Thursday, June 15, 2017
Here's something to ponder for a while...
Here's something to ponder for a while ... Internet penetration across the U.S. It varies in ways that I find surprising and not immediately explainable. The map is from this WSJ article. There's a very high penetration both where we used to live in Southern California, and the semi-rural place we live now in northern Utah. But where my sister lives (near Charlottesville, Virginia) is a relative Internet desert, and I don't really have any idea why that should be. Then there's southern New Jersey, where my parents used to live – it has no data. WTF, New Jersey? The part of North Carolina where a good friend of mine lives (near Asheville) rather closely resembles the nearby Charlottesville, Virginia area – and yet there, the Internet penetration is high. What on earth is going on here? The WSJ article portrays this as largely a rural/urban divide, but their own map belies that. I see lots of farming areas with high penetration, some with adjoining areas of low penetration. My first instinct is to be suspicious of the quality of the data underlying this...
Awesome news of the day!
Awesome news of the day! At least for those unfortunates like us who live a long, long way from the nearest Trader Joe's. I've just discovered that Trader Joe's has a storefront on Amazon, with over 2,000 products listed already. Woo hoo!
Paradise ponders: beautiful sunrises, shed lighting, and Mako neutering edition...
I took poor Mako into the vet this morning, as today is the day he gets neutered. He was really excited in the office, because of the other dogs and all the nice people to meet. When I weighed him in, he tipped the scales at 46.5 pounds – that little puppy has done quite a bit of growing, and it's all muscle. One of the vet techs (Madison) tried to take him into the kennels in the back, but he was straining to get to me as I left. Madison isn't much bigger than he is, so in the end they just both stayed in the same place. :) It wasn't until I actually walked out the door that Madison made any progress toward the back!
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Paradise ponders: wildflowers, healthcare market perturbations, and running-around-like-crazy edition...
Paradise ponders: wildflowers, healthcare market perturbations, and running-around-like-crazy edition... I was so busy running around buying electrical parts yesterday (three separate trips to Logan!) and installing them that I never even went up to my office, let along posting on my blog. That felt odd. Because of all the running around, I didn't get much actual work done wiring up the shed. I did manage to get one outlet box installed, though, and now the irrigation controller is powered up. It connected to WiFi just fine, though not to the deck access point like I expected. The first time it connected, it attached to the access point in my office – the furthest away from it! The next time, it attached to the access point in Debbie's office, on the other side of the fuel tanks from the irrigation controller. Weird! I'm guessing that our wire fence is reflecting the signal somehow.
If you're one of the three crazy people who have been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I have pernicious anemia, and that I inject myself with cyanocobalamin (synthetic vitamin B12) as treatment. In my case, the dose is 1 ml (milliliter), intramuscular, every two weeks. If you do the math, that means I use 26 ml of the stuff every year. When I was first diagnosed, 27 years ago, the standard form the drug was dispensed in was a 30 ml vial. Back then, that vial cost about $15, and my insurance paid for all but the $2 co-pay. The same exact drug was sold for veterinary use at about one third the cost per ml, though usually in (much) larger vials. Bottom line: it was a ludicrously cheap treatment for a condition that would otherwise be fatal.
It's interesting to see how Obamacare has perturbed the price of this (formerly) cheap drug. Obamacare forced insurance companies to cover only short-term prescriptions for drugs. Somehow this was supposed to save money, though I have never understood the rationale. For most drugs that meant a limit of 30 days worth, but for some (though not cobalamin) it is 60 days. Now consider my pernicious anemia – for 30 days I need two 1 ml doses, or a total of 2 ml. The drug companies could no longer sell cobalamin in 30 ml vials if they wanted insurance companies to pay for it. So the drug companies, quite reasonably, responded by packaging cobalamin in a way they had never previously done so: in 1 ml vials. If you're not familiar with ml, that's a teensy tiny amount of the drug – about the same as the ink in a standard ballpoint pen. The container is, quite literally, several times as costly as the drug that it contains. If I were to purchase cobalamin in this way, I'd pay a$10 co-pay for each of the 26 doses I needed per year. That works out to a $260 out-of-pocket annual expense for me – 130 times what I paid when I was first diagnosed. I'm not sure I want to know what the insurance company pays as their portion.
That just seemed ludicrously wasteful to me, and way more expensive than it really ought to be. I seriously considered just buying veterinary cyanocobalamin, like this one: $10 for 250 ml. No prescription needed, and theoretically the same exact drug. I talked it over with our local pharmacist, a very friendly fellow, and he suggested that I special order a 30 ml vial through him instead. That would cost me $145 out of pocket, just over half what the insurance co-pay would cost, and it's human-grade stuff (though I suspect it's really all coming out of the same cyanocobalamin faucet somewhere). So I did – I paid about $5/ml for the same drug that costs $0.04/ml if you're buying it for your horse. Sheesh. Nice job at reducing costs, there, Obamacare!
On Monday afternoon, Debbie and I took a drive out to Hardware Ranch. We didn't see much of the usual wildlife, but we did get a treat: two bird families are nesting inside the wall of the Hardware Ranch visitor center. One family are flickers, getting to their nest through the frame of an east-facing window. The other is a small hawk (unidentified), entering through a hole below a large light on the east wall of the visitor center. The two entrances are less than 20' apart.
And then there were the wildflowers! We spotted the blue ones first; they are so bright you can see them from 100' or more away. When I walked out in a couple of hillside meadows, I saw many more. This was truly a delight for me. Some photos below. There's a very pale violet lupine in that mix, but most of them are flowers I don't know. I also stumbled across a sage with a gnarled trunk that looks like it's 1,000 years old. The leaves on this species are particularly pungent when crushed.
If you're one of the three crazy people who have been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I have pernicious anemia, and that I inject myself with cyanocobalamin (synthetic vitamin B12) as treatment. In my case, the dose is 1 ml (milliliter), intramuscular, every two weeks. If you do the math, that means I use 26 ml of the stuff every year. When I was first diagnosed, 27 years ago, the standard form the drug was dispensed in was a 30 ml vial. Back then, that vial cost about $15, and my insurance paid for all but the $2 co-pay. The same exact drug was sold for veterinary use at about one third the cost per ml, though usually in (much) larger vials. Bottom line: it was a ludicrously cheap treatment for a condition that would otherwise be fatal.
It's interesting to see how Obamacare has perturbed the price of this (formerly) cheap drug. Obamacare forced insurance companies to cover only short-term prescriptions for drugs. Somehow this was supposed to save money, though I have never understood the rationale. For most drugs that meant a limit of 30 days worth, but for some (though not cobalamin) it is 60 days. Now consider my pernicious anemia – for 30 days I need two 1 ml doses, or a total of 2 ml. The drug companies could no longer sell cobalamin in 30 ml vials if they wanted insurance companies to pay for it. So the drug companies, quite reasonably, responded by packaging cobalamin in a way they had never previously done so: in 1 ml vials. If you're not familiar with ml, that's a teensy tiny amount of the drug – about the same as the ink in a standard ballpoint pen. The container is, quite literally, several times as costly as the drug that it contains. If I were to purchase cobalamin in this way, I'd pay a$10 co-pay for each of the 26 doses I needed per year. That works out to a $260 out-of-pocket annual expense for me – 130 times what I paid when I was first diagnosed. I'm not sure I want to know what the insurance company pays as their portion.
That just seemed ludicrously wasteful to me, and way more expensive than it really ought to be. I seriously considered just buying veterinary cyanocobalamin, like this one: $10 for 250 ml. No prescription needed, and theoretically the same exact drug. I talked it over with our local pharmacist, a very friendly fellow, and he suggested that I special order a 30 ml vial through him instead. That would cost me $145 out of pocket, just over half what the insurance co-pay would cost, and it's human-grade stuff (though I suspect it's really all coming out of the same cyanocobalamin faucet somewhere). So I did – I paid about $5/ml for the same drug that costs $0.04/ml if you're buying it for your horse. Sheesh. Nice job at reducing costs, there, Obamacare!
On Monday afternoon, Debbie and I took a drive out to Hardware Ranch. We didn't see much of the usual wildlife, but we did get a treat: two bird families are nesting inside the wall of the Hardware Ranch visitor center. One family are flickers, getting to their nest through the frame of an east-facing window. The other is a small hawk (unidentified), entering through a hole below a large light on the east wall of the visitor center. The two entrances are less than 20' apart.
And then there were the wildflowers! We spotted the blue ones first; they are so bright you can see them from 100' or more away. When I walked out in a couple of hillside meadows, I saw many more. This was truly a delight for me. Some photos below. There's a very pale violet lupine in that mix, but most of them are flowers I don't know. I also stumbled across a sage with a gnarled trunk that looks like it's 1,000 years old. The leaves on this species are particularly pungent when crushed.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Paradise ponders: quarter-rounds, expert electricians, LED lighting, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...
Paradise ponders: quarter-rounds, expert electricians, LED lighting, and ubiquitous WiFi edition... Today the electricians from Golden Spike Electric showed up, as promised. They went right to work installing an electrical subpanel in my cedar shed and running a circuit to the pumps in our little filling station. I helped a little bit by installing some solid wood inside the cedar shed for them to mount components on. As always, I was really impressed with the quality of their work. They are a great example of the sort of craftsmen one can find up here in Utah, and that we never seemed to be able to find in California. They couldn't quite finish the work today, though, as the explosion-proof “whips” they needed for the final connection to the pumps weren't available from the local electrical supply shop. They've ordered the whips in from a supplier in Salt Lake City, and they should be here sometime in the next few days. Meanwhile, though, I can now proceed with wiring up the shed to get ready for the irrigation components.
The first electrical item I'm putting up in the shed is some lighting. We went down to Home Depot this afternoon to see what was available, and I found some 4' long strips, 3200 lumens at 4000k (bright white). They look just about perfect for my application, so I got four of them to mount up on the ceiling of the shed. That should fix me up with lighting! Then I'll install a few outlets, with one dedicated for the irrigation “clock”. Progress! I also bought six more 100W equivalent bulbs for inside our house, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the price for these has dropped to under $14. When I first started buying them, three years ago, they were almost $30. I'm guessing it's less than five years until they're down to price parity with a high-quality halogen bulb of the same light output...
In between helping out the electricians, I put quarter-round trim all the way around the floor of the shed. That gave the new flooring a nice, finished look. The 45° cuts for the corners sure were a breeze with my “chop saw”. All the times I've done similar trim work, I did it with a hand saw miter box. The chop saw does a beautiful job by comparison, far better than I could ever do by hand. Plus, it's easy!
I'm very sore all over today from moving the hay yesterday. I thought I'd sleep like a log last night, but my aches and pains kept me awake half the night. Oh, well...
Finally, this afternoon I put up the last Ubiquiti access point, in my shop. The screen shot at right shows the lovely “green board” in the Dilatush WiFi Empire – all eight access points are up and running just fine, and we have rock-solid WiFi signals everywhere I've checked, inside every room in our house and barn, plus in our back yard. Our Internet connectivity (both wired and wireless) here is now better than any business I was ever a part of. Kind of mind-boggling, that is...
The first electrical item I'm putting up in the shed is some lighting. We went down to Home Depot this afternoon to see what was available, and I found some 4' long strips, 3200 lumens at 4000k (bright white). They look just about perfect for my application, so I got four of them to mount up on the ceiling of the shed. That should fix me up with lighting! Then I'll install a few outlets, with one dedicated for the irrigation “clock”. Progress! I also bought six more 100W equivalent bulbs for inside our house, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the price for these has dropped to under $14. When I first started buying them, three years ago, they were almost $30. I'm guessing it's less than five years until they're down to price parity with a high-quality halogen bulb of the same light output...
In between helping out the electricians, I put quarter-round trim all the way around the floor of the shed. That gave the new flooring a nice, finished look. The 45° cuts for the corners sure were a breeze with my “chop saw”. All the times I've done similar trim work, I did it with a hand saw miter box. The chop saw does a beautiful job by comparison, far better than I could ever do by hand. Plus, it's easy!
I'm very sore all over today from moving the hay yesterday. I thought I'd sleep like a log last night, but my aches and pains kept me awake half the night. Oh, well...
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Paradise ponders: pipe, hay, floor tile, and drained cistern edition...
I started my morning on my knees with a belt sander, smoothing out the joints on the floor in the cedar shed I built last week. Just as I finished that, my friend and neighbor Tim D. came over and we moved irrigation pipe while watching the sun rise through beautiful puffy clouds over the Wasatches to our east. While we were moving pipe, we noted Heath C. was over in his field picking up about 130 bales of hay by himself. So when Tim and I finished moving the pipes, I went over to see if I could lend a hand. A couple hours later, Heath and I had nearly finished picking up all the bales and moving them to a hay stack built on old pallets. Another neighbor, Ryan P., saw us working and came over to lend a hand himself. The three of us picked up the last trailer load of bales and got them all off the ground. Heath's going to be back tomorrow with some tarps to cover the hay stack before the rains we expect on Monday night. It felt good to help our new neighbor (Heath), but ... I was tired as could be after moving all that hay!
After all that, I went back to work on the cedar shed. First I vacuumed the floor to get the sanding dust off, then I went to work installing the stick-on vinyl tile. This tile looks for all the world like slabs of weathered spruce, and it even has the wood grain texture stamped in. They're quite inexpensive (under $100 for 80 square feet), they look great, and they'll protect the plywood floor quite nicely. Also, they're a breeze to install. A couple of in-progress photos are below. It's all installed now, and it awaits only some quarter-round trim around the edges to complete the job.
About midway through the tile installation, Debbie called me on my mobile to let me know that our house water pressure had gone to almost zero – just as she was getting ready to take a shower. She wasn't particularly pleased by this. I was afraid we'd had some disaster of the broken pipe variety, but then it occurred to me that I had turned on a single sprinkler a few hours before. If our spring was filling slowly, that sprinkler might have outpaced it, and drained our 1,000 cistern. So I turned off the sprinkler, told Debbie not to use any water, and went to look in the cistern. The lid on the cistern is made of diamond-plate steel, and I couldn't budge it – not even with a 6' steel rod lever! The thing is completely rusted shut. I wanted to look and see if it was empty, and I could not. That's another new project now, freeing the cistern lid. Just what I need: another project! I made another quick check of the water pressure, and it had come up substantially. That bolstered my theory of the empty cistern. We waited a bit longer, and the pressure came completely back to normal. A couple hours later, Debbie took a shower without any problems. I guess I won't be watering anything with our spring water any more!
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Paradise ponders: wandering iPhones, big-eye tuna, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...
Paradise ponders: wandering iPhones, big-eye tuna, and ubiquitous WiFi edition... Yesterday after we got home from having a lovely lunch at Los Primos with our friend Michelle H., Debbie realized that she didn't have her phone. It's a really nice iPhone in an Otterbox case, and it's got her life on it, especially photos. We searched everywhere, went back to the restaurant and asked, all to no avail. Then I tried Apple's “Find my iPhone” app ... and it said the phone was offline. Sheesh! Not only did that mean we couldn't see where it was, we also couldn't lock the phone or take any other action to help find it. Debbie's face was very long as she went to bed.
This morning we decided to check with the “Find my iPhone” app again, and this time it found it! Immediately we had an address for its current location (just a few blocks from Los Primos), and we could lock the phone (which I did immediately) and put a message on it giving our phone number to anyone who might pick it up. We got dressed, jumped in our car, and headed for the address in question.
When we arrived, we quickly figured out that the building it was in was a four unit apartment building. There were a couple of young Hispanic men outside, dangling cigarettes and looking generally a little rough. When we started talking with them, though, they were sympathetic to our plight. They were roomies in unit 2 in building, knew nothing about our phone, but suggested we try the other apartments. Because the app was showing the phone in approximately the middle of the building, and we'd already talked with people from unit 2, I tried knocking on the door of unit 3. A sleepy-looking young girl and her wide-awake parents answered the door. The parent spoke only Spanish, but the girl spoke English well and acted as a translator for us. We shared our story, again they were sympathetic, but they knew nothing about our phone. So I knocked on the doors of units 1 and 4, but nobody answered.
What to do? The app was showing Debbie's phone was right there, but we couldn't get to it. I couldn't think of anything else that we could do, so I called the police (the Logan City police). I was routed to the dispatcher in seconds, and he said he'd have a unit respond soon. About two minutes later, a cruiser pulled up and a (very young) officer got out. He was very friendly, and asked us a few questions to figure out what was going in. He wasn't familiar with the “Find my iPhone” app, but it made sense to him and he decided to start knocking on doors himself. He had exactly the same results with that effort that we'd had. Then the officer asked if we could cause the phone to make some sound, so we could see if we could hear where it was. I remembered that the app had exactly that feature, so we tried it out. Immediately we all heard a “pinging” sound, and we quickly narrowed that down to a locked storage closet associated with unit 4. The phone was there, for sure – all of us were now positive we had the right place, and further that we'd narrowed it down to a single apartment.
At that point the officer started working on locating unit 4's occupant. The other people (we had a little crowd there) knew the guy's name and that he was generally at work (in construction) until the late afternoon – but they didn't have a phone number and didn't know who he worked for. The police officer wasn't sure he was communicating accurately, so he called for another officer to help translate. At the same time, he got more information on unit 4's occupants by running the plates on their vehicles in the parking lot (identified by some of the other people there). That ended up getting him on the phone with a relative of the fellow we were actually looking for – and that relative called the guy we were actually looking for, got him to drive back to see us, and then he called the police officer back to let him know what was going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later an older Hispanic gentleman came driving in, walked straight to the locked closet with our phone, unlocked it, and with a big smile gave it back to Debbie. Turns out that he'd eaten at Los Primos yesterday as well, and when he climbed back into his truck he noticed the phone lying on the parking lot pavement. He's not a tech-savvy guy, so he brought it home, locked it up, and was planning to have his (more tech-savvy) son help him locate the owner tomorrow.
This was a three-way win, with lots of smiles all around. We won, because we got Debbie's phone back (in perfect condition, too!). The Hispanic gentleman won because he succeeded in getting the phone back to the happy owner (you should have seen his grin!) – and he got a big hug from Debbie. The police won because they were able to help a citizen retrieve their property without even ruffling any feelings, much less causing a ruckus – lots of smiles from them, too. That was a very pleasant way to start out our morning...
We just finished our big meal for the day, a scrumptious dish that Debbie made up on the fly after we stumbled upon some great-looking fish in Macey's, of a species we had never heard of: bigeye tuna. The fish looked like ahi, and we see that it's closely related to the yellowfin tuna that we know as ahi. That photo at right is my share of the piece we bought. Debbie cooked up some brown rice as a base, with broiled fresh asparagus on that. She seasoned the seared fish with a bunch of her low-sodium seasoning collection, plus sesame seeds (an inspired choice!). Then she topped that with some grilled green onion slices and a half an avocado. My oh my was that dish tasty! We're gonna have to have that one again...
After helping my friend and neighbor Tim D. move irrigation pipe this morning, I've spent the time we weren't retrieving Debbie's phone or eating installing more Ubiquiti Unifi mesh access points. I am determined to have rock-solid WiFi in every room of our house and barn, and in the parts of the yard we regularly inhabit as well. I started out with four of these access points, and I was very pleased with the results on them – so I bought four more, which is what I figured I needed to get coverage everywhere we want it. The screenshot below shows the Unifi controller's view of our Dilatush WiFi Empire right now. The “Shop” one shows disconnected because I haven't installed it yet. Six of the green ones are in our house, and they're all working great! Rooms (or places within rooms) that formerly had shaky WiFi signals now have full strength signals. Our entire back yard has a strong signal. All of the access points have between 250 and 400 mpbs bandwidth in both directions. It's ridiculously good! :)
This morning we decided to check with the “Find my iPhone” app again, and this time it found it! Immediately we had an address for its current location (just a few blocks from Los Primos), and we could lock the phone (which I did immediately) and put a message on it giving our phone number to anyone who might pick it up. We got dressed, jumped in our car, and headed for the address in question.
When we arrived, we quickly figured out that the building it was in was a four unit apartment building. There were a couple of young Hispanic men outside, dangling cigarettes and looking generally a little rough. When we started talking with them, though, they were sympathetic to our plight. They were roomies in unit 2 in building, knew nothing about our phone, but suggested we try the other apartments. Because the app was showing the phone in approximately the middle of the building, and we'd already talked with people from unit 2, I tried knocking on the door of unit 3. A sleepy-looking young girl and her wide-awake parents answered the door. The parent spoke only Spanish, but the girl spoke English well and acted as a translator for us. We shared our story, again they were sympathetic, but they knew nothing about our phone. So I knocked on the doors of units 1 and 4, but nobody answered.
What to do? The app was showing Debbie's phone was right there, but we couldn't get to it. I couldn't think of anything else that we could do, so I called the police (the Logan City police). I was routed to the dispatcher in seconds, and he said he'd have a unit respond soon. About two minutes later, a cruiser pulled up and a (very young) officer got out. He was very friendly, and asked us a few questions to figure out what was going in. He wasn't familiar with the “Find my iPhone” app, but it made sense to him and he decided to start knocking on doors himself. He had exactly the same results with that effort that we'd had. Then the officer asked if we could cause the phone to make some sound, so we could see if we could hear where it was. I remembered that the app had exactly that feature, so we tried it out. Immediately we all heard a “pinging” sound, and we quickly narrowed that down to a locked storage closet associated with unit 4. The phone was there, for sure – all of us were now positive we had the right place, and further that we'd narrowed it down to a single apartment.
At that point the officer started working on locating unit 4's occupant. The other people (we had a little crowd there) knew the guy's name and that he was generally at work (in construction) until the late afternoon – but they didn't have a phone number and didn't know who he worked for. The police officer wasn't sure he was communicating accurately, so he called for another officer to help translate. At the same time, he got more information on unit 4's occupants by running the plates on their vehicles in the parking lot (identified by some of the other people there). That ended up getting him on the phone with a relative of the fellow we were actually looking for – and that relative called the guy we were actually looking for, got him to drive back to see us, and then he called the police officer back to let him know what was going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later an older Hispanic gentleman came driving in, walked straight to the locked closet with our phone, unlocked it, and with a big smile gave it back to Debbie. Turns out that he'd eaten at Los Primos yesterday as well, and when he climbed back into his truck he noticed the phone lying on the parking lot pavement. He's not a tech-savvy guy, so he brought it home, locked it up, and was planning to have his (more tech-savvy) son help him locate the owner tomorrow.
This was a three-way win, with lots of smiles all around. We won, because we got Debbie's phone back (in perfect condition, too!). The Hispanic gentleman won because he succeeded in getting the phone back to the happy owner (you should have seen his grin!) – and he got a big hug from Debbie. The police won because they were able to help a citizen retrieve their property without even ruffling any feelings, much less causing a ruckus – lots of smiles from them, too. That was a very pleasant way to start out our morning...
After helping my friend and neighbor Tim D. move irrigation pipe this morning, I've spent the time we weren't retrieving Debbie's phone or eating installing more Ubiquiti Unifi mesh access points. I am determined to have rock-solid WiFi in every room of our house and barn, and in the parts of the yard we regularly inhabit as well. I started out with four of these access points, and I was very pleased with the results on them – so I bought four more, which is what I figured I needed to get coverage everywhere we want it. The screenshot below shows the Unifi controller's view of our Dilatush WiFi Empire right now. The “Shop” one shows disconnected because I haven't installed it yet. Six of the green ones are in our house, and they're all working great! Rooms (or places within rooms) that formerly had shaky WiFi signals now have full strength signals. Our entire back yard has a strong signal. All of the access points have between 250 and 400 mpbs bandwidth in both directions. It's ridiculously good! :)
Friday, June 9, 2017
Paradise ponders: another crazy day edition...
Paradise ponders: another crazy day edition... I got up a bit early today, getting all my morning chores finished before 6 am so that I could help my friend and neighbor Tim D. move irrigation pipe this morning. We got to share the sunrise and the setting full moon, along with our usual companionable conversation. Moving irrigation pipe isn't something I ever thought would be something I looked forward to, but ... I do.
After Tim and I finished, I cranked up my tractor and headed a half mile or so up the road to pick up the pipe cart I'd arranged to borrow yesterday. You can see it, attached to my tractor, in the photo at right. I loaded up 26 pieces of 3" diameter aluminum irrigation pipe, lengths varying from 10' to 40'. Most of my pieces were around 30' in length, but I had a few oddballs. All but one piece has fittings on them, and most have sprinklers (usually with risers) on the female fittings. I couldn't get the cart very close to the places where I had pipe piled, so I ended up moving each piece 50' or so to pile it on. Then I drove to the corner of Heath's field (in the photo) and unloaded it all. That was much easier, as the cart was alongside where he wanted it piled. I'm really glad to see my old beat-up pipe going to someone who can really use it. Heath will be here tomorrow setting up a couple of water lines on his pasture, just as soon as the baler is finished picking up the windrows you see in the photo. After finishing all this, I was especially appreciative of the kindness of Mike C., who lent me that cart. This would have been a far more difficult task without that handy little thing!
The contractors were here to work on the filling station today, and ... they finished! The three photos below show what it looked like at different times today. I've got a bit of woodworking to do in order to allow the nozzles to be racked, and the hose to move smoothly. My electrical contractor will be here on Monday to hook up the power, and at that point we should actually have a working filling station. It only took about 10 months! At the end of this month we'll be traveling up to Kalispell, Montana again to pick up some more metal work we've had done. Among the goodies on that trip will be the (lockable) door for the filling station. Once that's one, our masons will be able to put all the rock veneer up around it (on their schedule, of course!). Then it will actually be finished...
Our sprinkler contractors were also here, and they've now installed (if I'm counting correctly) 7 of the 22 total zones our system will have. The part of the yard they're working on looks like hell – trenches and piles of dirt everywhere, and great big holes every once in a while where the valve boxes are going. I have to keep convincing myself that the end result will be good, because it sure doesn't look like it right now!
My office air conditioning got repaired today. The problem turned out to be a simple (and relatively inexpensive) one: the refrigerant had leaked out of the unit. All they had to do was refill it, fix the leaking connection, and now my office has the feel of a meat locker. Lovely, that is!
Debbie and I went up to Tractor Supply this afternoon to buy birdseed (we're going through about 40 pounds a week right now, I think because the parent birds are busy feeding babies). While there, I spotted the ... thing ... at right. It's a $200, 6' tall, sheet metal rooster. Why? This one store has eight of them in stock. Are there really eight people in the area who would buy such a thing?
The contractors were here to work on the filling station today, and ... they finished! The three photos below show what it looked like at different times today. I've got a bit of woodworking to do in order to allow the nozzles to be racked, and the hose to move smoothly. My electrical contractor will be here on Monday to hook up the power, and at that point we should actually have a working filling station. It only took about 10 months! At the end of this month we'll be traveling up to Kalispell, Montana again to pick up some more metal work we've had done. Among the goodies on that trip will be the (lockable) door for the filling station. Once that's one, our masons will be able to put all the rock veneer up around it (on their schedule, of course!). Then it will actually be finished...
Our sprinkler contractors were also here, and they've now installed (if I'm counting correctly) 7 of the 22 total zones our system will have. The part of the yard they're working on looks like hell – trenches and piles of dirt everywhere, and great big holes every once in a while where the valve boxes are going. I have to keep convincing myself that the end result will be good, because it sure doesn't look like it right now!
My office air conditioning got repaired today. The problem turned out to be a simple (and relatively inexpensive) one: the refrigerant had leaked out of the unit. All they had to do was refill it, fix the leaking connection, and now my office has the feel of a meat locker. Lovely, that is!
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Paradise ponders: remembrance edition...
That morning our phone rang about 1 am. It was my mom's hospice nurse, a friendly and ever-helpful young woman. The call woke me up, of course, and while I was still half asleep she gave me the news that my mom had died – peacefully, painlessly, in her sleep. As I worked myself out of my grogginess, it occurred to me that this poor nurse must have to make calls like this often – how awful! I started a conversation with her about this, and she told me that these calls were by far the hardest part of her job. She loved caring for the people in hospice ... but letting her patients' loved ones know that her patient had died was really tough for her. I told her that I admired her courage – I'm not at all sure I could regularly do that – and that I, for one, appreciated the way that she did her job. I was able to tell her, truthfully, that my mom thought she was one of the nicest people she'd ever met. And I seconded that opinion. I've talked with her several times in the ensuing year, each time because she was calling to see how I was doing...
I had another busy day yesterday.
My replacement router arrived, and I was able to bring it up, completely configured, within just minutes. It worked on the first try after installing it, and my office IT situation is back to normal. Yay! Even better, when I contacted Amazon (where I had purchased the failed router), they told me they'd be happy to refund the amount I'd spent on it, no questions asked. They just want the old one back, and they'll pay for the shipping. That kind of customer service keeps me in the mode I'm in these days: the first question I ask myself when I want to buy something – anything – is: can I buy it on Amazon?
The laptop I'm using to write this post is a five year old Macbook Pro. It still works just fine, but it's a bit short on storage (just 500GB) and the battery life isn't the greatest (about 2.5 hours). The most recent versions of the Macbook Pros are considerably better on both counts: 2TB of SSD storage, plus around 10 hours of battery life. That's good enough to finally tempt me into getting a new one. I put mine on order this morning; should be here before the end of the month.
The sprinkler contractor is making good progress. The first two zones were pressurized yesterday – first water! The first two photos below show one of the solenoid valves that control the zones, along with a drain (open in the fall, closed before first irrigation in the spring). The third photo shows a set of sprinklers going. Yay!
Because the sprinklers are going in, I now have about 20 lengths of sprinkler pipe that I no longer need. A new neighbor of ours (Heath C.) bought a 2.5 acre lot about a quarter mile north of us. He and his family are pinching pennies to save up the money to build a house on that land, but he needs sprinkler pipe to keep his land green. I offered him my pipe, and he eagerly accepted – though he swears he's going to find a way to pay me back (I wouldn't take any money for my old, beat up pipe). I noticed a pipe cart (for behind a tractor) parked up on the land of someone I know. This morning I stopped by his house to see if I could borrow the cart, and he said “Of course you can borrow it!” So tomorrow morning I'm going to run up and grab that cart, haul the pipe over to Heath's, and then take the cart back. This will give me much pleasure, to give back a little to the neighborhood that has been so kind to us...
This morning my friend and neighbor Tim D. started moving irrigation pipe for the first time this year. Debbie spotted him out there by himself (he's 74 and just had back surgery!), so she called me to go out and help. That's always fun to do with Tim – lots of companionable conversation and smiles. Amazingly enough, none of the sprinkler heads were plugged up by anything. That rarely happens!
Yesterday and today my filling station contractor is hard at work mounting the pumps. I've been helping a bit, on the wooden mounts we needed for the pumps. Once that's done (should be any moment now), the rest will just be plumbing. On Monday my electrical contractor should be here to put in the explosion-proof electrical feed for those pumps. At that point we should have a grand filling station! Toward the end of the month the steel door for the filling station should be done. It's lockable, so we'll be safe from the predations of any unsavory characters who might decide to liberate some fuel. That's fairly unlikely around here, but you never know...
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
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. :)
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. :)
Monday, June 5, 2017
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...
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...
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Paradise ponders: small town edition...
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Paradise ponders, mesh WiFi and sun room plants edition...
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...
Friday, June 2, 2017
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...
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...
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