Sunspots... Yesterday I read a mention somewhere that there were big sunspots facing the earth. So I got out my eclipse binoculars and took a look – and sure enough, I could see three gigantic sunspots right near the center of the sun's disk. The image at right was taken this morning by the SOHO satellite, but it's pretty close to what I could see in the binoculars. The three big ones were easily seen, and I also saw a hint of the one off to the right. The smaller one to the left I couldn't see at all.
When I was a wee lad, I built a telescope (a 6" diameter hand-ground Newtonian reflector on an equatorial mount made from galvanized pipe!). It was a terrible telescope by any reasonable standards today, because it's now possible to buy superb mass-manufactured optics at very low prices. But for its time (and most especially for its nearly non-existent budget!), it was actually reasonably good. I had a simple solar viewer for that telescope: just a piece of white cardboard that I could project an image onto from the telescope's eyepiece. It was really awkward to aim that thing, and I had to view it at an angle because the telescope's tube was in the way – but it did work and I could see sunspots with it, which thrilled me at the time. I'll note, though, that the direct observation with these cheap (around $35) binoculars beats the pants off that telescope.
A bit of a side-note here... Building that telescope was an inflection point in my life, for several reasons. One was very simple: through the telescope construction I met Norman Edmund, the proprietor of Edmund Scientific. That company was located in Barrington, New Jersey, within bicycle range of the farm I grew up on. Back in the '60s, it was a pleasant enough ride, about three hours on mostly back roads. I bought my telescope parts from Edmund Scientific by mail order, but when I had finished grinding the primary mirror I needed to have it silvered and overcoated. At the time, Edmund offered mirror finishing as a service, and I rode down there to deliver my mirror for silvering and over coating. While I was there, I looked through the submarine periscope that was mounted in the showroom, and wandered through the aisles of surplus optics, astounded at what was on offer. While wandering, Mr. Edmund came over and introduced himself, and offered to help me find what I needed. I left with a bag full of lenses, prisms, and first-surface mirrors that he didn't charge me for – treasures to me. Years (and many visits) later, I ended up working there part-time. That exposure to all sorts of technology was another inflection point for me. The main takeaway, in the end, was the sense that I could build anything if I set my mind to it. Cost needn't be an impediment, as almost any kind of technology was available at low cost if you knew how to do it. My start in electronics was exactly like that: I scrounged scrap TVs from TV repair shops, and stripped them for parts. Using those parts, I built all kinds of things, including ham radio receivers and transmitters. It was really rare that I needed to actually purchase a part – I could find (or make) nearly everything I needed from those old scrap TVs...
Paradise ponders: orange caterpillars, finished project, shocking breakfast, surprise visitors, delicious dinner, and beautiful morning edition... Yesterday afternoon, while walking from our barn to our house, I spotted this caterpillar walking across our pavement – moving at a good clip, too! It's roughly the size of my thumb, quite large for a caterpillar. Thanks to the wonders of Google's image search, I was quickly able to identify it: it's the caterpillar of the Western Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio rutulus). More particularly, it's the caterpillar just prior to pupation – about to hibernate while it transforms into the adult butterfly. Prior to this life-cycle stage, the caterpillar is green. The Western Tiger Swallowtail is a fairly common butterfly here, and we recognized its photos immediately – but we had no idea it's caterpillar looked like that!
I was walking back from the barn because I had just finished the stairs for Michelle H. I'm really pleased with how they turned out, and so is she (though so far she's only seen the photo). Michelle will be over in the next few days to do some staining and polyurethane finishing, and then I'll go over and help her install them. Hopefully they'll fit properly!
Yesterday afternoon Debbie started our dinner, but it was going to take over an hour and I was hungry. I looked around for a snack and saw (a) a lovely ripe tomato, grown by Michelle H., sitting on our counter, and (b) some leftover fresh mozzarella cheese. Ah ha! A few minutes later, I had the dish at right – a little olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, and that tomato and cheese. Debbie had already eaten her share of the cheese, so I hogged this whole thing down myself. Delicious, it was!
Shortly after I finished that, a couple we didn't know drove into our front yard. I was up on our balcony, so we talked for a moment and I found out they lived nearby, loved our barn, and wanted to know who had built it. That led to a delightful four hours of conversation (after a tour of our place) during which we got to know Ben and Laura. They live about a quarter mile southwest of us, on the fields just above the east side of the Little Bear River. Ben is a firefighter, a civilian employee of Hill Air Force Base, near Ogden (about an hour's drive). Laura is an entomologist, working for the Utah State University in Logan, specializing in agricultural pests. They moved here the year after we did, and still don't really know very many of the local folks. We made a start on fixing that yesterday. :)
That lovely visit delayed our dinner by a few hours, and made me very glad I'd had that snack! Not long after Ben and Laura left, our kitchen was full of the enticing aroma of baking cod. Debbie had purchased two pounds of fresh cod from Macey's, and it needed to be eaten. She coated the fillets with egg and a spice mix, baked them until they practically fell apart, and then we feasted on that cod and some perfectly cooked white rice. Cod fixed that way is a favorite of both of us, and last night it was particularly good. But oh, man, were we ever stuffed!
Before sunrise this morning we headed up Blacksmith Fork Canyon, hoping to spot some moose like we did about a week ago. No luck with the moose this morning, though we did see quite a few deer, two kingfishers, and a chipmunk zipping across the road. After our drive we headed up to Angie's for some breakfast. The special was a bone-in ham steak and eggs, so I ordered that. Debbie ordered the “Florentine Eggs Benedict”, a concoction that is meatless, but has hollandaise sauce and avocados. When our waitress delivered the meal, I was shocked into speechlessness by the sheer heft of that ham steak. I hope you can get a sense of the scale of that thing from the photo - it was about 3/8" thick and about a square foot in extent. I stuffed it in until I could stuff no more, and I didn't even eat half of it. I never even touched the homemade rye toast that I love. Debbie was even less successful in the consumption department than I was: she could only eat half of her relatively tiny little dish. We walked out with about two pounds of food in boxes, after we stuffed ourselves to the bursting point. Our dogs will be forever grateful to Angie's for doing that, as they got to eat all of the (lavishly) buttered toast and ham. Debbie's Florentine Eggs Benedict she's going to try reheating, but I won't be surprised if it ends up as a dog treat, too. :)
Paradise ponders: white dust, finished stairs, and WiFi meshes edition... Yesterday I did the final glue-up on the stairs I'm building for Michelle H. They're now finished except for a couple of blocks I need to fabricate to attach the stairs to her wall. I'll be headed over to her house on Tuesday or Wednesday to put them in. The first photo below shows the bottom of the stairs, and the bazillion clamps I put on for gluing two 2x4s along the bottom of all the lap joints. I did this just to keep down the bowing that will naturally occur over time. The second photo just shows the other side, which will be the top of the stairs (the photo shows the stairs assembly sitting on its back, just for convenience while gluing). I'm very pleased with how this all came out, and I'm especially pleased with how well simple lap joints (created on the router table) worked out.
Yesterday afternoon I headed down to the cat room with a pile of new LED bulbs. We had three (of 12 total) bulbs burn out, and several were the wrong color (“warm white”, yellowish and dim to our eyes, instead of “daylight”), so I was on a mission to make them all uniform and bright. While replacing the three bulbs on the first fixture, I noticed that the inside of the fixture's glass appeared to be dirty. I ran my finger along it and discovered that there was nearly a quarter-inch thick layer of bright white fluffy dust. This layer was absorbing perhaps half the light produced by the fixture! So I took down the glass from all four fixtures, cleaned it carefully, replaced all the bulbs, and put everything back together. Success – the room is much brighter now. I think at least half the brightness problem was that funny dust, and it was thick enough that I think it may have caused some of the bulbs to overheat (and fail) as well. That cat room has no windows open to the outside, and has a great air cleaner – so I'm wondering just what the heck that dust is. Something the cats themselves produce, like dander? I'm not at all sure, but one thing I know: we have to clean those things a couple times a year, or this will just happen again...
This morning my first job was to install another WiFi access point, this time out near the cedar shed that holds my pump. There are two devices inside the shed that connect to my WiFi network: the irrigation supervisor computer (that I built and programmed) and the irrigation controller (a commercial device that turns all the zone valves on and off). Both of these devices were having WiFi challenges, as the signal strength there wasn't very good. A big part of the problem is the two (metal) fuel tanks that happen to be directly between those devices and the access points they could connect to. The solution was pretty straightforward: I purchased another access point (the white thing with antennas in the photo at right) and mounted it where it had an unobstructed line-of-sight to both the devices inside the cedar shed and the potential access points it could uplink to. There was just such a place just 8 feet or so from the cedar shed, and very convenient to mount onto, so that's where it went (and that's what the photo shows). The new access point, when I powered it up, automatically found the other access point that it had the best signal to – and to my surprise, that turned out to be the access point inside my office, in our barn about 200' away! The kitchen access point is much closer (about 80'), but apparently the house's external wall attenuates the WiFi signal much more than my barn's exterior wall does. Just as with the rest of the Unifi access points I installed a few months ago, bringing this one up was quite painless. It's such a different experience from consumer WiFi routers – incrementally extending the “strong signal region” of my WiFi network is now easy and predictable. We've gotten quite used to having strong WiFi anywhere in our house, barn, or in our yard – so different than the “stand in exactly this spot and turn your iPad 45 degrees” sort of mess we used to have...
Stairway to ... something or other... The stairs project for Michelle H. is coming along nicely. At this point I have just one glue-up left to go (to attach the shortest stair to the other three). As you can see from the photos below, having a nice clamp collection is really important for projects like this. After that last glue-up it's just a bit of sanding, making a couple mounting braces, and we're done!
Paradise ponders: stairs and sunken gardens edition... Our friend Michelle H. has recently refinished a garage into a usable family room. There was a challenge in that job: the floor of the new family room is 31" lower than the floor of the main house. To handle that, her son-in-law built a set of stairs for her – but those stairs were somewhat less than perfect. They're way too tall (each stair is 10 1/2" high), and the top and bottom stairs are at different heights. A few days ago her son tripped and fell down them (he's shaken, but fine), so she finally decided to take me up on an offer I made her long ago: to build her a new set of stairs.
So yesterday I ran up to Home Depot and picked up the materials. They still carry the oak stairs I mentioned yesterday, so with those, a couple of 2x12s, a 2x10, and a few hardware bits, I went to work. The first photos below shows the pieces I sawed up (2x12s sawed on all four sides) for the risers that hold the steps up. After that I did lots of routing to make sturdy glue joints, giving my router table a real workout. This project would have been a lot harder without that table! The second photo shows the first glue-up, for the tallest step. The last photo shows the second glue-up, for the next lower step. Once that dries, I'll be gluing those two steps together, and then gluing up the next lower step. It's fun to be doing some woodworking again!
Our sprinkler project ran into a problem yesterday. Mark, our contractor, discovered that we have wooden joists holding up the sun room floor – and that the lovely grade he'd just finished putting in caused the soil level to rise unacceptably close to those joists. This puts us at risk for various kinds of deterioration issues, most especially with wetness (including from snow piled against the house). We need to lower the soil a foot or so in the area immediately surrounding the sun room (the main house's floor level is 18" higher, so it's not an issue). He came up with an idea for accomplishing that, and both Debbie and I really liked it. He's going to dig out the area between the sun room's foundation and about 4' out, down to a point about 12" deeper than the surrounding soil, making a sunken garden perfect for flowers. Then he's going to install a short retaining wall around that sunken garden, made with natural rock. That work will start today, but it will take several working days to complete (including the challenge of getting the roughly four tons of rock delivered here). It's always something, isn't it?
I have not fallen off the face of the earth... I missed two days of blogging somehow – didn't even realize I'd done so until I looked at my email this morning and discovered several messages wondering if everything is ok. All is fine! I've just been feeling a little poorly (from a bad cold) and been busy puttering about. My big accomplishment yesterday was cleaning up the cedar shed pump house, removing all the detritus of construction and collecting the tools that I've been using out there. The irrigation supervisor computer has now been up solidly for 3 days, and every test of the system has been successful. One test, late yesterday, was particularly noteworthy: the pressure at my system's inlet (from Paradise Irrigation) had dropped to just 12 psi. That's not enough to even make the sprinklers pop up. But ... when I ran a test on the system, the pump kicked on, boosted the pressure up to 50 psi (as designed). The inlet pressure dropped to about 10 psi, but obviously there was enough water flowing to let the booster pump work. This low-inlet-pressure situation happens quite often, and it is precisely why I put the booster pump in. And it works! Woo hoo!
Today I have a fun little project: building a set of stairs for our friend Michelle. Her son-in-law made a valiant attempt to build her a set, but the result was ... less than wonderful. She's had a couple of people fall while using the stairs, and this scares her. Hence my fun little project! I'm going to make use of a product that Home Depot sells: oak stair steps made by gluing up small pieces and veneering. I've used these for shelves on several occasions, and the result is quite nice!
Perceptions... A few months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro to replace my aging (2014) MacBook Pro. Aside from the gimmicky (and, to me at least, confusing) touch bar, I really like the new machine. I especially liked the added SSD disk space (I got the terabyte version) and RAM (I maxed it out). My old 2014 box has been sitting on a shelf (literally), unused since the day I got the new machine. I kept it nearby in case something screwed up on the transfer I did to move all my stuff to the new machine ... but nothing went wrong; it “just worked.”
So today I picked up the old machine, dusted it off (it was awful!), and brought it into the house to see if it might be convenient to have for use there. I've been “iPad-only” in the house these past few months, and that definitely puts some restrictions on what I can do. I plugged it in, let it charge for a bit, then booted it up. Everything still works fine, as expected. What I didn't expect, though, was that I'd perceive it as slow!
Now my 2017 MacBook Pro really is a faster machine by the specs, but not all that much. The speed improvement wasn't big enough to catch my attention as I started using the new machine. But ... in going back to the old machine, I'm noticing all sorts of places where there's just a tad more time being taken to do something. A couple operations are much slower – for instance, opening my morning reading list (with 46 tabs) takes roughly twice as long on the old box. Isn't it odd that I didn't particularly notice the speed-up, but did notice the (same) slowdown?
A new widget at right... You may have noticed the new “Irrigation System” widget at right. I put that up this morning after some experimentation with different ways I could accomplish this. The two basic approaches I considered were (a) setting up a cloud-based server, pushing the data from the irrigation supervisor up to that, and pulling it down to the blog, or (b) configuring my routers to allow external TCP connections (carefully controlled) and then pulling it straight onto the blog from there. The first approach is the safer (from hackers) approach, but requires quite a bit of setup and ongoing administration. The second approach is theoretically less safe, but much simpler to setup and has no ongoing administration. After some research I opted for (b), and once I decided on the approach I had it all working in just a couple hours.
For the geekier types, here's what I did:
I configured our Xfinity gigabit cable router to allow inbound connections to a specific port at our public IP address. These inbound connections are NATted (not PATted, as the cable router isn't capable of that) to an IP address (the target address) assigned to the Mikrotik router in my house.
I configured the Mikrotik router to PAT from the target address and port to the address and port of the web server on the Raspberry Pi that hosts my irrigation supervisor.
I set up an account on the free Dynamic DNS provider DuckDNS, and installed a simple script (provided by them) on my Mac Mini server. This script runs (via cron) every five minutes, and it updates the mapping between my domain name and my external IP address. Xfinity can change my public IP address anytime they feel like it, and it seems to actually change on the order of weekly (though I've never tried to actually track it).
I configured a new URL redirect record at my domain name provider (Namecheap), who also hosts my public DNS records. This allows me to refer to a subdomain of a primary domain that I own, instead of DuckDNS's primary domain. It's also convenient, as the redirect takes care of the funny port number, and I don't have to type it in. I'm lazy, what can I say?
This all would have been simple and fast had I not run into a stupid problem with cron on the Mac Mini. That held me up for an hour while I researched the problem – which, as usual, turned out to be entirely of my own making.
Sprinkler update... I haven't said much over the past few days, but our sprinkler contractor has been here working steadily away. It's clear at this point that the job was vastly larger than he had estimated (larger in the sense that more labor is required). Much of this has to do with his inexperience with big jobs – most of his jobs, he tells me, have under 30 sprinklers. His previous biggest job had 94. We have 211 sprinklers in our system, plus three drip irrigation lines. Added to that is the complexity of our yard's sectioning and shape: five distinct pieces, each of an irregular shape. Nothing easy about our yard! He's also never worked with anyone who was willing to “buy up” quality and maintainability (that is, I'm happy to spend a big more to get better parts, or to make the things likely to break easier to fix). Generally on the bigger systems, people are more interested in saving money. I'm more concerned about being able to keep all this running by myself, especially as I get older and less capable. On top of all that, while he's got a really good eye for level and grades, he grossly underestimated how much topsoil we'd need to bring in to fix the issues in our yard. We've had almost 500 cubic yards of topsoil delivered so far, and I'd guess we're going to need another 200 to 300 before we're done – so 700 to 800 cubic yards of topsoil in all. That's a lot of dirt!
As I write this, a skid-steer is hard at work in our front yard, finishing the tear-out of the old landscaping along the front of the house and fixing the (relatively minor) grade problems there. That will be finished today, and then the skid-steer will go to work moving some gravel and (lots of) dirt to the remaining low spots in the rest of the yard. We're expecting 10 loads of dirt today and tomorrow, and that's the next work to be done. I'm told that on Saturday the sod will start going in the front yard portions close to the house, and the entire back yard. If that really happens, there will be some serious celebrations in our household!
Paradise ponders: Trout & Berry Days edition... As planned, we attended the Trout & Berry Days dinner last night. We got there 15 minutes before they were scheduled to start serving, and two things became apparent very quickly: there were way more people here this year than there were a year ago, and the hard-working volunteer crew were behind schedule. We had to wait in line quite a while before we got to the smiling trout-fryers and servers. Ordinarily that's the sort of thing I would absolutely hate – but this was actually enjoyable. First, I was in a small group of relatives (Debbie and my brother Scott), friends, and new friends. Scott brought along a friend (Glen L.) from Newton who was lots of fun to talk with, and our friend Bruce N. brought one of his son's (Nate) whom we'd never met before. There was much interesting conversation and lots of laughs. The only downer was that Debbie ran out of “standing steam” and had to go sit by herself while the rest of us kept her place in the line. Even that wasn't so bad, though: very quickly she had local acquaintances all around her.
The photo above right shows about half the seating as we left – and there was still a long line to get served! Depending on who you talk with, last year they served between 900 and 1,100 meals. This year it looks to me like they easily doubled that, and maybe substantially more.
As in prior years, we each got a plate with a grilled trout, baked potato, fresh sweet corn, a salad, a bottle of water, and all the trimmings. We also got a ticket good for one berry dessert; mine was blackberries on custard, in a graham cracker shell, with whipped cream. Adding to the fun for me was the fact that about half the cooks and servers are people we know; we were often greeted by name and a big happy smile. All of the food – but most especially the trout – was delicious. We sat completely surrounded by our little circle of relatives and friends, with our conversations continuing as we stuffed all that culinary gloriosity into our faces. In addition, every few minutes someone who knew us would stop by to say hi, and sometimes to introduce us to a family member we didn't already know.
Usually large gatherings like this make me very uncomfortable, and would completely wear me out – that's my introversion showing. That didn't happen last night, which more than anything is evidence of much I feel myself as part of this community, and not an outsider (which is normally how I feel in any gathering).
Debbie and I love living near this small town full of people so compatible with us. We know (and like!) more people here than in the sum of all the places we've ever lived before. We know all of our neighbors, and are quite friendly we many of them. We all help each other on darned near a daily basis. If we ever needed some kind of substantial help (whether financial, skills, or labor) there's no doubt in our minds that we'd be swarmed with volunteers to provide it. We do our best to reciprocate, but if we were keeping a ledger we'd be deep in debt to the community at this point. In addition we know quite a few people from the town (a half mile or so south of us). I struggle to put it into words, but the bottom line is that our experience living here is profoundly different than our experiences living in California – and all of that difference is in favor of Paradise. We are daily thankful that we made the decision to leave California when we retired...
Mom would have been 82 today, were she still alive... I stopped outside my barn for a bit this morning, looking up at the U.S. flag she made from some old picket fencing – and at the sunflowers growing around my barn (at right), which she would have loved. She would also have loved the goldfinches (both Lesser's and American) that swarm all over these as soon as I'm more than 10 feet away.
Irrigation supervisor is installed ... and working! I got done with the installation late yesterday afternoon, and had time to do one quick test just before we took off to the Paradise Trout & Berry Days dinner. I had to fix a couple of trivial software issues first (such as waiting 20 seconds for the pump to spin up, instead of 10), but then it just came up and ran. I also noticed a couple of additional software issues, mainly involving startup and logging, and this morning I fixed those. It's now calibrated (the pressure sensors) and completely functional in all my tests so far. Hooray!
The photos below show the three parts I've been working on for the past couple of days. At left is the Raspberry Pi computer board. From left to right, the major parts are the temperature-humidity-barometer, the pump motor control relay, the pressure sensor interface, the Raspberry Pi computer itself, and a level converter I built to interface a 24 VAC output from the irrigation clock to the Raspberry Pi. That entire assembly will soon have a wooden dust cover. The middle photo shows the pressure gauge assembly, and immediately below it the newly installed electronic pressure sensors. Finally, at right is the pump speed controller (with its cover off) showing the newly installed wires (the grey ones coming in from the bottom) for the control relay.
Have I mentioned that it's all working? :) Below is a screenshot of the web site the Raspberry Pi puts up, accessible only from our LAN (not over the Internet).
Paradise ponders: friends, bugs, and a community get-together edition... Yesterday and part of today our friend Aleck L. dropped in for a short visit. We met him at Red Iguana, which he'd never been too before. He seemed to rather like his appetizer (the nachos in the foreground), the mole sampler (the smaller dish near him), and his entree (not shown). We did some wildlife spotting with him yesterday evening, and this morning had a fun conversation just sitting in our kitchen. Yesterday afternoon I got to show him my pump house project and then we walked over to visit for a bit with two of our neighbors (Tim D. and Heath C.). He also got to see and pet a mule (Heath's Gunner) for the first time.
When we went to the post office yesterday, Aleck with us, Debbie spotted the beautiful praying mantis at left. When I tried to get a slightly closer photo, it looked mad and scooted away :).
Before we met Aleck yesterday, and after he left today, I've been working on a really big milestone for me: installing the irrigation supervisory computer in the pump house. I've so far completed 4 of the 7 wiring steps required, along with 2 of the 4 plumbing steps. I'm so close! Unless something goes horribly wrong, I should have the installation completed later this afternoon. Then I have some calibration and checkout to do, and then – I can turn it on. Woo hoo!
This evening we're headed to the Paradise Trout & Berry Days dinner. We're meeting our friends Bruce and June N. there, along with my brother Scott and a friend of his from Newton. We expect to see lots of local folks we already know, and most likely even more we'd never met before. Of course we're starving ourselves in anticipation of a delicious meal!
Eclipse...APOD has a beautiful photo of Monday's eclipse at totality, at right (click to embiggen, or get the full resolution image). This shows quite nicely what we saw through our binoculars at totality. It doesn't show how (relatively) bright those orange prominences were – they stood out very clearly. I could make out the two you see on the right side here; Debbie was able to make out the one on the left as well.
Below are a couple of animations made from images taken by the GOES16 satellite during the eclipse (and more where these came from). In them you can very clearly see the moon's shadow as it scoots across the U.S. from west to east.
Watching these and pondering upon them leads to a couple obvious questions. Why is the moon's shadow so darned fuzzy? And why is the darkest part only (about) 80 miles wide, when the moon itself is over 2,100 miles wide? Some information that will help you understand: here, here, and here...
Victory! Yesterday afternoon I watched our sprinkler contractor load a giant steel culvert onto his trailer for transport to the metal recycling facility in town. This is the culvert I had photographed a few days ago, after Mark first extracted it from the ground where it was 3/4 buried. Yesterday his sidekick Dave (photo at right) took a battery-powered Sawzall and cut it into three sections (on a single charge, no less!). These were small enough for Mark to lift with his skid-steer, to get the dirt out. Then he could lift and transport them to his trailer. I'll find out tomorrow what price they fetched, but I'm guessing not much – steel prices are pretty low right now. Too bad they weren't copper! :)
Anyhow, it's just great to get that eyesore out of the ground. Even though it's a long way from our house, just knowing it was there was irritating. It was actually quite close (less than 50 ft) from one of our neighbors' homes, so hopefully they're happy to have it gone...
We've discovered a new bread... This one – tomato herb bread – is from Great Harvest, in downtown Logan, where we did some bread shopping yesterday (and practically filled our freezer with fresh loaves!). When we picked up our bread, these had just come out of the oven, and the aroma was irresistible. Debbie and I both had a slice as soon as we got home. Then we tried toasting it, and it's clear this will be one of our favorite toasting breads. Several of the breads from Great Harvest have turned out to be terrific as toast – Cache Crunch and their raisin bread are two of my other favorites for toasting (and Cache Crunch makes a great sandwich, too).
We frequently reflect on the generally higher quality of food here as compared with San Diego. Baked goods are one of the more extreme examples of this. In San Diego, we only knew a couple of places to get good bread (Dudley's Bakery in the mountains was the standout, even though it was 30 miles from San Diego). There were a few restaurants that had consistently good bread, too (such as the Fish Market with their sourdough). Here we have three outstanding dedicated bakeries in Logan – all three with excellent bread, one with sublime classic pastries, another with local pastry favorites, and all three with great cookies, cakes, and biscotti. On top of that bounty, we have two grocery stores with in-store bakeries that aren't bad at all – and with particular items (like the cheese-onion rolls from Macey's) that are high on our list of favorites. If we venture further afield, there are even more choices. At the time we chose Cache Valley as the place we'd spend our retirement, we had no idea at all that we'd find such great food here. In fact, we worried that the opposite would be true – that the great restaurants we loved in San Diego would be but memories. Oh, how wrong we were! And happily so!
The banana game... We have a ritual every morning in our house, and I've probably mentioned it before. We call it the “banana game”. A few years ago we discovered that our dogs (all four of them!) absolutely love bananas – and bananas are actually good for them. Sometime after that I started getting in the habit of feeding slices of a banana to them in the morning, right after I got up and went to the kitchen. I have a particular place in the kitchen where I stand to do this. It didn't take long for the dogs to associate me standing in that place with delicious banana treats descending from the sky. :)
But over time they've learned earlier and earlier indications that banana slices are imminent. First they learned that I would peel the banana in the kitchen sink, so they'd all sit next to me and watch, rapturously. Then they learned that I removed one banana from the bunch first, and they'd start getting excited if I just moved in the general direction of the banana bunch (and trust me, they know exactly where that is!). This morning I noticed a new observation on their part: they've learned that when I pull a steak knife out of its block in the morning, the next step is the banana separation. I think they may have reached the limit here, because so far as I know there's no earlier indicator in my banana slicing pattern. This morning I had four sets of doggie eyeballs watching my every move starting the moment I slid that steak knife out of the block and ending when I started tossing banana slices at them.
They have a similar sensitivity to my pattern of feeding them. It starts every morning when I pick up Mako and Cabo's food bowls – plain stainless steel bowls that we store on top of Mako's crate. The instant I pick those up, all four dogs know that there is kibble in their immediate future. Judging from their reaction, that's the highlight of their entire day! :)
And now for something completely different: socks. Yes, socks. Those things that you (probably) are wearing on your feet.
For about a bazillion years, I bought the de facto male standard: white cotton crew socks, generally some department store brand, or Hanes, or some such thing. Price was a big part of the buying decision, as these things wore out fast (I think I averaged about 3 or 4 months for a pair); most of the socks I purchased were a buck or two a pair. Then a few years ago I bought a package of Carhartt crew socks. At $5 a pair, these were considerably more expensive than what I had been buying. They were also more comfortable, and longer lasting. After a year of wearing them it was clear that the Carhartt socks were actually costing me less than the ones I had been buying, as they lasted about a year. So I switched my sock drawer to Carhartts.
Then a couple years ago I decided to try a pair of much more expensive socks. I'd spotted them on Amazon, noted the great reviews, and decided just to try them. At nearly $13 a pair, they were roughly the same price as a dozen of the socks I used to buy – they'd have to be practically magical to be worth it to me. But for $13 I thought I'd splurge and give them a spin.
Well, the short version of the result is that after a few months of occasionally wearing them, I bought 10 pairs. That was about a year ago. Why? First and foremost: they're extremely comfortable for me. They never bunch up inside my shoes like all my other socks did. They're warm in the winter, and not particularly hot in the summer. The elastic is powerful (which my dad would have hated!), and I like that because it keeps the upper part of the sock up on my leg, not rolling down into my ankle. Plus after a few months with that one pair I couldn't detect any wear at all!
Now it's been just a year since I bought the ten pairs. Some of those pairs have been worn much more often than others. My sock drawer is basically a last-in, first-out (LIFO) queue – so some of those pairs (at the front of the sock drawer) have been worn probably 50 times, while others (at the back) just a few. I cannot detect any wear on any of those socks. The elastic is as strong as the day I bought them. There are no tears, no holes, no visible wear of any kind. So far as I can tell, I've got another year of use from these socks ahead of me, and likely even more. I still find them as comfortable as I did before – and on the rare occasions when I run out of clean Wigwams and wear a pair of my Carhartt crew socks ... I'm aware of the relative discomfort all day.
I count these as a good investment, one that I certainly didn't expect!
A happy discovery upon awakening this morning ... my cold (or flu?) is nearly gone! In particular, the fever has completely subsided and I now have more than four or five neurons firing. What a great feeling! The only bad part is that my lovely bride – who caught this evil thing before I did – is still suffering from it...
Paradise ponders: total solar eclipse, a new dog, a new (to us) eatery, and feeling punky edition... Debbie and I drove up to a point just south of Rexburg, Idaho yesterday to view the total solar eclipse. We left at 5:30 am on Monday morning, allowing six hours for a drive that normally takes three hours – this, because of the news reports of apocalyptic traffic conditions. Well, there was basically no traffic at all, and we arrived in Idaho Falls by 8 am. Since we were so early, we decided to top off our battery at the supercharger there, and grab something to eat at the Kool Beanz shop nearby. We were in for a surprise, though – all the charging positions were occupied when we got there (see photo at right)! As we'd never seen more than one other Tesla at this supercharger before, we were more than a tad surprised. There was one other guy waiting when we drove up, and another drove in after us – so for a while there were 11 Teslas at this fairly obscure supercharger at once. It was kind of cool to see so many Teslas in one place. :) We ended up waiting for perhaps 10 minutes, and then we slid in and charged up.
While we were still waiting for our food at Kool Beanz, Clay M. (a friend and fellow engineer for over 25 years) texted me, wondering where we were. He and his daughters had left Ogden at 6 am, headed for a rendezvous with us near Rexburg. But he was in Idaho Falls, and decided to meet up with us in Kool Beanz. As Debbie would say, “Cool beans!” Within a few minutes he was there with us, and though we hadn't seen each other for about four years, our conversation picked right up as though it was just four minutes. His daughters were a bit for me to absorb, though, as I hadn't seen them for about 16 years. They were toddlers then, but most definitely not toddlers now. It's great that they wanted to take this trip with their dad. :)
After refueling us and our car, we headed out to our spot near Rexburg. I had picked a spot in the middle of some potato fields that was 20 miles or so off the freeway, hoping for less of a crowd. I was actually expecting to be basically alone; Debbie was expecting a huge crowd. We were both wrong. :) As we turned off the U.S. highway onto back roads, we noted people selling parking places for $20 a day, and plenty of people with cameras and viewing glasses ready to watch. The further we got away from the U.S. highway, the fewer people – but even when we reached our chosen spot, there were still 30 or 40 people nearby. We parked right where we'd picked, but before we could even get out of the car a sheriff told us we couldn't park there, and guided us to a spot a mile or so away. There, in the equipment yard of a local farmer, we parked for free with about 20 other cars. It was a happy, well-behaved group, complete with a friendly chocolate lab, probably the next best thing to being completely alone. The photo at right shows about half our “crowd”...
We had plenty of time to watch as the moon's disc started sliding over the sun. Before totality we were using the Celestron 10x25 Solar Binoculars we picked up a few weeks ago. These worked great, giving us a particularly clear view of the progressively larger “bite” the moon was taking from the sun. We could also see several sunspots. Though the sun's light was slowly being extinguished, it wasn't really noticeable until about 10 or 12 minutes prior to totality. At that point so much of the sun was blocked that it was obviously darker, and the temperature started to go down. The photo at left was taken during this period. The silvery horizontal lines you see are aluminum high tension wires. As you can see, there's really not much difference between that and full daylight – we only noticed it, I think, because it was so much less light than just a few minutes prior. As we got very close (within three minutes or so) to totality, the atmosphere got a bit eerie. Debbie and I were both reminded of the same thing: the lighting as a storm approaches, or as you emerge into the eye of a hurricane.
And then there was totality. The transition to totality was quite sudden, a switch flipping day into dark. In totality the only light in the sky is from the sun's corona and any visible solar prominences. I didn't even try to take photos of that, as I don't have the right equipment for it. I just enjoyed being able to see it. Debbie and I switched to conventional binoculars (stabilized, though) and had a couple minutes of just spectacularly good viewing of the event. Details – streamers, especially – were readily visible. The corona has an ethereal appearance, ghostly and insubstantial. I could also see two solar prominences, bright orange, and much, much smaller than the corona. Debbie was able to make out three of them – she has better eyeballs than I do. So beautiful, it was! I did take a moment to snap a photo of the scene to our west (at right, above). The orange band stretched 360° around us, so it didn't really look like a sunrise or sunset. And it really was quite dark! The temperature dropped perhaps 10 degrees.
It was fun to hear our little crowd reacting to the eclipse. As totality approached, the normal conversational ruckus died down. At that point we mostly heard exclamations of surprise and happiness. At the moment of totality there were quite a few of these, including some we hardly ever hear where we live (such as one very clear “Holy shit, dude!”) :) The video at left was taken during totality by one of Clay's daughters. At right is Clay with his daughters (Sydney and Shayla), and Debbie in the background watching the moon eat the sun.
Then it was over, and all too quickly. Personally, I'd have liked a few hours of totality – but there would have to be significant changes in the Earth-Moon-Sun relationship for that to happen, and the side effects would be bad. :) We took off to go back home, planning to stop by the Idaho Falls supercharger one last time to top off. We had only driven a couple of miles from our observation point before we noticed the first odd thing: Google Maps was routing us along back roads instead of the U.S. highway. A quick look at the traffic data showed a solid red on the U.S. highway – and on I-15, which we had to take to get home. Uh oh. It took almost an hour for us to get into Idaho Falls, instead of the 30 minutes we expected. We topped off our car and headed for the I-15 – but just getting onto I-15 took over an hour (instead of the usual 10 minutes). And things pretty much went downhill from there. Our speed on the freeway ranged from zero (for as much as 20 minutes) to about 60 mph (for short bursts only). We were well south of Pocatello before we finally were at a steady speed, and we only hit the speed limit for the last few miles before we turned off for Logan on U.S. 91. After that we were at full speed, and oh-so-happy to be out of the traffic that we're so unfamiliar with these day. I have to note that the Model X made the traffic much easier to deal with, though. I turned on the automatic speed control, and it handled all the accelerating and decelerating on its own. All I had to do was hold onto the steering wheel, which was easy as I was so tired I needed the support!
Debbie and I stopped to eat at a place that opened a couple years ago, but which we'd never stopped in at: Jim's Grill, in Smithfield. We were greeted in a very friendly way, seated immediately, and we ordered our drinks (beer for Debbie, strawberry lemonade for me). With our drinks, our waiter brought rolls. My lemonade wasn't great, an in particular was way too sweet for my tastes. The rolls were good, but not a standout by any means. Debbie reports that her beer was excellent. My initial experience with the drink and roll lowered my expectations considerably – so I got a very pleasant surprise indeed when the entrees showed up (photos below). At left is Debbie's order of three shrimp tacos. Darned near as big as she is, and they looked scrumptious. I got one small bite of her third one; all the rest she shoveled into her face at breakneck speed, all the while a huge smile on her face and yummy noises emanating from somewhere inside her. My fish and chips (at right) was hands-down the best I've had in Cache Valley. The nearest I've had that's better is at Sea Bear's in Ogden. They served it with malt vinegar, lemon, and tartar sauce, covering all known bases. The cole slaw was notable for me, as it's sauce was just the way I like it: very slightly sweet, and not overpowering the cabbage. Even the “chips” were great, and (this being northern Utah), of course they came with fry sauce!
We finally staggered in the door at about 8 pm, and by that point I was just barely able to move. It wasn't just the exciting day that had me tired: I have caught whatever evil virus got Debbie last week. I'm about 5 days behind her, symptom-wise, so last night was the worst I'm expecting. I feel a bit better today, and Debbie is most of the way up the recovery curve. What a day that virus picked to attack me!
This morning Debbie got a message from a field spaniel breeder in Michigan, someone she knows through her dog agility network. It seems this breeder had a year-old female field spaniel returned by the person who bought her – and the breeder is having trouble finding a good home for her. She reached out to Debbie to see if we'd be willing to take her, and long-story-short, in mid-September there will be yet another dog living in our household. This one is tentatively named Ipo (Hawai'ian for “sweetheart”), and she'll be arriving by air with the breeder's husband, checked on as a service dog (this avoids most of the risks of checking pets as cargo). That will give us a total of five dogs (four of them field spaniels), with three of them being roughly the same age...
