Paradise ponders, homemade egg noodles edition...

Paradise ponders, homemade egg noodles edition...  Debbie and I had a very pleasant day yesterday, except for being cold.  Our furnace is still acting up, though toward the end of the day it suddenly started working correctly.  We made up for the cold by keeping a roaring fire going in our living room, which ended up being downright toasty!

After gorging ourselves on panettone (which we polished off this morning), we set to work cooking (a collaborative effort) and wrapping presents (that was all Debbie, so they actually look nice).  First we made the carrot-ginger soup, all but the last step (adding cream and a final heating).  That will be our appetizer this evening.  Then we made tartar sauce, using a recipe we've made several times before, from Julia Child.  The recipe she gives is quite basic, but includes a clause where you just throw any old fresh herbs you feel like into it.  For this batch we used a base of Duke's mayonnaise, with minced sour dill pickle, capers (lots of them!), tarragon, sage, thyme, Thai basil, chives (lots!), parsley, and marjoram.  This year's batch has the highest herb-to-mayonnaise ratio of any we've made – and it's really, really good.  And that's even before we let it stand overnight!  Then we made bread crumbs (from a fresh loaf of country white bread from Great Harvest, a local bakery).  Finally, we made homemade egg noodles for our beef stroganoff tomorrow.  Here are some shots of the the work in progress:

If you've never made noodles before, it's really rather ridiculously easy – but quite a bit of physical work.  The dough is just flour, eggs, and milk; it comes out fairly stiff and tough.  Then you roll it into a big flat pancake, as seen in the first photo.  That's a lot of rolling to get it to that point!  The next step is to simply cut it into thin strips – easy, but very repetitious.  Finally you just peel up the strips and curl them up onto a pan for drying (or you can hang them on a drying rack, if you have one).  That's it!  They are delicious when homemade, and if you're a noodles fan it's well worth making them like this.  Also, you get to experiment with the different recipes, with different flours, herbs, egg content, etc.

Today we're making it an easy day.  I'll be bringing in some firewood, and this afternoon we'll be making (and eating!) crab cakes.  We might accidentally dispose of a bottle of champagne while we're at it, and I think there might be a Christmas movie somewhere along the line.  We watched the 1951 version of Scrooge last night, and It's a Wonderful Life the evening before.  Both are traditions with us, as is Miracle on 34th Street, which I suspect will be cued up tonight.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Paradise ponders, panettone and bananas edition...

Paradise ponders, panettone and bananas edition...  Well, yesterday we did make our trip down to Salt Lake City (SLC) on a quest for fresh crab meat (photo at right we took on the way there) – and we succeeded, sort of.  I managed to find 1.6 lbs (we were looking for 1.5 lbs) of snow crab leg meat.  That's good stuff, but not the kind of crab meat one would normally use for crab cakes.  They should be good anyway, though.  In the process, we found two very interesting stores in SLC; we'll definitely be back to visit both of them.  We also found one that we weren't impressed with, and likely will not return to – even though that's where we found the crab meat!

The first of these interesting stores was the Ocean City Seafood Market, which had very high Yelp reviews, but lots of comments that didn't sound so wonderful.  After spending some time walking through the store, we concluded that these negative reviewers were just ignorant.  This was a market!  Lots of fresh seafood, mainly fish, on ice and looking great.  They had a giant tank full of live (and happy looking) Maine lobsters, at a great price.  They didn't have fresh crab meat, dang it.  They did have frozen crab meat, but we were looking for fresh for our crab cakes.  But that seafood was just the beginning: this is an Asian grocery store, though you'd never guess that from their name.  They have lots of produce, fresh herbs, Asian spices, and things you never see in an ordinary grocery store, like mochi, frozen pre-made lumpia, a huge selection of won-ton wrappers, etc.  The people there were very friendly and helpful, too.  Definitely a place we'll be returning to, especially for that lobster!

The second interesting store was an accidental find, when we were looking for the Aquarius Fish Company.  We found Aquarius, but it was closed (we were too early).  Next door, though, was Caputo's Market and Deli, which I took a stroll through.  It's got the best selection of cheeses I've seen in many, many years – the equal of a cheese shop I once visited in London.  That's not all it has, though: it also stocks an amazing variety of sausages and preserved meats, especially Italian types – and shelf after shelf of all things Italian food related.  I'm pretty sure that anything you'd ever need to make an Italian dish is readily available there.  I spent a couple minutes just smiling at their selection of capers – there must have been two dozen types!  That's another place we'll be returning to, with an Italian menu in mind...

The last seafood market we visited was the Market Street Grill, a chain with a half-dozen or so locations scattered around the U.S.  In many ways it reminded us of the Fish Market, a similar chain with a location we used to visit in Del Mar.  Their was a nice little seafood market attached to a large restaurant.  The selection wasn't very good, and the prices were high – and the lady who served us was distinctly grumpy.  However, they did have fresh crab meat, which I bought them out of.  I doubt we'll be returning; they're about 15 miles further from us than the other seafood markets, with a much smaller and pricier selection.  They're located in a tech district, and I suspect they're mostly catering to the lunch crowd from those places.

After scoring our crab meat, we stopped (of course!) at the Red Iguana to have some lunch.  It was quite crowded, even though we got there at 11:30 am.  We had to wait about 20 minutes to get in, not too bad.  For once their specials were unappealing to either of us, so we both ordered off the menu.  I had “mango enchiladas”, which were actually carnitas enchiladas with mango mole sauce.  They were heavenly; I savored every mouthful and scraped up every drop of that mole sauce.  Debbie had steak ranchero tacos, and they came as though someone had designed them for her: chunks of beef on corn tortillas, chopped onions and cilantro, salsa fresca, and rice and refries.  She ate it all except for a few refries, a big smile on her face the whole time.  Then we had flan (me) and arroz con leche (Debbie) for dessert.  A wonderful meal, as always.

Our house was cold when we got home: the thermostat was calling for heat, but none was forthcoming.  I did a bit of troubleshooting, but couldn't find any problem.  The furnace normally shows an error code (via flashing light) when it thinks there's something wrong, and there were no error codes.  So I called our heating and air conditioning guy – and he sent someone over within a couple of hours.  The repairman, Joe, spent a couple hours carefully going over everything we could think of, until he figured out that the plenum was getting too hot and a thermal switch was cutting out.  Once he'd twigged to that, he started eliminating all the things that could cause such overheating – and finally figured out that we only had two return grilles on the entire first floor.  With a 100,000 BTU furnace, we should have four or five, or even more.  Then with some detective work, we figured out that someone (probably the previous owner) had eliminated two of these return grilles – apparently just boarded them up.  Why, we haven't the foggiest!  So sometime next week we'll have to go to work on that problem.  In the meantime, we whooped up the fan speed in the hopes that that will get us by for a few days.

This morning I had a ball with the dogs.  They got a special treat: two bananas instead of their morning one banana, shared amongst the four of them.  All four of our dogs go bananas for bananas.  The puppies are especially cute with the bananas, as they completely lose their marbles while scrambling for them.  I slice them up and drop them into their gaping maws, but only after they've settled down and are sitting nicely.  Cabo is focused like a laser on the banana slice in my fingers.  Mako will alternately watch me and the banana.  The two adults know the drill: they wait for me to call their name and then go into action.  Lots of fun!

We had a treat this morning, too.  It's become a Christmas tradition for us to get a panettone, an Italian sweet bread loaded with fruit.  I especially like them when they're not too sweet, and have lots of tart, juicy fruit in them – and the one we got this year (below) fits that description perfectly.  It's hard to think of anything that goes more perfectly with a nice cup of tea in the morning!

Later today we'll be starting our Christmas cooking.  Homemade egg noodles, tartar sauce, carrot-ginger soup, and bread crumbs are on the agenda.  We also have a few gifts left to wrap.  Should be a fun day!

Paradise ponders, caramel popcorn edition...

Paradise ponders, caramel popcorn edition...  I finished up all my bookkeeping work yesterday morning, and then Debbie and I finalized our Christmas menu.  After that, we were off to the store to buy the groceries needed.  Along the way, we stopped at three places to drop off Christmas treats that Debbie had baked.  Lots of smiles from that! :)  After we got home, our friend and neighbor Tim D. called to wish us Merry Christmas, and to ask if he could come over to deliver a treat he'd made for us: caramel popcorn.  He made it without much salt, so that Debbie could safely eat it.  We sat and talked with him for an hour or so, while Debbie and I “sampled” about half the popcorn. :)  I'm pretty sure the rest of it will disappear by this evening!

While I was in the grocery store shoveling supplies into my cart, I noticed that they had some sea scallops left – the same big ones that we'd so enjoyed last Friday.  I grabbed a pound and a half of them, hoping that Debbie wouldn't mind making them for dinner.  She didn't. :)  They were just as delicious as they were last Friday!

UPS brought us a bunch of boxes, one of which was a gift from one of Debbie's friends down in San Diego: a dozen gigantic chocolate-covered strawberries.  I ate one mid-day, and it was about as scrumptious as a confection can get.  I had bits of chocolate and strawberry juice running through my beard, and I didn't care.  Ate it in front of a roaring fire, kicked back on a comfortable couch – decadent, it was...

Our tree was completely decorated a few days ago, but this morning is the first time I thought to take a photo of it without the sun behind it.

We're off this morning to Salt Lake City, to visit a seafood market and nab ourselves some crab meat for our crab cakes on Saturday evening.  While we're there, we're also going to see what's on offer at the Red Iguana.  It's at the point of an addiction, I'm afraid – we have trouble even imagining a visit to Salt Lake City without stopping there!

Paradise ponders, long-distance crab edition...

Paradise ponders, long-distance crab edition...  Except for the fact that I spent most of the day holed up in my office doing paperwork, it was a very pleasant day yesterday. :)  It was clear and sunny in the morning, and the temperature actually made it above freezing – so most of the ice on our driveway melted off.  Last night we got about an inch of snow, but at 5 am it was 31°F, just barely freezing.  Today will almost certainly be well above freezing, and that little bit of snow will melt off quickly (I hope!).

We've finally settled on our menu for Christmas and Christmas Eve.  We're spending Christmas Eve by ourselves, and for that evening meal we decided to make carrot-ginger soup (like we had at Jack's this week) and southwestern crab cakes (a favorite dish from meals in the past).  The challenge is the crab meat – there's no place in Cache Valley that we know of where one can purchase fresh crab.  So tomorrow we're going to make the drive down to Salt Lake City to visit the seafood markets there.  We've been wanting to do this anyway, just to see what they're like; this gives us a great excuse.  For our meal on Christmas Day, when my brother Scott will be joining us, we're going to make a hearty repast of beef stroganoff, with thick homemade egg noodles.  There will be a vegetable of some kind, some chicken noodle soup, and possibly a dessert of some kind, too. :)

I heard yesterday from my contact at Tesla – there will be no Model X for me before Christmas.  The promised date keeps slipping back, over and over – frustrating, that is.  The latest word is that it's “almost done” production, and will be ready for me to pick up “probably next week”.  That's nearly word-for-word what I was told in early November, and every week after that...

Paradise ponders, carrot ginger soup edition...

Paradise ponders, carrot ginger soup edition...  I spent a lot of my day catching up with paperwork, and that's on the agenda again for today.  Not exactly my favorite way to spend the day. :)

We had a few errands to run yesterday, including me getting a haircut and picking up some Christmas things.  Along the way we stopped in at Jack's, a favorite haunt of ours that we haven't been to in a long time.  The reason we haven't been there is that the two main items on the menu there (soup and pizza) are chock full of salt, which Debbie is minimizing.  These days she's got a lot more experience in salt avoidance, and we've learned that with careful selections on the menu she can minimize it.  She can have some salt, just not the dump-truck loads that she used to consume. So we wandered in, absorbing the wonderful smells coming from their wood-fired ovens, and looked over the specials board.  First thing we spotted: the soup of the day was carrot-ginger, and it seemed likely that would be sweet rather than salty (left photo, and it was not salty at all).  That's one she could try.  Then we found a pizza for her (their Cozumel, right photo) that would be relatively easy on the salt, and I got the special (a meat tower extravaganza, center).  Oh, yum!  That was so, so good!

Later in the afternoon we were visited by Lee Atwood, a local cabinet maker who just happens to live in Paradise.  We asked him to make the cabinets for our new mud room, and he stopped by with a proposal and a price.  The price was fine, and we've asked him to take on the job.  He tells us that it should be installed sometime in January.  Woo hoo!  One of our rooms might actually get done sometime soon!

Actually, that might be two rooms.  The only thing remaining on the sun room now is the covers for the two basement window wells.  I fired off the measurements and some practical details to Lazy K Wrought Iron up in Kalispell, Montana, and now I'm waiting for a response from them.  If past experience is any guide, they'll have the covers finished within a month.  My plan is to drive up there to pick the up, making at two-day mini-vacation out of it.  Hopefully we can do that in the Model X.  If it gets here by then.  The last word I have from them is "around Christmas"...

Paradise ponders, old friends edition...

Paradise ponders, old friends edition...  Well, my wish came true!  Sylvia E. wrote back last night, and now we've started an email conversation.  She's well, about to retire, and full of news.  What fun to reconnect with her!

It's 14°F here today, and my neighbor's horses don't seem even slightly fazed by that, as you can see in the photo at right that I took just a few minutes ago.  They're in the little field just north of our house, pawing through the snow and ice to get at the alfalfa below (there was about 6" of alfalfa when the first hard frost hit).

Yesterday afternoon I helped Debbie make a batch of cookies.  These were a favorite recipe, Amish cookies heavy on the butter, molasses, and cinnamon.  The main challenge was the sheer quantity of cookie dough needed, because she was making a batch of about 100 cookies.  The dough, when all was added, completely filled a six quart mixing bowl.  It was stiff, too, once the flour was added, so even our KitchenAid bulldozer of a mixer showed some signs of the strain.  The biggest challenge, though, was simply keeping the bowl and mixer from spinning on the counter-top.  Toward the end it was a two-person operation: Debbie stabilized the mixer, while I tried to keep the bowl from spinning.  We finally got it all ready, but by then it was dark...

...so we hid the cookie dough, jumped in our truck with Miki and Race (our two adult dogs) and took off to see Christmas lights.  We cruised all over Hyrum, Wellsville, Mendon, College Corners, and Nibley.  There were lots of beautiful displays to see, too.  There was also a new phenomenon that we didn't much like – quite a number of houses had some sort of projector set up that shined what looked like lasers (points) all over the front of their house, in many colors, and moving in disconcerting ways.

It was after 8pm by the time we got home, and I was ready to retire for the evening.  Debbie, though, stayed up until after midnight – baking all that cookie dough.  Now our microwave and one of our ovens are stacked high with delicious cookies under plastic wrap.  Some of them are for us, she tells me – but I'll wager not very many! :)

Paradise ponders, thirteen bags of chili edition...

Paradise ponders, thirteen bags of chili edition...  Yesterday afternoon Debbie made a gigantic cauldron of chili.  We gorged ourselves on it, and then set it on the counter to cool down.  That took until late this morning, at which point we started bagging it.  We used our vacuum sealer, with 10 x 13 inch bags, to do this – and it took 13 generously-filled bags to take care of it all.  We're still getting used to the idea of having this vacuum sealer around, but this chili experience is really driving that home.  Formerly we'd have poured the chili into plastic containers that were really too big for a single serving, and stacked them in the freezer.  Now we've got thirteen future meals, packaged with just the right size, all ready to go.  It took amazingly little effort to do this, too – just a teensy bit more than simply pouring it into containers.

One thing that was very interesting to us: we bagged the chili while it was still a bit above room temperature.  It felt just barely warm to the touch, but that was enough that it came to a vigorous boil as the vacuum sealer sucked the air out of the sealing chamber.  It has a clear lid, so we were able to watch this.  It's very weird to watch chili that you know is about 100°F coming to a violent boil!  We overfilled one bag, and that one spewed a small amount of chili past the sealing line – but it didn't seem to affect the result at all.

This morning we (finally) decorated our Christmas tree (front and back view below).  There sure are a lot of memories in those ornaments – many of them were gifts from my parents, Debbie's mom, or friends.  Others made us think of friends, some no longer with us.  Some of them brought smiles as we remembered where and when we'd gotten them.  Especially moving, for me, were the ornaments that made me think of friends or relatives I haven't seen in a long time.  For instance, the little hand-made angel on the top of the tree was made by Sylvia E., a colleague for eleven years when I worked at Stac (which became Previo), starting in 1990.  She was an executive secretary that entire time, a friend for much of the time, and eventually my executive secretary (really, much more of an assistant than secretary) when I became CEO.  It's been three or four years since I last talked with her, but this morning I fired off an email to her old address, and hope to hear from her...

Over the past couple of days I did a little electronic design work – that's ridiculously satisfying for me, for reasons I can't entirely explain.  In this case, I'm going to solve a silly little problem in, I hope, an elegant and highly usable way.  The problem is that the cabinetry we're going to install in our mud room will cover the light switch near the front (exterior) door.  This is the switch we'd use upon entering the house through the front door, to turn on the lights so we can actually see in the mud room.  A useful thing, that is! :)  On the other hand, the cabinet is also highly useful – the particular cabinet right by the present light switch will be holding a snow shovel and salt bin.  How can we have both a light switch and a cabinet?

I came up with the idea of letting the cabinet pull (which will be metal) closest to the open door be the light switch, too.  It's an easy bit of electronics these days to make the cabinet pull touch-sensitive (by sensing the body's capacitance).  We don't want to turn the lights on and off every time the cabinet is opened, though.  So I came up with the idea that the switch should toggle only if (a) it is touched for less than a second, and (b) the door is closed the entire time it is touched.  That way, if you're opening or closing the cabinet door, the lights won't toggle – but if you just tap the cabinet pull, they will.  This little circuit could be built with a PIC or similar microcomputer (and probably would be, if it were to be mass-produced).  But that would require programming, and that would be more work than simply building it in hardware.  The design I came up with requires six integrated circuits, three of which (touch sensor, Hall effect sensor, and relay driver) would be needed even with a microcomputer).  The other three: a 555 timer (I'm amazed they're still being made!), a collection of six gates on a single chip, and a dual D flip-flop.  These parts, plus a power supply and a SPDT relay (to emulate a three-way light switch) are all that it requires.  I ordered the parts today; it will make a fun little project to put that together and troubleshoot it (because you know it ain't all gonna work on the first try!).  Once I get it all working I'll publish the schematic just in case some other lunatic wants a crack at it.

Paradise ponders, deep freeze edition...

Paradise ponders, deep freeze edition...  Baby, it's cold outside!  It was 12°F when I walked out to my office in the barn, and it's supposed to get down to 0°F tonight (and a high of 15°F!).  Our driveway is basically a solid sheet of ice...

Yesterday I was feeling yukky enough that just doing some running around town was taxing.  I did very little the rest of the day.  The main excitement for the day was dinner: Debbie made her signature broiled scallops – dang, those things are good!  Really the only other occurrence of note was the arrival of Kelly R. with most of the missing parts for our doors.  He and I spent a half hour removing and reinstalling the glass on the door and sidelight between our bedroom and the sun room – so now they both have built-in Venetian blinds, and the control for the blinds is on the bedroom side.  Yay!

I'm feeling a bit better this morning, but I'm going to take it easy today to help my recovery along (I hope!).  Debbie's going to make a huge batch of chili today.  We'll eat maybe 1/12th of it for dinner tonight, and the rest will go into some vacuum pouches for future meals.  I love having a freezer full of this sort of treat, ready for use anytime...

Paradise ponders, vacuum soup edition...

Paradise ponders, vacuum soup edition...  Debbie and I are both feeling a bit under the weather.  Debbie seems to be on the improving side of the thing, I'm still going downhill, dang it.  Chicken noodle soup sounded good to both of us, so I ran to the store for the ingredients and then we both got to work.  I made the noodles from scratch, and once again we were both wondering why we ever did anything else.  Homemade noodles are so good, and they're easy as can be.  Debbie made the rest of it, roasting chicken thighs for the meat (which we never cook in the soup; it tastes so much better to use roast meat), and chopping lots of veggies.  We ended up with about six quarts of soup, and of course we only ate a small fraction of it yesterday.

I've mentioned our vacuum sealer in an earlier post.  Here's an example of it in action, making freezer bags for the leftover chicken noodle soup. Taking the photos left-to-right and top-to-bottom:

1. Filling a bag, using a bag stand designed for the three common sizes of sealable bags.  Not shown: a canning funnel, which sits on top of the bag's opening and lets us easily fill the bag without slopping soup all over the place.
2. A filled bag laying in the vacuum sealer, prior to sealing it.  The chamber slopes down toward the back, so the liquid all flows down there.  The heating bar is on the near side of the photo, and the bag's opening is flat against it.
3. The vacuum sealer's control panel while it's working.  I snapped this partway through the vacuum process, which had 16 seconds to go.  The vacuum gauge on the left is already in the green area, meaning the vacuum is good enough for sealing.  At this point the soup was gently boiling, even though it was at room temperature.  The boiling point of water is proportional to the atmospheric pressure, so as the chamber's pressure declines the boiling point may be passed.  If you want to bag something where the turbulence of boiling is undesirable, best to chill it or even freeze it before bagging.
4. The sealed bag when the vacuum sealer has finished it's work and the lid popped open.  If you look closely you can see the melted seal on the heating bar, on the near side of the photo.
5. A sealed bag, labeled with contents and the date of sealing.
6. Some yummy future meals!

Walnut microwave...

Walnut microwave...  A project completed!  Our new microwave is in, and works.  I finished all the related carpentry, including a couple of walnut trim strips that look better than I expected them to.  The photos below show the work as I went along, with the last one showing the finished project:

For the moment, the two walnut strips are being held in place by mounting tape.  That may not prove to be a good long term solution, and in that case I'll be replacing them with magnets.  I want to be able to easily get back into the cabinet should I need to repair anything!

The new microwave has a much more modern user interface than our old one, but it's new to us – so we'll be learning its ins and outs for a while.  Nevertheless we can already appreciate some of the features.  For instance, to reheat anything with the automatic sensor takes just three clicks, all obvious.  Much easier than the old microwave!

Solar eclipse...

Solar eclipse...  On August 21, 2017, there will be a full eclipse of the sun – and the path of totality will pass near us!  We're just a couple hour road trip away from a good place to watch it.  Hopefully we'll be able to get up there...

Paradise ponders, twinkling bulb edition...

Paradise ponders, twinkling bulb edition...  A few days ago I wrote about the “twinkling” LED Christmas tree lights that I'd ordered, and I promised to report back on how they actually worked out.  Well, here's the report: they're great!  The video at right is of our tree, after we put up the lights but before we added the ornaments (we'll be doing that today).  As you can see, the LEDs do, in fact, blink separately, and with quite a bit of variation in their rate.  Even when you first power up the string they're nicely out of sync; within just a few seconds they appear to be random.  The video shows the blue lamps (and to a lesser extent, the green lamps) greatly outshining the yellow, orange, and red lamps.  This is an artifact of the camera or post-processing; to the human eye the brightness of all the colors are well-matched.  At the end of the video I tilted up to the ceiling, hoping to show you the colored shadows.  Once again, there the blue and green lights totally swamp the other colors.  The bottom line, for me, is that these lamps are very similar to the blinking Christmas tree lights of my youth.  I love having them!  If you're interested, these are the lamps we got (from a source other than Amazon, at a much better price), and we mounted them in this stringer.  We're very happy with both.  Out of 100 lamps and sockets, I had just one bad lamp and zero bad sockets.

Yesterday I started a new project, putting off progress on our deck for a day or so.  This project is to replace the GE Advantium microwave/infrared oven that came with our house.  More modern microwaves are far more capable, and the infrared part we've never used.  There's a challenge or two in this replacement though.  The biggest challenge: the hole in the cabinetry for the Advantium is 28.5" wide (standard) and 21" high (way taller than a typical microwave).  A smaller challenge: when I removed the Advantium, I discovered that the previous owner had done a (typically) terrible job on the wiring, just wire-nutting the wires and letting them dangle behind the unit.  I installed an outlet in a proper metal box, visible in the back of the photo at right.  The size of the hole means I have some carpentry to do in order to mount the new microwave, and you can see the beginning of that at right.  We're going to vertically center the new microwave in that hole, which means I have to build a false bottom and top that are (each) 1 13/16" inset.  The false bottom is visible in the photo, and I'm about to go build the false top.  The microwave has a trim kit that will cover some of the gap above and below; the rest we're going to cover with a walnut plate.  That will contrast with our existing cabinetry, which we're hoping is more attractive than a poor attempt at matching.  The 15 year old wood of our kitchen cabinets has a color we'd never be able to exactly match with new wood.

We're having some interesting weather.  Yesterday morning we got about 3" of snow, but then the temperature climbed above freezing and we got rain.  Last night the temperature never went below 30°F, and for today the forecast is calling for over an inch of rain.  It's supposed to start this afternoon and continue all night and into tomorrow morning.  Then tomorrow the temperature should drop precipitously and the rain will turn to snow (and likely all the wet surfaces will be coated with ice).  I didn't bother plowing yesterday, as it never really stopped snowing.  It's a wet mess outside right now, but if it really does rain then there's not much point in plowing that, either, as the rain will get rid of it all...

Paradise ponders, holy crap the tile is finished edition...

Paradise ponders, holy crap the tile is finished edition...  I wasn't really sure I was going to live long enough to see this day, but – all the new tile in the house is now finished.  Yesterday the tile crew showed up as promised, finished the tile cutting they needed to do on the sun room, and grouted it when they were finished (at right).  Our three big home improvement projects are starting to get down to the little details, now.  The biggest remaining item is to finish wiring the deck, then installing the tongue-and-groove ceiling on it...

This morning I drove up to my brother Scott's log cabin, about a half hour north of our house.  He got some new LED work lights that I helped him install.  First we scoped out the job, then headed to town to get the parts we needed (and of course we had to stop at Angie's first and stuff our faces).  It took a few hours to put all four of his new lights up, and one of the was broken so the job won't really be complete until the replacement arrives later this week.  But now his garage is bright, making a good place for him to work indoors in the winter.

I'm feeling a little under the weather this afternoon.  Think I'll take it easy the rest of the day...

Paradise ponders, frozen elk edition...

Paradise ponders, frozen elk edition...  Yesterday morning Debbie and I took a ride up Blacksmith Fork Canyon to Hardware Ranch.  It had snowed the evening before, and had been below freezing since, so we were hoping for some beautiful winter scenery.  And we got it!  Here are some photos from the outing:

The wind was blowing while it was snowing last night, so the snow is all plastered to one side (the northwest side) of everything.  It stuck particularly well to the teasels in the first three photos.  The last photo shows a phenomenon that we haven't figured out yet.  When we look up at the mountain sides, as in the last photo above, we see swathes of trees flocked with snow – and other swathes that are still green.  Why are some trees clear of snow?

When we got up to Hardware Ranch itself, we could see that the elk were in their winter paddock, and the ranch crew were giving rides to kids (see photos below).  These rides are very popular with the local kids, and earn a good portion of the Hardware Ranch's expenses.

At home I took a couple hours to staple up lightweight canvas all around the periphery of our new deck, to hopefully trap warmed air.  Then I fired up a 20,000 BTU “construction heater” that's powered by propane.  Within 15 minutes, the deck had warmed up by 15°F – most excellent!  I'm going to use this to let me finish the deck wiring and tongue-and-groove ceiling despite the cold weather...

Music-synchronized Christmas lights...

Music-synchronized Christmas lights...  A few days ago, a friend (Michelle H.) told us about a home in Nibley that had a fantastic Christmas light display whose lights flashed to the music playing on a radio station.  Nibley is a town about 10 miles north of us, just south of Logan.  Michelle gave us rough directions, and last night Debbie and I set out on a quest to find it.  It wasn't hard at all to spot: the flashing lights were visible from one of the main roads in Nibley, and we homed in on it in just a few minutes.

This home does indeed have a fantastic Christmas light display!  The video at right is one I took last night.  It's only a couple of minutes long, just enough to give you an idea what the display looks like. The music that the lights are synchronized to can be heard on FM 100.9, which is a local transmitter for KVFX.  The selection of music wasn't exactly to our tastes, but no matter: the synchronized lights were gorgeous!

After we sat and listened for a while, we realized the music selections were on a loop that lasts about fifteen minutes or so.  This implies that the synchronized lights were hand-composed, rather than being electronically derived.  It's still quite impressive though.

If you'd like to see these for yourself, follow the map at left.  When we went (around 7 pm) there were about ten cars parked nearby to enjoy the show.  I can imagine that it gets much worse sometimes...

A Paradise resident I wish I'd been able to meet...

A Paradise resident I wish I'd been able to meet...  Richard Rallison lived less than a mile from our house up until 2010, when he died near here in a paraglider accident.  He was an electrical engineer who ended up working mainly in holographic optics, playing a big part in the invention of holographic bar code scanners, heads-up displays for high-performance aircraft, and much more.  He had a very well-equipped optics lab in an 8,000 sq. ft. structure right next to his house – that would have been fun to explore!  I've heard about him from several people here in Paradise; he was a out-sized character in a community that's got more than its share of characters.  I'm sure I'd have enjoyed getting to know him.

If you're curious, there's much more on him here, here, and here...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders ... Christmas decorations edition...  Our house is starting to look downright Christmasy.  A little elf named Debbie has been hard at work, with a little help carrying boxes up from the basement.  At this point I think she's just about finished except for decorating our Christmas tree (more on that in a moment).  Here are some photos from around our house:

Those candles are not real – all of them are actually battery-powered LED lights.  Some that she bought this year have remote controls, which kind of boggles my mind – they're quite inexpensive, and yet they come with such a thing.  Electronics have gotten rather crazy cheap!  One particular type of candle (the red ones on the mantle) are much more realistic than the others – not only does the light's intensity vary on them, but there is actual motion that closely resembles the wavering flame of a candle.  There's a clever little mechanism powered magnetically that creates that effect.  My hat's off to whatever engineer dreamed up that solution – it's clever and very good.

The tree isn't decorated yet only because I made a discovery yesterday: randomly “twinkling” LED bulbs are now apparently available.  I've been looking for these for years now, hoping that eventually some manufacturer would step up to do it.  I found these online, and I don't know yet how well done they are.  I'll post about them when I do (allegedly we'll have them in hand by Wednesday).

My love of the twinkling bulbs stems from the incandescent twinkling bulbs we had on our Christmas tree when I was growing up.  I remember the year we got the two sets of these lights – my dad loved them when he saw them at Sears, and splurged on the two sets.  They were low-voltage lights, operated through a massive transformer, and for the day they were quite expensive.  Each bulb was roughly the size and shape of a birthday cake candle, and contained a thermal blinking mechanism based on a bi-metal strip.  The bulbs had coatings of various colors, four or five different colors in all.  When strung on the tree, the bulbs cast a shadow on the ceiling of the branches above it.  At any given moment, a random collection of bulbs was lit up, and it would change several times per second as bulbs lit and turned off.  It was like a movie, with colored lights and sharp shadows.  My dad loved to lie on the floor and look up at that show on the ceiling, and I'd lay there with him for long stretches, just staring up at the Christmas tree show.  I've longed to have that again.  Those blinking lights became hard to obtain right about the time I could afford to buy them (in the late '80s, a set like my dad bought cost over $100).  The few incandescent light sets that are still available have all the lights in series (electrically), so the blinking light bulbs won't work.  The “twinkling” LED sets have all been ones where the entire string of lights blinks on and off simultaneously – not the same thing at all!  I'm excited about these twinkling LED lights I've just ordered – they might, at last, give me something like what we had in my childhood.

A couple of days ago, our friend and neighbor Tim D. called and asked if I could help him with a couple of computer issues.  The first one was that his Internet access had gone down, and after six or seven hours on the phone with Comcast he still didn't have it working.  I went over and started checking things out, and it quickly became obvious the problem was somewhere between his computer's Ethernet port and the WiFi modem's Ethernet port that it was plugged into.  The first thing I tried was wiggling the cables – and that did the trick.  One of his connectors had some dirt or corrosion on a pin, probably, and just a little wiggle was all it took to clear it up.  That took six minutes, including the travel time to his house. :)

The second problem was a big more challenging: he was trying to make his brother's laptop usable.  The fundamental problem was that it had Windows 8 on it, and neither he nor his brother had any idea how to use it.  Nor did I!  But I have, perhaps, and advantage over him with my computer experience, and I was able to figure out enough to get some basic things running.  When I went to update his apps, I discovered that Windows 8 was no longer supported by Microsoft, but Windows 8.1 was – time to upgrade Windows!  That took us about an hour of fiddling around before I discovered that Microsoft's antivirus program (Windows Defender) was preventing the upgrade from working.  I'm so used to the Mac now that my default was to expect the upgrade installer to handle that intrinsically.  Not only did it not handle it, it didn't even notify us about the problem – it just kept reporting that it couldn't install with no explanation of why.  Sheesh, Microsoft – get with the program, will ya?  When we finally did get Windows 8.1 installed, we found, to our delight, that it now looked much more like versions of Windows we both knew and hated.  But at least we now knew how to find things.  That made life ever so much easier – we then were able to easily configure his brother's computer in a way that gives him at least a fighting chance at being able to use it.

It was very satisfying to be able to help on that.  It goes part way toward repaying Tim for all the help he gave me a couple of years ago...

More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...  Today's photos are all taken from a small photo album I discovered amongst her things.  None of these photos are dated.  They appear to be photos of her older sister (my aunt) Betty Over (nee MacLaughlin) and her family.  I don't know where they were taken, or when – or why my mom even had the album!  All of them are 2" x 2" snapshots, of the kind that the classic Brownie cameras made.  On each photo, left-to-right, top-to-bottom:

1. This photo was unlabeled.  The subject looks a lot like my youngest brother Mark, but I'm guessing it's actually one of Aunt Betty's (many) children.
2. My aunt Betty, my mom's older sister.  Her appearance here matches most of my memories of her, so I'll guess it was late '50s or early '60s.
3. Labeled “Mike”, so I'm guessing that this is Aunt Betty's son (my cousin) Michael Over.
4. Labeled “David and Gregory”, and I recognize the younger one as my cousin (Aunt Betty's son) Gregory.  I remember him as quite a bit younger than I was.  I don't remember David or his relative age.
5. This one is labeled “crashup” and it intrigues me because I don't actually recognize any of these kids!  The second one from the left looks like it might be my brother Scott.
6. Labeled “Gary” and I have no memories of him.

Conspicuously missing from these photos are Aunt Betty's daughters. 

A Dyson shout-out...

A Dyson shout-out...  Debbie reported a problem with our Dyson Animal vacuum cleaner this morning.  Problems are my job. :)  I've written about this vacuum before; we've owned them for about five years now, and we're still amazed at what a great job they do.  We're a bit of a conspicuous consumer of these: we have four at the moment, an older Animal we brought with us from Jamul, two modern Animals like the one at right, and a portable. 

Today I just want to talk about the engineering that went into these.  It's superb, as becomes obvious whenever something goes wrong.  The problem Debbie reported was that it would run, but weakly, for about ten minutes and then shut down.  If you waited an hour or so, then it would run again, the same way.  We've had this happen before, so I knew exactly what it was: the vacuum motor was working too hard, overheated, and then had to cool down again.  There are really only two things that could make that happen: either airway was clogged up, or a filter was so dirty that it couldn't pass enough air.

So I needed to examine all the airways.  With every other vacuum cleaner I've ever owned (and I'm old enough that that's a disturbingly large number!), this would mean an elaborate and confusing disassembly.  Quite likely, it would need tools that I didn't have, or even proprietary tools (Kirby, I'm looking at you, you Communists!).  Not with the Dyson.  One snap-off plastic ring (no tools), one sliding inspection window (no tools), and one snap-off collection container (no tools), and I could examine all the airways.  Total time: about 15 seconds.  Total confusion and frustration: zero.

Our problem today was a piece of cardboard that had gotten stuck in the airway, obstructing it.  One push with a piece of wire and it was out, and the vacuum as good as new.  A few seconds later, I had it all put back together.  No tools.

Now any manufacturer could have made their vacuums easy to assemble and disassemble, at any time in the past 60 years or so.  It's just a bit of engineering, albeit inspired engineering, and a decision by someone to design it in a consumer-friendly way.  There are no magic materials required, no high technology.  Just engineering, done extremely well.  Any manufacturer could have done it, but none did until Dyson came along.  There's lots of other superb engineering in this machine that's obvious at a glance, too – not least of which is the miniaturized cyclone system that Sir James Dyson is justly famous for.  Other manufacturers are doing some of these things now, but they're doing it because Dyson has been so successful, commercially – they didn't (and wouldn't have, I suspect) think of these things themselves.  So I will give my vacuum business to Dyson, should I ever need to buy one again – great engineering like that deserves a commercial reward...

Paradise ponders, winter wonderland edition...

Paradise ponders, winter wonderland edition...  Well, the snow arrived essentially as predicted yesterday afternoon.  By the time we woke this morning there were about three inches of the stuff on the ground.  I was out shortly after daybreak to plow it before it started to melt (that's what the forecast said was going to happy) and got sloppy, or worse, icy.  So I plowed the driveway, used the snowblower where the plow couldn't get, and just as I put the snowblower away it started raining.  Inside of 60 seconds the driveway was perfectly clear, and now, just a few hours later, it's dry.  That worked!

But there's much more snow in the forecast, including up to 8 inches tomorrow...

Yesterday a technician (a guy my age named Jim) showed up from Darrell's Appliances, a local outfit that's given us excellent service on two prior occasions, both times with Jim.  This time we had him out to check out our two ovens.  Debbie's been frustrated with them because the temperature seemed higher than what she set.  Before we called Darrell's, I used an electronic thermometer to verify that both ovens were, indeed, out of whack.  Jim used a more sophisticated thermometer, a thermocouple-based one, and determined that one oven was actually dead on, but the other was almost 150°F hotter than it should be!  We're guessing that the one he tested as dead on has an intermittent problem in the thermostat, and the other is just plain broken.  They're ordering new parts and he'll be back out when they come in.  He was in our house for about two hours, doing a very thorough job, and holding an interesting conversation with us the entire time.  Here's the main reason I wrote this paragraph: that visit will cost us $79, but we haven't been charged yet.  They aren't bothering with that until after the parts are in and he comes out again to actually fix it.  I just love the assumption of honesty that's so common here.  No muss, no fuss, unasked for – they just behave that way by default...