Paradise ponders, slippery mud, wet wood, and sushi edition...

Paradise ponders, slippery mud, wet wood, and sushi edition...  I was able to spend most of day yesterday (and some this morning, too!) working on my stairs project.  In the first photo below, you see the results of the first round of sanding off the black (using 100 grit and the orbital sander).  The large landing has one round of sanding done (second photo is a closeup), while the smaller step is unsanded.  Quite a difference!  I ended up doing two rounds at 100 grit and a final round at 220 grit, and in the end I was pretty happy with how it looked.  The black color stayed in the dents as I'd originally intended, but it also was infused in some other areas in a way that resembles how wood weathers.  All good!  Then I started applying stain: two coats yesterday, another this morning.  The result (still wet) is in the third photo.  I think I'm going to stop at three, as it looks pretty good.  The stain has the side-effect of making the blackened areas a bit indistinct, again more like wood actually weathers.  Once these stairs are in the sun room, the little bit of red still visible will gradually fade, and the white parts will yellow slightly – both of these effects will, I think, improve the appearance.  So far I've only stained the top; later today I'll flip it over and start the process on the bottom.  By tomorrow I believe I'll be applying the matte polyurethane...

We went out for our lunch yesterday to a local favorite: Black Pearl.  I had sushi (my seafood nanudo roll at right); Debbie had their house pad thai.  Both were excellent!  We were both stuffed by the time we rolled out of there, and Debbie had some leftovers, too.  Not me. :)  On the way there we had an odd thing happen with the Model X.  From appearances, the GPS stopped reporting the car's position to the navigation system.  The car's symbol was stuck in one place on the map.  Nothing I did made any difference at all.  After we ate and started home, the position was still stuck – but only for a couple of blocks.  Then it suddenly started working again, and has been since then.  I've no idea what might have caused that.  The Tesla forums have a couple of mentions of the same problem, with the exact same outcome, so I'm not too worried about it.

Last night and early this morning we got slammed with a big rainstorm.  The snapshot at right shows the total storm accumulation; we got just over a half inch.  That wouldn't be so bad except that our soils were already super-saturated with water – so nearly all the water from this storm is either sitting on the surface or turning the first inch or so of soil into a slurry.  Some areas to our west and southwest got over 2" in this storm.  These are areas that are normally very dry, so this will likely cause a burst of plant growth – and wildflowers!  We have another storm approaching, too – starting around noon today we're expecting rain for 12 hours or so, with another half inch or a bit more in precipitation.  All this water is going to make our sprinkler project quite a bit harder.  I suspect Mark T. will be waiting a few days for things to dry out at least a little.  After today we've got 10 days with little chance of rain in the forecast, with highs in the upper 50s or low 60s, light winds, and lots of sun.  A few days of that and we'll dry out a bit, I hope!  The farmers around here who didn't plant this week are going to have to wait another week or so before their tractors can make it through the fields...

Apple dribbles out some hope...

Apple dribbles out some hope...  I've held off buying any Apple desktop product for over four years now.  Two separate problems have stopped me.  The first was that the new Mac Pro (sometimes called the “trash can”), while interesting from an engineering perspective, was so constrained on upgrades that I couldn't imagine shelling out the bucks for it.  The second was that the iMacs, while very cool products, had limited memory and storage options, just not enough horsepower for me to be happy with them as my development desktop.  So I've been stumbling along on my nearly five-year-old Macbook Pro, which even as I write is busy overheating (as I can tell by its fan sounding like a Pratt & Whitney turbojet) in its stand.

In the past month or so I've been pondering a radical switch for me: moving my desktop to Linux, on a conventional PC.  In that hardware world, getting something with specs I'd be happy with is almost trivial these days.  Furthermore, the price would be substantially less than any Mac would be.  I'd even gotten to the point of starting to check out specific hardware configurations, and pondering just which distro of Linux I'd move to.  I've gotten very used to my Mac tools, though, so this move was not one I was really looking forward to.

Then a couple of days ago Apple did something really surprising for them: they held a meeting with the press and talked about their future plans for “Pro level” Mac products.  I can't recall any similar forward-looking announcement by Apple – they must be really feeling the heat from disappointed “Pro” users, of which I am one.  And what they announced is exactly what I've been waiting for, on both fronts: a modular (upgradable) Mac Pro, and a “Pro” version of the iMac.

So I guess my poor little Macbook Pro will be overheating for a while longer.  I sure hope that fan holds up!

Paradise ponders, boring meeting, giant valve, and blackened wood edition...

Paradise ponders, boring meeting, giant valve, and blackened wood edition...  Last night was the annual shareholders' meeting of the Paradise Irrigation company.  I've attended the past two meetings, both of them interesting mainly because there were some controversial issues to deal with.  Last night's meeting was about as routine and boring as such a meeting can be, mainly because (a) Porcupine Reservoir, the source of our irrigation water, is already overflowing with much more water to come when the snow melts, and (b) the finances of the company were in far better shape than they were last year.  Our Board members were all re-elected by acclamation, so even the voting was boring.  The meeting was over in about 30 minutes.

On Wednesday evening I applied the first coat of the finish on the stairs.  It did not go as expected, nor as my one past experience went.  This coat is a dark grey that I intended to have lodge in all the dents to highlight them.  I expected to be able to just wipe it off the flat surfaces, like the similar product I've used in the past.  From the first moment I wiped it onto the wood it was obvious that this product was more like a stain, soaking into the flat surfaces.  Once I'd made the first wipe, though, I was committed – whatever I did needed to be done over the entire surface.  So I wiped it on everywhere, with the result you see at right.  Yikes!  When I was done, I figured out what happened.  Being the dummy that I am, I assumed this product was similar to the one I'd used in the past, and I didn't read the instructions.  Had I done so, I'd have noticed that you're supposed to apply this product only after you've sealed the wood.  In other words, this stuff was supposed to go on as a second coat, not the first coat.  Dang it!  I'm going to have a lot of sanding to do to get rid of this, as black stairs are the last thing we want.  Hopefully the dark color will remain in the dents after I sand it, so the end result may be just fine anyway – just a lot more work than I'd expected!

Mark T. and Dave were here all day yesterday.  One of the things they did was to start the installation of a gigantic gate valve.  In the first photo below you can see how they cut a hole in the existing 6" water pipe.  Note that the irrigation system is empty all winter, and won't be pressurized for several weeks yet.  That's why they can work on it now without causing geysers.  :)  In the second photo you see the valve body (the red part) before they installed it.  The last photo shows Mark in the process of installing it, and there you can get a good idea of the scale of this beast.  They're all done with the installation except for the step of torquing down the bolts on the various pieces (about 40 bolts in all).  The bolts and nuts on the valve required a 1 1/8" socket (huge!) and will be torqued to 50 ft/lbs.  Mark's bringing the required tools today, and then our shiny, new, gigantic valve will be complete.  They'll be filling in the hole, and installing a vertical pipe that will let us use a “key” to turn the valve on and off.  This will make the valve nearly invisible, especially since the vertical pipe's upper end will be hidden by our willow tree's trunk.  This will give us the ability to shut off the water supply to just Tim and myself, so that when we (inevitably) break a riser or dig through a pipe, we can shut off just us and not our neighbors.

Paradise ponders, playful puppies, gray foxes, and holey yards edition...

Paradise ponders, playful puppies, gray foxes, and holey yards edition...  Yesterday afternoon I took little Cabo for a mile-and-a-half walk, mostly with the aim of doing some leash training.  She did very well, actually – being alone (specifically, without her brother Mako along to make trouble) she was fully engaged in what we were doing and learned her leash-limits quickly.  She was also smelling absolutely everything in sight, especially any little piles of dried grass that might hide a vole within them.  She flushed several of them, but her snapping jaws missed by fractions of an inch each time.  She certainly tried hard, though!

The highlight of the walk happened on the way back.  I was looking at the road ahead, Cabo just ahead and to my right.  Suddenly she went completely berserk, bouncing off the end of the leash, barking like crazy.  When I looked where she was looking, I saw a beautiful gray fox about 50' away, loping quickly away from us while staring back at the fearsome Cabo.  Nice!

Our back yard now has about ten holes in it, dug by Mark T. and his sidekick Dave.  They're locating all the relevant pipes and fittings, and they've now dug out a place to put a 6" gate valve in.  This valve will very conveniently control the flow to our sprinkler system along with Tim's irrigation system (a mix of hand-line and underground sprinklers).  Both Tim and I will appreciate that.  But in the meanwhile, our back yard is a glorious mess – it looks like a WWI battlefield with trenches and places where artillery shells exploded!

Paradise ponders: monetary disappointment, another hole-digger and glue on the stairs edition...

Paradise ponders: monetary disappointment, another hole-digger and glue on the stairs edition...  The fellow at right (Dave) is standing in a hole that he dug in our back yard this morning.  Dave works for Mark T., the contractor who's working on getting sprinklers installed into my yard.  His day job is professor of political science at Utah State University, but when he's not teaching he's working for Mark doing much less frustrating work. :)  He waxes poetic about the joys of digging holes, which instantly reminded me of my dad (as it would anyone who knew him) – for my dad's “hobby” (as we liked to tease him) was digging holes.  As with Dave, the bigger the better.

Dave made an unexpected discovery upon digging this hole.  What he expected to find was an elbow on a 6" diameter irrigation water line.  The plan was to cut the line here, tap into the source side for the water for our new sprinkler system, and use the other side as a tunnel underneath our driveway (for a 4" pipe for the new sprinklers, plus a bunch of control wires).  But he didn't find that elbow.  Instead, he found a 3" diameter pipe for the source of the irrigation water, connecting into a 6" pipe that runs a quarter mile south of there.  With some more work, we figured out that whoever installed this system connected from one 6" main through a 50' long piece of 3" pipe into the second 6" diameter main.  That's like having an interstate highway with a few miles of one-lane country road in the middle of it!  None of us can imagine any good reason for doing this.  I shouldn't be surprised any longer at the crazy things the previous owner did, but this one probably is the new one for top billing...

This morning I rinsed the sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide residue from the wood I bleached yesterday.  That took a lot of elbow grease, but the result was worth it.  That bleach really works well!  Then early this afternoon I enlisted our friend Michelle H. to help me glue up the ribs and the landing board.  The photo at right shows that assembly in clamps.  When I made that landing, I glued it up with a (very) slight bow in it, so that the center was slightly higher than the ends.  That allowed me to use the simple clamping arrangement you see here, with the blocks in the middle pressed down by a pair of clamps on a board.  The result is a nice flat surface as the clamp presses the landing board down onto the flat surface of the ribs.  I've had better results with a center clamp like this than with either a perfectly flat board or a bowed board the other way – I'm pretty sure that's because of the single clamp in the center, as you see here.

A couple of months ago, I posted about a book I'd read about: The End of Error, by John Gustafson.  I've finished it now, and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed.  My biggest hope is that he'd devised a good way to implement floating point arithmetic such that it could (practically) be used to represent money.  I judge that he failed to reach that lofty goal.  He did, however, have a few ideas that I really like.  One of them is the notion of using a bit to specify whether the floating point number is exact or an approximation.  That's a valuable piece of information when you're dealing with money.  Unfortunately, he specifies the approximations as truncations of the actual value – whereas for money you would want the rounded approximation.  Another very interesting idea is the notion of allowing encodings where the precision is specified as part of each number.  That would allow much more compact encodings on average in most applications, assuming you don't actually need a fixed length.  Those are a couple of great ideas that could be incorporated in a pragmatic money representation.  Yet another idea is to associate a context with computation and encodings of numbers in a particular usage – particularly powerful for allowing variable precision for different needs.

The next version of Java is likely to have a better money representation, but what I've read suggests that it will simply be an amalgamation of BigDecimal and Currency.  These are existing classes with much less than ideal characteristics for a general-purpose representation of monetary values.  It amazes me that after over 20 years of use in business applications, Java still does not have support for a pragmatic representation of money...

Your morning smile...

Your morning smile...

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...