Expensive punctuation...

Expensive punctuation...  Consider this sentence, lifted from a Maine state law:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.

That sentence defines what occupations are not eligible for overtime pay.  A recent dispute centered on the meaning of that sentence.  In everyday English usage, there are two possible interpretations of that sentence because there is no comma between "packing for shipment" and "or distribution". 

A US appeals court has ruled that the sentence above is ambiguous, and therefore a labor dispute should be decided in favor of the employees rather than the employer.  More examples of such ambiguous legislation or contracts here.

Reading about this reminded me (rather too forcefully) of one of my least favorite aspects of executive life, back in the bad old days when I was still one of them.  I spent a ridiculous amount of time reading all the language in contracts, including such details as whether to use the Oxford comma or not in any particular sentence.  On a large contract (as the examples linked above illustrate), a large amount of money might ride on possible interpretations of contract language.  What really got me going on this issue was discovering language that was almost certainly intended to deceive or trick us, in draft contracts coming from large multinational corporations we were considering doing business with.  It was easy to tell if these were deliberate constructions or not: we would simply red-line the language in question and propose an unambiguous alternate.  If the other company pushed back on our change ... then we knew it was deliberate.  I consider that dishonest behavior myself, and I see no need for that in a legitimate business contract.  Given what I saw, however, I have to conclude that mine was a minority viewpoint – at least with many large corporations.  There were exceptions, thankfully.  And the small businesses I dealt with never seemed to have this issue.  I suspect it has to do with the point at which a corporation becomes large enough to have a permanent legal staff – they seemed to believe that such trickery was part of their job description...

Paradise ponders, where the hell did that day go edition...

Paradise ponders, where the hell did that day go edition...  Yesterday I was scrambling all day long.  I was feeling a bit off (and I am today as well), but none of the day's activities were onerous – there were just a lot of them!  I never even thought about making a post, much less actually doing it...

Miki, our oldest field spaniel, went to the groomers for a haircut yesterday.  He came out looking sleek and fit, and acting very happy.  I'm thinking we let him get a bit too shaggy.  When I walked into the groomer's 45 minutes early, I expected a little confusion when I checked in.  Nope.  The groomer recognized Miki immediately, greeted him in a happy way, and it was clear Miki recognized her as a friend right away.  A little later, still talking with the groomer, she asked about Cabo and Mako – obviously remembering them from their one haircut about six months ago.  She especially asked about Cabo, wondering if she still had “those eyes”.  :)  When I assured her that Cabo still had that same face, the groomer was delighted – and then showed me the photo of Cabo that she kept on her phone.  Wow!  Then she went on to say that her experience with our four field spaniels (she's given Mo'i a cut as well) convinced her that her next dog needed to be a field spaniel.  Our dogs apparently made quite the impression!

For the past couple of days we've had roofers working on our small outbuilding.  This is the oldest structure on our property, built in 1990 by the owners who built the house we now live in.  They used that outbuilding (which has power, heat, and a bathroom) and an RV as their domicile for the two years it took to get the house built.  I don't think it's received any TLC since it was built.  The roof was fiberglass and asphalt shingle, the gutters aluminum.  The shingles were wearing out, the underlayment was all dried and cracked, and the gutters falling off.  That old roof has been removed, as have the gutters.  New underlayment is down, and the entire roof has been sheathed in standing seam steel, matching our house.  On Monday they will be back to install fascia and soffit (all aluminum), and later next week they'll put the new gutters up there.  They'll also be replacing the gutters on our house, which are also in bad shape plus the construction we did last year involved several roof-line changes that also require redesigned gutters.

Yesterday and today we have “Blue Stakes” people here to mark the locations of the various underground utilities (gas, electric, cable TV, and phone).  This is in preparation for another round of digging in our yard, scheduled to start next week.  This time, the digging will be in all our yard covered with lawn – about three acres in total, in four discrete pieces.  This round of digging is to get sprinklers installed.  This is a system I've been working on getting installed for nearly two years now; it's proved far harder to find a craftsman to do the work than I ever thought it would!  I finally did find one, though, and this same fellow is going to sod about an acre of our lawn, and overseed the rest.  He's also going to fix all the various grade problems caused by our paving our driveway three years ago, and from the construction last year.  All this right in the middle of mud season!  There's going to be quite the mess around here for a while...

I went to Angie's for breakfast yesterday with Bruce N., a local friend whom I hadn't seen for a while.  He's got lots of interesting things going on in his life, including plans to build an extension onto his home in Avon, and a large steel barn close by on the same property.  These projects are both derived from the fact that one of his sons has moved in with him, complete with wife and four grandkids (with another on the way!).  That leaves very little room for Bruce and his wife June, so they're building an extension for themselves.  The barn is something he's wanted all along; a place to park tractor, mowers, truck, etc., and to have a baby goat pen alongside for his grandkids.  He got surprised when they started looking for a contractor to excavate the foundations for these projects – everyone is so busy now that the times being quoted would completely mess up their plans.  So Bruce and his son decided to buy a medium-sized Komatsu excavator (similar to the one above), use it this year to complete a long list of earth-moving projects, then sell it.  That's way cheaper than putting 3 or 4 hundred hours on a rental, and they'll be able to tackle some other projects they'd like to do (drainage ditches, terracing, etc.).  They took delivery of it just yesterday, and now Bruce has to learn how to operate it.  Sounds like fun to me!

Debbie and I grabbed lunch at Los Primos yesterday.  She was really, really hungry and put away that entire carne asada plate at right.  I had a couple of gorditas.  As usual, all of this stuff was delicious.  Also as usual, the staff were super friendly and smiles were everywhere.  We love this place...

Also yesterday our persevering oven repairman  (Jim) came for his next attempt at repairing our two broken ovens.  This time, he succeeded with one!  Yay!  He had the right part, it was identical to the one he was replacing, and it all worked on the first try when he buttoned up the oven.  The oven he fixed had an intermittent temperature control problem, and in that oven all of the temperature control is contained in a single thermostat assembly, which is what he replaced.  So that oven should now work correctly.  The other oven was the one he worked on during his last marathon visit a couple of weeks ago.  That oven exhibited the same wildly high temperatures with 100°F swings even after he'd replaced the thermostat assembly.  This time he was on the phone with the manufacturer's technician (Viking is the manufacturer) trying to troubleshoot it.  After an hour or so on the phone, they concluded that a control board (electronics) was at fault.  The old thermostat probably was just fine.  So we've ordered that part (about $200), and now we're expecting Jim for the fourth visit in a couple of weeks.  The labor charge for the repair is fixed, and if you calculate the per-hour charge it's going to work out to about $5/hour.  Darrell's is taking a bath on this one.  Little do they know that a cloud of weirdness follows us everywhere.  Probably our address and phone number will be tacked to their wall after this, with instructions to hang up should we ever call again. :)

Non-standard addressing...

Non-standard addressing...  This blog post by national geek treasure Ken Shirriff details how the Intel 8008 designers saved a few then-precious gates by addressing a stack with a sequence that wasn't in the usual binary numerical order.  Long-time readers may know that the 8008 has a special place in my professional life: it was the heart of the first microcomputer that I designed and built myself.  Until I read Ken's post, I had no idea that the 8008 addressed its stack this way – as a user of the 8008, there was no way to detect that.

That general technique, though, I've used myself, back in the '70s and '80s when I was designing a lot of digital hardware.  I got there in two steps.

The first step was a mental leap I made when wire-wrapping a Z80 prototype that included some dynamic RAM and an EPROM.  The way the chips were oriented on the board, to connect the Z80's address lines to the eight RAM chips and PROM chip in the ordinary way (that is, A0 to A0, A1 to A1, etc.) would have caused the wires to cross over each other twice in an aesthetically annoying way.  It dawned on me as I thought about my stupid problem that the RAM chips really didn't need the address lines to be connected in the ordinary way at all – I could connect them in any way that was convenient, and it wouldn't change the operation of them.  In fact, the address lines could be differently connected to each individual RAM chip (though that wasn't convenient or neat) and even that would still work just fine.  All that really mattered is that the 12 bits (4k RAMs) of address all be connected, so that each possible address presented a different state of address lines to each RAM.  The EPROM was a slightly harder case, as it might be in either of two places: the Z80 board itself, or the EPROM programmer.  The programmer's address pins were wired in the usual way, so if I wired my board in an unusual way the addresses wouldn't match.  But that problem was easily solved, too: a simple little program would “scramble” the sequence of the bytes I wanted to program in the EPROM so that they'd match how I'd wired my Z80 board.  Unconventional, but it would work – and I built my board that way, along with several later boards that made it to printed circuit boards where the layout convenience actually saved us a layer.

The second step happened when I was building a piece of test equipment for the Marines.  There are a lot of good stories in that experience. :)  This piece of gear was based on a Z80, but had lots of discrete TTL logic associated with it.  One requirement included 16 bit address counters for some RAM that collected state information.  There were 32 channels of information, so 32 of these 16 bit counters were needed.  Extensible 4 bit counters were standard TTL parts, and the obvious choice – but I'd have needed 128 of them for the job.  Extensible 8 bit shift registers were also standard TTL parts, so if I could figure out how to use them I'd only need 64 of them, saving a hefty pile of parts in my design.  Remembering the lessons I'd learned above about “scrambling” the address lines, it occurred to me that there was no requirement for a standard binary sequence.  I was already familiar with using shift registers and a few gates to generate pseudo-random sequences for noise generators, so I jumped right to that as a design solution.  I ended up taking 2.5 parts (shift registers plus gates) to build each of those “address counters”, a very nice parts count reduction from the original approach that took 4 parts. 

It did cause a bit of an issue when my design went through an independent design review, though.  The engineer doing the review had never seen a pseudo-random sequence generator, so I had to spend quite a bit of time in the review convincing him that they actually worked.  Then he flat-out didn't believe the RAMs would still do the job if not addressed in sequential address order.  I actually had to step him through a chalkboard example of a 3 bit address memory to convince him.  My customer was quite discomfited by all the back-and-forth between the reviewer and I.  The reviewer had a reputation in San Diego for being a top-notch digital designer.  What kind of a weird design had I made, that this guy was so puzzled by it?  Fortunately for me, when the review was over (and my design approved with no changes) that reviewer went out of his way to say what a great design it was, and that he'd learned several things he expected to apply himself.  With that sort of endorsement, I was hopeful that I'd get more business from the Marines.  I would have, too, had I been willing to do the work – but it took nearly a year for me to get the check for the first work I did.  Not many small businesses can afford that sort of payment delay.  The Marines approached me several more times with projects they wanted me to do, but I turned them down.  I wanted to get paid!  :)

Doom. I feel the doom coming on...

Doom.  I feel the doom coming on...

Paradise ponders, puppy birthdays and irrational numbers...

Paradise ponders, puppy birthdays and irrational numbers...  Today (3/14/2017) is the first birthday of Mako and Cabo, our little field spaniel puppies.  The video at right is one I took of them last June, when they were about 3 months old.  It captured one of their play “battles” in slow motion.  They still do the same thing today, though the physics are now a bit different since they weight a lot more.

We celebrated this morning by giving them some half-and-half with their morning kibble, and by letting them have two bananas instead of their usual one (split between four dogs).  The little puppies have no idea why they got this bonanza this morning, but (trust me on this) they weren't complaining. :)

Today is also Pi Day, commemorating that most famous of irrational numbers: pi.  Of course there's a web site dedicated to it, where you can find the first million digits of pi if you're looking for some reading material.

A few years ago I read a study that attempted to measure adult innumeracy in various countries around the world.  There were two questions related to pi on there.  The first one asked for a definition of pi.  The second asked the test taker to write down as many digits of pi as he or she knew.  Americans stood out for their ignorance of these.  I don't remember the exact numbers any more, but it was something like 15% of Americans could define pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  The average number of digits known by Americans was less than one.  That means a great many Americans didn't even know that the first digit was “3”!  I remember comparing those results with those from Estonia, and being appalled at the gap.  The majority of Estonians could define pi, and the average number of digits was over 4.  On a good day, after my morning tea, I can remember 6 or 7 digits – which makes me extraordinary for an American, and slightly above average for an Estonian.

A friend of mine, Clay M., came up with a clever and fun way to help his daughters understand pi.  They baked a pizza, then cut it up into a lot of skinny slices, 20 or so.  Then they arranged these slices side-by-side, alternating the pointy end up or down.  This made a rough rectangle whose height was the radius of the pizza (diameter/2) and whose length was pi * radius.  By simply measuring the length of the “rectangle” they could measure pi – and then they got to eat the pizza.  Win!

Paradise ponders, acidic wood and big hunks of redwood edition...

Paradise ponders, acidic wood and big hunks of redwood edition...  Yesterday I got a bit of a scare: I discovered that wood I'd left on my table saw's cast iron table had left big ugly black marks and rusty corrosion on it.  What the hell did that?  Well, the wood was redwood (4x4s) that I'm using for the stairs I'm building.  It turns out that the red heartwood of redwood lumber is highly acidic – something I had no idea of until yesterday.  I'd left the wood on that table for just two days, and the corrosion that developed in that short time felt like sandpaper when I ran my hands over it.  Not good at all!  The wood also had a terrible black stain on it, but fortunately not on a side that will be visible when I've finished the stairs.  After trying various ways to remove the corrosion, I found one that worked: a combination of M1 oil, Scotch-Brite pads, and elbow grease.  Two hours and some sore arms later, I had removed nearly all trace of that corrosion.  The only way you can see it now is by spotting a slight discoloration when you get the light at the right angle.  I put a new coat of M1 on it and called it a day.  But I will never store redwood on metal again!

What I was really trying to do yesterday was to get my big redwood “landing” built.  And I did!  I cut up six 4x4s into eleven 44" lengths, then drilled holes in the ten butt joints for dowel pins (60 holes for 30 pins, 3 on each of the 10 butt joints).  I used the jig I made yesterday to do that, and it worked fine.  The first photo shows the finished glue-up in the clamps.  With a piece this big, there's a danger of bowing.  The easy way to minimize that is to have clamping from both the top and the bottom, which is why you see so many clamps here.  There are other ways to solve this problem, too, but if you've got the clamps, this is the easy way.  This morning I removed the clamps and put the two slabs (big one near the camera, small one away) up on my workbench to get ready for sanding.

I'm quite pleased with how well these turned out.  First, there's no bowing at all on either slab.  I'll be installing “ribs” on these before I'm finished, and that will (or should!) prevent any future bowing as well.  Second, the joint mismatches are all well under 1/32", thanks to the dowel pins.  This will make them easy to sand to an acceptable flatness.  Well, it would be easy if I had a belt sander.  I thought for sure my trusty old 4" belt sander made the trip to Utah with us, but I searched high and low for it yesterday and it's just not here.  Apparently I left it in California with some of my other tools.  I ordered one last night, as for work like this (which I'd like to do more of), it's an essential tool.  “Like this” means “too darned wide to fit in my planer!”  So work on the steps is stymied until Thursday, when I'll have the new sander...

I did have one thing go slightly wrong while gluing up that big slab.  If I do something this large again, I'll be doing it in two steps to avoid the issue.  Because this time I did it all in one step, by the time I got done gluing and doweling the tenth joint, the first two joints had partially hardened.  It took me about 30 minutes to do all the gluing, so apparently the limit for TiteBond II glue is around 20 minutes at the 70 °F I was working in.  The specs say 10 to 15 minutes, but it seems to be a tad more than that.  I know from past experience that the bond will still be strong – this is more an aesthetic issue than a structural one.  There is a tiny gap remaining on the first joint, and an even smaller one (nearly invisible) on the second.  I worked some more glue into them to hide the issue, which I'm sure nobody but me will ever notice.  Still, what I should have done is to first glue up two smaller slabs, then in a third step glue those two together.  Had I done so, my working time would have been within limits for all of it...

Another sign that spring is springing...

Another sign that spring is springing...  The past week's production from our solar panels.  We had many weeks of zero production recently, because of snow (see 6 March, below).  They've been completely free of snow for four days now; the less-than-perfect production is because of intermittent cloud cover.  Soon we'll start seeing those perfect curves again, when we have our first clear days...

USPS fail...

USPS fail and medical care...  No surprise in a USPS fail, right?

For years now we've routinely tracked the progress of packages shipping from Amazon to us.  The vast majority of these packages ship via Fedex or UPS, and the tracking for them is easy, fast, and accurate. 

But every once in a while, an Amazon seller will ship to us via USPS, no doubt to keep the cost down.  Usually this is via one of the “priority mail” boxes that don't charge by weight, and the item is something heavy.

That just happened to me: a couple of woodworking clamps are headed my way, and the seller sent them by USPS last week.  Four working days later, the USPS tracking number still shows “No information available”.  I cannot recall even one instance in which the USPS tracking system actually worked.  The items I ordered shipped on March 8th, and the USPS estimates delivery on April 24th.  The first time I saw such a ridiculous estimated delivery time, I was quite alarmed – but the package actually arrived in quite the timely fashion, as have most of the others.  I can only guess that the USPS sets the estimate so long so that no matter how badly the screw things up, they can still claim an “on-time” delivery.

The USPS likes to claim that they are not a government agency, and technically they are correct.  However ... for any practical purpose, they really are a government agency: their subsidies, rate regulation, employment regulation, Congressional oversight, the franking privilege, etc. make them effectively one even if technically they are not. 

My point is that the kind of awful service delivered by the USPS is always what we get when we let the government run something.  As a veteran of the U.S. Navy, I can attest to the almost unbelievable amount of economic waste in the military.  All of us know how wonderful the DMVs are, especially in the blue states (where government bureaucracies have run the furthest off the rails).

So how is this related to medical care?  Like this: the progressives in this country deeply, desperately desire our healthcare to be a so-called “single payer” system, meaning that the Federal government pays for it all.  The UK's NHS is their model.  This is the connection, and the part I least understand: what they want is for the same “quality” of the USPS, or DMVs, to be applied to our healthcare, too!  At least the damned post office won't kill me!  Talk with any UK residents about their three month waits for an MRI, or their relatives who died of cancer while waiting for diagnostic tests, and you'll see our future should a single payer system ever be put in place here.  What I simply cannot understand is why anyone wants this!

Who wouldn't want some effective corporate organization (Amazon, anyone?) to take over the USPS?  I'd be willing to wager that the quality would go up and the price down – so long as there was competition...

Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition...

Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition...  So I took a few quick photos of Mako and Cabo to assuage the demon readers who are pestering me about them.  Here are the superstars:

I took these before the sun rose, which is why they aren't as crisp as you'd expect.  The first one is Cabo, the little girl.  She has those eyes all the time, perpetually looking startled.  Sometimes the lighter hair on her head stands straight up, like a little mohawk cut.  The second is Mako, the big boy.  At the moment I took that, he thought I had some food.  The last photo shows both of them, and gives you an idea about their relative size.  Despite being much smaller than Mako, Cabo holds her own in any play battle.  That's mainly due to her completely ruthless nature.  When they're “fighting”, she will chomp down on any part of Mako that happens to be handy – yes, including those parts.  Ouch!  She's also much quicker and more agile than Mako, so she'll make fast runs at him and bowl him over.  Mako, on the other hand, appears to be much more polite about their battles.  Sometimes he even looks offended when she does something outrageous to him, and often he looks befuddled by the sheer speed with which she does it.  Despite all the mock fighting, though, these two are best buddies.  They spend all day in each other's company, even when they don't have to (our yard is big).

Yesterday afternoon, our neighbors across the street (Gary and Elayne S.) called us and invited us to go to dinner with them.  That was completely unexpected, but we hadn't seen them for a while, so we eagerly accepted.  We ended up going to a place we'd never been before: the Logan Steakhouse, which recently began the process of turning themselves into the Copper Mill.  Their web site apparently isn't operational yet.  We'd read bad reviews of the steakhouse, which when combined with high prices kept us away.  The reviews for the new Copper Mill were very good, though, so we'd been planning to try it out.  Our outing with Gary and Elayne was the perfect time to do that.  Debbie and I shared a fish & chips plate, and it was delicious – cod done perfectly, great fries, dinner rolls right out of the oven (or they sure tasted that way!), and a nice salad for Debbie.  Price was modest, too.  We approve!

Our conversations over dinner were mainly catching up on the past few months.  Somewhere in the conversation the subject turned to our solar panels, which Gary wanted to know why we had installed.  That led to a discussion about our Tesla (because the panels largely were justified by the need to charge it), which Gary and Elayne didn't know we had.  It turns out that their son has been urging them to get one, and they really couldn't figure out why.  That led to Gary and Elayne wanting a ride in our Tesla.  Gary wanted it to be to “someplace important” :)  So we're going to out with them to Maddox sometime next week.  And who knows?  Maybe we'll end up with our neighbor having a Tesla, too!

We bought a couple nice chunks of fresh ahi tuna from Macey's, and that's our dinner today.  Yum!  It's hard to beat ahi for fresh fish...

I have a new question to use in order to rule political candidates in or out.  “Do you support getting rid of Daylight Saving time?”  If they say “no”, they're not getting my vote...

The crazy is taking over the world, part 88,372,119:

The crazy is taking over the world, part 88,372,119:

Paradise ponders, dowels and maple-nut bar edition...

Paradise ponders, dowels and maple-nut bar edition...  A few days ago, Michelle H. (a friend who's a member of the LDS ward that we're in) invited Debbie to an auction being put on by the Ladies' Relief Society.  This auction was something completely new to us.  Everyone attending (all women, I believe) filled out questionnaires.  From Debbie's description of the questions on it, I think they're trying to make a measure of how good and how faithful you are.  The questionnaires were scored, and the points one scored become the currency for the auction that followed.  Additional points were also awarded for things like participating in the song, staying until the end of the auction, etc.  Debbie ended up with a few hundred points, while others had thousands.  As Debbie said, having some was better than nothing, because in the auction she bid on a couple of items and won them!  She brought home two maple-nut bars and two big mason jars of homemade soup.  We only have one maple-nut bar now, as I ate the other one – delicious!  The soup looks fantastic: an Italian sausage soup with a tomato base and orzo.  I may have some later tonight!  All of the items being auctioned were homemade food items (and possibly some craft items, too).  The ones that went for the most points were things like pork ribs and roast turkey – and some homemade fruit pastries from a woman well-known for her baking.  Debbie also got a hearty breakfast out of the event, including samples of some of the aforementioned fruit pastries.  Debbie understood fully why they fetched a high “price”!  The best part of all for Debbie was that she got to meet and spend time with some of the local women.  She had a blast – she was all smiles when she got home.

While she was off stuffing her face and having a great time, I managed to get the next step (literally!) of my stairs project done.  I finished the drilling jig and used it to drill dowel holes in all of the faces to be glued, and I did the gluing and clamping.  The first photo below shows my test of the drill jig and depth setting on the drill press.  The goal was to have the hole depth be just a hair over half the length of a dowel peg, so that the same amount of the peg would be inside each piece.  That worked great.  The second photo shows a test fit of two pieces of the step held together just by the dowel's friction.  That fitting showed no errors of over 1/32", and that I can fix by sanding.  The third photo shows the little mark I made on each glued face to keep the orientation straight.  One arrow points to the upper surface; the other to the end that the jig should be fit onto.  The fourth photo shows the jig clamped to a step piece, ready to be drilled.  The fifth photo the clamps in the process of being set up.  The plastic is there to keep glue from dripping onto the workbench.  Note the two scrap boards that actually touch the clamps; these spread the clamping force more evenly across the face of the boards.  The last photo shows the boards all glued and clamped.  I had to move the end clamps right after gluing as the tops of the boards were pulling together with all the clamps on the bottom.  This will be even more of a challenge on the larger step, and I think I'm going to address that by using all eight of my pipe clamps on it: four on the bottom and four on the top.  Once the glue fully dries on the first, smaller step I'm going to sand out the small misalignments.  Tomorrow I'll tackle the big step!

Fake news...

Fake news...  Remy weighs in...

Paradise ponders, howling dogs and red-winged blackbird edition...

Paradise ponders, howling dogs and red-winged blackbird edition...  Yesterday I was on the phone with Tesla several times – they were working to get my Model X fixed by the end of the day, but didn't want me to drive down there for nothing.  We had a deadline at 3 pm, as that would leave us just enough time to drive down there to SLC before they closed at 5 pm (and on a Friday, of course nobody there wanted to stay late).  Well, we talked right at the deadline and the tech was “very confident” he'd have it fixed by 5 pm, so we jumped in the #$%^(#@( Mercedes CLA 250 and headed down.  That car made us both crazy; we couldn't wait to get back in the Model X!  We made it into the service center just a few minutes before 5 pm, to see our Model X all nicely washed and being charged.  When we walked in the door, a smiling Denise (their front desk person) handed me my fob, took the key for the Mercedes, and we were out the door.  Zero paperwork, zero hassle.  That's really hard to beat!

When I checked my email this morning, I had a “service invoice” from Tesla.  I expected this to be a warranty repair, so I was really surprised and a bit alarmed by that.  Turns out the invoice is for zero dollars (they really should change the name of that!), and really just served to tell me what they did.  They replaced the hinges, as I'd been told, but they also replaced the actuator motor that actually moves the spoiler up and down.  They also put some special lubricant on the hinges that is supposed to keep them from corroding as they did.  We'll see how well that works long-term...

Debbie had made us reservations at Current Fish & Oyster, which is the first nice restaurant in SLC we've tried other than Red Iguana.  It was so hard to make ourselves deliberately go someone other than Red Iguana. :)  But we did it, and we were very glad: we had a fantastic meal.  We started with a pair of appetizers: crab cakes and mussels.  We both love crab cakes, and these were good – but as it turns out, they were the least impressive part of the meal.  The mussels were simply wonderful.  There were a dozen or so fat mussels, slices of an excellent chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage), and slices of a really good, doughy sourdough bread grilled in spiced butter.  There was a sauce poured over the whole thing that was aromatic and full of mussel flavor.  That appetizer was so good that we ordered a second one to share for dessert after our meal (really, we did!).  Debbie's entree was a fish stew (first photo below), mine was roasted scallops (second photo below).  Both were awesome.  Mine had a carrot-ginger sauce that was so good I had to sop it all up, and a rice cake in the middle that was darned near as good as the scallops themselves.  The vegetables included a new one on me: purple carrots, slightly less sweet than a normal carrot.  All of those veggies were delicious.  Debbie's sauce was just a bit too spicy for me (it included jalapenos), but then, I'm a spicy food wuss.  I tried one of her shrimps, and it tasted like it had just come off the barbie – really good.  Debbie had a glass of wine; I had their homemade ginger ale.  That ginger ale, presuming that you like ginger (I love it!), will make your brains fall out.  I'd go back there just for that!  We shall return to Current for another meal, for sure...

Yesterday while waiting for Tesla's service, I was planning to go to the next step on my stairs project.  That didn't happen, because I discovered that I'd messed up my jig: two parts that were supposed to be glued at a right angle were actually at about 80°.  That wouldn't do at all!  So I ripped the jig apart, re-routed the slot for the 1x6, and redid the glue job.  So this morning I'm right back where I thought I was yesterday morning.

On Wednesday morning we heard the songs of red-winged blackbirds.  These are our reliable harbingers of springtime, so we were very happy to see them.  We have the spectacular yellow-headed blackbirds in the valley, too – but about ten miles north of us, not here, darn it.  There are several dozen of them that stay near our irrigation canal, which is filled with water all summer.  Usually at this time of year it's empty, but this year, with all the snow and rain, it's running about half full just from the runoff.  That must make the blackbirds very happy!  Soon our barn swallows will return, too.  Some robins stayed through the winter, but the spring cohort is starting to arrive as well.  A pair of Canadian geese landed in the field north of our house yesterday, possibly the same pair that nested in an adjacent tree last year.  They were here this morning as well.  Lots of bird song around the place now!

For the last few days (and in the forecast for at least the next ten days) we've had highs in the 50s and 60s.  The snow is melting at a prodigious rate, both in the valley and up the mountain slopes below about 8,000' altitude.  Starting in a week, the forecast calls for frost-free nights, too.  Our “mud season” has begun!  Many of the fields around us are largely clear of snow, and some of the alfalfa fields are already greening up.  The only deep snow left on our property is the giant piles on the north side of our house, made by snow sliding off our roof, which this time of year are shaded all day long.  Some of those piles are still 6' high!

This time of year the sun is rising just south of due east of our house.  There is a small mountain peak in that direction from us, and that means we're in shadow in the early morning, while the valley both north and south of us is in the sun.  This morning when I looked toward my neighbor to the north, his trees were brightly lit.  They're all deciduous trees, so it was the branches and twigs that were lit – and he's got two weeping willows with bright yellow twigs, and a tree I don't know with bright red twigs.  Both of them were striking in that bright morning light, especially as seen from the shadow I was in.

A reader (Glen B.) wrote me this morning wondering why I haven't mentioned our puppies recently.  Well, there's no good reason other than my cranial density!

The two puppies, Cabo and Mako, are really not puppies any more.  They're a year old, and they're starting to get their adult personalities.  Cabo is much smaller than Mako – she's the smallest adult field spaniel we've had, and Mako, I'm pretty sure, is even bigger than Mo'i was.  Cabo is especially affectionate.  She loves to deliver kisses and ear nibbles, even while she's trying to chew a hole in Mako.  Mako is also affectionate, but in a lunky sort of way that involves leaping onto you, trying to claw his way up into your arms, etc.  Cabo, on the other hand, is very gentle.

The two of them sleep in crates in our kitchen at night, while Miki and Race have the run of the kitchen.  In the mornings, right about eight hours after we put them up for the night, Cabo and Mako make it known that they want out.  The way they do this has us laughing at them every morning.  Somehow they've developed the habit of using some highly creative canine vocalizations to get us up.  I think maybe they hear us laughing at them, and are encouraged by that.  We've never heard dogs making sounds like they do, so it's hard for me to describe.  I'm going to have to figure out a way to record them, so I can post them here.  Mako, in particular, is very good at these exotic dog sounds.

Anyway, those vocalizations are my cue to get up and let them outside.  But when I open the crate, the first thing they do is jump on me for attention.  By the time I've let them outside and I walk back into the bedroom to take my morning shower, my face, hands, and arms are covered with dog slobber – the detritus of ten million “Good morning, papa!” dog kisses.  Never fails to start my day in a cheery mood. :)

What's Elon done now?

What's Elon done now?  Via still-stuck-in-San-Diego friend and reader Simon M.: I can fix South Australia's power network in 100 days or it's free.  As Simon quipped: “You’ve got to love this guy!”

Triggered memory ... of my “plantsman” dad...

Triggered memory ... of my “plantsman” dad...  Some of my favorite memories from the many trips I took with my dad are of our conversations.  These conversations mostly happened in two settings: while driving (and we drove a lot, as some of our destinations were 1,500 miles from our home) and while resting in some beautiful spot on one of our hikes.

During one of those “while driving” conversations, while on the way to Santa Rosa, California, we talked about Luther Burbank.   My dad and I were traveling to Santa Rosa as a sort of pilgrimage for my dad, to Burbank's old estate (now a gardens and museum).  Burbank was one of my dad's botanical heroes, for lots of reasons.  He died when my dad was but a little boy, but his dad visited Burbank on his epic travels to California in the early 1900s.  My grandfather Earle Dilatush brought back stories and memories of that visit, and shared them with my dad.  When I was a small boy, my dad kept a set of books detailing Burbank's work by his desk.  All I can remember about those tomes is that they were thick (and heavy!), filled with photos and a few color plates, and all the text was completely beyond my comprehension.

So what triggered the memories that led to this post?  Reading this article, link forwarded by a friend.  My dad and I saw all of the plants referenced in that article on our visit that day, sometime in the mid-'90s.

Once again I'm reminded just how much I cherish those trips with my dad, and how thankful I am that Debbie and I found the money and time to make some good memories with our parents...

A whole band ... on a single guitar.

A whole band ... on a single guitar.  Cool!

Paradise ponders, dancing with jigs edition...

Paradise ponders, dancing with jigs edition...  Our Tesla Model X is still at the service center, but I did get some news on it yesterday.  The technicians there tracked the problem down to a corroded “hinge” that lets the spoiler move up and down.  It's not at all clear to me how a hinge would be used to move the spoiler up-and-down on its mounting posts, but that's what they told me.  There's a new hinge on order that should come in today.  The techs told me that some other Model Xs have been having the same issue, so engineering is tracking it and looking for a long-term solution.  It was refreshing to have such a frank and open discussion with a car manufacturer's representatives; that attitude is much appreciated by me.  We're hoping to be able to return the #%(*#($ Mercedes CLA 250 today and pick up our Model X.  We may have to take it back in at some later date for the long-term fix, but that's ok.  We knew we were getting a version 1.0 when we pre-ordered it. :)

I did manage to get a little time in on my stairs project yesterday, and I hope I'll get some more today.  I'm putting three dowels down the centerline of each 4x4 butt joint I'm making, and to get the holes precisely positioned in the opposing faces I needed a drill jig.  That's what I built yesterday, from some scrap white pine 1x6 and a 2x4.  The first photo shows the guide I rigged with clamps in order to route a groove in the 2x4 to insert the 1x6.  The second photo shows the result.  The third photo shows the 2x4s being glued to the 1x6, and the last photo the end result.  This morning I'll drill the three template holes in the 1x6, and then the jig is done.  I didn't really dance with it, though. :)

This exercise made me think of the day, many years ago, when it dawned on me that clamps were pretty much the center of any woodworker's universe.  When I thought of a wood shop, I, like most people, thought of tools like saws, planes, hammers, etc.  But now I think I could best tell you if someone was a woodworker by looking for the clamps in their shop.  :)  I own 28 clamps (I counted yesterday) of five distinct types, and I have 8 more arriving today (pipe clamps, for the sixth type).  This isn't nearly enough; I'm pretty sure I need at least twice as many, both in number and in type.  I also need a rack to store them all, as right now I just keep them in a messy pile.

Habits and conventions...

Habits and conventions...  This morning I had my usual tea and toast (Cache Crunch!) for breakfast.  To get the bread out, I had to untwist the “twist-em” closure on the loaf's bag – and for the ten-millionth time, someone (presumably named Debbie :) had twisted it on “backwards”.  I'd expected to twist it counter-clockwise to remove it, but instead that just wound it up some more.  With the twist-em closures, you can't really discern the direction of twist by inspection, you just have to try it to figure it out.  For me, it was disconcerting to discover that the closure was twisted that way – but I find it that way so often – roughly half the time – (including straight from the bakery) that it must be me that's weird.

So that got me to thinking about why I thought twisting clockwise to close the bag was the “right” way to do it.  I believe it must be derived from learning how to tighten and loosen bolts, screws, and pipes.  Except in the unusual case of “left-handed” threads, all of these everyday items tighten (screw in) when twisted clockwise, and loosen (screw out) when twisted counter-clockwise.  I've done so much work with such devices over the years that the directionality of them is now at the subconscious level.  When I do run into one with left-handed threads, it's disconcerting in precisely the same manner as that backwards twist-em.  But then, thinking about that, I remembered that I've known quite a few people for whom this directionality was not so clear.  Many of these people are women who have not (for reasons I'll let you speculate about) done much work with bolts, screws, and pipes.

Others, though, have life experiences more akin to mine.  Just to make one example: I have a neighbor who is older than I am, and has spent his entire working life around machinery.  While fixing an irrigation pipe last summer, he ran into trouble that he thought was caused by his arthritis interfering with his finger strength – he was unable to remove a 6" long nipple.  He called me over to help him out.  The pipe unscrewed easily, and when my neighbor saw me do it, he immediately started making fun of himself – because he'd been trying to tighten it!  Fifty years of field experience with machinery, and he still didn't have the directionality of threads down pat.  In fact, I discovered, he relied on a little jingle (“righty tighty, lefty loosy”) to jog his memory, but somehow he'd messed that up.  He told me that he's always had trouble remembering the direction to turn bolts, etc.  He's even marked his tools with arrows to help him remember.

Thinking about this apparent dichotomy (people who can or can't easily remember thread directions) got me to wondering if it might be related to dyslexia.  A little googling quickly eliminated that hypothesis: dyslexia is strictly related to words (as you can see from the word's roots!), and doesn't affect any other abilities so far as I can tell from the studies I scanned.  I learned thread directions so long ago that I can't recall at all whether it was difficult for me to learn.  Anything you've learned so well that it's now not even raised to a conscious level is, I suspect, like that.

Might it be related to one's spatial reasoning ability?  That's an area where the tests I've taken indicate I have a high ability, and it's also (feminists, avert your eyes) one where women score, on average, considerably below men.  Some men, obviously, score low as well.  I wonder how well this ability correlates with the ease of internalizing thread direction?  Or the sense of “proper” twist-em direction?  :)

Unusual morning skies...

Unusual morning skies...  The mountains to both our east (the Wasatch range) and west (the Wellsville range) have clouds over them this morning, and the sun is rising through a notch in the Wasatches.  This caused the Wellsvilles to be very brightly lit this morning, by sunlight pouring through that notch and under the clouds on the Wasatches.  These conditions don't all come together very often!

Haversine...

Haversine...  Just ran across this trigonometric function in my reading this morning.  I'd never heard of it before.  Turns out there's a boatload of these “vestigial” trig functions. As the author of that post mentions, I learned about sine, cosine, and tangent in high school, then picked up secant, cosecant, and cotangent somewhere along the line.  The rest of these I'd never heard of: versine, vercosine, coversine, covercosine, exsecant, excosecant, haversine, havercosine, hacoversine, and hacovercosine.

The reason why these functions were invented is interesting, too.  It all comes down to the fact that people didn't used to have calculators or computers at their desks, and these functions, provided in tables, saved a great deal of manual computation...

Paradise ponders, koa cat and bad Mercedes edition...

Paradise ponders, koa cat and bad Mercedes edition...  While we were in Hawai'i last week, we stopped a couple of times at an interesting shop that we really enjoyed: The Gallery of Great Things.  It's a bit of a challenge to characterize this place, as you'll see if you wander around their web site.  The employees who helped us were a delight: the polar opposite of the pushy salespeople – they seemed a bit unhappy that some of the items they carry were departing.  The store serves as a retail outlet for quite a large number of Hawai'ian artists of many types: painters, sculptors, tapa makers, bead artists, and many more.

There were quite a few things there that we enjoyed looking at, and some wooden items in particular that we wanted to buy.  On our past visits, we never had enough money to even consider buying some of the larger wooden items that we liked.  This time we could, though, and we bought two of them.

The first thing we got was a cat carved from a koa log (three view below).  It stands about 3' tall and weighs about 35 pounds.  I'm not quite sure what to call this style.  “Abstract” doesn't seem quite right.  The engineer in me wants to call this “low resolution”, since it's a bit like an image rendered in low resolution.  Whatever you want to call it, we liked it a lot.  The carving is nicely done, and the finish is beautifully done – smooth and pettable. :)

The carved koa bowl at right is the second piece we got.  It, too, is carved from a koa log.  On the right hand side the blue “streak” is a crack that was filled with crushed turquoise and epoxy.  The rest of it is flawless and carved down to roughly 3/8" (10 mm) thickness.  It's now the centerpiece of our dining room table.

We selected both of these while in Hawai'i, letting the gallery ship them back to us in Utah.  The folks at the gallery assured us that the owner was the world's leading expert in packing fragile items for shipment to the U.S., and that they do this pretty much literally every day, so I wasn't too worried about it.  We got the packages a few days ago, and I can attest to the quality of the packing job – both pieces were swaddled in so many layers of waterproofing, shock-absorbing, and protective materials that it's really hard to imagine how anything could have hurt them!  And nothing had: both pieces arrived in perfect condition.  They were shipped UPS Ground from Hawai'i, which, one presumes, isn't really how they were shipped. :)  Each piece took just 3 business days to get here, which really seems kind of astonishing to me.  The cost for shipping each piece was well under $100.  The world seems to get smaller all the time...

The bad Mercedes?  Well, that's got nothing to do with Hawai'i! :)  This morning we drove our Tesla Model X down to Salt Lake City for the technicians to try again (second time) to repair our reluctant spoiler.  It's supposed to extend and retract automatically as you drive; ours was stuck in the fully extended position.  The techs couldn't estimate the time, so they arranged for a (free) loaner car.  They didn't have a spare Tesla to lend us, so they rented a Mercedes CLA 250 instead.  We drove that back home.  We hated it.  It's tiny, we feel like we're riding in a go kart, every little bump feels like someone is hammering our butts, it's noisy, and the way the engine stops and restarts every time you pause at a traffic signal is very distracting.  The worst sin of all, though, is that the damned thing doesn't even have a backup camera!  We had a hell of a time figuring out how to use some basic things, too, such as the radio.  We were both thoroughly underwhelmed.  We want our Tesla back! :)  The plan is to drive back down to SLC tomorrow to get it...

Lossless compression ain't quite what it used to be!

Lossless compression ain't quite what it used to be!  Way back in the dark ages of computing (I speak of the early '90s), I worked for a company that made quite a bit of money from lossless compression software (and even a little from hardware!): Stac Electronics.  I wasn't one of the subject matter experts there, but I worked with them every day, and a little bit rubbed off.  I've had an interest in it ever since.

So when a blog post raved about a lossless compression library I'd never heard of before (Zstandard), I went and read about it in a blog post, then off to the GitHub repository to take a look at their docs and at the API.

It's really kind of amazing what's happened in the 25 years since I was at Stac.  The core LZS code at Stac had a trivial API by comparison, and the code base was vastly smaller.  As with almost every kind of software, the newer things are far more complex, more sophisticated, and more capable.  Even just looking at the statistical graphs is kind of mind-boggling; we didn't have nearly as complete an analysis – mostly we had “point” tests with results under just a few sets of conditions.  Of course the CPUs are vastly more powerful these days, and that enables all sorts of interesting things, some of which Zstandard leverages some of those.

Sometimes I wonder if there's any such thing as simple software anymore... :)

A stunningly great support experience...

A stunningly great support experience...  Those are not words I write often! :)  I just got off the phone with a support agent (Debbie) at Health Equity.  They are a company that provides and manages HSA accounts, a confusing topic in the first place.  The health insurance that we started this year (Regence – Blue Cross/Blue Shield) uses Health Equity as a partner.

We're new to the whole thing as of January 1st, and I was trying to understand why I had a credit showing on one of my claims.  It looked to me as though the claim should have a zero balance, but the Health Equity website showed a small credit on it.  I first submitted a request (yesterday) via a web support page, but promptly got an email saying that I should call them, as they didn't want to put private details in an email (good security practice!).  They sent me a number that was allegedly 24x7 and invited me to call.

So at around 7 am this morning, cringing in anticipation of a difficult conversation, I picked up my phone and called.  After a short and easy automated routing, I was put in queue for a support agent.  Within 10 seconds, Debbie picked up the phone and we started talking.

That call may be the best single telephone support interaction I have ever had.

What sticks in my mind the most is Debbie's attitude: cheery, eager to help, funny, friendly, and personable as you could imagine.  She's located in Draper, Utah – just south of Salt Lake City – not northeastern Uzbekistan or Sri Lanka or whatever.  English is her first language.  She knows the area – she's even familiar with Paradise!  Bottom line from the call: neither she nor others there understand why there's a credit on that claim.  It looks to them, too, like the balance should show as zero.  They were open and upfront with that; no BS was dispensed. 

Kudos from this ancient manager to the folks at Health Equity that are making this happen.  Support like that doesn't happen by accident...

The next time I need to call them, I certainly won't be cringing in anticipation.

Hell, I might call them if all I need is cheering up!

Paradise ponders, rectangular redwood edition...

Paradise ponders, rectangular redwood edition...  Well, now that I've finished snowplowing for the day, I managed to get some time in on the steps project.  I made 3 more passes through the planer on each of the 8 4x4s that I started with.  That's 24 passes today (half filling my dust collection barrel!), and now the redwood 4x4s are distinctly rectangular in cross-section – but the corner radius milling has been completely removed.

The first photo shows the 8 former 4x4s; the next two show the micrometer measurement of the thickness and width, respectively.  So ... the 4x4s are now dimensional lumber, 2.8225" x 3.3530". :)  The thicknesses are all the same to within my ability to measure, though that will change as the pieces dry out.  The widths vary considerably, though: from 3.2733" to 3.4504".  Note that all of them are under the 3.5" that they're supposed to be.  I'm not sure if that's the mill cheating us a teensy bit, or (more likely, I think) shrinkage from the wood drying out. 

One of the challenges of building out of solid wood is dealing with shrinkage.  This project is much less critical than, say, a tabletop.  I will be using dowels to keep the centerline of the pieces stable, and then good glue joints to attempt to keep edges from shifting.  I'm using good quality glue that resists shear forces, but even so, if the differential shrinkage between two adjacent pieces is too high, they will slip and form a little ridge.  The only way I know of to guarantee that that won't happen is to glue up all the pieces and then dry them in a kiln for at least a few days.  The few days I've got, but the kiln I do not. :)  I'll be letting them dry in my heated barn for 4 or 5 days before I sand them down.  Hopefully the majority of any differential shrinkage will have occurred by then..

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders ... Debbie and her cat edition...  Yesterday afternoon I brought firewood in and laid a fire, thinking Debbie (who's still in the throes of some evil virus) would like it.  I got it going nicely and then went into the bedroom where she was napping to roust her.  The sight at right greeted me.  That cat is Jahar, our Savannah cat – and he owns Debbie.  He just barely tolerates me, and then only on special occasions.  She went back to napping, and didn't come out to enjoy the fire for a couple of hours. :)

Yesterday evening we had terrific gusty winds and fairly heavy snowfall.  The snow was of the wet, gloppy kind.  With all the wind, the accumulation was variable: zero in some places, but over a foot in others.  The photo at left is a metal-bending machine (for roofing panels) parked near our house.  The tarp protecting it tore and blew off, and the machine (as you can see) is pretty well stuffed with snow and ice.

Around 8 pm, our power and cable Internet connections simultaneously died.  Our backup generators kicked in within a few seconds – and ran constantly for the next five and a half hours.  The outage that got us also took out the entire southern section of Cache Valley, 1,000 or so homes and businesses.  That was just one of over 50 outages suffered along the Wasatch Mountains front at roughly the same time.  The snowy and icy road conditions meant quite a few accidents, and some of those were collisions with poles.  The wind meant quite a few downed trees, and some of those took out power, telephone, and cable lines.  I'm not sure which failure mode we experienced, but the repair time was long because the power company's crews were stretched to the limit.  Our general experience is that we're back up within an hour or two; this was much longer than that.  After the power was off for an hour or so, I poked my head out our front door and back door, to look around at the valley.  Other than at our house, there wasn't a light in sight – total darkness prevailed.  Apparently we have the only backup generator within a couple of miles.  After last night's experience, at least one of my neighbors is suddenly very interested. :)  We were very grateful ourselves, as we didn't have to worry about getting cold, losing the food in our freezer, or even being slightly inconvenienced.  Everything just worked.  If my memory serves me right, this is the fifth outage we've had (and by far the longest one) since installing the generators.  The decision to spend the money on them is feeling pretty good right about now...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders ... homecoming in the wind edition...  We've got smiles on our faces around here, because our friend Tim D. is due home from the hospital any minute now.  His recovery went faster than anticipated, always a good sign.  He's up and walking around, but he does have rather severe limits on what he's allowed to lift: just 15 lbs. for the next year (though it's possible they'll relax that earlier if it's clear he's healed enough).  For a retired guy whose hobby is farming alfalfa on five acres, that's going to be tough.  So many things require lifting around a little farm like this, but most especially the irrigation pipes (which are in use roughly half the days from May through September, and which must be moved on each of those days) and hay for his two horses.  The hay Tim's wife Jeannie can handle, except when one of the big 1,200 lb. bales needs to be moved; for that, my tractor will do the trick.  The pipe moving we've started to organize some of the (many!) youths in Paradise, and me.  So good to know he's home and the surgery was successful!

Debbie and I had breakfast at Angie's this morning.  She had a “Santa Fe” skillet with chicken, I had eggs and ham.  Good, solid, delicious food as always.  It was fun to hear the locals talking about local things once again; the first time we've been immersed in that since our trip to Hawai'i ended.  I overheard the conversation at a nearby table, a middle-aged couple visiting Logan because they're considering moving here from Ogden.  They were raving about Angie's – they couldn't believe the quality of the food, not to mention the quantity, and the smiling, friendly service just blew them away. We're not far from Ogden, but the cultural difference really is quite large.  Ogden is much more the “big city” atmosphere, and service such as provided by Angie's would, I'm sure, really stand out.  But I think that only explains part of it – some of it is Angie's. I've met the owner, who's often around, talking with customers.  He's just like his staff – open, friendly, welcoming, interested, eager to please.  I'm sure that attitude and energy trickles down to all the staff, or at least all the staff who stay employed.  It's not that we get unfriendly service elsewhere in Logan, because we do with but rare exception.  What I'm really trying to say is that even here Angie's stands out.

Despite overly full belly ('cause there's no such thing as a small breakfast at Angie's so far as I can tell, and it's so good you're definitely going to want to eat it all!), I started working on the steps project that I bought lumber for yesterday.  There will be just two steps, 44" wide.  The upper step will be more like a landing, 36" deep, because the door from our house will open over it.  The other step will be about 11" deep.  Both of them will be roughly 3" thick, solid redwood.  I'm making them by gluing multiple 4x4s together, using dowels to get accurate joints.  The 4x4s come from the lumberyard with a roughly 3/16" radius to make rounded edges – a good thing for most purposes, but not for mine, as I want the top of the slab to be free of the grooves that would make.  So I'm planing all the 4x4s down on two opposite sides, to eliminate the radius.  That will reduce the thickness to roughly 3" instead of 3.5".

In the first photo below you can see the side I planed on the bottom, and the unplaned side (with the radius milling) on the top.  The second photo shows all eight of the 4x4s I need with one planed side (on the top).  These all measure 3.137" in thickness now, down from the roughly 3.4" (with lots of variance) as I received them.  This little exercise was a nice test of my planer, to see how stable its depth of cut was.  So far as I'm able to measure (0.001"), it's perfect – the first piece and the last piece both measure 3.137" thick no matter where I measure them.  A few hours from now, as the wood starts drying differently on the different pieces, that will no longer be true. :)

To plane all those 4x4s took a total of 24 passes through my planer, three for each piece.  Why?  Because the planer can only remove 3mm (a shade under 1/8") on a single pass.  So to chew off enough wood to remove the radius milling, it took three passes.  I'll have 24 more passes to take off the opposite side of each 4x4.

When I finished that first side on all of them, I decided to take a break.  I went to shut off my dust collection system and saw that the collection barrel was over-full (see first photo below).  Oops! I've only emptied this barrel twice since installing it almost two years ago.  Most of what I do doesn't make all that much sawdust.  But the planer is an entirely different story: it removes a lot of wood, and fast – in fact, that's it's entire job.  The second photo shows what I saw after I removed the lid and cleared the “extra” chips from the transparent feeder tube.  Those are all redwood chips on the top from the planing I did this morning.  I reached down into the chips to see where the redwood started – and discovered that 2/3s of the barrel are redwood chips from this morning.  I'm going to have to pay closer attention to that system when planing! :)

The wind is howling outside.  We have an average wind speed of 28 mph predicted for later this afternoon, and I think it's probably around 20 mph average right now (though some gusts are clearly much higher speed than that).  The temperature is 53°F right now, about like yesterday, and between the wind and the heat our snow cover is melting very rapidly.  Many fields are completely clear already.  But ... our forecast is showing up to 6" of snow over the next couple of days, so I'm not removing my snowplow from my tractor just yet...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We've been visiting Tim D., our friend and neighbor, in the hospital every day.  He had back surgery to fuse three vertebrae on Wednesday.  The surgery went very well, and he's recovering faster than they'd predicted.  We saw him a couple of hours ago, and he's smiling and ready to be up and at 'em.  I warned him that I'd take a baseball bat to him if we caught him trying to lift anything (he's got a 15 lb. limit for a year!).  It's really good to see him doing well – he's one of the good guys, and we've been worried about him.

Debbie's out having her nails done at the moment, and she drove her new truck by herself for only the second time.  She's had it for two months now, but didn't want to walk by herself when we had snow and ice.  So we've been going together, in the Tesla, while her new truck sat in the garage.  It started right up after we figured out how to do it (there's no key, and it won't do a darned thing unless your foot is on the brake).

My brother Scott went with me to pick up some lumber today.  I'm building a set of stairs to get from our bedroom to our new sun room; there's a 12" drop involved, so just two steps.  I'm making them from redwood, which I'm going to bleach, artificially distress (basically, I'm going to bash the hell out of it with a variety of bashers), then finish with a two-color system to accent the dents, and finally a coat of matte polyurethane to keep the natural wood look but protect it well.  It should be an interesting experiment.  Just getting the wood was more trouble than I expected.  First, redwood is rather expensive these days.  Second, in both Home Depot and Lowe's the lumber had been handled roughly and left outdoors – so it was quite dinged up and in some cases soaking wet.  Lowe's had more of it in stock, so we went there and picked through a pile of wood to get the 9 4x4's that I needed (I'm gluing up the 4x4s to make a thick slab for each step).  One item I wanted didn't exist in the store: pipe clamps.  You wouldn't think pipe clamps would be scarce in an area with so many woodworkers, but they only had one in stock.  Lots of bar clamps, but just the one pipe clamp.  I had to order them from Amazon...

An accidental discovery...

An accidental discovery...  While on our recent trip to Hawai'i, we stopped in at a coffee and tea shop to stock up for the mornings in our cottage.  Naturally I'd forgotten to pack my favorite little tea infuser, so I asked at the shop for one.  They didn't have any (which really surprised me!), but they did have something I'd never heard of: tea filters.  I picked up a 20 pack of them for a few dollars, and used them during our trip.

How did they work out?  Short answer: they're better than any infuser I've ever had, and I really liked the infusers I've had for the past few years.  I ordered 200 filters last week and got them yesterday.  The filters themselves are conical paper (much like coffee filter paper, but a little finer) with two little holes at the top.  The filters come with a little plastic stick, cleverly shaped to go through the two holes, sit firmly on your cup's rim, while holding the filter cone open (so you can pour hot water over it).  I've been rinsing my tea leaves in the infuser with cold water to get the tea dust off; that's not necessary with the filters.  If you let the filters drain in your sink, in a few minutes they're dry enough to toss in the trash – very convenient.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves tea...

Slow blogging for a few days, most likely...

Slow blogging for a few days, most likely...  I'm catching up on the huge pile of paperwork and backlog of stuff put off while we were on vacation.  In addition, a good friend (Tim D.) had some serious back surgery yesterday.  We'll be spending some time with him in the hospital until he gets home.  Also we're on standby to help out at his home with anything his wife might need...

Excellent...

Excellent...

Some advice for liberals...

Some advice for liberals ... on Carryn Owens' moment in the spotlight last night.  The author is Mary Katharine Ham, also widowed (under very different circumstances).  Her response to the loss of her husband is itself a moving story of strength under incredible pain.  Rereading some of those events even today brings me to tears.  But here the point is that she knows a bit about the topic she's tweeting about...