Paradise ponders: more fall color, crispy morning, and electronic pursuits edition...

Paradise ponders: more fall color, crispy morning, and electronic pursuits edition...  Yesterday around noon I finished all my bookkeeping and set off on a short trip to Porcupine Reservoir to see the fall color (photos below).  That was one beautiful drive.  Near Avon I passed the home of our friends Bruce and June N., so I stopped in to say hi.  Ended up talking to Bruce for an hour, catching up on all sorts of things.  June was away in California, so I didn't get to see her.  From their home, on a knoll, you're surrounded by some of the best fall color I've seen.  What a perch they have for this season!

This morning I was outside working at the crack of dawn, cleaning up the deck in preparation for caulking and painting.  It's cold – just 26°F when I first got outside.  Once the sun came up it (slowly) started to warm up.  The views were very nice, too.  The first photo below is looking to the southwest from our front yard.  If you click to embiggen it, you'll see the beautiful fall color on the sunlit hillside, and clouds amongst the peaks toward the left (due south).  The second photo is looking east at our (newly sodded!) back yard, covered with frost.  I had intended to catch the dogs playing in the sunlight there, but naturally when I brought up my phone to take a photo they all ran away and hid.  Communists!

Yesterday I read about the new iMac Pro, with lots more detail than I've seen before.  My basic reaction is: I gotta get me one of these!  They're due for release in December, so I think I know what my Christmas present will be this year!  A shipment I've been anticipating arrived yesterday, too: a GPS extension board for the Raspberry Pi 3b, along with a matching roof mount antenna with a low noise amplifier (LNA).  The parts to mount it are due tomorrow.  This particular GPS board has a pulse-per-second (PPS) output and uses all the extant GPS satellite networks, plus it has a stationary (base station) mode.  All of this combined makes it the perfect time reference for a stratum 1 network time protocol (NTP) server.  I have no actual reason to own a stratum 1 NTP server, but it's something I've always wanted (and actually, briefly, had a few years ago).  Having this server on my local network should give me computer time accurate to sub-millisecond levels on all the computers I own (about a dozen at this point).  What's that good for?  Not much.  But if you're a geekly sort, it's way cool!

Paradise ponders: electrical phenomena and gorgeous fall color edition...

Paradise ponders: electrical phenomena and gorgeous fall color edition...  Saturday evening, my brother Scott contacted me to let me know that there had been a lightning strike near his cabin (just outside Newton, Utah) and that he'd lost power.  By 8:30 pm, power was restored, so I wasn't worried.  Then on Sunday morning he contacted me again: he had no water and his refrigerator had died.  Yikes!  I grabbed my trusty DVM and headed his way...

The 30 minute drive to his place was spectacular: a mix of blue sky and rain squalls turning into rain near his place, views of the red and orange fall color that blankets our mountains.  As I drove, I listened to an NPR reporter trying her level best to get a Puerto Rican citizen to condemn the US (and by inference, Trump) response to the hurricane.  The citizen kept insisting that the response was good, much to the frustration of the NPR reporter.  It was a pretty clear example of media bias, though I doubt most listeners would even realize that.  It was a strange juxtaposition to the beauty around me...

Once I got to Scott's place, I did a little diagnostic work.  The refrigerator's circuit board was easily accessible (thank you, LG), and I spotted a soldered-in fuse on there.  A quick test showed the fuse was blown.  Then I started checking out the well pump (a fancy variable speed pump and controller).  The controller had no LEDs, not a good sign.  The cutoff switch was open, cover missing, and some quick testing there showed 240 VAC on the line side, and 0 VAC on the load side.  At first I couldn't figure out what the heck could be wrong with the switch – not much to go wrong on them.  Later I figured out what had happened: that switch was fused, but the fuses had quite literally exploded.  The explosion damaged some of the internal switch components and blew the door off the switch box (door and box made of sturdy steel).  Scott wasn't home when this happened, or that noise would most certainly have scared him! 

So off we went to get parts.  At home Depot, we bought a replacement fuse for the fridge, and a soldering iron to install it.  At Lowe's, we bought a replacement cutoff switch, fused.  Then we went to Herm's and had a great breakfast: carnitas skillets all around.  Man, those are great!  With properly fortified tummies, we headed back to his place to do the actual repairs.

First up: the fridge.   I soldered some brass wire to both ends of the replacement fuse, then soldered it piggy-back on the blown one.  We plugged the fridge back in and it worked.  Yay, fuse!

Then down into the basement, and I replaced the blown-up cutoff switch.  That was a straightforward exercise, and afterwards we turned on the power ... and the pump controller still had no lights.  Dang.  So I opened up the controller and looked for an internal fuse – no joy.  On closer inspection I saw char on the board, near the switching power supply transformer.  Looks like the controller blew up, too – the cutoff switch fuses must not have blown quickly enough.  Scott will be calling the pump folks this morning, and hopefully they've got a replacement controller in stock.  If not, Amazon has them.  For the moment, he's without running water.  At least he has food. :)

After that I headed back home, again treated to a glorious drive.  I drove all the way down to Wellsville on State 23, paralleling the eastern side of the Wellsville Mountains.  The entire length of that trip I had spectacular views of fall color up the slopes...

The last one...

The last one...  The last full portrait of Saturn taken by Cassini before it crashed into Saturn.  It sure is a beautiful planet...   Via APOD, of course...

Paradise ponders: catch-up edition...

Paradise ponders: catch-up edition...  Just after dawn on the morning we learned that Debbie's mom had died, I walked out to our barn ... and saw what you see in the photo at right.  The sight of that flag makes me think of my mom and her love of all things crafty every time I see it.  I have no equivalent piece of memorabilia for Kate (Debbie's mom)...

Debbie arrived safely in Ohio yesterday afternoon.  Her sister Judy picked her up at the Cincinnati airport, then took her back to Judy's home near Oxford.  Debbie used gate-checking for the first time on her trip yesterday, and was very happy with the results: her luggage arrived in Cincinnati along with her. :)

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been working steadily on the deck project in between bad weather and all the other things happening in our life.  In the first photo below, you can see my clamping arrangement for one of the dowel-pinned butt joints I made in the rails (one in each of the four rails).  In the second photo you see one of the butt joints after gluing and sanding – they came out very well indeed, with an almost invisible joint.  Despite the good results, if I ever do this again I'm going to use a half lap joint instead – they're much stronger, though a bit more challenge to get perfect.  The third photo is of the cedar ceiling again, and the fourth is the finished redwood rails, after their last (of six!) coats of polyacrylic finish.  I used satin polyacrylic, lightly sanded with 600 grit paper between coats, and I'm very happy with the results.  Now I just hope it stands up to the weather as promised!  The fifth photo shows the (much less messy!) deck with the rails in place, and the last photo is a closeup of a rail and stanchion.  The color for the stanchion's finish was chosen by Abigail at Lazy K Wrought Iron – it sure looks good with that redwood!  Speaking of Lazy K, they're going to be making the metal framework for our deck stairs as the next project they do for us...

Yesterday when the sun broke out in the afternoon, I took a ride up Blacksmith Fork Canyon to Hardware Ranch.  It felt quite odd to do this by myself!  I didn't see a single animal, and only a couple of birds – but the fall color was just spectacular.  I had spotted the orange and red hillsides through the rain earlier in the day, but when the sun came out ... well, see for yourself:

I had about two hours of intermittent sunshine, and I made the most of it with the beautiful drive and several short walks.  I sure wish Debbie was here to see this – it's far better color than in the previous years we've seen.  Hopefully we'll see it again another year.  One thing I noted yesterday is that several species have yet to turn color – most particularly the quaking aspen, who have just barely begun to lose their green.  In another few days they should reach their peak – maybe Debbie will get to see them!

Paradise ponders, discombobulation edition...

Paradise ponders, discombobulation edition...  Sorry for the radio silence, folks – things have been a tad confused and hectic around here.  I just got back from the Salt Lake City airport, where I dropped Debbie off for her flight back to Ohio to attend her mom's viewing and funeral.  She'll be back home next Friday.

On Thursday, Debbie got some great grief therapy: she went shopping with our friend Michelle H., getting an outfit to wear at the events of next week.  She might have accidentally bought about six other outfits as well. :)  She came back home much cheered.  Bless you, Michelle!  My own much less effective efforts at therapy included conversations about the good memories about her mom, and playing long games of Mexican Train.  Those didn't come close to rivaling the effects of shopping with a good friend...

In between all the other stuff happening, I did finish the redwood 2x6 rails for our deck.  I'll be installing them today, weather permitting (rain is in the forecast, so there's some doubt about this).  Yesterday Randy Bingham and his sidekick Jeffrey showed up to install the stone on our two front porches.  They'll be back today to finish up the porch by our front door.  The porch to the sun room has a problem, though: the quarry cut one of the four pieces incorrectly.  Randy and Jeffrey took that back to the quarry yesterday, either for re-cutting (if they can) or cutting four new matching pieces for us.  It will be done on Monday, either way, and they'll have it down soon thereafter.

I have some photos of this stuff, but I'm not where I can post them right now.  I'll catch up on that another day (maybe tomorrow!)...

RIP, Mary Kathleen Geis Lorenz...

RIP, Mary Kathleen (“Kate”) Geis Lorenz...  Debbie's mom died last night, after living several years in a nursing home with gradually worsening Alzheimer's.  It's been a couple of years since Debbie was last able to hold a real conversation with her, and about a year since Kate last knew who Debbie was, so in a sense she's been gone for a while now.  With Kate's passing, all four of our parents are now gone.  That's a strange and lonely feeling...

I knew Kate fairly well, mainly from her many visits to us when we lived in California.  I have many fond memories of her.  She was at our wedding, which my own parents couldn't afford the travel to attend.  We went on several trips with her: to the La Sal Mountains in Utah, to Idaho, to Yellowstone, to Hawai'i, and up the California coast.  Those trips were huge adventures for her, as she had only rarely strayed more than a few dozen miles from her home in Liberty, Indiana.  Kate was a most excellent traveling companion: full of wonder at all the new things to see, always in good humor, and willing to put up with all the privations of traveling on a tight (sometimes nonexistent!) budget.  Debbie and I are lucky to have a brain full of these wonderful memories to remember her with.  Here are just a few:

• Four-wheeling in the La Sal Mountains near dusk, and coming upon a “tornado” of swallows.  We'd never seen this behavior before, nor have we since: something over 100 swallows flying in a tight vortex over a knoll, continuing even as we approached quite closely.  I remember Kate's face as she watched this, full of wonder.
• Visiting a “hummingbird lady” in Idaho, after getting directions from the owner of the B&B we were staying at.  This lady had perhaps 50 or 60 feeders, all crowded with hummers.  We sat under a covered porch and watched them with the hummingbird lady: a little old lady with a sunny disposition who was happy to share her flying jewels with anyone who happened by.  This was before we fed hummingbirds ourselves, and was the first time Debbie and I had ever seen anything like it.  Kate was transfixed, her eyes following those little hummers for the entire time we were there.  Uncharacteristically she was quiet, almost reverent.
• Pretending we'd put a gecko on her back in the cabin we were staying in, in Kalopa State Park on the big island of Hawai'i.  The hooting and screeching, and subsequent laughter, still brings a quick smile for me.  On this same trip, her luggage went to Pago Pago (literally!) instead of Kona.  She wore clothes borrowed from us until her luggage was found.  When it finally got to Kona, a taxi driver brought it to us, about 90 minutes from the airport.
• Four-wheeling down to Kealakekua Bay, and back up.  It rained while we were down on the bay, so I had to get the vehicle back up slippery wet lava to get back to the top.  This involved several occasions when I'd run at a steep slope as fast as I dared and let momentum carry us up.  Kate's screeching and hollering when I did this was hysterically funny; we were crying we were laughing so hard.
• Four-wheeling through the Parker Ranch (then still operating), and coming upon a cattle drive, complete with cowboys (paniolo) on horseback.  The cowboys stopped to talk with us, and Kate watched the entire affair with delight.
• Standing with her at the Monterey Aquarium, in front of the jellyfish tank.  Those jellyfish gave her the heebie-jeebies, but she seemed unable to move away from them, fascinated by their movement.

I could go on with these memories for a long time.  It's very comforting right now, just to have them...

Paradise ponders: dogs and rails edition...

Paradise ponders: dogs and rails edition...  Ipo, our newest field spaniel, acts like she's been part of the Paradise hooligan field spaniels forever.  At right you see her last night, just before she tucked in with us for the night.  I took about 25 flash photos of her, and this is the only one that wasn't completely wrecked – she just won't stand still when there's something exciting like bedtime at hand!  I'm (very pleasantly!) surprised how fast she's integrated with our herd.

This afternoon I walked out in our back yard with the three  youngest (Ipo, Mako, and Cabo) and watched them play and run (two minutes of happy field spaniels at left).  Ipo acts just like the other two, and all three are having a ball...

In between runs to Home Depot, feeding the birds, and other sundry chores, I managed to get a start on the redwood rails for the deck.  For the long rails, on the east and west sides of the deck, I joined two 92" pieces of 2x6 to make a 184" rail.  I used my dowel jig for the first time, and I'm very pleased with the results.  In the first photo below, you can see the jig attached to the bottom piece of 2x6, and the results in the top piece.  I've made a lot of dowel joints, but never have they been either this easy or this precise.  Those holes are positioned to within 1/100" of where they should be, maybe much better.  The second photo shows my gluing clamp arrangement in the foreground, and a glued rail in the background (lying flat).  These joints are darned near perfect – after a swipe or two of 200 grit sandpaper the joints will be impossible to feel...

Paradise ponders: the all-kinds-of-stuff, catch-up edition...

Paradise ponders: the all-kinds-of-stuff, catch-up edition...  Seems like ages since I've had a few calm minutes to sit down and blog!

Jimmy and Michelle made it back to the airport for their trip home on Saturday, after a stop at the Red Iguana for yet another outstanding meal.  We had a fifth person with us: Jay G. (more on him later), who hails from Michigan and was unfamiliar with “real” Mexican food (Taco Bell was most of his previous experience).  Because he was unfamiliar with the items on the menu, we helped him order: chicken tamales smothered with his pick of the mole sauces.  His surprised smile when he tasted the first bite was priceless. :)  There were not many molecules of deliciousness left on his plate when he was finished!

Last week Michelle and Debbie made a wonderful b'stilla (a traditional Moroccan delicacy, a kind of sweet and spicy chicken pie).  I mentioned this in a previous post, but failed to post the photos – I've fixed that below.  The two of them were disappointed that the phyllo dough didn't hold together, but Jimmy and I couldn't have cared less: it tasted great, and brought back fond memories of a restaurant in San Diego, long out of business...

Speaking of Jimmy (aka “the goat”): here's a snap of him and our border collie Race, who milked every bit of attention from both Jimmy and Michelle that he could get.

Sometime last week, our friend Michelle H. showed up with pillows for our mud room.  She made these for us, after she and Debbie picked out a bunch of different colored cloth to make them from.  They're beautiful!  The photo at left shows half of them; the bench on the other side of the mud room is similarly pillow-equipped.  The pillows also fixed a color problem that Debbie had with the mud room – the color of the new cabinetry didn't go well with the color of the floors and walls, and somehow the pillows were needed to fix that.  Such things are beyond my ken, but Debbie and Michelle were happy with the results, so I'm happy!  :)

While Michelle was visiting, I walked by her car and saw this bumper sticker on it.  Loved it!

On one of our rainy days last week, we spotted the season's first snow on the local mountains – it's just visible under the cloud bottoms on the photo at left.  There's a lot more snow up there today, as you'll see in a photo below...

Friday was quite hectic for our contractors putting in the sprinklers and sod: rain was due Friday night, and they were scrambling to get the sod all laid down in time.  They did it, but only just: the first rain started just as they finished.  By this morning we've had over an inch of rain fall here, and the newly sodded areas are thoroughly drenched. The first photo below shows one of the trucks that delivered our sod (three loads in all).  The truck is too big to get into our driveway, so they drove through our hay field to get as close to our house as they could, then drive a couple hundred yards with a fork lift to deliver each pallet of sod.  Each truckload delivered 28 pallets of sod; we used 62 in all.  The center photo shows the dogs on their first outing onto the sod-covered yard.  For the first ten minutes or so, there was non-stop sniffing by all five dogs.  After that, they started into the hard-core playing (especially Cabo and Mako, the younger two).  They played so hard that they've been flipping up corners of the laid sod. :)  All of them love their new back yard!  The last photo is from this morning, looking at our back yard: nicely smoothed, gently sloped for good drainage, and (for the moment) free of anything even resembling a weed.  The color differences, I'm told, come from the fact that the sod was cut from different parts of the field, with different exposures, soil types, etc.  That should all even out by the middle of next season.  Mark (the contractor) tells me that I'll likely need to mow it next week.  Amazing!

The fellow I mentioned earlier (Jay G.) was here on Saturday because he flew in from Michigan with our new field spaniel, Ipo.  He stayed with us on Saturday night, and we took him back to the airport yesterday for his trip home.  Ipo was an absolute sweetheart from (literally) the first moment we spotted her.  As I walked from the car to the curb to greet Jay, Ipo jumped up to investigate me, all curious and bold – but very gentle and respectful.  When we got her home, we introduced her to our other four dogs one at a time, out in the yard – no problems at all.  Within just a few minutes, she was bounding around our yard with all four of the others, and joyfully roughhousing with Cabo and Mako.  We've had a few minor tussles, always between Ipo and Mako, but they got it all straightened out by themselves in just seconds.  If you've had any experience with adult dogs meeting new adult dogs, you know that's about as good as it gets.  By this morning they're all acting like they're in the same pack – just wonderful from our perspective.  That's Ipo in the two snaps at right.  She's slightly larger than Cabo, quite a bit smaller than Mako; darker brown than they are in overall color, with a nice big white patch on her chest.  Her face is longer than Cabo's, narrower than Mako's, and her shoulders and thighs are narrower than either of them.  She's fast, clearly smart, very confident (in both personality and physicality), and graceful.  We've had her with us for two nights, working on our bonding, and she's been most respectful of us – but also occasionally (during the night) coming up to see us for some reassurance.  She's had three homes in the last two months, so we're paying a lot of attention to making her feel confident of this one – her last one, though we have no good way to tell her that.  Debbie and I are a bit surprised that even though we have four field spaniels, they are four very distinct animals, both in appearance and in personality.  There are no problems telling this group apart! :)

I'll leave you today with a photo I took this morning.  I was driving to our vet just before 8 am, to drop off Laki for a couple of minor surgeries.  I had to stop to capture this: the Wellsville Mountains in the early morning sunlight.  This is the sort of display – common here – that causes Debbie or I to say: “We live in a postcard...”  Indeed we do...

Paradise ponders: shrimp burgers, electrical details, and the endless Mexican Train game...

Paradise ponders: shrimp burgers, electrical details, and the endless Mexican Train game...  Well, we had our shrimp burgers yesterday afternoon and they were delicious.  They were followed up by some most excellent chocolate mousse, homemade from scratch by the dynamic duo of Debbie and Michelle.  The chocolate in it was Callebaut, the best we know of for cooking.  There are several more servings of that mousse sitting in our refrigerator...

Yesterday morning I made scrapple and eggs, as planned.  The scrapple was good, but quite different than what I grew up with.  The biggest difference in the ingredients is that instead of just corn meal as the cereal component, this stuff has wheat flour and oats in addition.  Also, it's much less spicy than other scrapple I've had, and more “porky”.  None of those differences were bad, and I quite enjoyed it – and yet, it's not the same as the scrapple I'm familiar with, so I couldn't help being a little disappointed.  Nevertheless, the scrapple we bought won't last long, I'm sure.  :)

Jimmy and I finished up all the electrical work on the deck last night.  It's beautiful!  There are now nine 100 watt equivalent (but actually 17 watt LED) bulbs on the deck ceiling, giving us bright, shadowless light across the entire deck.  There are also four duplex GFI outlets, two on the wall of the house and two on the ceiling, away from the house.  Now all we need is the grill and nice enough weather!  Well, that's not quite true...  I still have to put up the rails.  I have 8 pieces of 8' long 2x6s of clear redwood heartwood.  These will be cut up into four rails, each of which will be made of two sections dowel-pegged together.  I've got to do that cutting and doweling, then some routing (to round off corners, sanding, finishing (with three or four coats of clear acrylic polyurethane), and then mount them into the stanchions.  I also need to caulk and paint a bunch of stuff on the house wall, and on the outsides of the deck ceiling.  The weather next week promises to be great for all this work...

Yesterday we played an epic Mexican train game.  On all our previous games we've played partial games, generally using half the starting numbers (0..12), in order to keep the game to just a couple hours.  Yesterday we did the entire thing, a total of 13 rounds, each one lasting around a half hour.  It was a lot of fun, and there was much merriment and laughter (helped by generous quantities of alcohol :), but it sure lasted a long time!

This morning we head to SLC to pick up our new dogger (Ipo) at the SLC airport, then lunch at the Red Iguana, drop off Jimmy and Michelle at the airport, pick up bird seed at Wild Birds Unlimited, visit the southern SLC Trader Joe's, and then finally head home.  After ten days with Jimmy and Michelle, our house is going to seem quiet and empty – though the presence of Ipo should cause a bit of a ruckus!  :)