A bit of this and that...

A bit of this and that...  I took the photo at right (click on it to embiggen) last night, standing on our deck and looking northeast, after the sun had set on the valley but while it was still playing on the Wasatch Mountains to our east.  As we like to say: we live in a postcard...

I've spent a few days basically sitting at the kitchen table.  At first that was because I was feeding the Plex monster (copying BluRays, DVDs, and music CDs).  Later it was because I didn't feel much like doing anything at all, and feeding the Plex monster was about as challenging as I cared to get.  This morning I'm feeling much better, and I wandered out to my office to wrap Debbie's presents and catch up on things a bit.

As I walked into my office, the Sisyphus table was churning away.  I took the photo at left a few days ago, but it was finishing up the same pattern when I walked in this morning.  And speaking of Sisyphus...  The Sisyphus app lets you upload vector graphics (.SVG) files to make your own patterns.  I couldn't make it work with any hand-crafted files, though, and I couldn't figure out why.  I asked the Sisyphus folks for some help, but it turns out this is a feature they haven't explored much themselves!  They couldn't even give me a sample file, and it turns out they use a completely different mechanism to make pattern files themselves.  After a few emails back and forth, their tech Micah felt sorry for me, and made some test files with Adobe Illustrator (which I don't have) and emailed them to me.  They worked!  With an example in front of me, I was able to make my own file that also worked.  And that means I can write software to make arbitrary files to print whatever pattern I want to.  This is gonna be fun!

We had snow a few days ago, and again yesterday (I had to go out and plow for the second time this year).  That put the kibosh on any more rock work getting done.  The good news, though, is that they're largely finished with the rock work.  All three walkways are complete, and all the retaining walls are in place.  All that remains, so far as I know, is gluing the top few runs of rock on the retaining walls, and backfilling the dirt-facing side.  Some photos of the rock work below.  You wouldn't know it from the photos, but the rock is actually quite colorful and full of sparkly material.  At the moment it's all covered with frozen mud and rock dust, so it will probably be spring before we can pressure-wash it and get the nice stuff showing again.  The rock is heavy and non-porous, with the general look and feel of amorphous quartz with colored impurities.  It's the perfect sort of rock for a walkway that will suffer the abuse of grinding boots and winter salts...