanking
noises coming from under the truck were caused by broken cab
mounting flanges: the stamped girder under the cab, which rests on
large rubber donut isolation mounts on the frame, is all cracked and
broken, probably from the fatigue of driving on rough roads with a
very heavy load. How to fix this looked very worrisome to me, but I
stopped at a shop in Moab (Utah) which builds very serious off-road
rock-crawling trucks, and they said it would be easy for them to
repair with just a few hours' labor - - the advantage of a shop skilled
in welding and fabricating parts, not just bolting them together.

After coming up through the Death Valley area last February, I spent
a couple of great weeks with my friend Joey Tuttle near Monterey
Bay, with some good birding in the nearby Elkhorn Slough estuary
and at the oceanside cliffs at Santa Cruz. Joey is a great source of
new authors to read, and a super-whiz at computer stuff. Around 35
years ago he introduced me to the computer language APL and
was my mentor is learning how to use it, and this profoundly
enhanced my next 20 years at IBM. 

I spent the next few weeks first visiting the birding areas near Los
Banos in the Central Valley, then back through the Death Valley
area taking some of the little roads I'd missed coming north, and
then back across the Mojave desert to the Salton Sea where I'd had
such great birding the year before. 

I'd been thinking of reversing my route of earlier in the year across
SW Arizona on the El Camino del Diablo (along the Mexican border),
but when I hit Yuma it was 97 degrees, so I just took the interstate
east to get to higher altitudes and lower temperatures. At 7-8,000
feet in the mountains east of Tucson it was actually cool, very nice,
with great scenery and good birding. After a couple of days solo, I
was joined for a couple of days by my camping and birding friends
Audrey & Ray McMullen, on their way back to Michigan from a
winter in Baja California. Then my daughter EV flew into Tucson from
Portland (Oregon) and we had a terrific week touring and camping
and birding in the beautiful 'basin and range' country of SE Arizona.
This area in internationally famous among birders, and although I've
been there several times before, it was always in February - - April is
much more active! We saw 100 species, of which 50 were new for
EV and 25 new for me. We visited 10 areas well known as birding
hotspots, and often had good birding at casual lunch and camping
stops. 

I've been taking scenery pictures along the way, as well as birds,
and have put them in to 2 separate slideshows, one for California,
and one for Arizona

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows, but with a new
server address (firestardesign.com is changed to gj.net:

http://www.gj.net/johna 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to
be just 'john')

The new slideshows are 

07 03 March So Calif.exe
07 04 April SE Arizona.exe

Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then
OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I
have used my updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free,
so you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous
<.exe> files'. 

Right-Arrow or Right-Click will advance to the next picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture.
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems
stuck.

If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files on a phone line   please let me know,
as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you
would like any of the individual images, just let me know. I have
limited space on the server, so must sometimes remove older
slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to send
you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them from 2004-2007
along with their accompanying eMails, on CDs. And if you don't
want to get any more eMails like this one in the future, just let me
know. If you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to
add them to my eMail list.      

Regards, John Armitage