Paradise ponders: spraying, cable connectors, dovetails, flowering trees, and weird parts edition...

Paradise ponders: spraying, cable connectors, dovetails, flowering trees, and weird parts edition...  Yesterday I sprayed our yard with 2,4-D to knock down the dandelions and a few other noxious weeds.  Later this year the fellow working on my sprinklers is planning to spray something that kills a broader range of weeds in an attempt to recover the south two acres of our lawn.  I also sprayed the yard of one of my neighbors (Alan and Nikki L.) for the same reason.  My 60 gallon sprayer (with an eight foot wide boom) that I tow behind my ATV really makes this easy.

Yesterday and today we spent most of the day sans Internet – our intermittent problem seemed to have come back.  I had another pleasant experience with a Comcast tech online, and we quickly determined that we needed another tech to come visit us and do some more troubleshooting.  At the time we made the appointment our service was completely knocked out.  Of course, just one hour before the tech made it here it all came back up just fine.  However, that tech had monitored the signal strength coming from the router back to Comcast, and he noted that it was far too low.  So when Clint (the tech) got here, he went straight to work replacing every old connector in the line, as in his experience that is the major cause of such problems.  He also noted that the ground of our line wasn't “bonded” (connected) to the house's power ground, which can cause problems – so he bonded it at the power pole.  Result: we're now getting 230 mbps downstream and 12 mbps upstream.  The downstream speed is faster than we've ever seen here.  I'm hopeful this means that Clint actually found the problem.  If not, he says the next step is to run new wire from the pole to the house, as that's about the last thing left that could be intermittent...

Today I was actually able to build a pair of dovetail joints.  The part I needed (at right) came in on Thursday night, so I finally had everything needed to make my dovetail jig work.  That weird little gadget fits onto my Bosch router to let it follow the templates on the jig.  It's a Bosch adapter that allows quick changes of the bushing (the little part with the circular writing on it).

My first dovetail joint with setup is at left.  Rather than just throw away the test boards, I made them into a pair of brackets to be wall mounted and holding a piece of 1/2" galvanized pipe to hang my C-clamps on.  They're being glued in the photo; tomorrow I'll sand the joints a bit and I'm done.  That jig worked a treat – by far the easiest and best dovetails I've ever made...

There are trees in bloom all over the valley right now.  Some of them right in our neighborhood are below.  The first two photos are of the same tree.  It had so many bees in it that the ground below it was vibrating from the sound of their wings.  The third photo is of my neighbor's tree, one of two right in front of his house – gorgeous, they are.  The last photo is one of four in our yard, right next to our barn.  Their smell will knock you off your feet, so sweet and strong, especially early in the morning...