Crazy people being crazy...

Crazy people being crazy...  They seem to be having a lot of fun doing it, though...

F-22 Raptor...

F-22 Raptor...  Scary looking, no?  That's a photo, not a painting.

If one of these was coming after me, I'd be thoroughly intimidated, just from its appearance!

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  I forgot to mention yesterday that the barn painters showed up, to start work on the outside painting.  It's warm enough now!  They caulked and reset siding all around, and painted three coats of white on three sides – they ran out of time before getting to the west side.  The barn is so bright now that it hurts your eyes to look at it :)  The crew will be back next Monday and Tuesday to finish it all up, including the trim in my office.

I spent the day spraying, using the ATV to haul the sprayer around.  The sprayer pump's electrical power is supplied by the ATV, through the 12V outlet I installed last week.  It's a sweet setup compared with what I used last year, when I hauled the sprayer behind our riding mower.  My biggest challenge with this rig is to make the ATV go slow enough – the thumb throttle is very sensitive.  I just found a motorcycle-style twist throttle kit online, and ordered it – that should help a bit...

I used just under two gallons of 2,4-D concentrate today, spraying about five acres in total.  That's our entire yard, the canal sides, field edges, and highway median strip.  The whole job took about seven hours, three tank fillings (for 110 gallons of spray in total), and really very little physical labor.  Nice!  Most of the spraying I did with the three-nozzle bar sprayer on the back of my rig, which sprays an 8' wide swath.  The bits that were so full of trees and shrubs that I couldn't drive the ATV on them, I sprayed with the wand.  It's got a 12' hose that I'll probably replace with something longer.  Most of the wand spraying I did from the ATV's seat, which felt like the height of spraying laziness.  When I was a kid I helped my dad spray in customer's yards.  He had a hand-pushed sprayer, heavy as hell, with a gas-powered pump (also heavy!).  His sprayer was more powerful than mine, but oh man was it a lot of work.  That memory is why my current rig feels lazy :)

The first photo below shows the bottom of the black willow that I cleaned out yesterday.  I really need a before-and-after photo set here, but where you can see the trunks of the willow now was completely obscured by deadwood yesterday.  Now the only thing blocking view of them are the roses.  The middle photo was taken from the same spot, looking toward our house (just west of north).  It's a beautiful spring day!  The last photo is of a couple of bad dogs that followed me out on our morning walk.  I had Mo'i on a leash as well (have to, because he can't hear our commands to come back!), but he wouldn't sit still for the photo...

Scale model B-29 and XS-1...

Scale model B-29 and XS-1...  Via friend, reader, and former colleague Larry E.  This is some awesome footage of a beautiful scale model B-29 with a scale model Bell XS-1 (the same plane Chuck Yeager flew to break the speed of sound).  The B-29 takes off with the XS-1 under its right wing, then drops the XS-1 – which shortly ignites its rocket and zooms off toward the heavens.  Both model planes land safely.

Thank you, Larry!

NGC2841...

NGC2841...  A Hubble photo, via APOD, of course.  Full resolution version...

A hard day's work yesterday...

A hard day's work yesterday ... and I slept like the proverbial baby (my understanding is that the real babies don't actually sleep :).  The weather hear yesterday couldn't have been nicer for hard physical work: mostly sunny, temperatures in the low 60s, and a nice breeze.  I spent the day clearing out 30 years or so of dead wood from a clump of 60' high black willows.  About half the wood was on the ground; the other half was dead branches I cut down with a hand saw (the Felco F610 shown at right).  I also had some chainsaw work to do – once I got the bigger (4" to 10" diameter) branches on the ground, I used the chainsaw to saw them up into roughly 4' pieces to pile onto my tractor's fork for transport to my (now gigantic) brush pile).

I've used quite a few different pruning saws over the years, mainly those purchased at Home Depot or the like.  I don't think I ever paid more than about $25 for one of them, and I thought they were fine – but they didn't last long.  They either lost their sharpness, or the blade got bent on a push stroke, making the saw unusable.  Last year I did a lot of pruning, cleaning up the pines and spruces in the yard of our new house.  I went through three Home Depot pruning saws in a week (can you say "Frustrating!"?), and decided to try my dad's favorite brand of all things pruning: Felco.  It cost over $50 for the saw above.  What did I get for that?  Well, first of all, I'm still using that saw, even after lots and lots of pruning last year.  It's still sharp.  No matter what I've done to it, I haven't managed to bend its blade.  Best of all: the sawing effort is noticeably lower with this saw than with any other pruning saw I've owned, though I've no idea why.  It's yet another demonstration of the value of a quality tool...