Too much to cover

It has been too long since I last posted, and there is no way I will cover everything, so I won't even try. Instead, I will talk about a few specific things that I find interesting.

First, when I was out at the Mall del Rio several days ago, I saw the setup in the picture below. It consisted of a wading pool perhaps 12'x20', with about a foot of water in it, and two large inflatable balls of clear plastic. The balls are ~5' in diameter, with a zip-lock kind of opening perhaps 30" long. They would open the seal, let a kid climb in, zip it almost closed, and then stick in the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner and inflate the ball with the kid inside. When inflated, they would finish closing the seal and then the kid would have 3-5 minutes to run, stand up, fall, and otherwise play. Watching them, it was evident that they were getting intense exercise and having a blast. I don't know if such would be allowed in the US. I can think of half a dozen or more issues that might get them shut down, but it looked like a blast.

It was obviously very difficult to maintain your footing inside, but that was part of the fun, as it also looked like it would be very difficult to hurt yourself when falling. And given that it was apparently limited to kids less than 4 feet tall, who can generally fall with impunity anyway, it looked safe to me.
Then yesterday I got invited to go out to a piece of land that is on the market to see if the water looked usable. When we got there, it was socked in with fog, and my GPS showed that it was at about 11,200 feet of elevation. The guy who currently owns the land took me down into a gully to show me where the spring water first surfaces, and then on down to where we hit the road again. He said the forest in the picture was primary forest, and had never been cut. I could feel the organic debris under my feet was probably several feet thick.
He also has a garden, where he raises potatoes and radishes, among other things. He told me that these radishes had been planted as seeds only 28 days earlier.
When I got back, I was hungry, so I went to a place a few blocks away where I had seen a sign advertising roasted chicken. The two skewers on the grill are mine, along with a couple of the potatoes and some mote [it would be posole in New Mexico, or hominy in other places]. Anyhow, the coals had died down some, so the woman preparing my chicken grabbed a blow-dryer to fan the coals and generate more heat. I thought that was very creative. Everything together cost me $3. Next time I will just get one skewer, as I really ate more than I should have.