A favorite branch...

A favorite branch...  This is from Botany Photo of the Day, by Daniel Mosquin.  Beautiful, it is.  You can sign up for this free email here, where you can also read more about this Magnolia sargentiana...

Paradise ponders, despondent border collie edition...

Paradise ponders, despondent border collie edition...  It's a beautiful morning here in Paradise: scattered clouds in a blue, blue sky, snow-capped mountains all lit up around us, long shadows on the greening valley floor.  It's the kind of a morning that makes us say that we live in a postcard.  For my younger readers, here's what a postcard is.  The photo at right is someone else's photo from an actual postcard of Cache Valley (where we live).

This morning I fed our four dogs, as always.  From their behavior you'd think we starved them for weeks in between feedings. :)  I feed them in a particular order: Cabo, Mako, Miki, Race, as once they've learned the order they all behave better.  If I feed them in random order, they'll all squabble for the right to be first.  Because poor well-behaved Race is at the end of the line, he gets to watch me feed three other dogs before it's finally his turn.  At that point he's always a drooling bucket of despondency.  Even worse, from his perspective, is that I always make him sit and stay while I put the food bowl down (to protect my hands from accidental injury when he attacks the bowl).  He can't eat until I release him from the stay.  The first photo below is what he looks like every morning after I put the food bowl down while he's still in a stay.  He's totally focused on my lips, waiting for the word “okay” to come out.  He's also drooling about 4 gallons/minute.  The second photo I took approximately 3 picoseconds after uttering that “okay”.  About a third of the food is already in his stomach. :)

Paradise ponders, spring walk, oxide, and oven edition...

Paradise ponders, spring walk, oxide, and oven edition...  I took Race and Miki (right) for our usual non-winter two mile walk this morning, first time since last fall.  The road was still a bit muddy, but it was walkable nonetheless.  The fields are just starting to green up, but those fields that are going to be replanted have already been plowed and harrowed by the busy farmers.  Right now the fields are so muddy that a tractor would sink right in, I think. :)  But the next few days are supposed to be fair weather, and they'll probably get dry enough for the farmers to plant – and I suspect they'll do exactly that.  This coming Saturday we're due for another big rainstorm, just the right thing for a freshly planted field...

This morning I set up sawhorses and drop cloth, and got all my hazardous substance gear (face shield, rubber gloves, etc.).  Then I got to work on something new to me: bleaching the redwood stairs.  I was a bit hesitant to even try this stuff, as the chemicals involved are nasty: concentrated hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide.  The first photo below shows the surface of the big landing after the bleach had been on for about 10 hours.  It will remain there until tomorrow morning, when I'll rinse it off (which will get rid of the splotches visible in that photo) and let it air dry.  At that point it will be ready for final sanding, gluing, and then finishing.  Progress!  The second photo shows both bleached areas and unbleached areas (I didn't bother bleaching areas that would be invisible in glue joints).  The color difference is pretty dramatic, no?  That stuff actually works!  It wasn't very hard to apply, either: just a 3" synthetic brush to slop it on with.  The chemicals have the viscosity of water, so brushing it in was a cinch.

A technician showed up today to fix our oven.  This made his third visit for the purpose, and the second part being replaced.  The new part (a control board) made no difference at all, unfortunately.  The poor guy has spent 10 hours or so at our house at this point, futilely working on this damned oven.  His company is taking a bath on this job, as they charge a fixed price for their labor.  Today we pulled the plug on the effort (our decision, after four months with a non-functional oven).  We're going to trash this oven and get a new one.  One that, as Debbie says, actually works.  What a concept!  Almost certainly it will be a Bosch oven, as we have several of their appliances at this point and we absolutely love them...

A great day for a bonfire...

A great day for a bonfire...  It was cloudy and drizzly, exactly as forecast.  From a safety perspective, that's perfect weather for a big bonfire – no matter what happens, I wouldn't set the valley on fire. :)  I started the fire with a bit of packing material and a bag full of shredded documents (those burn hot!), and within 60 seconds of striking my first match I had a roaring fire going (first photo), despite the steady drizzle.  I worked steadily at this for about 3 hours, dumping 18 large forkfuls of brush on the fire.  Each one of those was over a cubic yard, compacted – I'd guess around 25 or 30 cubic yards of compressed brush in all.  The tractor did all the heavy lifting while at the same time keeping me at a comfortable distance from the fire.  That was one hot fire – so hot that I could see raindrops flashing into steam before they even hit the bonfire.  When it rained heavily (which it did only briefly), that steam made a sort of dome around the fire.  As I write this the fire is down to the last embers.  I've spread it out over 100 square feet or so to cool.  Done!

Paradise ponders, all banged up and blackberries edition...

Paradise ponders, all banged up and blackberries edition...  The area where I live is a big berry growing area, and the biggest of the berry farms is a mile from our house.  When they're in season it would be hard to beat our local berries.  But they're certainly not in season right now, so when I read this Neoneocon post about wonderful fresh blackberries at (of all places!) Walmart, I knew I'd have to try them. 

She was talking about blackberries by Driscoll's, a company that grows blackberries in Mexico and is working hard to improve them.  More on their genetic work here.  And if you, like me, had no idea what a °Bx is, here's an explanation (it's sugar content, basically).

So yesterday we were in our local Walmart, and Debbie thought to check the produce counter.  The Driscoll's berries were there!  I bought two pints.  This morning I poured about a half pint into my morning muesli.  Heaven, I tell you.  Heaven.  Heaven is Rosehill's decadent Creamline milk on Bob's Red Mill muesli with Driscoll's blackberries generously mixed in.  That's it, exactly!

For the past year, our two crate-trained puppies (Cabo and Mako) have been getting old, mangled towels as their bedding material.  We started out with an actual dog bed for them, but they shredded them within seconds.  So old dead towels has been their fate.  Yesterday we decided to try them with beds again, so we hied ourselves to Walmart and bought a couple of inexpensive, washable stuffed beds for them.  Last night was the first experiment.  Two things happened, both of them good.  First thing: the beds survived unscathed.  Second thing: the puppies did not wake us at two or three AM, as has been their wont.  Instead, we slept in until almost eight AM.  If you know us, then you know that's like normal people sleeping in until two PM or so. :)  That was the most restful night's sleep I've had in quite a few months, and no drugs or alcohol was involved.  Could be a coincidence ... but it could be those beds.  Oh, how I hope it's the beds!

I worked on the sun room stairs most of yesterday.  The first part of the day was sanding: 60, 80, and 100 grit on the belt sander, then 220 grit on the random orbital sander.  By the time I was done with that, you could have used the surface of those stairs as a mirror.  Then, per my lovely bride's instructions, I purposefully ruined it.  :)  What she really wanted for those stairs was reclaimed wood, but obtaining pieces of a suitable species of reclaimed wood in the desired dimensions would have been both challenging and outrageously expensive.  So I'm “manufacturing” some simulated reclaimed wood through a process of prolonged beatings and some creative finishing.  Yesterday was the beatings part.

In the first photo below you can see most of my basic tools: a fairly random collection of clean hardware, and a polyurethane-and-lead-shot dead blow hammer.  The dead blow hammer is much easier to control than an ordinary hammer, and the relatively soft head splatters the hardware much less.  I also used one other tool, not pictured: a small (5 ounce) ball peen hammer, to make some dents.

I got into a very mechanical, repetitive mode while doing this: hammering with my right hand while randomly moving the hardware about with my left.  Every 60 seconds or so I stopped and collected splattered hardware off the floor, which also gave my right arm a bit of a break.  Altogether I spent about three hours hammering away, and in the last photo you can see a closeup of the results.  It's enough to make a grown woodworker cry, with that beautiful hunk of redwood wrecked...

The next step is bleaching, with a two-part bleach system of sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide.  That work needs to be done outdoors, and today (with gloomy skies rain in our forecast) is not the day for that.  So today I will be burning the giant pile of brush I collected last year.  I got my burn permit (online here, instantly delivered, and free – so different than California!) and I'm all ready to go...

Paradise ponders, special request gluey liverwurst edition...

Paradise ponders, special request gluey liverwurst edition...  Because one of you just had to ask, here's the redwood sanding dust and glue filler material I've been using.  The first photo shows a nifty blue silicone glue dish I picked up a few weeks ago, with a pile of redwood “flour” and a blob of Titebond III glue.  The second photo shows the stuff after mixing with a putty knife.  It's got roughly the color and texture of liverwurst, though it smells much better. :)  I mix it fairly thick so that I can press it into cracks with the putty knife, then scrape it level with the same knife. 

Once you mix it up you've got about 10 minutes of working time.  Cleanup is crazy easy: just scrape the excess you can easily extract into a trash can, then wash it up under warm water.  It could hardly be any easier than that!  Once it hardens for 24 hours, the stuff is easy to sand and paint.  One lesson I've learned: you'll want to press it into the cracks as hard as you possibly can with the putty knife, so that the paste infiltrates the rough sides of the crack.  Adherence is much better that way...

Paradise ponders, mud, mueseli, and Musk edition...

Paradise ponders, mud, muesli, and Musk edition...  I saw the results of a snap poll taken last night, asking 120 random adult Americans what the significance of that day's launch of a Falcon 9 was.  Only 43 of them knew what a Falcon 9 was – and of them, only 17 knew that yesterday was the first attempted reuse of a rocket booster capable of putting a payload in orbit.  It was also the first attempt to re-land such a booster.  Both attempts were successful, something I suspect is likely to figure as an inflection point in mankind's exploration of space.  The 13 minute video at right is the first edited highlight reel; I'm sure more complete and produced videos will be forthcoming if you're interested.

The story of SpaceX (the company that made the Falcon 9) is a powerful argument for the primacy of capitalism as the engine behind the advancement of mankind.  Their goal from founding was to lower the cost of exploiting space (whether for manned or unmanned missions) by creating relatively simple reusable rockets.  Prior to SpaceX, all rockets were thrown away after a single use – and each of those rockets cost many millions of dollars.  The floor of the Atlantic Ocean east of Cape Canaveral is littered with the wreckage of thousands of such used-once rockets.  Our government space agency (NASA) insisted for decades that the notion of a reusable rocket was impossible on the face of it.  Later they changed their tune a bit, and said it might be possible but the development cost would be prohibitive.  Now NASA is a big customer of SpaceX, who did what NASA said was impossible – and did it with a tiny fraction of NASA's budget for a single year.  If they had any honor, NASA would close their ludicrously expensive development facilities and turn over their development to SpaceX and its competitors.  I won't hold my breath on that one.

Anyway, a tip of the hat to the entire SpaceX team this morning for a job spectacularly well done.  The founder and CEO of SpaceX is Elon Musk, who is also the founder of PayPal, Solar City and Tesla Motors, as well as the originator of the Hyperloop idea and most recently the launch of Neuralink.  If you were looking for support for the Great Man theory of history, his story would be a pretty good place to start. :)

A couple of weeks ago I went to our optometrist for an eye exam, mainly because my glasses weren't doing the job any more – especially close up.  My prescription had changed significantly, as I've previously posted about.  Last week I received my new glasses and wore them for a week.  They were significantly better for close up work, so much so that I could wear and forget them for all my woodworking, computer work, and reading at distances greater than a foot or so.  There was, however, one small problem: my distance vision was compromised during the daytime – and at night was downright horrible.  So back to the optometrist I went, and without any hesitation he re-examined me, decided I needed to change my distance prescription slightly, and ordered new lenses for me.  All this was at no cost to me.  My new glasses should be here on Monday or Tuesday next week.

Yesterday Mark T. and his helper Dave went to work on the trench for the new line of risers we're putting outside our back yard fence.  About an hour after they started (and made great progress!), the sky opened up and the rain commenced.  Within a half hour, the nice firm soil they'd been working with turned into something closer to peanut butter – and the surface an oily semi-liquid form of mud.  They parked the trencher and left; there really wasn't any other choice.  Now things will have to dry out for a day or two before they can go back to work.  Of course, we have more rain in the forecast for today and Sunday, so the drying out may take a bit longer!

Last week I came across something I'd actually completely given up on ever finding in the U.S.: quality muesli that wasn't sweetened (or at least, wasn't very sweet).  I've been eating hot cereals from Bob's Red Mill ever since I moved up here.  Last week, looking over the display of their cereals, I spotted this muesli – and saw that the ingredients contained no added sugar or corn syrup.  The only sweeteners were dates and raisins.  If you're of fan of traditional muesli (which you can easily find in Europe), you're gonna love this stuff.  Highly recommended!

I finished all the milling to be done on the stairs yesterday.  The first two photos show the jig and results of milling the end of the big landing (this will be the side facing our bedroom door).  The second two show the jig and results of milling a groove in the ribs to hold the cross-member that will prevent them from wobbling.  These were the last bits of milling on the entire project; now all I have left is sanding, beating (to simulate use), bleaching, and finishing.  :)

This afternoon we'll be heading to Los Primos for a special treat.  Our waitress on Tuesday told us that they'll be making Salvadoran stuffed peppers as a special today.  Recipes we found online convinced us that these were certain to be a delicious feast – so off we'll go!  Hopefully we'll be bringing our friend Michelle H. too...

Stairs, continued...

Stairs, continued...  Just finished milling out the four grooves on the underside of the two steps that will accommodate the ribs.  It all came out very nicely!  It's kind of amazing what you can do with a router and a couple of straight edges...

Then I did a trial fit of the steps onto the ribs; first time I've done that.  I had to sand about 1/64" off of one of the ribs for it to fit into the groove, but once I did that: voila!  That's a good approximation of what the stairs will look like once installed.  There's a cross-member going between the two ribs, and it will be (barely) visible.  The finish will, of course, dramatically change the appearance.  But so far as the shape of the stairs goes, this is a very good approximation...

“Just another bad mutation...”

“Just another bad mutation...”  George Carlin, in a performance I watch periodically just to refresh my perspective...

Stairs ... a little machining...

Stairs ... a little machining...  So this evening I jigged up a router template (first photo) to cut one of the grooves in the bottom of the stairs, just the big landing step for now.  Both steps are in the pipe clamps.  The other clamps are holding the jig in place, and the bags of lead shot are ensuring that the jig lies down flat on the step.  In the second photo you can see the result after I ran the router through the template (but before I cleaned up).  It took three passes to cut a half inch deep groove, 1.5" wide.  I cut the groove a tad longer than it actually needs to be, so that the rib will fit in nicely without worrying about the radius of the router bit.  After I cleaned out the groove with compressed air, I did a test fit of the rib – perfect fit!

Let the trenching begin!

Let the trenching begin!  I've been trying for two years now to get sprinklers installed in our yard.  I could write several thousand words just describing all the various things that have gone wrong on the three separate attempts I've made.  But today is a red-letter day on this project, because today the first trenching on the project occurred.

If I were to stop right there, you'd think that great things were likely happening.  But about 30 seconds after I snapped the last photo below, an alarm started sounding on the skid-steer – the engine coolant was approaching a critical high temperature.  Oh, noz!  A little quick detective work on Mark T.'s part showed that there was a coolant leak, and that the coolant level was low.  Mark tells me that today's work is the first time any of this gear has been used since last fall, and he's had coolant leaks develop over the winter before.  So now he's off to get some more coolant, and to gather his tools to find and fix the leak.  Sigh.

Ignoring that little problem, though, his trenching machine is a pretty cool little gadget.  It's powered hydraulically, through the enormous hydraulic pump on the skid-steer: 24 GPM vs. the 5.5 GPM on my tractor, despite the nearly identical horsepower rating of the machines.  The teeth on the trencher drag soil to the surface, where an auger scoots it out of the way to the left of the driver.  It makes a very neat trench about 6" wide, and it does so quite quickly compared with a backhoe.  On the other hand, it can only do skinny little trenches – if you need one any wider than 6", you're out of luck...

Paradise ponders, Medicare edition...

Paradise ponders, Medicare edition...  So yesterday Debbie and I visited Sam Winward, our health insurance agent.  He's been very helpful to us the past couple of years, helping us navigate the (many) challenges of Obamacare insurance for older individuals.  Yesterday was the day we'd set aside for him to educate us about Medicare.  I turn 65 this year, so it's time for me to join that system.  Sam told me last year that I was really going to like switching to Medicare, so I wasn't too worried about what I'd learn today.

Though there are a mind-boggling number of options available (unlike with Obamacare!), it didn't take long for us to home in on a low-deductible Part F plan.  While this was the most expensive option available, the price is so low (roughly $400/month for me, $265 of which is the baseline Medicare premium) compared with our current plan, and the benefits so much better, that it was basically a complete no-brainer.  When I say the benefits were so much better, I mean: nationwide network of providers, no deductible, no co-pays, large drug formulary, no caps on hospitalization or physical therapy, and so on. 

How is this even possible at such a low cost?  Well, fundamentally it's because of two things:

• The baseline Medicare premium is heavily subsidized by the Medicare taxes we all pay on wages.  For me, that's a little over a quarter million dollars over my working life.  That's far more than would be required to subsidize my health insurance, so as an above-average wage earner my taxes subsidizing a lot of other people's insurance as well.
• The Part F supplemental is mainly insuring against the risk of exceeding the baseline Medicare's caps (especially for hospitalization).  That part of it resembles an old-fashioned major medical policy – the kind of policy I really wish we could have now instead of this #%^(&$# Obamacare policy we have.

Anyway, obviously Sam was right.  The health insurance situation under Medicare is way better than as an ancient Obamacare individual who isn't broke...

Right after that meeting, we went to Los Primos for what is becoming our Tuesday afternoon ritual: a meal of their outstanding beef and vegetable soup.  After we'd seated ourselves, the waitress we see most often (but who wasn't serving us yesterday) came over to say hello.  We ended up having a nice discussion about, of all things, stuffed peppers.  It turns out that stuffed peppers are something of a Salvadoran specialty, and they're making them on Friday.  If they're anything like these, they look great!

The day I have to wear a tie to fly...

The day I have to wear a tie to fly ... is the day I'll stop flying!

2.7 Billion views...

2.7 Billion views...  This says something about today's world, but I have no idea what!  This is the most-viewed video on YouTube.  Here's a list of the top 500 videos, ranked by number of views.  Nearly all are music videos by performers I've never even heard of, much less listened to...

Our man-killing window holes are now covered...

Our man-killing window holes are now covered...  And very nice-looking they are! These are the two covers that we traveled to Kalispell, Montana to pick up.  My brother Scott helped me install them today.  Both of them fit perfectly – another outstanding piece of work from the wonderful folks at Lazy K Wrought Iron!

I don't think I'll go out of my way to try this particular delicacy...

I don't think I'll go out of my way to try this particular delicacy...  Even though it's seafood, which I love.  Because it's fermented for six freakin' months, and I don't have to try that to know that I don't love it.

This stuff is from Sweden, it's called surströmming, and here's more than you ever wanted to know about it.  Watching the video is enough to convince me that Sweden should be quarantined from the rest of humanity, permanently.  First Volvos, then Abba, now surströmming?  That's three strikes, and they should be out!

Paradise ponders, burgers and Foyle's edition...

Paradise ponders, burgers and Foyle's edition...  We had kind of a lazy day yesterday.  I finished some chores in the house, built the second rib for the stairs, and then came inside for our afternoon meal: burgers.  That is, I had a burger (at right).  That's 3/4 pound of Macey's 85/15 burger (all that fat makes it delicious!), on a Macey's Asiago-and-onion roll, with avocado, ketchup, and sweet pickle relish.  Yum!  Debbie made her share of the ground beef into an enormous taco salad, low in sodium but apparently very tasty, as she ate the entire (gigantic!) thing.

After that meal we were so full that any resembling ambition flew off to an obscure country in southwest Asia.  So we crawled upstairs (slowly and carefully), and watched the last three Foyle's War episodes in a binge.  That's five hours of television, something I haven't done for decades.  The very last episode is a real shocker, ending with (literally) a big bang.  We're kind of sorry to be done with it.  But no matter, at our age we'll probably forget all about it within a few weeks, and can start it over as though it were brand new to us. :)

Today's big project for me is to help my brother Scott with his taxes.  I finished mine last week, except for the filing.  Doing my taxes never fails to put me in a bad mood, but the trip to Montana immediately following really helped pick me up.  In the future, I'm going to have to plan something nice for the few days immediately following tax prep.  It will help tamp down the anger I can't help feeling as I watch my hard-earned dollars being stolen by the government so they can waste it on something I don't believe in.

Before my brother gets here, I'm working on the stairs project.  I did an hour or so of sanding before I came up to write this post, and I'll probably go do some more in a little while.  Sanding is amazingly relaxing, and it's very good arm exercise. :)

Back to the stairs project!

Back to the stairs project!  The stairs I'm building use a couple of “ribs” to hold up the big landing and the smaller stair.  These ribs will stand vertically, their bottom on the floor and their top inserted into a 1/2" deep slot routed in the bottoms of the redwood stairs.  I just finished fabricating the first one.

I started with a piece of redwood 2x12, cut to the right length on my chop saw.  Then I ripped it to the right maximum width on my table saw, and made the cuts that I could on my band saw.  The result is in the first photo below.  If you embiggen that one, you can see a couple of 1" cuts I made to make a notch – but the last cut (a 2 1/2" horizontal cut) there was no way to get the band saw in there.  I could have drilled a hole in there and then used the scroll saw, but that saw is not very good at straight lines (at least it isn't when I'm using it :).  So I decided to try chiseling that piece out, something I haven't done very often.  That's the middle photo, and it turned out to be much easier than I'd imagined it would be.  That notch will be invisible, so it didn't really have to be a nice straight line – but I'm glad it turned out that way anyhow.  The last photo shows the finished rib.  Now I need to make another one just like it...

Paradise ponders, sea bass and spinach edition...

Paradise ponders, sea bass and spinach edition...  My beautiful bride fed us in style yesterday afternoon, with the dish at right.  That's fresh sea bass, grilled perfectly, with a lovely sauce over it, on rice and steamed spinach.  That was great!

We ended up not doing much yesterday. :)  Our main activity was watching a couple of episodes of Foyle's War, one of our all-time favorite TV series, and one of the very few that I actually enjoy watching...

I'm not really surprised...

I'm not really surprised...  But I do feel the doom coming on...