Paradise ponders: a confluence of contractors...

Paradise ponders: a confluence of contractors...  So many things happening yesterday!  All good, too, though it meant that my day was basically one giant interruption.  :)

But first: on Monday Debbie and I both had a craving for sushi.  That meant an afternoon out at the Black Pearl, where we both had sashimi (along with our standard avocado egg roll as an appetizer).  The photo at far right was mine, with ahi, hamachi, sake, and white tuna.  Debbie's was in the near right photo, unagi and white tuna.  Yummy, they were!

Afterwards we went up to Aggie's Creamery for an ice cream cone, and this time Debbie walked in with me – first time in over a year she felt up to that!  She's making much progress, exercising hard nearly every day.  Her strength and endurance are steadily building, and her gait improves a little every day.  So nice to see this!

Our sprinkler contractor was here, with three people hard at work.  Until living through this myself, I had no idea how much destruction was involved in putting sprinklers in.  The three views below give you some idea, but I assure you that it's even worse than it looks!  The contractor brought the “clock” (the indoor, 24 station version of this) and I installed it in the cedar shed – the first irrigation component to go in there.  I also got to see one of the filters that will go in the shed soon – they're huge!  The contractors installed the filter temporarily outside, on the pressurized irrigation line, so that they could pressurize the line they're installing and use it to wet our (burned, dry) lawn down. 

I got a most pleasant surprise in the afternoon: the plumbers who are going to install the pumps in our filling station arrived and started working.  The first step was to drain fuel out of the existing lines (I helped a bit with that) and then to disassemble all the fine work they did three weeks ago.  This morning they're supposed to be back to do the pump installation.  Hooray!

Then our electrical contractor contacted me yesterday to confirm that he will be here on Monday to wire up a subpanel in the cedar shed, and run an explosion-proof circuit out to the new fuel pumps.  Amazingly enough, the timing on all these inter-dependent jobs is going to work out just fine.  The only bad news there was that he insisted that I must be sitting down when he presents me with the cost (before he starts working) for the fuel pump circuit.  He's afraid I'm going to keel over when I find out what those parts cost.  Just to give me a heads-up, he told me that the junction box inside the filling station costs him about $200.  If you're not familiar with junction boxes, a typical one at Home Depot goes for about $3 (but that's not explosion-proof).  Yikes!

I got a phone call in the morning from a vendor in Logan who I'd contacted a couple weeks ago to find a source for western red cedar, 3/4" tongue-and-groove, that I'm planning to use for our deck's ceiling.  It was good news: he's found a source, and he's going to call me this morning for the pricing.  He's getting the raw wood, then milling the tongue-and-groove, so there's some work for him to do in order to get the price.  But I'm going to be able to get the wood.  That western red cedar is getting quite difficult to source, worse than redwood.  But this fellow found a Canadian source, at the quality level (small, tight knots) that I wanted.  Yay!

Finally, late in the afternoon a roofer referred to me by a contractor whose work I really like showed up to look at a repair job we have.  Our little second-floor balcony's floor is a disaster.  We just had it installed two years ago, and the contractor who did it really messed it up.  This fellow was all about doing it right.  He had lots of ideas, good ones, and was very straightforward about what things were done well and which were not.  He ended up poking around for about an hour, and will be calling me back today or tomorrow with an estimate on the materials.  He's working “off the books”, so I'll be paying for the materials up front and then for his time.  Ordinarily I wouldn't proceed this way, but he's got a stellar reference from someone I trust, and I was most impressed with his attitude, knowledge, and creativity.  Plus he could hardly be worse than the guy who did it before!

This afternoon my new router should show up, and then I'll be focused on getting my office back up and running, IT-wise.  I think I'll be installing the WiFi controller on my deck today, unless I get a whole bunch of interruptions. :)

Paradise ponders: weeds, rakes, and IT problems edition...

Paradise ponders: weeds, rakes, and IT problems edition...  This morning was a fine, cool morning, so I decided it was a good time to whack all the weeds around my barn.  That's a sizable area, equivalent to a rectangle about 80' x 35' – and it was full of every noxious weed you can imagine.  I got perhaps 1/4 done when my friend and neighbor Tim D. interrupted me with an unhappy look on his face.  It seems his tractor was acting up, and he really needed to get his hay windrows turned over.  So he wanted to know if he could borrow my tractor.

Well, of course he could!  But there was a bit more to it than that, of course.  First we had to disconnect his broken tractor from the rake, and get it out of the way.  Then we set about connecting my tractor to the rake.  Even though it's a “standard” three-point hitch, the parts didn't fit right.  We had to do a little modification with my grinder, which took a half hour or so.  Finally we got the darned thing mounted on my tractor (an Italian rake on a Japanese tractor!), and Tim set off to turn over his windrows.  I went back to weed whacking.

Then, when I was maybe 1/2 done, a smiling stranger came up to me.  This was while I was behind my barn, a most unlikely place for someone to stumble upon me.  When I got my hearing protectors off and could talk with the fellow, I discovered that he was here to do the semi-annual maintenance on my backup generators.  He'd never been here before, so I had to show him where everything was located.  Then I went back to weed whacking again.

This time I was able to finish.  By that time I was soaking wet with sweat (it's only 80°F, but I was in full sun) and quite tired.  So I went upstairs to my barn office to take a break.  Sat down to review my email, and ... no Internet connection.  WTF?  It took only a few seconds of troubleshooting to figure out that I couldn't even ping my router (which my computer is directly connected to).  Bad.  Tried rebooting the router, but it didn't make its usual beeps and boops.  It's looking dead.  Dang it!  It's possible that it's just overheated, so I pulled the power and I'm letting it cool.  Most likely, it's just fried.  I'm not real happy about that...

Paradise ponders: small town edition...

Paradise ponders: small town edition...  Starting this past Wednesday, signs like the one at right have been hung on utility poles along the roads approaching Paradise, including the road we live along.  Free homemade donuts in the town park, to celebrate the last day of school (this past Thursday, here) and the beginning of summer.

Debbie spotted this gorgeous (and large! about 2.5" long) moth hanging out on our deck screen.  Nice looking thing...

When we went to get the mail at our Post Office box yesterday, we found these three goats and a cow all lying together in the only shade to be found in their pasture adjoining the Post Office parking lot.  They got up as I approached to take this photo, with the cow moving away and the goats moving toward me.  The goats all wanted to be scratched. :)

Yesterday Debbie made us a delicious salmon dish that she's made before.  The salmon is marinated in a sauce that includes maple syrup; that sauce is then reduced to be poured over the salmon.  She sprinkled our pieces with sesame seeds and chopped green onions, and we had broiled asparagus along with it.  Yummy, it was!  The salmon itself, though, isn't as good as the Ora King farmed salmon that we love.  This was wild salmon, caught by friends here and given to us as a gift.  It was good, but not as good as the Ora King...

Paradise ponders, mesh WiFi and sun room plants edition...

Paradise ponders, mesh WiFi and sun room plants edition...  I spent most of the day today bringing up a mesh WiFi network, using four of Ubiquiti Networks' UAP-AC-M-US Unifi Mesh Access Point devices (photo at right).  Mesh WiFi networks have long been used in corporate environments, but only recently have they come down in price to the point where one might consider them at home.  Ubiquiti Networks' entry to this marketplace isn't the cheapest, and actually isn't the fastest one out there (though it's close) – but it comes with an enterprise-ready management server that is just awesome, and Ubiquiti Networks gear has been the favorite of ISPs for years, for its reliability, capabilities, and manageability.  Those are all important things to me, so I sprang for the extra $100 or so and got them. 

Bringing them up was mostly a matter of (a) fixing the errors in my router configurations, and (b) building cables.  The access points all worked on the first try once I had that done.  The Unifi management server is, if anything, better than I expected – it gives me the best overall picture of a WiFi network that I've ever seen, including the enterprise systems I've worked with.  Configuration, firmware upgrading, provisioning, and monitoring are all a breeze.  Three of the access points directly replaced WiFi routers I used to have, and those all have wired uplinks.  The fourth access point, however, is going on our deck (mainly so we have a clear WiFi path to our irrigation controller, which is managed via WiFi).  That access point wirelessly links to the access point in our kitchen, and that was an absolute piece of cake to install.  Love this thing!

Earlier today Debbie and I went to a couple of nurseries in town to pick up a few plants for our sun room.  We got a dwarf Japanese maple, an ornamental bamboo, a Boston fern, and a flower we don't know called Veronica.  All very pretty stuff, in ugly nursery pots.  So very shortly after I post this, we're headed to Lowe's to see if we can't find ourselves something mo' bettah...

Scotland...

Scotland...  Our friend and former colleague Simon M. is presently touring Scotland with his wife Carrie.  He sent along some photos that make me want to go there with Debbie!  In order: Cuith-Raing, Loch Ness, and a view toward the Isle of Skye...

Paradise ponders: cedar sheds, sunny cats, broken pipes, and handsome weasels edition...

Paradise ponders: cedar sheds, sunny cats, broken pipes, and handsome weasels edition...  Wednesday night as I was nodding off to sleep, my phone beeped: I had a text message.  It was our neighbor, Alan L., wanting to know if I was awake.  “Barely.” I told him, and asked why.  He wanted to know if I had the “key” (a tool, really) to shut off the irrigation water.  It seems that one of his kids' friends had driven an ATV over one of our irrigation risers and busted it.  Sigh.  I got myself up and dressed, and ran over to the broken riser with my key.  After I shut off the water, we inspected the break.  To fix it, we'd need to dig a hole around the broken pipe, about 2' in diameter and 18" deep.  Alan volunteered the three boys for that job, the following morning (yesterday morning).  I said I'd be back by 9 am with the parts.  Well, next morning I called Tim D. (our friend and neighbor), and it turns out he had all the parts on hand.  So I was out there by 8 am and “supervised” the boys with their digging.  I ended up doing the heaviest part of the digging myself, as it was beyond their ability (these are all 7th and 8th graders). Once we got it dug out, I cleaned the pipe off, sawed the break off flat, then glued in a female-to-female coupler, a short section of pipe, a female-to-threaded coupler, and finally screwed on the aluminum riser body.  After waiting ten minutes for the glue to set, I opened the valve.  The fix held, and the kids committed to filling the hole in.  That used up much of my morning yesterday!

We've recently started letting the cattery cats up into our sun room.  Debbie's  been decorating it (still more of that to do), but that cats are loving it already (see documentary evidence at right).  We've had as many as six at a time up there, lounging in the warmth and sunlight, and watching the birds (aka “cat TV”).  We let Jahar out there with them, under supervision.  Most of the time they all get along ok, though we've broken up a couple of tussles between Konani and Jahar...

The cats come up into the cattery through one of the metal basement window casement covers we had built earlier this year.  I put a short cat tree under the hole, and within a minute the boldest cats were up it into the sun room.  That's Konani at left, poking his head out of the hole to see if the coast was clear before coming up...

The cedar shed is nearly finished; I will be completely finished with it in just a couple hours.  I took the second photo below just before knocking off last night.  The only remaining work to do is the trim around the door!  Overall I'm very pleased with this kit.  No parts were missing, and none were damaged.  There's a small bit of leftover wood, perfect for repairs if needed.  The shed is sturdy, and it looks very nice.  It will look even better in a couple of years when the sunlight has bleached the wood...

Yesterday evening Debbie and I took a nice drive out to Hardware Ranch.  Blacksmith Fork Canyon was full of things in bloom, and wonderful scents (especially from the abundant choke cherries).  We saw some deer, an American dipper, and a weasel (we're pretty sure it was a long-tailed weasel).  I got a couple photos of flowers in the canyon, both species I don't recognize.

Our sprinkler contractor has been working away at trenching.  His helper (Dave) should start laying pipe and setting sprinklers today.  In a couple of weeks, we're told, we should have something that actually looks like a lawn – instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war...

Paradise ponders: bicycles, neighbors, and a whole lotta shed edition...

Paradise ponders: bicycles, neighbors, and a whole lotta shed edition...  Yesterday I went to our local hardware store (Ridley's) to pick up some deck screws.  I needed them to attach the steel connectors between the floor beams and the joist-and-floor assembly I finished the day before.  When I parked near the hardware store entrance, I noticed this girl's bike leaning against the fence.  I'd seen it there quite a few times before, so I guessed that it belonged to an employee.  But this time I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before: that bicycle is not locked to the fence.  The lock is there, but it's not being used.  Curious, when I went into the store I asked about it, and sure enough, it belongs to a young woman who works there.  Turns out she's worked there for 3 years, and she's never locked it.  And obviously, it's never been stolen.  This is in the town of Hyrum, which has a considerably higher rate of crime than we do in Paradise, just four miles south.  But ... apparently it's not all that high!

In today's mail we got the card you see at left.  I had no idea what it was, but our friend Michelle H. filled me in: it's an announcement of Sarah's imminent high school graduation.  The card looks very professionally made.  Apparently it acts as an invitation to the graduation ceremony (though there's nothing explicitly about that on the card).  It also is a nudge for a graduation gift. :)  Sarah is a neighbor of ours, so I'm not surprised we were included in her broadcast.  What gave me a really big smile, though, was that envelope.  It's addressed simply to “Tom & Debbie Dilatush”, but the post office had no problem delivering it.  Small town America!

Yesterday and today I've been working hard on the cedar shed, and much progress has been made.  Yesterday Debbie helped me a lot – it was very nice to have the help, but even nicer to see that she could do it.

The first thing I did yesterday was to tap the four floor beams carefully into position, mark the concrete to match, then flip up the joist-and-floor assembly (first photo).  Lifting that sucker by myself was hard – right at the limit of my lifting capacity.  But I did it.  Then I screwed on four connector end caps (second photo), on the side away from the flipped-up floor.  Next step was to secure the four beams onto the concrete slab; I did that with 12 Tapcon 5/8" concrete screws into holes that I drilled into the concrete to match the holes in the four beams (third photo).  They worked great!  I torqued them all down to 25 ft/lbs and those four beams aren't going anywhere at all.  Then I flipped the joist-and-floor assembly back down (amazing how much easier that was that lifting it!), and scooted it over the beams to mate up with the end cap connectors I'd previously installed (fourth photo).  Next step was to lift the side of the floor away from the connectors, prop it up on a log (fifth photo), and install cap connectors on the other side of the four beams.  That done, I lowered the floor and put approximately 3.7 billion screws into those eight cap connectors, along with into six straight connectors along the sides of the front and back beams (sixth photo).  That was a bunch of work!

This morning I started assembling the side panels.  There are ten panels all together.  Debbie helped me with this part, keeping panels in alignment while I tacked them into place with a few screws.  When we finished with that, we trial-fitted the door (it was perfect).  Then I put about 2.4 billion more screws in, to tie all the panels firmly to the floor and to each other.  Next step was to install top plates (2x3s) all the way around the top, which did wonders for the rigidity of the longer sides.  Finally I put the two gables up (at right) and put the first two roof panels on.  Those I could do by myself, but the next two roof panels I need help on – and that help is arriving in about 45 minutes, in the form of two of Michelle's strapping sons.  Each of them is much stronger than I am, or was even at their age (late teens/early 20s).  We'll put the next two panels up this evening and I'll tack them into place.  Tomorrow morning I'll put the last two roof panels up on my own, and then all that's left on the shed are details.  Important details, mind you (like the ridge cap), but details nonetheless.

I'm a tired puppy again tonight. :)

A year ago today...

A year ago today ... Debbie was miserable, and my life was just a tad more complicated that it is right now.

Debbie had shattered her left knee joint and right kneecap just a few days before.  She'd just come out of surgery to reconstruct the knee's socket and had been admitted to the TCU (Transitional Care Unit) at Logan Regional Hospital.  She was in considerable pain, and both legs were strapped into braces that locked them straight.  We hadn't learned of her osteoporosis yet, but we knew that something must be wrong with her bones.

My mom had just arrived at the nursing home in Logan, and was giddy with happiness at having done so.  We had no idea, at that moment, that she had just ten days or so to live.  All we knew was that she was here, bubbling over with the joy of being here, seeing my brother Scott and I, and meeting some of the Utahans she'd been hearing about.  Scott and I were very busy getting her room outfitted.  The only concern we really had was that her mental state seemed out of character and almost unreasonably happy, and we didn't have any idea why.

I had just picked up our two new field spaniel puppies, Cabo and Mako.  The two of them were quite a handful – bundles of non-house-trained energy and joy.  They were a lot of work for both me and Michelle H. (who pitched in to help on many occasions for a few weeks starting late May last year).  I have trouble imagining how I could possibly have coped with Debbie's injury, mom's arrival, and the puppies' arrival without Michelle's help.  She was the good friend we could count on, going out of her way to check on me, calling every day to coordinate where I needed help with the chaos, and always, always cheering me on.  Despite being a lot of work, the puppies were also a source of peace and happiness for me.  Amid the chaos of my life, I could count on them to bring a smile and calm me down. 

By comparison things seem downright placid today...  :)

Remembering...

Remembering...  I woke this morning around 4 am, realized that today was Memorial Day, and started thinking about Luke, Dave, and Bill – the three people I knew who were killed in Vietnam.  For some reason Dave is the one who was foremost in my thoughts.  I knew him while attending “C” school for Data Systems Technicians (DS rating) at the Mare Island Navy base, near Vallejo, California in 1972.  Dave was a big, friendly, bear of a guy, from Nebraska if I remember correctly.  He entered the Navy without much in the way of math skills, and zero prior knowledge of electricity or electronics.  He'd struggled mightily to get through “BEEP” (basic electronics) school in San Diego, and was struggling harder in DS school.  After a few months, he was booted out of DS school – he just couldn't keep up with the pace.  At that time, students booted out of DS school were sent to the PBR (Patrol Boat, River) school, also at Mare Island.  There Dave excelled, as we heard when he proudly came to see his DS friends after graduating – and just before deploying to Vietnam.  He was in Vietnam for just a couple of months when he was killed by sniper fire from the shores of a river whose name I've long since forgotten.  I didn't learn of his death until after I'd deployed to the USS Long Beach (CGN-9), when I came across an article about the incident in which he and another crew member were killed.  His photo was there, and caught my eye. 

Within the Navy, the PBRs in Vietnam were notorious for their high casualty rate (casualty, to the military, is both deaths and injuries).  Depending on what source you find, the casualty rate was between 5% and 8% of the crews per month.  At a 6%/month rate, if you served on a PBR crew for a year, you had more than a 50% chance of being a casualty.  By comparison the four years I served on the USS Long Beach were effectively risk-free.

I didn't know Dave all that well, but nevertheless well enough to know that he had no well-formed rationale to support risking his life in Vietnam.  He'd have simply seen it as his duty, once he'd signed up to serve his country.  I remember Dave as one of the few young men willing to say he saw signing up for the Navy as his patriotic duty.  At the time ('71), the country was being rocked by antiwar protests, and many – perhaps most – young people perceived military people as despicable “baby killers”, and someone unabashedly patriotic, like Dave, really stood out.

I shed some tears for you today, Dave, and I'll be thinking of you all day...

Paradise ponders: ahi, joist boxes, and plywood floors edition...

Paradise ponders: ahi, joist boxes, and plywood floors edition...  Yesterday afternoon Debbie made us the most delightful meal: baked ahi with a sweet 'n sour salsa to accompany it, over rice with diced avocado on top.  Oh, so delicious it was!  That's my serving at right, moments before I attacked it.  If you're wondering what that pink concoction I'm drinking is, that's prickly pear flavored Pelligrino sparkling water.  It's one of my favorites of a line I like in general.  I somehow managed to eat that entire mountain of food.  Debbie gave out part way through hers, and that isn't the kind of dish that could be kept and reheated – so the dogs had an unexpected treat.  Much appreciated, it was!  :)  As I write this, Debbie is making today's meal.  I don't know the dish, but I know it involves cabbage, ground pork, and ground beef.  No way that's going to be bad!

Yesterday and today, Debbie and I worked on building the cedar shed that will house the weather-sensitive components of our irrigation system.  The first step was for me to fabricate the four pressure-treated beams to hold up the floor of the shed, and at the same time compensate for the slope of the concrete slab they'd be sitting on.  At right you can see one of the cuts I had to make, in this case to a 4x4 (I ripped two of these, and also two 4x6s).  First I had to put my saw back together after I tripped the brake the day before, and then I had to run my saw in “bypass” mode so this wet lumber wouldn't trip it again.  That all worked fine.  All these cuts were carefully calculated in terms of the height of the resulting beam, and the 1.6° angle of the cut.  I had to dust off my high school trigonometry to figure all this out! :)

I also had to fabricate three holes in each of the four beams, where the hold-down bolts will go through to the concrete slab below.  Each of these holes has a 1.75" high hole that's 9/16" diameter, just big enough for the tie-down bolt to extend through.  Above that, through the remaining thickness of the beam, is a 1.25" diameter hole that will accommodate a nice thick washer to spread the load on the wood, and my socket wrench so I can torque that bolt down.  The photos below show me doing the holes, with the last photo showing the debris under my drill press once I'd finished.  What a mess!

After finished the fabrication of these four beams, I loaded them up on my tractor and hauled them out to the site where we're erecting the shed.  I put them down in the approximate position they'd be under the floor, and then put a test board up across them (at right).  Note how the closest beam is quite a bit taller than the furthest – that's to correct for the fairly steep slope of the slab.  I was testing for level and for alignment of the top surfaces of the boards, and I was very happy to see that both of them were spot on.  Yay!  Trigonometry and careful fabrication works!

Finally it was time for some actual work on the kit itself.  Much of the first step (constructing the floor) would be easier with two sets of hands, and Debbie volunteered to help.  It's wonderful that she's recovered enough to even consider doing this, and she not only did it, she did it well.  I took the first photo as we were building the first (of six) “joist boxes” for the cedar 2x4 joists that would support the plywood floor.  In the second photo you can see a finished joist box leaning up against a wall section.  The third photo shows the lazy man's way to transport the joist boxes from where we assembled them to where we'd be using them.  Love that tractor!  The fourth photo shows two joist boxes being screwed together.  The clamps are holding them in alignment while I'm screwing in the screws – they made it very easy to get everything perfectly lined up.  The fifth photo shows the plywood floor sections (each the size of a joist box) laid in place.  Finally, the last photo shows the floor completely assembled, glued and screwed to the joist box (and, most importantly, all aligned correctly).

Tomorrow I'll be leaning that floor up against the fuel tanks adjacent to it, and fastening the four big beams to the concrete.  Then I'll be putting the floor back down onto the beams and installing the metal connectors that will tie the floor solidly into the beams.  Some of the metal connectors (for the shortest two beams) will have to be modified slightly, as they're bigger than the beams at the moment.  I'm expecting that to take all day, and perhaps a bit longer if all doesn't go well.

Tonight I am one tired puppy – more tired, really, than I ought to be.  I sure hope my thyroid's sluggishness turns out to be the problem, and that once we get the dosage adjusted correctly I'll regain my former energy levels.  Last year this amount of work wouldn't leave me in the quivering-muscle state I'm in right now.  I don't like this at all, not one little bit.  As Debbie likes to say, getting old is not for sissies...

Paradise ponders: exploding saws, hydraulic ignorance, and wooden trigonometry edition...

Paradise ponders: exploding saws, hydraulic ignorance, and wooden trigonometry edition...  Yesterday morning I started on the project of building the cedar shed kit that arrived the day before.  The shed is going onto an existing concrete slab, but there's a small challenge there: the slab is sloped (3.5" in 10'), and I'd kind of like my shed to stand up straight.  The kit includes a plywood floor built on cedar 2x4 “joists”.  After examining that floor's design, I figured out that I could support the floor on four pieces of pressure-treated lumber, nominally 4" thick.  The height of each piece would be different, varying from 2" to 5.5", to correct the slab's slope – I actually got to use some trigonometry to figure that out.  I'd also cut each piece of wood using a small angle (1.6°) so that the tops of the pieces would all be in one plane and level.  Sounds easy!  So off I went to Home Depot to buy my four pieces of lumber.

When I returned, I set up my table saw for the first piece, put on my hearing protectors, lit off the dust collection system and the saw, and started to rip the first pressure-treated 4x4.  Then ... BOOM!  The saw blade stopped and dropped down below the table top.  Scared the hell out of me!  It took me a minute to figure out what had happened: the safety system in my SawStop saw had triggered.  That system stops the blade by driving an aluminum pawl into it, and that's what you see at right after I raised the blade back up.  That experience showed me just how fast that blade really does stop – right freakin' now!  After I regained a bit of my equanimity, I pulled the blade and brake cartridge out of my saw (they had become one); that's the first photo below.  I hammered the brake cartridge off the blade (second photo) to see what the blade did to the pawl.  The last photo shows what the brake did to my blade (now in the trash).  It's interesting to see that the blade stopped within a very short distance – once that pawl engaged a tooth, it couldn't move very far.  SawStop says that engagement time is 5 milliseconds.  At 4,000 RPM (unloaded) and a 10" diameter blade, that works out to 10" of blade travel, about 1/3 of a rotation.  I don't much like to think about my finger or hand enduring that much cutting action – but it beats the pants off the blade not stopping at all...

So why did the saw's safety system trigger?  My finger never touched the blade.  However, the pressure-treated lumber I was trying to saw was quite wet, as evidenced by its weight.  Lumber that's sufficiently wet will conduct electricity, and the saw detects human contact with the blade electrically.  Because the lumber was conductive, it fooled the saw into thinking that it was in contact with me, and it triggered.  The saw has a “bypass” mode that will let me run it without the safety mechanism.  That's what I'll have to do to saw this lumber – after I replace the brake cartridge and install my new saw blade.  I could let the lumber dry out, but then I wouldn't be able to build my shed until about August!

When I ran up to Logan yesterday to pick up a new saw blade, I stopped by an irrigation company referred by my sprinkler contractor, to talk with them about constant pressure pumps.  I'm not going to name the company, as I haven't actually done any business with them.  They had me talk with their pump expert.  It was kind of appalling, really.  I am far from a pump expert, but I do know a little bit about them.  I understand, for instance, the relationship between pressure and flow rate; I know what friction loss and head height is.  I know how to read a pump curve.  That dangerously small amount of knowledge made me a certifiable rocket scientist by comparison with their “pump expert”.  He was also very fast with the (outrageously) expensive solutions.  For instance, he proposed two $1,400 motor-operated valves when I told him I wanted an automatic bypass for the pump.  When I showed him how to accomplish the same thing with a $50 check valve, he had trouble comprehending how it would work and was clearly put off by my interference with his $2,800 sale.  I don't think I'll be buying my booster pump from those folks! :)

Paradise ponders: drone photos, geysers, cedar sheds, and routers edition...

Paradise ponders: drone photos, geysers, cedar sheds, and routers edition...  I got copies of the photos of our place taken by the drone earlier this week.  One of them is at right.  The resolution is a bit disappointing; someone has modified it from the 4000 x 3000 resolution of the native Phantom 3 camera.  West is up in this photo, and north is to the right.  It shows roughly the eastern third of our property.  That's Utah 165 running left-to-right at the bottom, the Hyrum irrigation canal just above it.  Looking at the buildings toward the right, our outbuilding is at the bottom, house in the middle, and barn near the top.  My irrigation contractor had this taken so that he could plot out all the sprinklers accurately.

Yesterday morning Debbie and I went out to our new sun room to enjoy the morning as we drank our tea and coffee.  I looked toward the south and saw something odd.  On closer inspection, it was a geyser – roughly 30' tall, emanating from the south side of our field, about 600' from our house.  I knew immediately what it was: a broken riser on the irrigation line that runs east/west there.  That riser is on a 3" diameter pipe, so it squirts a lot of water.  Most likely a snowmobile broke it off in the winter, and the irrigation company pressurized our pipes on Wednesday evening sometime.  So Thursday morning we woke up to our very own (and quite impressive!) geyser.

That event dictated my morning.  I went out immediately and shut off the valve that controls the water to that string of risers.  Then I assessed the situation, and there was good news and bad news.  The good news was that the riser broke off about 5" above ground, at the top of a piece of 3" PVC pipe, which means I wouldn't have to dig a pit in order to fix it.  Yay!  The bad news was that the valve wouldn't completely shut off the water – so there was still a trickle of water coming out of the riser.  Ordinarily the pipe has to be bone dry in order to glue it, and that wasn't a possibility here.  After consulting with my much more experienced friend and neighbor (Tim D.), I learned that there existed a kind of glue (solvent, actually) that would work on wet pipe.  Off I went to get it, though the nearest source was 20 miles away in North Logan.  Once I had all the parts I sawed the pipe off square, shoved a rag into the pipe to at least slow down the water, glued the new connector on, waited five minutes, and opened the valve to repressurize the pipe.  The glue joint held, and didn't leak.  Yay!

But I may have celebrated too soon.  I discovered shortly afterward that while I was in town getting the magic glue, the irrigation company shut down the lines so that they could repair the numerous leaks.  So I won't really know if my repair worked until the crank the pressure back up.  As of this writing, it's still off.  We may have a repeat geyser! :)

I spent most of my remaining day cleaning up a bunch of little details on the changes I've made with our network recently – especially the “heart transplant” that was replacing the routers.  I've mentioned before that I chose the MikroTik RB1100AHx2, a very capable box for a mere $350 – less than I used to pay for Cisco's annual firmware license!  After spending 15 hours or so working with this thing over the past few days, I'm ready to give it a grade.  I'll give it a solid “A”.  It's got far more capability than anything but the most loaded-up Cisco router, for a tiny fraction of Cisco's price.  The hardware fully delivers on its promise of gigabit performance on 13 ports.  It's far easier to manage and configure than Cisco's IOS devices.  The built-in tools (packet sniffer, bandwidth testing, etc.) are simply superb.  For any IT networking tech who isn't fully invested in his CCIE certification, MikroTik's “Routerboard” operating system for routers is a geek's dream come true: ridiculous power that's easy as hell to use.  So far, I have just one complaint: the two fans in it are noisy.  That wouldn't matter if this box were in a server room, but ours are located in our offices, and that noise now dominates the room.  Thankfully, that's easily fixed: I've purchased new fans that make just 1/40th of the noise, and they'll be installed soon.

Yesterday a truck arrived with the biggest, baddest kit yet: for a 8' x 10' cedar shed.  The photo at right shows what the completed shed should look like.  Right now, it looks like a big pile of cedar!  :)  This shed will house some of our new irrigation system's components: the booster pump, filters, and sprinkler controller.  It's going on the same concrete slab (behind our outbuilding) that currently hosts our fuel tanks and our backup generator.  That slab has a distinct slope to it, so one immediate challenge I have is to build up a foundation that will correct that and let the shed have a level floor.  I've come up with a relatively easy approach, and I'll be starting on that this morning.  It will involve some precision ripping (of pressure-treated 4x4's); a good exercise for my table saw.

I have remarked...

I have remarked ... several times about the astonishing ignorance many younger Americans have about the changes that have occurred in the world within the past 100 years, especially with respect to the steep declines in poverty and the casualties of war.  This morning I ran across a short documentary on the latter, and it is absolutely superb.  I especially like the post-WWII perspective segment at the end – it's something that we should pound into every young head in school, but which instead is nearly completely ignored.  I'd love to see something like this on the subjects of poverty and liberty... 

Paradise ponders: routers, sprinklers, and ARP proxies edition...

Paradise ponders: routers, sprinklers, and ARP proxies edition...  It was a long, long day for me yesterday.  The end result of yesterday's work (and some more this morning) is at right: the Internet speed test on my office laptop.  That's what I get when I send a gigabit stream of Internet data through two routers and a radio link to my laptop.  It actually varies from around 500 to 800 mbps, and 800 mbps is the limit of what my laptop's network interface can do.  Woo hoo!  I got data now!

Yesterday I ripped out our two older MikroTik routers and replaced them with newer, (much) faster models (RB/1100AHX2).  I brought up the one in my barn office first.  That was a tedious, but fairly straightforward affair, and by 1 pm I had that up and running.  After returning from a very pleasant lunch with Debbie and our friend Michelle H., I started on the house side.  I had it all installed by 6pm, and it was talking between the house and the barn just fine (over my new radio link).  But it wouldn't connect to the Internet at all.

I troubleshot it for three hours, with (to me!) very puzzling symptoms.  The new MikroTik router could talk to the cable modem just fine, but nothing connected to the router could do so.  Sounds like a routing problem, right?  I inspected and re-inspected all the address and routing configuration, and found no problems at all.  No reason for it not to work!  So then I did some packet sniffing, using a constantly-running ping session on Debbie's workstation as a source of known data.  The outbound ping got routed to the cable modem just fine, but then the cable modem never responded.  Tried the same thing with a ping from the router, and the cable modem responded just fine.  My tired brain couldn't process that information, so I went to bed and hoped that with fresh, caffeinated neurons in the morning I could figure it out.

Round about 2 am I woke up, visions of router configurations dancing in my head.  After thinking about it some more, it occurred to me that it might be a problem with ARP (the Address Resolution Protocol).  Unless you're a networking geek, you probably have no idea what that is.  In technical terms, it gives networked devices a way to translate an IP address into an Ethernet destination (a MAC address).  This isn't a great analogy, but it's a bit like a service that translates ZIP+4 codes into a street address.  In terms of my problem, if the router was trying to send a packet to an IP address (in this case, Debbie's terminal) that it didn't know the corresponding MAC address for, it would broadcast an ARP request to all the devices directly connected to the modem, and then my new router should reply (because it already knows how to send something to that IP address).  If that ARP request was never sent, or if my new router never replied to it, the symptoms would match what I was seeing.

So I got up around 3 am and started working on the problem.  With a bit more packet sniffing, I was able to determine that the cable modem was sending an ARP request – but my new router never responded.  At last, something concrete to track down!  With a bit of poring through documentation and configuration screens, I found the place where ARP behavior is configured.  That ARP setting on the screen at right is ordinarily set to “enabled”, but on this particular interface (the one connected to the cable modem) it needs to be set for “proxy-arp”.  Why?  My router's ether1 interface is connected to the cable modem, and it's address is 10.0.0.2/8.  All the other router interfaces are subnets of that one.  For instance, the client machines are on 10.1.4.x/24.  That matters because all the IP addresses that the router issued ARP requests for are within 10.0.0.0/8 – so my new router didn't know that it had to reply; for all it knew some other device would reply.  By changing that setting to proxy-arp, the router sent the ARP request to the interface with a matching subnet, and that interface replied to the ARP request.  With one simple little tweak, all of a sudden the entire network on the house side started working correctly.

Amazing what a little sleep will do for your troubleshooting capability!

We had another little milestone yesterday: Mark T., the fellow installing our new lawn sprinklers, arrived and started digging the trenches.  Progress!  His trenching machine is working much better now that our soil has dried out a bit. :)  He's starting on the section of our yard that we call the “driving range” (because that's what the previous owner did with it).  It's about half our total grass area.  He thinks he'll be finished trenching that part by Friday...