Feeling much better today...

Feeling much better today...  I'm not real happy about how long it's taking me to get over this bug, but still ... getting to the end is a good thing.  My fever is almost gone this morning (99.1°F, where my normal temperature is about 98.4°F), and noticeably more brain cells are functioning. :)  Better yet, I made it to 4:30 pm still feeling pretty good.  It sure will be good to see the back side of this bug!

This afternoon Debbie made us a spectacular meal, real brains-fall-out-onto-the-table sort of fare.  The entree was fresh halibut (from our local Macey's!), the first of the Alaskan season.  Debbie found a recipe she liked, then tweaked it, and produced a masterpiece.  The fish was baked sans sauce first, then slathered with the sauce and broiled for a few minutes.  That sauce, oh that sauce!  It contains (amongst other things) mayonnaise, butter, Parmesan cheese, green onions, and Peppadew peppers.  The combined flavors were just wonderful.  The broiled asparagus and steamed sushi rice are standard fare for us, but a delicious accompaniment to the halibut nonetheless.  It was just stunningly good...

This meal got us to pondering (once again) just how much better we're eating here than we were in San Diego.  I still don't really understand why, but the fact is that our ordinary grocery store here (Macey's) has more and better fresh fish, at quite reasonable prices, than we could get in San Diego at any price (and you can pay a lot for fresh fish down there).  The variety isn't quite as large, and certain things are harder to find (lobsters, for instance) – but that's more than made up for by the frequent availability of things we love but could rarely (if ever!) get in San Diego.  Probably the best example of that is fresh giant sea scallops, 5 to 8 to the pound, available here two or three times a month.  It's not just seafood, either – the same store routinely carries several cuts of prime beef.  We're practically addicted to the prime ribeye steaks, which are every bit as good as the best we've ever had in a restaurant.  The produce is abundant, fresh, and (in season) locally sourced.  I can't say the tomatoes are New Jersey quality, but just about everything else (today's asparagus, for instance) is first rate.  We've mentioned our milk before, but it's worth repeating: we get our milk delivered weekly, and it is the best commercial milk we've ever had.  It's high butterfat (9%) whole milk, not homogenized, and low temperature pasteurized.  We each had a glass with our dinner tonight.  And then there's the ice cream, from Aggie's Creamery, part of Utah State University's agricultural department.  I'll be having some chocolate tonight, as an ice cream soda made with plain Pelligrino sparkling water (I like my ice cream sodas unsweetened – no syrup!).   It's the best ice cream I've ever had out of a store, and it's everywhere here.  It's so good that the incentive to make our own ice cream is much reduced.  Why is the food so much better here than it was in San Diego?  I'd love to really understand that, but surely it has something to do with choosier customers.  It doesn't really matter, though –  it's more than enough just to be able to enjoy it...

SpaceX...

SpaceX...  Just watched the latest SpaceX launch, this time with 10 IridiumNext satellites on board, launching from Vandenburg AFB in California.  Once again, a totally routine event, with everything (up through the first second stage burn, anyway) working “nominally” (space-speak for exactly as expected).

This one commercial, profit-seeking company has completely transformed space travel already, and they have many ambitious goals yet unmet.  They've done what NASA called (in testimony to Congress) “impossible”.  They've dramatically reduced the cost of putting things in orbit.  They've increased the reliability of putting things in orbit by a large factor.  Finally, they have a greater capacity to launch (more rockets, in other words) than any other institution, private or public.  It's a wonderful example of the power of capitalism and its associated incentive structures.

It amuses me when I see appalled leftists and statists bleating about the supposed “taxpayer subsidies” leveraged by SpaceX, as though they were a horrible problem.  NASA is 100% “subsidized” (paid for) by the U.S. taxpayer.  NASA uses SpaceX because they're cheaper, more reliable, and more available to launch than any other source of launchers. They get development contracts from NASA and other government entities because they're producing more results with less money.  About the only legitimate ding on SpaceX, in my opinion, is the assertion that they cost jobs at NASA – and that's a ding that I applaud them for, as NASA is a huge sinkhole for wasted taxpayer dollars.  It's a boondoggle that should have been reined in a long time ago...

Ilex vomitoria...

Ilex vomitoria...  Many years ago, when I was a young lad, my father used to regale us kids with tales of American Indians drinking tea made from holly leaves.  They'd drink it, he told us with some envy in his voice, so that they'd vomit after a feast – thus allowing them to go back and enjoy another round at the feast.  At the time, our farm was raising American holly (Ilex opaca), so this meant that we were raising close relatives of a tree the Indians used.  That it was used for puke induction only made the story more attractive to a young boy. :)

Now to say that my dad was a teller of tall tales would be a considerable understatement of the actual facts.  He reveled in telling tales that were far-fetched, yet believable to a kid – such as his assertion to us that chocolate milk came from brown cows, or that buttermilk came from cows that liked to jump around.  When I was quite young, he'd tell several of these tall tales every day.  We believed those tales, for a while.  What made him particularly good at these tall tales was that he'd mix in a few actual facts to them, and even occasionally tell a tall tale that was actually true.  And he had one promise to us: that if we asked him if one of his tales were true, he'd tell us whether it was.  I did ask him, one day, if the tale of the holly tea was true – and he said that it was, though there was some disagreement amongst historians on exactly how it was used.

Fast forward to something like 35 years ago, when I decided one day to read up on this “holly tea”.  I quickly found a reference to it (this is back before the Internet, so I was in a library researching this): my dad was talking about a tea called yaupon, made from the native-to-America holly Ilex vomitoria.  An article I read this morning got me looking again, this time on the Internet.  I found many references online, including this one from 1917 referencing the caffeine content of the plant's leaves, and this one talking about one drink (“black drink”) made with Ilex vomitoria and other herbs that was in fact an emetic (vomit-inducer).

My interest was piqued by the article I read this morning, where I learned (for the first time) that the emetic effects were not actually caused by Ilex vomitoria, but in fact by other herbs.  Also interesting in that article was some speculation about how the name came about.  Apparently Ilex vomitoria is relatively rich in caffeine, and is quite tasty as a tea (according to a considerable number of comments I found online).  That got me to look on Amazon, and sure enough, yaupon tea is readily available!  So I ordered two ounces of it to try out.  I'll report back after I try it, in particular on whether it has any chance of displacing my beloved Darjeeling.  One thing that occurred to me is that here is a tea that (I believe) my Mormon friends could drink without violating their health laws.  A little online research tells me that is very uncertain.

I think my dad would have enjoyed this discovery, and would also have enjoyed trying out the yaupon tea.  His reaction, I'm sure, would have been most entertaining...

Still haven't quite shaken this bug...

Still haven't quite shaken this bug...  My fever is gone this morning (yay!), but some of the other symptoms are still with me.  The most noticeable, for me, is a near-complete absence of my ability to smell or taste.  I had tea and orange rolls (from Kneaders) this morning, and just about all I could taste was the sweetness.  Debbie tells me that both the scent and the taste of those rolls is very strongly orange, but I couldn't detect that at all...

In the morning our friend Lizzy H. and her 6 month old baby Lilly came over for a visit.  We've seen Lilly fairly often since her birth last September, and it's been a lot of fun to watch her developing.  She's now on the verge of crawling, and starting to babble and make noises in reaction to her environment.  Her vision has developed to the point where she can track and watch faces, and she seems to react to your expression and vocal tonality.  Yesterday, while her mom or grand mom was holding her, she was very curious about our old field spaniel Miki – who was also curious about her (unusual for him, as normally he doesn't want anything to do with kids).  It was fun to watch Lilly interacting with Miki, from both perspectives.

We had a doctor's appointment for Debbie yesterday, way up in North Logan.  She was there for two reasons: one was an occasional sharp pain she gets in her knee as she's recovering from her fall early this month, and the other was to see if anything could be done about the large bump on the outside of her left knee (the one most recently operated on).  On the pain, her doctor wants to wait a month to see if it just goes away, as it would if it was not any particular injury but just part of the recovery process.  On the bump, the doctor had not much good news.  He thinks it is likely a bursa caused by irritation of the IT band (a major ligament in the knee) from the two relatively recent surgeries on that knee.  It's a common side-effect of such surgery, he tells us, though it's most commonly seen on a different ligament in the knee.  There are two possible ways to get rid of it.  The first, which would be the one he'd recommend doing first, is a shot of cortisone straight into the bursa.  He doesn't want to do this, however, until the sharp pain problem is resolved.  The second way to get rid of the bursa is surgical removal, but he doesn't want to do that.  He didn't flat out refuse, but I suspect he might have if pressed.  I asked him why the reluctance, and got an explanation that I really liked: he doesn't do surgeries that don't have a functional goal.  This surgery would not increase her knee's ability, and would not resolve any pain – it would be purely cosmetic.  He doesn't believe taking the risk of a surgery for such a thing is a good idea.  Clearly he is ill-suited for a career in plastic surgery!  But I like that attitude in a surgeon...

After the doctor's appointment we headed to a nearby restaurant that we like: La Unica, with great Mexican food.  The owner of the restaurant has been running a few Mexican food trucks in Cache Valley for years, and they also have outstanding fare.  We've been visiting their trucks for three years now, and have gotten to know some of the family members in the process (the owner works with at least two daughters and two sons in the business).  As usual, we had a great meal (carnitas burrito for me, fish tacos for Debbie, mango drink for both).  As we were eating, the owner came over and asked if the red car in front was ours (we drove my Tesla Model X).  When I said yes, out came a stream of questions.  We learned that one of his sons (working there yesterday) had spotted it and was all excited about it.  One thing led to another, and on our way out all the family members working there came out to look at our car.  The first thing they wanted to see: the falcon wing doors, of course. :)  Four of them were ooohing and aaaahing at everything they saw, from the leathery smell of the interior to the giant screen on the center console.  One of the daughters, it turns out, loves her pickup truck – and when I told her of Telsla's plans for a pickup, she got real interested.  A lot of fun, that was. :)

A bit better this morning...

A bit better this morning...  The magic infrared thermometer says my temperature is 99.8°F, and my brain feels like it's at least firing on all cylinders, though at an idle.  I'm beginning to cough up foul things, always a sign that the end is near.  I may survive this after all!

Yesterday afternoon we watched a movie we first saw something like 30 years ago: Karate Kid.  We both had fond memories of it, but really didn't remember very much.  We quite enjoyed it this second time around...

After the movie, it was just before dark and I let the dogs out to play.  As I stood on our deck in the deep twilight, I heard an owl hooting nearby – and when I turned toward the sound, I saw the owl sitting in our leafless weeping willow tree.  Debbie and I watched the owl silhouette for several minutes.  Would have been a great view had there been even the tiniest hint of daylight!  It was pretty good even with the silhouette, though...

My brother Scott told me yesterday of a plant sale nearby, where bare-root trees and shrubs were being offered at fantastically low prices.  The form at right (with my personal information whited out) shows what we're ordering: 140 trees and shrubs for $330.  That works out to $2.36 per tree or shrub – quite a bargain, that!  I wouldn't have to have many of these survive for me to be happy with the deal.  Better yet, my brother – crazy guy that he is – volunteered to plant all of these for me.  Woo hoo!  In a few weeks we're going to have a lot of new starts around here!  It will be interesting to see which ones thrive...

This morning it's wall-to-wall blue sky, with no precipitation in the forecast.  Yay!  I took the photos below from our yard, just before dawn.  The first photo is looking westward, toward the Wellsville Mountains.  The other is looking eastward, towards the Wasatch Mountains...

When you're sick...

When you're sick ... you want Debbie to make your meals.  Trust me on this!  At right is the soup she whipped up for me yesterday: a creamy chicken soup, not salty at all, stuffed with yummy roast chicken and vegetables.  Jealous, y'all should be...

She made this by modifying a cheesy sausage soup recipe she's used for years.  Substituted chicken for the sausage, and queso quesadilla cheese for the cheddar.   If you love to cook and you don't know about queso quesadilla, it's well worth learning about.  It's a very mild cheese, lower in salt than almost any other, with a soft texture and very meltable.  It adds a nice cheese note to just about anything.  Our grocery stores here all have a Mexican cheese section (because there are several really good Mexican cheeses!), and that's where we find it...

I've still got a fever this morning.  And it wasn't helped a bit by the inch of fresh snow that fell and stuck last night.  I've decided not to plow the driveway, as the layer is thin enough to drive over and I don't much like the idea of 90 minutes outside while I have a 100.5°F fever...

A problem we have...

A problem we have...  Debbie and I have different tastes in movies, mostly overlapping.  In music our tastes are nearly two disjoint sets. :)  That's just background for the problem we have, though: we can't rely on reviews to help us choose a movie to watch.

The latest case in point is Pan's Labyrinth.  On Rotten Tomatoes, we saw that both viewers and critics loved it.  We watched the trailer and thought it had possibilities.  So a couple of nights ago, we streamed it from Amazon, and ... we were disgusted with it.  One big surprise for us: it was full of gratuitous, cartoonish violence.  There were many scenes that we just couldn't stand to watch, and several violent scenes that happened by surprise, so we had no chance to turn away.  We thought the characters, even the main characters, were very poorly developed.  The plot was full of things that just made no sense to us as we were watching, though some we managed to puzzle out afterwards.  It was definitely surreal, but not in any way that we found interesting, intriguing, or entertaining.  I had a similar reaction to it that I have to much modern art: I just don't get it.  I don't understand what could possess anyone to say “I like this!”

And that, in short, is our problem.  This one you could summarize as “lots of false positives” on movie reviews, meaning that many movies that are positively reviewed – either by critics or viewers – we think are awful.  It is quite possibly over half of positive reviews are “false” from our perspective.  Even worse: we also get a lot of “false negatives” – many movies are are negatively reviewed we think are great.  The rate of false negatives isn't quite as high as the false positives, but it's far from zero.  So the end result is that we basically can't use reviews as guidance for movies we've never seen.

What we need is “movie reviews for weirdos like us.”  Rotten Loonies, maybe?  Anybody know of such a thing?

Felt like hell yesterday...

Felt like hell yesterday ... and about the same this morning.  Whatever damned virus has got a hold on me is really annoying.  Because of the fever associated with the virus, my brain feels like it's running at a tiny fraction of its normal power, and that's the part I hate the most.  Yesterday I was playing my usual Scrabble games over the Internet (with my sister and her friend, and with a friend in Poland), and it was really, really hard for me – trying to think of words to fit my letters felt like I was wading through mental quicksand, where normally it's a breezy sprint for me.

I didn't do much of anything yesterday (see previously mentioned virus), but a few things did stick out.

First, I ran to our little local grocery store (Ridley's) in Hyrum to get some hamburger.  Debbie was making her patented chili comfort food, figuring (correctly!) that I would like it when I was feeling awful.  On the way into the store I was confronted (very politely, and with humor) by an adult woman dressed in a cookie costume and waving a sign around.  I soon figured out that she was guiding victims customers to the table in front of the store where several cute Girl Scouts and an adult woman were selling Girl Scout cookies.  On my way out of the store, I bought two boxes of them.  The Girl Scout who helped me choose the cookies, when we were done, asked me “What happened to your hair?”  My hair is pretty short at the moment, and it's getting sparser by the day.  This was not long after my morning shower, and my hair was all frizzy and pointing in every which way.  I don't blame her at all for being curious about it! :)  The adult woman behind her, though, sucked in her breath and called out the girl's name admonishingly.  I laughed and told her it was fine, and told the little girl that my hair is what happens to men who are older than dirt.  She just looked confused, but the mom behind her got a laugh. 

When I went to pay for my cookies, I had an experience of quite the different kind.  I was directed to another Girl Scout, a little older, to take my money.  She told me the cookies were $4 a box.  I didn't have correct change, so I handed her a $20 bill.  She looked up at me, apologetically, and said “I’m really bad at math, and I’m in high school.  I don’t know how much change you’re supposed to get.”  I found out, through a bit more conversation, that she was in 10th grade.  If we were still in California, where the poor Girl Scouts (where and when we lived) had to compute a 8.67% sales tax, I could forgive the inability to compute the correct change in her head.  But here in Utah there is no sales tax on Girl Scout cookies, and the price ($4 a box) is about as easy to compute as you can get.  I talked it out with the girl, mom behind her watching closely, and determined that she could figure the price for the two boxes (though only after great mental labor), but figuring the change I was due was completely beyond her.  Even in my mentally incapacitated (see fever mentioned earlier), this was a trivial exercise for me.  In the end I had to tell this high school girl that $20 - (2 x $4) = $12.  With relief evident in her face, she handed me the change. 

In most countries I've traveled in (and that's quite a few), such an encounter would be unthinkable unless that little girl actually had a mental deficiency.  Here, even in Utah, it is all too common an occurrence.  It's this sort of thing that makes me feel the doom coming on – and makes me confident that there will be a successor to the U.S. hegemony in the world.  I'm not sure which country it will be.  China and India are the two likeliest looking ones to me at the moment...

Last night we watched an old (1963) movie: The Three Lives of Thomasina.  I had never seen it before, but it was a favorite of Debbie's childhood.  I had read the book (Thomasina by Paul Gallico); it was a Christmas present from my parents in the late '50s, one of the first books my parents bought for me (as opposed to the books my dad inherited, and the many books they bought for themselves).  I remember getting it not long before they surprised me with a complete encyclopedia (that one purchased from a yard sale).  Both are vivid memories for me, along with three or four other books that were early and special to me.  Anyway, the movie's plot at least resembles the book, enough that I could easily follow along.  I quite enjoyed it.  Debbie did too, through her sobbing and sniffling (she gets quite emotional about stories involving animals).

It's snowing this morning.  Dang it!  I thought we were likely done with this white stuff, but apparently not quite yet...

Some random things...

Some random things...  I felt lousy most of yesterday, and I woke up feeling about the same this morning – some kind of virus that's giving me a low-grade fever and a general feeling of unperkiness.  The part I hate the most about these sorts of illnesses is what the fever does to the working of my brain: it feels like all my thinking is proceeding through some thick fluid that makes everything happen soooooo slowly.  Mental activity that's normally effortless for me (say, adding a couple of numbers in my head) is so hard I can just barely force myself to do it. 

Despite that, some nice things happened yesterday and this morning.

For starters, we got some rain last night – something like a half inch, maybe a little more.  Apparently it got cold enough so that we also got a little snow, but I'm sure that will be gone in short order.  The rain cleared most of the snow piles that had been remaining, and it also woke up some of the plants around our place.  At right is some sedum my brother Scott gave me a couple of years ago, planted in a big piece of driftwood.  Sometime overnight it turned from a dull brown into this red gloriousness.  Gorgeous, it is!  If you look carefully, you'll see that there is still a bit of snow stuck in it.  I'm pretty sure that's old, unmelted snow, as this is sheltered under a willow that otherwise has no snow under it.

A few days ago I saw an old friend's posting in Facebook after I logged in for the first time in five or six years (I hate Facebook): Vera S., whom I met at work in FutureTrade in 2002.  I messaged her, and yesterday she messaged back to invite me to call.  Last evening we (she, Debbie, and I) had a wonderful conversation, just reconnecting after our last conversation back in 2011.   Now we have her new email address and her phone number, so we can stay in touch.  We also have her commitment for a visit up here (she and her husband Konstantin live in Huntington Beach, California).  We're so looking forward to that!

After talking with Vera, Debbie and I finished a game of Mexican Train.  Debbie loves this game, at least partially because she beats me about 99% of the time.  Somehow yesterday, despite my mental fogginess, I eked out a win (score sheet at right, low score wins).  That was startling enough that I had to take a picture of that score sheet to preserve it for posterity! :)

This morning Debbie shocked me to my core.  After I took my shower and wandered out into the kitchen, I discovered a bowl of creamy chicken noodle soup on the table for me, and shortly after I sat down she delivered two pieces of buttered toast and a cup of heavenly Darjeeling tea.  This sort of thing is quite rare these days! :)  To be fair, this is largely because for most of the past four years she's been limited in her ability to move around due to her multiple knee and back injuries.  I cannot even remember the last time she made breakfast like this.  Her explanation: I'm feeling yucky, so she wanted to take care of me.  Maybe feeling yucky isn't so bad after all!

Feeling yucky again...

Feeling yucky again...  Dang it!

A nice afternoon drive...

A nice afternoon drive...  We went up to Hardware Ranch again, and saw a lot more wildlife than we've been seeing recently.  Hundreds of elk were wandering around within view from the visitor center parking lot.  Dozens of deer were also there, and we saw lots of deer both on the way in and on the way out.  Debbie spotted a couple of Sandhill Cranes out in the ranch's pastures, mingling with the elk.  We've been seeing them in Cache Valley for the past four or five days as well.  I don't know whether these are migratory cranes just passing through on the way south, or if they're amongst those who summer here.  It could easily be the former, because our recently uncovered pastures are full of things for them to eat (perhaps most especially voles, whose under-snow passages are now fully exposed).

The first photo below shows a group of three deer who stopped about 100' away from us as we drove by.  Deer seem to be quite unafraid of our Tesla Model X, we presume because it's so quiet.  That was taken with my iPhone, on the 2X optical telephoto, handheld.  The second photo we took right near Hardware Ranch.  That's a flock of turkeys – enough meat to feed half of Cache Valley right there!  :)

More morning bananas...

More morning bananas...  Here's another attempt to capture the morning banana ritual.  It's surprisingly hard to capture this wide-angle event in our narrow-angle kitchen!

The last photo...

The last photo...  I'm still working my way through my mom's belongings.  This afternoon I came across the little point-and-shoot digital camera she had for the last couple of years she was alive.  I'll be giving that camera away, but inside it I found the memory card, with about 400 photos on it.  I'm pretty sure those are all the photos she took during those few years; I don't think she ever figured out how to copy them to her computer.  Every time I visited her, helping her send photos to her friends was high on her list of things for me to do.  :)

My mom was a remarkably bad photographer, which given her artistic sense was a bit of a surprise to me.  It's the mechanics of the camera she never seemed to understand, from the zoom lens to the focus.  I'd guess that of the 400 or so photos, less than a dozen of them are properly exposed and in focus.  Probably 90% of the photos are of flowers; the remainder are split between people, bugs, and dead bats.

There was a surprise for me near the end of the photos, though.  Unbeknownst to me, she had taken a dozen or so photos after she arrived here in Utah.  Most of these were of people: some friends of ours who visited her to welcome her to Utah, the staff at the assisted care facility (she loved those folks), and so on.  One, however, was the photo above.  From it's placement in the camera's sequence, I'm pretty sure one of our friends took that photo, almost certainly at mom's request.  What you see there is how she looked during her happiest time here, just after she arrived.  It gave me a real start to see that.  In a good way, though.

Miss you every day, mom...

Do I still use...

Do I still use ... DEVONthink and my Fujitsu ScanSnap IX500 for scanning receipts and other documents?  So asks Ron L., by email. 

The answer: hell, yes! 

At this point I've been using this for over three years, and I've got just over 4,000 documents scanned.  The process of scanning and transferring numbers to my bookkeeping (for which I use Moneydance) has long since been burned into my “muscle memory” – I no longer have to think about it at all.  All those 4,000 documents are just electrons, and not occupying file cabinets and boxes like they used to.  Since I got my iMac Pro in December, the OCR time has dropped to something insignificant – a second or two unless I scan something like a 20 page legal document in fine print.

Best of all, finding a document is now just a matter of a Google-style search, with effectively instantaneous results.  This took a couple of years to become a reflexive habit, much like it took me a while to think of the camera on my smartphone as a way to remember or record things.  Just recently I've started yet another use of DEVONthink: I create .pdf files containing notes (and optionally drawings or photos) and import them.  DEVONthink is happy to accept .pdf files from anywhere, and indexes them just like it does scanned documents.  Being able to do Google-style searches on these is very useful, and basically infinitely faster than the file search built into OSX.

At this point I consider all this part of my minimally-acceptable computing environment.  If one of them dies, I will have to find a replacement...

A feverish Saturday...

A feverish Saturday...  Yesterday I was operating on intellectual fumes for most of the day, the victim of a fever that reached 102.7°F at its peak, just before I went to bed.  Most of the day I spent playing simple games with Debbie (and losing!) and reading; anything more mentally challenging would have been impossible.  At around 4 am I woke shivering, and realized that my fever was breaking.  By 4:30 am my brain was operating on all cylinders again, and now this morning I feel fine.  I can't remember ever having such a short, intense illness before.  But it's gone now – yay!

The two videos below are of our dogs.  The first one shows all five dogs enjoying their morning bananas.  I'm going to try re-shooting this one with a wider field of view, as this attempt doesn't show them actually catching the banana slices, except for Ipo.  The second video is showing off a skill that Ipo has acquired.  All three of our young field spaniels have thoroughly learned that when they come in from outside, they're to run directly to their crates and wait for a treat.  We trained this behavior in the possibly forlorn hope that when they come into the house during mud season (just started) we won't have pounds of mud to clean up in the kitchen – it will all be contained in their crates.  This all works great unless the crate doors are pushed to the closed position.  Even unlatched, this stops the dogs cold – except Ipo.  All on her own she learned how to grab the wire of the door with a front claw and whip the door open, so she can run in and make preparations for Milk Bone consumption.  In this video it happens so quickly you really can't see how she's doing it...

Do we still like our iPhone Model Xs?

Do we still like our iPhone Model Xs?  A question I received this morning from reader (and all around crazy person) Dick M.  Answer: why, yes, we do.  The large screen in a small form factor is great for our ancient eyes.  The brandy-new biometric feature (face ID) works amazingly well, and it's been integrated with nearly all of the apps I use on the iPhone that require identification.  I love the resulting ease of use.  There's a security tradeoff there, obviously: someone who wanted something on my phone badly enough could tie me down and hold the phone up to my face to get access.  On the other hand, someone who wants access to my phone that badly is probably going to get access anyway. :)  The one situation I can imagine where there's a risk I don't like is border crossings, and if I ever take my phone across a border I will be disabling face ID for the crossing.  It's not the foreign countries I worry about, it's the U.S. border agents with their freedom to examine (and even confiscate!) my electronics.

And I left the best for last.  The iPhone X's camera is superb.  My videos are notably less shaky, and I find myself using the 2X optical telephoto very frequently.  The camera is enough better that I'd be happy with the iPhone X even if the camera was the only new feature.  But it's not!

A few mornings out of the year ...

A few mornings out of the year ... several things line up just right such that the morning sun angles into one of my office windows and strikes the “Tuscan yellow” wall.  The result is a bright, cheerful glow that lasts just a few minutes until the sun climbs high enough that the lit spot is on the floor.  This morning was such a morning...

So what has to line up, and why does it happen only rarely?  For starters, to our east are the Wasatch Mountains.  Generally by the time the sun climbs over the mountains in the morning, the angle is already high enough that my wall won't be lit up.  The point where the sun comes up varies over the course of the year, as the seasons change.  Within the range of sunrise points there are two “notches” from the perspective of our property.  This morning the sun rose in the bottom (lowest point) of one of those notches.  The other notch (which the sun comes up through in the summer) is so far north that the patches lit up in my office on those mornings don't strike any walls.  The sun rises through the other notch in late November and mid March.  Then there's another bit that needs lining up: the patch of sun has to strike the wall where nothing is hanging.  That's about half the possible time.  Finally, it has to be a nicely clear day – even haze will diminish the brightness enough to ruin the effect.

A good start to my morning!

A reader asks...

A reader asks...  Mary L. wrote to ask me if I use an ad blocker for my web browser, and if so, which one?  The answer is “Hell, yes!” I use an ad blocker!  I hate seeing those ads, and even more I hate the delayed visual “pop” when they populate after the text I want to read renders.  I have to say, though, that because I read so much on an iPad (with no ad blockers, dang it) I am getting to the point where tuning out the ads is nearly automatic.  I consciously (almost) never click on an ad, though, as I know that information will be collected and used to target more ads to me.  As things are right now, the ads I see are almost entirely comprised of three categories: things that I've looked at on Amazon, things that Debbie has looked at on Amazon (we share an account), and things related to electronics.  The latter, I presume, is because some vendor I've dealt with has sold my name to a list (I'm betting it's Newark, where I bought my 'scope). 

As for which ad blocker: at the moment I'm using Ublock.  I'm happy with its performance, it eliminates virtually all ads, and it's available for both Chrome and Firefox (I still use both browsers about equally).  It's also available for Safari, but I can't speak to its performance there as I almost never use Safari (because of compatibility issues on several sites I visit daily).

A slightly weird snowfall...

A slightly weird snowfall...  I spotted this pattern on our front door walkway when I was about to carry some groceries in.  Nearly all the areas of rock have melted, but the areas of sand/rock fines have not.  I'm going to guess, from this, that the larger thermal mass of the rock takes longer to drop below freezing (once warmed up) than the sand/rock fines areas – and so there was enough heat in stored up in the rock to melt the snowfall, but not so in the sand/rock fines.

What bothers me about my theory is that I haven't seen this before!

The groceries I was carrying in were a bit different than our normal fare.  Our local Boy Scout troop is having a food drive this week, specifically asking for canned goods.  When I took some cardboard up to Hyrum to be recycled this morning, I noticed that our local grocer was having a “case lot” sale on canned goods.  I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the sale is during the same week as the food drive.  It's easy to imagine here that the Boy Scouts were clever enough to hold their drive on the same week as the sale – but it's equally easy to imagine that the store manager decided to contribute to the food drive by holding the sale on the week of the drive.  However the coincidence happened, as I picked the canned fruit, vegetables, and meat I noted that all of the items on sale were of the right type for the food drive – and that all three of the other shoppers choosing with me were buying for the food drive as well...

We love living here!

That pesky white stuff again...

That pesky white stuff again...  By yesterday afternoon our spell of warm, sunny weather had cleared nearly all the snow from the Cache Valley floor.  Then, last night, despite slightly-above-freezing temperatures, it started snowing again.  I got up around 1 am to let our dogs out, and there was three inches on the ground.  When we got up at 7 am this morning, there was just an inch of a mix of snow and slush, and the temperature was well above freezing.  We have rain and warmer temperatures forecast for today and tomorrow.  So it's all white outside (and it's still snowing), but none of this is going to stick.  I hope!  Our driveway had warmed up nicely, so there's no snow accumulating on it.  Snow plowing bullet dodged!