Red-winged blackbirds are here...

Red-winged blackbirds are here...  This is a couple of months early for them.  It must have been our warm spell that brought them, and they arrived to 18" of snow.  Not exactly blackbird happiness!  They're swarming our feeders; I suspect they'd be starving if not for what we're putting out...

A very German case...

A very German case...  The little aluminum “suitcase” at right holds a pair of binoculars that we just bought.  The case cracked me up – I'd be able to identify it as German even without seeing the logo. :)

We've been looking for stabilized binoculars with high magnification and big objectives, to give our ancient eyeballs the best wildlife viewing we possibly could.  We already own a pair of stabilized Canon 18x50s – great magnification, fairly bright, so-so optics, so-so stabilization.  We also have a pair of stabilized Fujinon 14x40s – so-so magnification, so-so brightness, very good optics, fantastic stabilization.

I finally located something that promised to be a combination of the features we prized the most: these stabilized Zeiss 20x60s.  We've only had them out on one outing so far, but our impression so far is that we have a winner.  The magnification beats the Canon by a little.  The objectives collect 44% more light than the Canon; they are super-bright.  The optics are simply magnificent; the best I've ever looked through.  The stabilization is great, but very, very different than our other stabilized binoculars.  For starters, the Zeiss stabilizer is totally mechanical – no electronics, no battery, and (we quickly noticed) totally silent.  Unlike the electronic stabilizers, the Zeiss stabilizer doesn't seem to interact with panning or tilting the binoculars at all.  In that sense, they act just like unstabilized binoculars.  On the other hand, for the small tremors and vibrations that plague us when using unstabilized binoculars, the Zeiss stabilizer works perfectly.  On the other other than, for large perturbations, the Fujinon's stabilizer works better – which makes perfectly good sense for their target market: mariners.  On the whole I find the Zeiss stabilizer perfectly adequate for our needs – and I really like the absence of batteries and noise.  Zeiss' target market (for these binoculars) seems to be hunters and military, and those with deep pockets – these are damned expensive binoculars.  We had to think long and hard before plunking down our cash, and what tilted us toward it was that wildlife and bird watching is such a big part of our enjoyment of Utah.

Lazy Susan shelves...

Lazy Susan shelves...  In our kitchen cabinetry there are two corner cabinets in the same corner: one below the counter-top, the other above.  When we bought the house, there were plastic Lazy Susan rotating shelves in both of them.  These worked, but not all that well.  For starters they weren't quite level.  The white plastic the shelves were made of looked cheesy and were quite flimsy.  Another thing we didn't like is that all the shelves rotated at once (the supporting rod had rotating joints at the top and bottom, and the shelves were all fixed to the rod).  The worst problem, though, was that the lowest shelf scraped against the cabinet bottom as you rotated it.  So one day last week when I looked at them for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that something better might be available, if the sizes happened to be standardized.  Maybe even something made from wood.

So I did what I always do in such circumstances: I went to Amazon and searched.   In no time at all I found two made from wood, one 30" in diameter and one 18" in diameter.  Could our shelves be that size?  They were!  I ordered them, and a couple days later they were in my hands.  It took just a couple hours to install both of them, including removing the old ones.  The biggest challenge I had was cleaning – because the back corners of those cabinets hadn't been cleaned in probably 15 years.  Maybe even more. :) Much scrubbing was required!

You can see the result in the photo above right.  They're great!  The shelves rotate independently, they're perfectly level, they don't scrape the cabinet, and they're wood.  That was a quick win of a project!

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...  I have no interest in dice or anything generally done with them.  But these dice, which I purchased recently, are absolutely fascinating to me – because of what they're made from and how they were made.  The material is titanium, pure titanium.  They are machined from a rough block – with the machining done on a CNC milling machine with accuracy in the 0.0005" range.

When I was a kid, such an artifact would not have been possible to make at any price, much less the $39 I paid for this pair.  Pure titanium was available, but in a very limited number of shapes, in small quantities, and very expensive.  Machining titanium was just barely possible, with the most expensive of tools, a very high running cost (because of the need to replace bits), and of course it would be done manually.  Titanium parts were used only for the most exotic needs where no other material could possibly do the job.  The intricate engraving on these dice would have challenged the very best machinists – and it would have taken many, many hours.

But today, for the price of a nice meal out, I can hold these in my hand.

These are silly, useless objects – but – I marvel, I do...

Weather forecasters have the best job...

Weather forecasters have the best job...  They never have to be right!  Two days ago, our forecast called for 1 to 3 inches of snow yesterday and last night.  As of this writing, we're at 18 inches – and it's still snowing.

Now mind you, this is actually a good thing – we need the precipitation, especially for snow pack up in the mountains around us.  We're fervently hoping they got a similarly unexpectedly great amount.

Yesterday morning when it started snowing, the temperature was in the high '40s, and the ground hadn't been frozen for a week.  Consequently the first 3 or 4 inches that fell turned into a thick layer of slush, especially on our driveway where it was about 2 inches thick.  The forecast called for a hard freeze last night, around 20°F (which it did) – so I decided to plow the driveway even though it was still snowing hard, in the hopes of getting that layer of slush off before it froze into solid ice.  Checking this morning, it appears that I succeed in that: we've got about 4 inches of powdery snow sitting on the driveway.  That should plow off very nicely.  I'll be out plowing in an hour or so, and tonight the forecast calls for another 1 to 3 inches – so I expect to be out plowing tomorrow as well.  If I'm to believe the forecast, we won't see above-freezing temperatures until next Sunday – a huge change from the warm spell of the past two weeks or so...

The two photos below are from yesterday afternoon, about halfway through the snowfall.  We have quite a few branches so heavily loaded now that they're at risk of breaking...

Blogiversary today...

Blogiversary today...  On this day thirteen years ago I made the first post on this blog.  I haven't posted every single day, but I'm close to that.  This post will be the 13,914th post since I started this thing.  When I started, way back in 2005, blogs were “the next big thing.” That hasn't worked out quite as many people thought it would, but it's worked fine for me.

If you're a regular reader (as about five of you are! :) then you already know this blog is mainly aimed at friends and family.  But, you might say, that's what Facebook is for!  And I say: a pox on Facebook!  I can't stand the damned thing.  I have an account there, but it is almost completely unused.  These days all I use it for is to see posts that people ask me to look at (generally by sending me an email link).

Nevertheless, it's hard for me to accept that I've been doing this for thirteen years, and that I've written almost 14 thousand posts.  Crazy!