Nearly every day...

Nearly every day ... something happens that reinforces our happiness with our decision, five years ago, to move to northern Utah.  Yesterday there were several things:

• I took one of my lawnmower's tires in to Hyrum Tire for repair.  One of the owners (two brothers) dismounted the tire, noted that it had been previously repaired (by them), and took it upon himself to apply a double layer of patching – both to the new hole and to the older one.  Then he searched for tougher tires that would fit the rims; unfortunately, none are available (naturally, I have a strange tire size).  Then he charged me $12.79 and insisted on carrying the tire and wheel out to my car.  Such a pleasant exchange, front-to-back!
• I took my old lawnmower back to Ipaco for repair.  They had previously repaired it (in May), but when I got it home I discovered that it still had the same problem (blades stopped turning after about five minutes of mowing).  After a short, pleasant conversation in which they got full details of the problem, they told me that their repairs were fully warranted and they took the mower back for repair.  It should be done today or tomorrow.  No hassle, just smiles!
• The Wild Birds Unlimited store in Salt Lake City called to confirm my address before they shipped an order I made online.  Ten minutes later, the store manager called me back to suggest that I save myself some money by joining a “club” they have.  That club costs $25 a year, but on just the order I placed it would save me over $30 – and it would save more on any future orders I placed.  She went out of her way to note the possible savings, call me, and get permission to do so.  Friendly and cheerful every step of the way, too.
• The Tesla service center in Salt Lake City called me to let me know that some parts on backorder for my Model X had come in.  They wanted to arrange for their mobile tech to come out later this week, and needed to know what days and times would work for me.  This sort of call would usually be just a direct question or two and you're done, but the fellow who called was friendly and engaged in some happy banter.  

If we had never lived in southern California, we might think all this was normal.  But ... we did live in southern California, for many years, and we're still not used to having such nice, honest, responsible people all around us.  We are profoundly grateful for this, and so, so happy that we somehow ended up retiring to this community...

Debbie and I...

Debbie and I ... made a trip this morning up past Hardware Ranch and part way to Ant Flats (our usual wildlife prowl).  I slept very poorly last night, as expected (see previous post), so I didn't feel safe driving.  We wanted to take our Model X because it's such an excellent ride for wildlife viewing, so ... Debbie drove it.  This was only her second time behind the wheel of the Model X, and she's still quite intimidated by it. :)  She did just fine, except that she flatly refused to back it into the garage upon our return.

We saw a lot of wildlife this morning!  We got off to a great start when Debbie sighted a fawn, still in spots, just 20' or so from the road's edge (photo at right).  Particularly surprising about this fawn was that it was all alone – no mom doe in sight.  It looked healthy other than having a slight limp, and it appeared to be old enough to graze (if it had to feed itself), so probably the main risks for it are cars and large predators (especially mountain lions, which are reasonably common up here). We're hoping the mom was lurking about somewhere, afraid to come out while we were there.

A bit further on we spotted two more fawns, this time with two does (though from their behavior, we think the fawns were actually twins belonging to one of the does).  Then on our way back out of Blacksmith Fork Canyon, we had a scare as a fawn crossed in front of an oncoming car, then in front of us – no more than 5' off our bumper.  Debbie slammed on the brakes when she first spotted it, and if she had been even a fraction of a second later we'd have hit it for sure.  The car beeped and booped, so we know it detected the fawn – but we're not sure if it braked before Debbie stomped the pedal. 

We saw lots of birds! 

On the way out toward Ant Flats, we spotted a bald eagle flying toward us at low altitude.  It circled three times over a pasture just to the right of our car, so we had some rather nice naked-eye viewing.  Later in the trip, as we drove up toward the generating station's holding pond, I spotted a flash of white above a rock maybe 40' higher than us and a couple hundred yards away.  I thought it was a small white bird of some kind, but when I got my binoculars on it I discovered that it was the head of another bald eagle, perched behind the rock so that I couldn't see its body.  We drove another quarter mile or so down the road and found a parking spot where we had a great view of its whole body.  We could see why it was perched there: the thing was soaked!  We hypothesize that it had dived into the holding pond to catch a fish (or perhaps steal one from another bird), got wet, and then flew up there to a nice perch for drying.

In addition to the eagles, we saw one cedar waxwing as it flew by on a journey, a mostly gray Great Blue heron, several belted kingfishers (including one with unusually bright and clean plumage), about a bazillion swallows, a lone northern harrier, lots of juvenile mallard ducks, and several Swainson's thrushes.  We'd seen the latter before, but today was the first day we were able to identify them...

Trouble in diphenhydramine-land...

Trouble in diphenhydramine-land...  If for some inexplicable reason you're a regular reader of this blog, then you may remember that early this year I discovered the insomnia-destroying effects (for me, anyway) of diphenhydramine.  That's the active ingredient in the allergy medicine Benadryl, but for me it's been working great for six months as a way for me to regularly sleep through the night.  That's been a new experience for me, as I'd been an insomniac for my entire prior adult life.  After some experimentation, I settled on a 12.5 mg dose, which I've been taking every night, an hour or two before I go to sleep.

The last week or so this has not been working.  The logical conclusion, reinforced by some online reading, is that my body has developed a tolerance for the drug, and I'd have to increase the dose for it to continue being effective.  Of course, that's the first step of the classic dependency cycle, and I refuse to get on that particular train to destruction.  So ... last night's dose will be my last, at least for a while.  I suspect my insomnia will return with a vengeance in the short term, then after a few days or weeks I'll be back to my pre-diphenhydramine norm. 

This makes me very sad, as I've been greatly enjoying all the benefits of a full night's sleep ... and I don't know any other way to get that...

The downing...

The downing...  Last year the honey locust in our back yard was looking pretty bad, sick with something.  We were quite sad about that, as that tree was a favorite.  This spring it was clearly dead – we waited and hoped that some leaves would pop out, but there wasn't a one.  Less than 50' away is an identical honey locust, planted at the same time (around 15 years ago), and it is doing just fine.  We really don't know what killed the one in the back yard, though we suspect girdling by lawnmower.

Anyway, we finally decided it was time for this thing to come down, so on Thursday I set up my tractor with a 1" nylon rope to put some constant tension on it, so that it would come down away from the house.  The photo at right (click to embiggen) shows this setup.  The nylon rope is fairly “stretchy”, which is great in this application.  I could easily position the tractor to put something like 500 pounds of “pull” on the rope – plenty to ensure that when I sawed the tree off low on the trunk, it would fall at least roughly toward the tractor.  By the time the tree fell enough to release the tension on the rope, it would be headed down in the direction I wanted it to go.  This is far better than trying the same thing with something that didn't stretch at all, such as a chain.  That sort of connection would release the tension as soon as the tree moved even one inch – and then I wouldn't know what direction it was coming down at all.

When cutting down a tree that's been tensioned like this, there are still some ways for things to go horribly wrong.  The one that worries me the most (and which I've experienced once, unfortunately) is that the trunk snaps and kicks back in a random direction.  This snapping can throw the trunk straight at you while you're sawing.  Possibly even worse, it can throw the chain saw.  So whenever I do this, I am very careful and I cut very slowly so that I can watch the progress.  I also cut at an angle from the side away from the tensioning downward to the opposite side.  This angled cut makes it less likely that the trunk will kick very far backward.  Generally there will be at least a few seconds warning before the remaining trunk starts to give way, and that's enough time to get yourself and your saw out of the way.  I make sure I have good footing, a clear escape path, and that I'm well off to the side (as the most likely kickback direction is 180° from the direction the tree is tensioned.   That's what I did this time, and all went well as you can see from the post-downing photo at left.  I got myself and my saw out of the way in good time, and the tree fell almost exactly where I intended.  The rest of the job was just cutting up and hauling away, which my brother Scott and I did the next day...

Willows, drones, and other things...

Willows, drones, and other things...  My brother Scott finished pruning the weeping willow in our back yard yesterday, and it looks much nicer than it did before (a couple of views below).  Now I can mow under it, and our little tree farm (visible in the second photo) gets a bit more light than it had been getting.  Also in the second photo you can see the irrigation going on the field to our north (the one I'm in the process of buying).  Our Paradise Irrigation Company water was off yesterday while they were de-mossing; today its back on and up to 40 psi – so we're getting lots of water down on the field today!

For several years I've periodically looked into the notion of buying a drone, primarily for photography and videography of natural landscapes and possibly some wildlife (especially nesting birds).  The main thing that's stopped me from buying one is really the fear of losing the entire investment when I crash the drone 30 seconds after unpacking it. 

I've had some experience flying remote-controlled airplanes, and I know first-hand how confusing it can be to control something when you're standing some distance away.  This is a big contributor to the fear-of-crashing.  I'd be much more confident in controlling a drone if it had a camera pointing forward, giving me a view while flying as if I was a pilot in the aircraft.  These have recently become available, even acquiring their own name in the process: a “first person view” camera.  Such a live video view, as if I were a pilot in the aircraft, is a big confidence builder for me. 

Another factor that looms large amongst the risks of owning a drone is the fear of losing the thing should there be a problem with the radio link, the battery running low, etc.  This is another area where the better drones have made fantastic strides.  Many drones now have a robust return-to-home feature wherein if something goes wrong, they fly themselves back to the point where they took off, land, and wait for you to come back.  Integral to that capability is the ability to avoid obstacles – and again, the better drones have amazingly good systems for detecting things they need to fly around.  Some of these detectors are acoustic (ultrasonic rangefinders),  some are infrared rangefinders, some are short-wavelength radars, and some are full-on optical rangefinders that use the same stereoscopic vision system that humans use.  Some drones have a combination of several of these.

Put all that together, and the result is that one can buy a drone today that is likely to survive a while.  I'm certain I could still kill it, but I'd have to try a lot harder than I would have just a few years ago.

There are even some drones available that have a separate, steerable, gimballed, vibration-isolated camera for shooting high-quality photos and video – while at the same time having all the safety and reliability features I described above.  Some of these cameras are very impressive in their own right, and a few of them use MFT (Micro Four Thirds) lenses – meaning there is a huge selection of high quality glass for them.

Yesterday Debbie caught me doing the check-out-the-drone thing again, and she told me to just go get one.  So I finally did it – I ordered a DJI Inspire 2 with the Zenmuse X5S camera option.  It should arrive within a couple weeks...

Irrigation...

Irrigation ... is probably more challenging than you think.  That's especially so for a large pressurized system, which is how the irrigation for our home works.  We have 17 acres, 12 of which are irrigated alfalfa fields, and 3.5 of which are irrigated lawns.  I'm a shareholder in the Paradise Irrigation Company, as are all users of the irrigation system that supplies our irrigation water.  I've learned a lot over the past four years about how this system works, and I was quite surprised at just how complex it is.

The source of our irrigation water is the Porcupine Reservoir, located about 5 miles southeast of our home and 500 feet higher.  The Paradise Irrigation Company is just one of four irrigation companies that store and use water from Porcupine Reservoir.  All four of these irrigation systems are fed from a common “pond” at the base of Porcupine Dam, and this pond is fed from a manually adjusted gate at the bottom of the dam.  This gate is adjusted frequently, by hand, to keep the pond's water level roughly correct.  The consumption of water by the four irrigation systems is highly variable, so keeping this gate adjusted correctly is quite a challenge.  To an engineer like myself, this screams for automation – and yet such automation would add significant cost and complexity to the system, and would require ongoing maintenance, so it isn't done.  You would likely be surprised at just how small the budgets of these irrigation companies are – adding $100k or so for automation of this gate would be a huge increase.  So the gate is manual, and I suspect it will stay that way.

The common pond feeds four irrigation systems, but from this point on I'll be describing just one of these: the Paradise Irrigation Company's system.  It is fed from the common pond by a canal that runs a couple of miles to a point within the town of Avon, south of Paradise where we live.  The canal gets mossy in the bright summer days, and this moss can significantly impede the water flow – so two or three times a year the canal must be “de-mossed” – which is a chemical treatment that stops the water flow for a couple of days.  The de-mossing operation sends large quantities of dead moss through the system, which I'll talk about in more detail later. At this point the canal water passes through a large rotary screen to take out the larger chunks of junk in the water (and there's a LOT of it!).  This rotary screen is similar in concept to the drawing at right.  This screen only removes objects that are larger than about 1/2" in all dimensions – plenty of junk still makes it through, including some fairly large sticks and some very small mammals (like baby voles).  The slightly-cleaned water then passes through an adjustable gate (manually adjusted!) and into the high end of the pipe system for the Paradise Irrigation Company's system.  This intake is about 400' higher than our home, which means that theoretically the static pressure at our house should be about 190 psi – but we never see anything even close to that because of friction losses in the 4+ miles of pipe between that head end and our home.

Adjusting that manual regulation gate is the job of our company's “water master”.  People like to holler at this poor fellow when their pressure is too low, because most of them don't understand what an essentially impossible job he's got.  If all he had to do was to keep the pressure correct for one particular point in the system, it wouldn't be so bad.  But that's not what he does.  Instead, he's got a single point of adjustment where he's trying to keep dozens and dozens of users happy – and every one of them is getting water through different pipes with different volumes of water flowing at any given moment. I'm amazed that this works at all!  Just below the control gate, the Paradise Irrigation Company's system splits into three large pipes, each feeding large zones of a few square miles each.   The water usage between these zones can be (and often is!) hugely unbalanced – so one of those three pipes has far more water flowing than another.  All the people on the pipe being used more are going to have lower pressure from the friction losses.  All the people on the pipes being used less are going to have higher pressure.  There's nothing that the water master can do about that!  It's much, much more complicated than what I just described, though, because each of those zones are further subdivided several times.  The 6" pipe that feeds our place has four divisions (that I know of!) between it and the reservoir, and every one of them can be badly unbalanced.

The end result of this crazy system is that the water pressure in our irrigation pipes varies between 2 psi and 50 psi.  The pressure varies as users turn irrigation on and off in the hundreds of fields irrigated by the system.  The changes tend to happen in the mornings and afternoons (the common pipe-moving times), with large changes generally occurring over days rather than hours.  Our pressure is at 18 psi at the moment, but yesterday afternoon it was 40 psi.  Most fields are set up with sprinklers at 40' intervals, using nozzles that spray about 40' with 50 psi pressure.  This provides considerable overlap, which means that the entire field will still get watered so long as the pressure is above about 25 psi.  The lower 18 psi pressure we have right now means that there are portions of our alfalfa field that are not getting any water this time.  This happens on every field, and the farmers just live with it.

When I had the pop-up sprinklers installed for our 3.5 acres of lawn, I knew I had a more challenging situation.  I could only water this much lawn with the Paradise Irrigation Company water, as that's the only water I had the right to use in such quantity (water rights are real property in Utah, as in most of the western U.S.).  Those pop-up sprinklers are adjustable, but only within a fairly narrow range of pressure (such as mine, which are 45 - 50 psi).  Furthermore, the small pop-up sprinklers have quite small nozzles that cannot handle the up-to-half-inch junk in our irrigation water.  So I had a bit of a challenge on my hands to water my lawn using Paradise Irrigation Company water!

To my surprise, the local vendors who install and maintain irrigation systems did not have experience with this problem!  I ended up designing my own system, which has now been in place for a year and is working quite well.  I've had two irrigation companies come by to check it out, so they can use the ideas themselves.  I didn't really do anything all that innovative, it's really just that it's new to them here.  Paradise Irrigation Company water is connected to the inlet of an ordinary 5HP centrifugal pump with a synchronous electric motor, the kind that can survive moderate amounts of trash in the water.  This pump isn't directly connected to the power; instead, it's connected through a variable speed pump controller.  These have been available for about 20 years.  They work by converting the 60 cycle AC to DC, then back to AC but with a variable frequency.  The one I selected varies from 30 cycles to 75 cycles, which means the pump's RPMs can vary from 50% to 125% of it's nominal RPM (what it would have if connected directly to 60 cycle power).  Because the output of a centrifugal pump is not linear with respect to RPM, in the case of my particular pump the output can be varied from 30% to 120% of nominal – and that's plenty of range to let it regulate the pump's output pressure to 50 psi.    Finally, I run the output of the pump through a pair of screen filters (coarse/fine) so that everything larger than 0.05" in diameter is screened out.  These water filters are roughly 18" tall and 4" in diameter, and in normal use I need to clean them just a few times a year.  However, when the canal is de-mossed, the dead moss flowing down the line instantly clogs the filter completely, so I also have to clean them each time there's a de-mossing – and somehow that never seems to correspond with a “normal” cleaning.  :)

Now, isn't that at least a tad more complex than you thought an irrigation system would be?

A new toy...

A new toy ... and lots of work...  Yesterday I took delivery of a front-mounted auger for my tractor.  This thing is powered by a hydraulic motor that needs 6 gallons per minute (gpm) of hydraulic fluid flow.  My tractor can deliver 7 gpm, so it's just barely big enough to handle this thing.  There was a small problem at first – it was delivered with the wrong hydraulic connectors – but once that was fixed, it worked beautifully.  I dug a few test holes today; all worked just fine (photo at right was taken during the second drilling).  This auger is going to let me plant a bunch of trees, and place a few posts for various things I want to mount in the ground.

My brother Scott has been working at our place for the past two days, and will be putting in roughly half-time for a while.  He's tackling our landscaping (and that's a big job!) as well as some maintenance items like pruning.  He's plenty crazy enough to do this work for free, so I didn't let him start until he agreed to be paid a reasonable amount.  Yesterday he went to work on making measurements for the front of our house, which is his first project.  Today he and I tackled several pruning jobs (and there are lots more remaining!).

The past few mornings I've been moving pipe again, and this time Tim is working right alongside me.  His strength is back enough for him to pick up pipes and move them, but his arthritis is giving him fits.  His hands are the worst affected, swollen so much that he has trouble making a fist, and even more so applying any force.  To shake hands is agony for him; the slightest pressure triggers his arthritis pain.  Our mutual neighbor Nick S. is helping every morning, too.  He's 20 years younger than I am, and can move pipes twice as fast as Tim and I combined.  All Tim and I can do is admire and envy his strength and stamina...

When I woke up this morning...

When I woke up this morning ... it was to the sound of a baler working in the field just to the north of us (the field we're in the process of buying).  The photo at right was taken a few days ago, right after the field was first mowed.  Tim had it mowed with very wide windrows, to speed up the drying.  Since then it's been raked twice to turn over the windrows, fluff them up, and let them dry thoroughly.  Then this morning was the baling.  It was just barely daylight, and that baler was making short work of the baling job.  Before the baler was even finished, there were two trucks with hay trailers out on the field, with 6 or 7 people working to load it all up.  By the time I finished with my tea (and homemade apricot/pistachio biscotti!), the field was clear and I knew Tim would want to get the water going.  So I walked out, met Tim on his way over to start putting down pipe, and the two of us got three strings of pipe up and running.  The arthritis in his hands is keeping him from gripping anything, but otherwise his strength is at least 50% of normal, maybe better.  Considering that two weeks ago he was down to about 5%, this seems almost miraculous.  He did about half the work of moving the pipe this morning, where when he's 100% he does about 2/3 (because he's stronger than I am, and can move two pipes at once).

I did manage to get a bit of work done on the grill cabinet drawers over the past few days.  I'm currently working on the two drawers for the center unit of the cabinet.  That's one of them at left, having it's bottom (1/2" birch plywood) glued on, with 25 lb. bags of lead shot as “clamps”.  In addition to the work on the drawers themselves, I also got the four cabinet half of the rails installed.  I'd made a jig for this on the first two shelves, and this greatly simplified the rail installation I did yesterday.  Hooray for jigs!

I sold some of our index-fund ETFs yesterday, in preparation for buying our neighbor's place.  Those ETFs were purchased in early 2014, over four years ago.  I was surprised by the capital gains on them – over a 100% gain on each of the three ETFs I sold.  The stock market has been very good to us in our retirement.  Well, so far, anyway...

Hoping to make some progress on those drawers this morning!

Had a busy couple of days...

Had a busy couple of days...  Our friend and neighbor, Tim D., (along with his wife Jeannie) came over to tell us that they have decided to move into a smaller house, nearby in Paradise.  We had a standing offer to them to buy their current place, should they move, because they have a 2.5 acre field adjacent to our property that a new buyer could build on.  We knew that Tim and Jeannie would never build there, as they valued that field as a buffer as much as we did.  But a new owner?  Who knows?

So I've been scrambling to do all the things one must do to buy a piece of real estate.  We've agreed a price with Tim and Jeannie.  We've engaged a realtor friend to represent us in the transaction, and to make sure the paperwork all gets done correctly.  We've consulted with the county to make sure that we will be able to “detach” that field from its current parcel, and merge it with our own parcel that's adjacent to the field.  The county treats this as a routine matter, so we're not expecting any trouble there, and the cost is quite modest (well under $1,000).  We do have to hire a surveyor, though, to make new legal descriptions for the two lots being modified.  We also arranged for a local hay farmer to lease the newly merged field from us, for a grass and alfalfa mix (horse hay).  Once the field has been moved to our parcel, there will remain a 3.5 acre property with a nice house near the center of it, and that piece we'll put up for sale. 

So many details, though! 

A sonic mystery...

A sonic mystery...  Most mornings at home, I make a cup of tea for myself and a cup of coffee for Debbie.  We both use the same kind of mug: a 16 ounce double-walled stainless steel mug.  A long time ago I noticed something odd: tapping a spoon on the rim of the mug makes a distinctly different sound on the tea mug than it does on the coffee mug.  The tea mug sounds higher pitched and crisper; the coffee mug lower pitched and sort of a thud.

Why would this be so?

I've been trying various experiments over the past couple of weeks to try and narrow down the cause.  First I kept track of the mugs we used, and switched which one was for tea.  That made no discernible difference.  Then I compared the tea and coffee with no additives (cream, sugar, etc.).  This time the two mugs sounded very similar, though the coffee mug was still slightly lower pitched and not quite as crisp.  Then I added sugar to the tea – and the pitch went up (not what I expected at all!).  I added Equal to Debbie's coffee and heard no difference.  I added milk to my tea and the sound pitch went down slightly and got slightly less crisp.  Then I added collagen powder to Debbie's coffee, and the sound changed quite dramatically: lower pitch, much thuddier.  Ah ha!  Then when I added milk to her coffee and the pitch went down a bit more.

So ... collagen powder made the biggest difference.  Why?  What does it do to the liquid that affects the sound of tapping the mug's rim?

I have two theories.  First theory is that the collagen powder increases the viscosity of the liquid, and thereby increases the damping effect it has on the “ringing” caused by the tapping.  Second theory is that the collagen powder, when dissolved, changes the speed of sound in the liquid, which changes the resonating characteristics.

Do any of my readers have any knowledge of this phenomenon?

On precision...

On precision...  Do you know the best way to gauge the alignment between two pieces of wood?  This need comes up frequently in woodworking, and getting alignment wrong means (at best) a lot of sanding and (at worst) discarding a piece of work.  So what's the best way to determine whether two pieces of wood are lined up exactly?

Most woodworkers already know the answer, either from a mentor early in their woodworking efforts, or through hard experience.  I'm in the former camp, myself – my grandfather (father's side) taught me this simple technique.

Most non-woodworkers don't know this technique, and if asked to speculate, will usually come up with answer involving a known straight edge and squinting at how it sits across the joint that is supposed to be lined up.  That technique is difficult and quite error-prone – and isn't all that accurate anyway.  The best way actually involves no tools or instruments of any kind – just your finger!  All you do is run your finger across the joint to feel if there's a difference in height between the two pieces of wood.  Really!

A study five years ago determined that fingertips can detect surface details as small as 13 nanometers ( about 0.0000005 inches).  No instrument within reach of an amateur woodworker or cabinet shop can measure anything that small.

Your fingers are a marvel of texture-detecting design – better than anything mankind has ever been able to make...

Tesla Model X...

Tesla Model X...  Our Model X is still in the shop, as the techs haven't yet figured out the source of one problem I reported.  That problem: sometimes as I start a trip, the cruise control won't work.  Also the center console isn't showing a picture of the road, with other cars detected.  I infer that the sensor system is therefore not working, as that's the source of the data for both observed issues.  A few miles after starting, both issues just go away, and everything works as usual.

The techs could not replicate this problem, of course (isn't it always like that?).  However, the Model X apparently has quite a bit of logging internally, and they were able to see the evidence of the problem in that log (and, incidentally, convince themselves that I wasn't some kind of nut).  So the techs kicked this up to engineering.  The first group of engineers to examine issue, late last week, couldn't figure out what was going on.  So they kicked it up to “zone”, which, I'm told, is internal Tesla-speak for “the real engineers, the ones who actually know what they’re doing”.  I'm told that escalation to “zone” is quite unusual.  It figures that such weirdness would be visited upon me!  The plan as of Friday was to wait out the day on Monday (tomorrow) to see if “zone” comes back with some kind of answer.  If they do, then they'll fix the problem and I can have my car back.  If they don't, then the techs will finish servicing my car and give it back anyway – and whenever “zone” finally decides to grace us with some feedback we'll decide what to do next.

Which means that we've been stuck with the Audi A6 since Wednesday.  I'm ready to find me a great big power hammer somewhere and squish the damned thing!

Last night...

Last night ... Debbie made Brussels sprouts and blue marlin (fresh from our local supermarket), photo at right is just before they went on the grill.   The marlin was very tasty, but Debbie and I agreed that it's one of those fish dishes that really needs a sauce.  The meat's texture, after cooking, is much like chicken – it's not an oily fish, like (say) salmon.  The Brussels sprouts were delicious, but I suspect not quite done in the middle, and my tummy rebelled.  Debbie's learning how to use our new grill, which is amazingly hot compared with anything we've ever had before.  Today she made chicken and roast corn, the former following some directions specific to our grill (she found them on the web).  The chicken pieces (thighs) were on the grill for just 8 minutes per side and they were completely done.  That grill is fast – but the high heat means that Debbie has to learn grilling techniques that are a bit different than what she's used to.  Tomorrow she tries a ribeye steak...

I started working on the remaining five drawers for the grill cabinet today.  It's almost a week since Jim and Michelle left, and I last worked on them – my time has been consumed with all sorts of other things.  I started two drawers today: the two that go under the wider middle sections.  One of those drawers is the shallowest I've made yet, which means the vertical pieces that tie the horizontal rails together are the shortest I've made yet – under 2" long.  That's so short that I can't have opposing pocket screws that line up with each other, as there simply isn't room for them.  So I resorted to a “trick”: I offset the screws just enough to let them clear each other.  At left below is the piece of wood with the pocket screw holes drilled, and at right is the installed piece.  It worked great!

Midway through this construction process, I heard an ominous rattle from my trusty Makita drill.  With a little investigation I figured out that it was the thrust bearing – quite an important piece of any electric drill (even when in screwdriver mode).  It still worked, but it seemed clear that it wouldn't survive for long.  So I decided to make a run to our local Home Depot (one of the few places open on Sunday here) and pick up a replacement.  I am delighted with that drill, which I purchased about seven years ago, so my intent was to purchase exactly the same drill.  This was not to be, as Makita has stopped making them.  There's a newer version, however, with all the same functions (drill, screwdriver with torque limiting, and impact drill), but with more torque, a brushless motor, electronic speed control, and smaller.  In the photos below, the all-black drill is the new one, the blue-and-black the old one.  I've long been impressed with Makita's battery-powered tools, but I didn't think they had much room for improvement on their drill.  I was wrong.  The new one is a bit lighter, substantially smaller, and the added torque is impressive.  The brushless motor with electronic speed control is really nice – the drill ramps up the torque as required to maintain the speed you've selected.  The old drill's trigger didn't select the speed, but rather the power – and often that meant the drill would run much faster than you intended when the load was light.  Not this one.  Another nice touch: manually tightening the chuck is much more comfortable with the new, larger, rubber chuck grip.  Nice one, Makita!

An old friend of mine...

An old friend of mine ... Mike B., from North Carolina, mentioned to me that he had two GPS systems for his big rig truck that were broken.  He depends on these to do his job, and the loss of the more capable GPS was really making his life difficult.  In both cases the necessary repair involved soldering tiny little parts.  The more capable GPS had a surface-mounted mini-USB connector that needed replacing; the other a resistive touch screen that needed to be soldered (flexible PC to flexible PC).

I have the right tools to do the job, and perhaps hands that are a bit steadier.  So I had him ship the two GPSs to me.  Working yesterday and this morning, I was able to repair them both.  Some specialized tools really helped a lot.  I have a head-mounted pair of 3.5x binoculars (designed for surgeons and dentists, much like the ones at right); these gave me a nice, clear view of the work.  I'll bet I looked pretty weird while wearing these!  My Hakko desoldering iron (with built-in vacuum) nicely desoldered the old parts.  Finally, my Hakko soldering iron with a 0.03" diameter tip let me solder the new parts on.  I don't mean to say that it was all easy because of the tools, though – there might have been a bit of non-Mormon approved language as I struggled to get all the pieces in place and hold them there while soldering.  Removing the old mini-USB connector was a challenge mechanically.  My finest solder was twice the diameter of the work piece, making it a real challenge to get solder only where it belonged.  And both circuit boards had taken some hits, with traces lifted during both the current and previous repairs.  Those had to be repaired with wire jumpers. 

But in the end, I managed to get both of them working.  Mike was very happy to see this (I sent him proof-of-life photos of the GPS screen).  It felt good to be able to help a friend, and it also felt go to have proof that I can still repair delicate electronics.  Both GPSs are now at the post office, and he should get them next Tuesday or Wednesday...

We are laughing at ourselves for this!

We are laughing at ourselves for this!  Our Tesla Model X was due for service, and on Wednesday morning we made the 90 minute drive down to Salt Lake City to drop it off.  We made an appointment early in the morning (8 am) to maximize our chances of getting a Model S as a loaner (we knew they'd be keeping our car for a day or two).  We didn't get the Model S – they'd all been taken already.  So we got a rental: an Audi A6.

At any point in our lives prior to buying the Model X, we'd have been astounded at getting an A6 as a loaner.  By any conventional measure, it's a very nice car.  Plenty of power, handles very nicely, lots of modern conveniences, etc., etc.

But we are Model X owners.  We've driving 36,000 miles in our Model X.  We're spoiled rotten by the experience.  Now the A6 looks like a miserable POS to us.  We hate it...

Some thoughts on giving back...

Some thoughts on giving back...  Nothing profound here, just some thoughts about our experiences...

Anyone who knows Debbie and I well will be unsurprised to learn that much of our giving back is aimed at animals.  Not all of it, by any means, but quite a bit.

For many years we gave modest amounts to carefully selected animal-related charities.  Over and over we learned to our chagrin that the beneficiaries of our largess were anything from outright frauds (ouch!) to high-overhead operations where too much (often most) of our contribution went to paying the officer's salaries.  We got fed up with this, and searched for a better way. 

Today we're making three regular animal-related contributions.  Two of these are through small, local organizations that we know personally.  Obviously we could still get surprised by these, but I think it's much less likely than with the contributions we've made to the larger organizations that actually market for contributions.  The third is one that we started about six months ago.  We met with the owners of a local veterinary clinic – people whom we know and trust – and arranged to create a fund that helps people with animals who need veterinary care that they cannot afford.  This was our idea, though we discovered when we talked with the clinic's owners that they already had a poorly funded version of a similar idea going.  The money involved is quite modest, but it has direct impact on local animals in need – and, of course, on their owners.  We make these contributions anonymously, but we learn about the animals (and owners) that have been helped.  It's been very satisfying to have direct knowledge of the impact of our contribution, and comforting to personally know those people who are (in effect) administering our contributions.  We like this general pattern much better than sending a check to a large, opaque organization and never knowing what they did with money.

We've also found a few ways to follow the same general pattern to help some local people in need.  I'm not going to get into the details on these, as in some cases these are done anonymously and we'd like to keep it that way.  The important bit, for us, is the combination of direct knowledge of how the contributions get used, and a trusted intermediary to administer them.

After a bit of fumbling with ways to do achieve this pattern of contributing back to our community, we've learned to be a little creative and a lot careful – and we really like the results...

Moved pipes this morning...

Moved pipes this morning ... in our alfalfa field, just north of our house.  I started before sunrise, finished just as the sun was peeking up over the Wasatch Mountains to our east.  In the middle of this effort, there was a moment when the eastern sky was bright along the Wasatch silhouettes, and the puffy clouds were all lit up against a gorgeous blue sky.  In the mountain foothills, the spray of dozens of irrigation systems was all backlit by the bright sky, jewels against the dark green carpets of alfalfa, oats, and other grains.  A light breeze rustled the leaves of willows, cottonwoods, and box elders along the irrigation canal 100 feet east of where I was standing.  Several hawks circled overhead, while dozens of other birds greeted the morning with a nonstop chorus.  I heard a few rooster crows, and a couple of our neighbor's dogs barked at who knows what.  What a beautiful morning in the 'hood!

Yes, I'm happy...

Yes, I'm happy ... with Trump's selection of Judge Brett Kavanaugh as the nominee to replace the retiring Justice Kennedy.  Very happy, actually.  And yes, overall I'm still unhappy and frightened by Trump's performance as President.

Why on earth is it so difficult for people to understand how both of those statements can be true at the same time?  Must we either love or hate any politician 100% of the time?

We're baaaaack!

We're baaaaack!  Our friends Jim and Michelle B. have, sadly, departed for their home in the high tax, underfunded pension headquarters also knows as Southern California.  As always, we had a wonderful time during their visit.  They were only here for a week this time, and that time seemed to just fly by – seems like we were waving goodbye the day after they got here.  Next year they're going to try to make it up at the end of August, and see Paradise's Trout & Berry Days.  This year they watched the Fourth of July fireworks at Hyrum with us, and it was just as good as it was last year.  We had lots of good talk, good food, and good times together.  Maybe they'll escape California someday and join us up here...

Jim and I built two (of seven) drawers for the grill cabinet while they were here.  The photo at right shows a nearly finished drawer, lacking only the handle and the spar varnish I'll finish it with.  There are an amazing number of parts in that drawer: 16 pieces of framing wood (poplar), 4 pieces of trim wood (also poplar), 1 piece of 1/2" birch plywood (bottom), 4 pieces of 1/4" birch plywood (sides), 3 pieces of cedar (front), 40 pocket screws, 2 slides, 20 wood screws (to hold the slides in place), 1 handle, 2 handle screws.  When you add all that up, that's 93 parts –  for one drawer, and I'm making 7 of them.  That's 651 parts in all!  Some of the steps in building the drawers involved gluing and clamping; a couple shots of those below:

Here's a nice sunset we shared with Jim and Michelle, enjoying it from our deck.  The weather here was hot every day they were here, except for one morning when we had a few scattered showers.  Every morning Jim and I went out at just after 6 am and moved irrigation pipes, along with our neighbor Nick S.  This is something I've been doing here for years, usually just Tim D. and I.  This year, as I've written before, he's unable to do it – it's a privilege to be able to help him, but I miss his company while we do it...

We got our new grill installed just a couple of days before Jim and Michelle arrived, but we used it several times during our visit.  Jim and Michelle have lots of experience grilling, and Debbie thoroughly enjoyed having the chance to get some tips and instruction from them.  I thoroughly enjoyed the results, such as the steak and grilled vegetables meal at right.  Yum!

Two days before Jim and Michelle got here, we had our once-every-two-years driveway resealing done.  We used Statewide Paving for the work, and this makes twice that I've been very pleased with the job they did.  The owner's son (Andrew) both supervises and participates in the work, and everyone works their butt off to get the job done.  Their attention to detail beats any paving contractor I've ever seen at work.  This time, for example, they found a place in my driveway where there were a couple hundred square feet with embedded soil (from where we had piled dirt during construction).  Rather than just coat over it, they took an extra two hours to power-wash that part off – and charged me nothing extra for that work.  If you need a driveway resealed, you can get Andrew at 208-317-4418.  Highly recommended.  Here's a few shots of them working away...

Another thing that happened this past week: our roofing contractor showed up to finish up some work started almost a year ago (seriously!), and to put gutters up on my barn.  The barn has 82' long eaves, so they bent up two 82' long gutters – quite a big piece of sheet metal to carry around and install!  The photo at right shows the metal as it came out of their automated gutter bending machine.

The contractor who works on my lawn, sprinklers, etc. came out with an aerating machine – a “core aerator”.  This is possibly the most evil looking machine I've ever seen.  Dave M. is guiding this beast in the photo at left.  The front end of this machine has dozens of “teeth” that dig down about 3" into the ground and pop out a round “plug”, leaving a little hole in the ground.  It also left my lawn covered with thousands of what look like small dog turds.  :)  Those, I'm assured, will disappear after a few waterings.  We'll see.

On the day that Jim and Michelle got here, I finished a couple of projects on my gas pumps that I shelved last year when it got too cold to work outside.  One was to replace one of the filter cups – that took just a few minutes.  The other was a bit more challenging: installing an electronic lock on the “gas station” door.  That's what you see in the photo at right.  It actually wasn't very hard at all to install, once I figured out the directions – they were harder for me to understand than such directions usually are, despite being written by a native English speaker (so far as I could tell).  One part I found challenging was that the directions were divided up into “panels” for each of the 10 steps they identified.  The panels were numbered, but the number wasn't particularly prominent.  The physical layout of the panels on a single large sheet of paper was really odd – they started about 1/3 of the way down the left side of the paper, went across to the right, then back to the left margin and down – and subsequently over three vertical columns.  Why would anyone lay out directions in such a confusing way?  Things like that really puzzle me.  Anyway, eventually I found the numbers on the panels and was able to do the steps in the right order, which turns out to be critical for success.  When I got all done, everything worked on the first try – even programming in my own codes.  Now our gas station has a lock, and (much more relevantly in our area) a latch to keep it shut when the wind blows.  Hooray!

All is fine, folks...

All is fine, folks...  We have not disappeared from the face of the earth. :)  Things have just been a bit hectic.  Here's a quick update; more on everything mentioned here later...

Most important event: Tim is ever so much better!  He was in the hospital for a few days this week, and it made an enormous difference to him.  He's eating (though food still doesn't taste good to him), his important blood indicators are being monitored carefully, and he's under treatment for all the issues they found (worst problem: blood calcium levels spiked way up).  His sense of humor is back, as is his color, and he's walking around without having to stop every five feet to rest.  He came over to visit us for an hour or so this afternoon, and ... we had the old Tim back.  It was so wonderful to see him looking so much better!

The granite folks were back on Friday to finish the granite installation on our grill cabinet, and we hooked everything up on Saturday.  Debbie cooked some salmon on it – and it was great!  The cabinet looks wonderful  When we get the drawers done, we'll have a real showpiece there...

On Friday my new mower was delivered, and what a magnificent beast it is!  It's by far the nicest mowing machine I've ever used – soft, sprung-and-shock-absorbed seat, smooth controls, flawless cutting.  It's also built like the proverbial tank.  Before I had two hours of use on it, I got a flat tire.  Hyrum Tire fixed that for me today for $12.97. 

Our lawn guys were here today with an infernal machine called a “core aerator”.  Basically it drills holes in our yard about ever 6", and spits the dirt “cores” out on the top.  It's supposed to improve the health of our grass, but it looks more like a grass torture machine to me...

On Saturday we had our driveway resealed, an all-day operation by a three man crew.  In order for them to do that, I had to clear everything off our pavement on Friday – and that took me the entire day.  I was exhausted by the time I was finished.

And momentarily our friends Jim and Michelle B. shall arrive for a week-long visit.  We can hardly wait!  Because of their visit, my posting will be intermittent again...