Lingual papilla in Paradise... I could hardly get the preceding post typed in, as I was salivating over the delightful scents wafting up from our kitchen. Debbie is there, in the final stages of making a pasta dish. It has bacon, asparagus, mushrooms, peas, cheese and lemon – and all those perfumes are hitting me on an empty belly. Hence the stimulation of my lingual papilla, aka “taste buds”.
At this moment I live only for Debbie's call out that our lupper is ready!
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Paradise goose...
Paradise goose... Yes, again :) This time I managed to get a few photos in full sunlight. I sure hope I can get the goslings when the time comes!
Paradise trailers...
In the photo you can see a tractor with a fertilizer spreader running in our field. That's Scott N., the fellow who leases our south field, putting down phosphate fertilizer on the alfalfa he planted last year. He rents that (quite nice) fertilizer spreader for $30 from IFA, the same place where he buys the fertilizer. I had no idea that such implements could be rented at all, much less at that kind of a reasonable price. I'm gonna have to check into that!
My little trailer caused a little stir this morning :) First, our friend Michelle H. pronounced it “too cute!” Then, after I took it out to pick up trash, my neighbor across the highway (Gary S.) drove over in his ATV to take a look. He wanted to know what the orange blight was :) Then I had two people driving by stop to ask where I'd bought it. They were disappointed to hear that I'd built it, as they wanted to go get one for their ATV!
I'm very happy with how this project turned out, even though it was far more work than I'd imagined it would be – especially the painting...
Paradise goose...
Paradise goose... She's turned around to face our house directly this morning, and she was eyeballing me carefully the whole time I was taking these photos. I set up my spotting scope outside (so no windows) about 155' from the base of the tree she's in, and got some better photos:
The mama goose is (according to what I've read) always the one sitting on the eggs. The papa spends a lot of time in the general area, guarding the nest. I am carefully keeping away from that area, so as not to stress them, so I don't know what his behavior is if there's a perceived threat of some kind.
Yesterday I twice saw the mama leave (presumably to feed) and return to the nest. Her approach and landing have to be seen to be believed – somehow she manages to steer those giant wings of hers in between all the branches and end up perched on the edge of the nest. It looks impossible to a bystander, but she does it without apparent effort. Her mate flies with her, right up to the nest, but at the last second veers off to the side.
You can see in these photos how carefully the mama is watching me. If looks could kill, Debbie would be making cremation arrangements right now...
The mama goose is (according to what I've read) always the one sitting on the eggs. The papa spends a lot of time in the general area, guarding the nest. I am carefully keeping away from that area, so as not to stress them, so I don't know what his behavior is if there's a perceived threat of some kind.
Yesterday I twice saw the mama leave (presumably to feed) and return to the nest. Her approach and landing have to be seen to be believed – somehow she manages to steer those giant wings of hers in between all the branches and end up perched on the edge of the nest. It looks impossible to a bystander, but she does it without apparent effort. Her mate flies with her, right up to the nest, but at the last second veers off to the side.
You can see in these photos how carefully the mama is watching me. If looks could kill, Debbie would be making cremation arrangements right now...
Monday, April 4, 2016
Canadian goose nesting...
I took that photo through my telescope, at 45 power, from 175' away through a window. I'm going to try for a better one when I get full sunlight, hopefully tomorrow.
Canadian geese normally nest on the ground, but when we searched for information about Canadian geese nesting in a tree, we found plenty of other examples – so this isn't quite as weird as we thought it was :)
Debbie's first question: how are the goslings going to get down to the ground from up there? My guess: they get pitched out like wood ducks do with their babies, and they bounce when they hit the ground. I hope we manage to catch that event!
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Paradise ponders...
Yesterday afternoon Debbie and I ventured down to Maddox Ranch House for our “lupper”. We both had fried chicken for our entree. I thought it was the best I've had up here, but Debbie likes the fried chicken at Angie's better. They both are very good to be sure. I had soup (a cheesy broccoli and carrot cream soup) and Debbie had a salad (with homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing); both were outstanding. There were of course all the usual things about the meal to be fond of: the bread, the drinks, the excellent service. But then there was dessert: fresh strawberry pie for me, raspberry cream pie for Debbie. That strawberry pie was strawberry heaven on earth: perfectly ripe berries, a sauce that had just the right sweetness, and fresh (real!) unsweetened whipped cream. I didn't taste Debbie's raspberry pie, but judging from the noises she made while eating it, it must have been pretty spectacularly good.
While we were enjoying the meal, I saw one particular waitress walk by our table a dozen or so times. She was perhaps 35 years old, and not a beauty by conventional standards – but she had a wonderfully sunny and cheerful face as she greeted all the diners and coworkers she passed. Her smile was infectious; it cheered me up every time I caught her (which was often!). On our way out of the restaurant, she happened to be walking toward me, so I stopped and told her how much her beautiful smile had cheered me – and I got my own 10 kilowatt smile in response. That was fun :)
Paper tape...
Paper tape... This article brought back all sorts of memories for me. Several of the earliest computers I built (back in the mid- to late-'70s) used paper tape as their only non-volatile memory. I started with a baudot teletypewriter (a Teletype Model 28 ASR) jointly purchased with a friend that we named “Ralph”. When I got tired of waiting several hours for a long tape to load, I built an optical tape reader that could read a couple hundred characters per second – a huge advance. My little hobby area had a large number of paper tape rolls, each containing the object code of a program or the text source code.
Hobby computing was just a bit different back in those days! Not better, just different. In some ways it was more exciting, because all of us participating in the hobby had the sense that we were oddballs on the fringe of something growing. We really had no sense at all for how big and important these little computers would become – we were just having fun pushing the envelope of what was possible...
Hobby computing was just a bit different back in those days! Not better, just different. In some ways it was more exciting, because all of us participating in the hobby had the sense that we were oddballs on the fringe of something growing. We really had no sense at all for how big and important these little computers would become – we were just having fun pushing the envelope of what was possible...
Local online paper...
Local online paper ... pranks the community for April Fool's. The idea of a “Gentleman’s Club” (a common euphemism for stripper bar) in Cache County is pretty much unimaginable – unless it were the kind of gentleman's club they reported!
Saturday, April 2, 2016
What have we all been missing?
What have we all been missing? Paragraph in a fascinating article:
It's encouraging (to me, anyway) to see a piece like this in the mainstream press, instead of in Rolling Stone.
I know a few people who admit to having used either psilocybin or LSD, and I've read about others (including Steve Jobs, famously). None of these people have any observable negative effects. Some of them are standout creative people, especially the engineers I've known. Something I found interesting, though it may simply be coincidence: they were all particularly pleasant people to associate with. It's experiences like this, rather than any personal experience with illegal drugs, that make me highly skeptical of the frightening stories that the government and other authority figures tell us. My own observations negatively correlate with these stories...
In a 2011 study, 18 healthy volunteers were given four doses of psilocybin. The vast majority of participants reported prolonged positive changes in attitude and mood, feelings that lasted for at least 14 months. In follow-up research, scientists determined that many of the volunteers from both studies had undergone a change in personality, something that is supposed to remain relatively fixed after 30. Participants had become more open-minded, tolerant and interested in fantasy and imagination.If you've been living under a rock for the past 50 or 60 years, psilocybin is the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”.
It's encouraging (to me, anyway) to see a piece like this in the mainstream press, instead of in Rolling Stone.
I know a few people who admit to having used either psilocybin or LSD, and I've read about others (including Steve Jobs, famously). None of these people have any observable negative effects. Some of them are standout creative people, especially the engineers I've known. Something I found interesting, though it may simply be coincidence: they were all particularly pleasant people to associate with. It's experiences like this, rather than any personal experience with illegal drugs, that make me highly skeptical of the frightening stories that the government and other authority figures tell us. My own observations negatively correlate with these stories...
Keep 'em out with a wall!
This is actually an interesting demonstration of what happens when you have a contest between a government project and a capitalist profit motive. The latter's gonna win every time!
Friday, April 1, 2016
Paradise ponders...
While waiting for that coat to dry, I came back inside and started working on the accumulated bills and receipts. After a couple hours of that, I could stand no more, and decided to take a break.
So I finished putting my new spotting scope (a Swarovski ATX95) together, and took it outside to see how well it worked (or didn't). The first poking around by eyeball got me pretty excited – the field of view feels wide and flat, and is crystal-clear from edge to edge. At the lowest power (30x) I couldn't detect any aberration at all. At the highest power (70x) I could see a bit of radial brightness variation, but no color aberrations. The tripod is smooth and easy to use, and I really like the fact that the zoom and focus are on adjacent rings, right near the tripod mount where they jiggle the scope less. Very nice all around.
Then I tried putting the camera on. All I did was slip on a disk with a hole in it (supplied by the scope's maker). This adapter is intended to be coupled with a holder for a mobile phone, but there are no holders available for the iPhone 6S+ that I have, so instead I simply held the iPhone in place. The three photos below are my first three attempts through the scope. The first two are at 30x, the last a repeat of the second, but at 70x:
For that first photo I was 22 feet from the feeder. For the last two, I was 160' from the base of the tree. I think I'm gonna like this thing :) Now I just need a bird to stand still long enough for me to get a photo of it!
Word of the day...
Word of the day... Via my brother Scott:
deja poo: a political term describing the feeling that you've heard that shit before.Ha!
Paradise postcards...
Paradise postcards... I looked out our office window a minute ago, and said to Debbie: “We live in a postcard!” Why? Because I was looking at the isolated peaks to our north, snow-covered, and lit up by the rising sun while we were still in twilight. It's the sort of scene you'd find on a postcard, and we get to see it every day...
Yesterday morning we were worried about Mo'i (our oldest field spaniel). After weeks of him obviously feeling better, and urinating much less, he was once again getting lethargic and urinating at a rate you wouldn't believe unless you actually witnessed it. The weeks of feeling better were while we had him on Clavamox (an antibiotic often prescribed for urinary tract infections in dogs). He had finished a three week course of it about 10 days ago – but here he was, looking like the UTI had recurred.
So we called our (wonderful!) vet's office and told them the situation. They asked us to bring a urine sample in. A few minutes later, I was outside trying to hold a small bottle in the right place under Mo'i – and he was looking at me with such a questioning look on his face. Why are you doing this? You never did this before! Let me pee in peace!
Even though I only caught maybe 10% of the urine in the bottle (and 20% on my hands), I managed to get more than enough for their testing. We ran it up to the vet's office and then went into town to do a few errands. On the way home we called them to see if they had any news – and learned that our vet had (personally) run the urine sample up to the veterinary school at USU for some special testing. In the afternoon she called us with the results: Mo'i's urine is highly alkaline (unusual), has lots of uric acid crystals (bad), and he had a UTI again (which is what we suspected). Poor old man! The vet prescribed one more round of Clavamox, but asked permission to culture the infection in Mo'i's urine, to find out if we had some bacteria there that Clavamox wasn't knocking completely out. That may result in us switching to another antibiotic, but we won't know for up to a week. She also prescribed some special food (low in urea, a precursor chemical to those uric acid crystals) and passed along a recommendation from the folks at USU to add methionine to his food (this helps reduce the alkalinity of his urine). We had to go to a health food store to get that; it's not something a vet or pharmacy normally carries.
Just a few hours after giving Mo'i his first dose of Clavamox, he was feeling noticeably better. That's such a fast response that I thought I must be imagining it – and then I saw him run to his food bowl. Mo'i hasn't actually flat-out run in years. Then he was jumping around with food anticipation just like the two youngsters. Finally, last night he produced only a tiny fraction of the urine he had just the day before (we judge this by the diaper weight in the morning). That's an amazingly fast reaction to an antibiotic! He may end up being on antibiotics for the rest of his life.
Yesterday afternoon we went on a drive up Hardware Ranch and toward Ant Flats. We saw all sorts of wildlife: bald eagles, ferruginous hawks, northern harriers, belted kingfishers, Sandhill cranes, American dippers, bazillions of deer and elk, and more. We took a slightly different route than usual (going up the “back way” to the Hardware Ranch visitor's center) and were able to drive up to within about 200' of a herd of 50 or so elk with a bunch of deer mixed in. That herd had a magnificent bull elk, who stood on the hill just above us and stared us down. Beautiful!
Yesterday morning we were worried about Mo'i (our oldest field spaniel). After weeks of him obviously feeling better, and urinating much less, he was once again getting lethargic and urinating at a rate you wouldn't believe unless you actually witnessed it. The weeks of feeling better were while we had him on Clavamox (an antibiotic often prescribed for urinary tract infections in dogs). He had finished a three week course of it about 10 days ago – but here he was, looking like the UTI had recurred.
So we called our (wonderful!) vet's office and told them the situation. They asked us to bring a urine sample in. A few minutes later, I was outside trying to hold a small bottle in the right place under Mo'i – and he was looking at me with such a questioning look on his face. Why are you doing this? You never did this before! Let me pee in peace!
Even though I only caught maybe 10% of the urine in the bottle (and 20% on my hands), I managed to get more than enough for their testing. We ran it up to the vet's office and then went into town to do a few errands. On the way home we called them to see if they had any news – and learned that our vet had (personally) run the urine sample up to the veterinary school at USU for some special testing. In the afternoon she called us with the results: Mo'i's urine is highly alkaline (unusual), has lots of uric acid crystals (bad), and he had a UTI again (which is what we suspected). Poor old man! The vet prescribed one more round of Clavamox, but asked permission to culture the infection in Mo'i's urine, to find out if we had some bacteria there that Clavamox wasn't knocking completely out. That may result in us switching to another antibiotic, but we won't know for up to a week. She also prescribed some special food (low in urea, a precursor chemical to those uric acid crystals) and passed along a recommendation from the folks at USU to add methionine to his food (this helps reduce the alkalinity of his urine). We had to go to a health food store to get that; it's not something a vet or pharmacy normally carries.
Just a few hours after giving Mo'i his first dose of Clavamox, he was feeling noticeably better. That's such a fast response that I thought I must be imagining it – and then I saw him run to his food bowl. Mo'i hasn't actually flat-out run in years. Then he was jumping around with food anticipation just like the two youngsters. Finally, last night he produced only a tiny fraction of the urine he had just the day before (we judge this by the diaper weight in the morning). That's an amazingly fast reaction to an antibiotic! He may end up being on antibiotics for the rest of his life.
Yesterday afternoon we went on a drive up Hardware Ranch and toward Ant Flats. We saw all sorts of wildlife: bald eagles, ferruginous hawks, northern harriers, belted kingfishers, Sandhill cranes, American dippers, bazillions of deer and elk, and more. We took a slightly different route than usual (going up the “back way” to the Hardware Ranch visitor's center) and were able to drive up to within about 200' of a herd of 50 or so elk with a bunch of deer mixed in. That herd had a magnificent bull elk, who stood on the hill just above us and stared us down. Beautiful!
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Paradise water...
Paradise water... The Paradise irrigation water company had their annual shareholder's meeting, which I attended along with a motley collection of geezers and their wives, and a couple of token youngsters (aka people under 50). Unlike the predictably contentious meeting last year, when a water shortage loomed, this years meeting was very cheerful. Porcupine Reservoir is almost certain to fill to the brim this year, barring a giant meteorite strike or catastrophic eruption at Yellowstone. That means that all the farmers are sure to get their full allotment of irrigation water, and that of course means contented farmers.
So we zoomed through all the formalities of reading and accepting last year's minutes, a status report, and opening the floor for questions. There was much good humor, even though there were no free donuts this time. Even the election of three new Board members was done to general good cheer and no contention, with just one candidate for each of the three districts. By the time we got around to the last one, we were all tired of the process and we just re-elected the existing Board member by acclamation – didn't even bother with the nomination :)
The most interesting bit to me was the review of the financial statement. The small scale of this water company amazes me. Their total expenses for the year (which includes assessments for their share of the Porcupine Reservoir itself and the High Line water delivery canal) are well under $100,000 – and they've got over 6 months of expenses in the bank. Things like the accountant's fee ($400) are significant enough, proportionally, to be on their own line on the annual P&L. Such a tiny little enterprise ... and yet there are hundreds of people whose livelihoods are utterly dependent on it. Of course the biggest reason why it's so inexpensive to run this little water company is that it's not a government enterprise – it's basically a formalized cooperative, a non-profit mutual benefit society. As such it has huge incentives for reducing costs, and every shareholder is cognizant of that.
One can only imagine what would happen if the government were to take over. Here in Utah, my guess would be a trebling of expenses. In California, it would easily be much more than that. They spent $3.5 million building a bridge over a creek on a two lane road – some California bureaucrat would look at this water company as an opportunity to build an empire, and soon we'd have office buildings, platoons of administrators, unions everywhere, etc., etc. My guess would be something like 100x the current expenses of Paradise Irrigation.
I love living here!
So we zoomed through all the formalities of reading and accepting last year's minutes, a status report, and opening the floor for questions. There was much good humor, even though there were no free donuts this time. Even the election of three new Board members was done to general good cheer and no contention, with just one candidate for each of the three districts. By the time we got around to the last one, we were all tired of the process and we just re-elected the existing Board member by acclamation – didn't even bother with the nomination :)
The most interesting bit to me was the review of the financial statement. The small scale of this water company amazes me. Their total expenses for the year (which includes assessments for their share of the Porcupine Reservoir itself and the High Line water delivery canal) are well under $100,000 – and they've got over 6 months of expenses in the bank. Things like the accountant's fee ($400) are significant enough, proportionally, to be on their own line on the annual P&L. Such a tiny little enterprise ... and yet there are hundreds of people whose livelihoods are utterly dependent on it. Of course the biggest reason why it's so inexpensive to run this little water company is that it's not a government enterprise – it's basically a formalized cooperative, a non-profit mutual benefit society. As such it has huge incentives for reducing costs, and every shareholder is cognizant of that.
One can only imagine what would happen if the government were to take over. Here in Utah, my guess would be a trebling of expenses. In California, it would easily be much more than that. They spent $3.5 million building a bridge over a creek on a two lane road – some California bureaucrat would look at this water company as an opportunity to build an empire, and soon we'd have office buildings, platoons of administrators, unions everywhere, etc., etc. My guess would be something like 100x the current expenses of Paradise Irrigation.
I love living here!
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