Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I spent the entire day working with my brother Scott, preparing a place to plant 25 5-gallon sumacs, a ground-cover variety.  These are going on the north and the west side of our shed.  The idea is to cover the soil and suppress all the weeds while refraining from taking out the alfalfa.  To get the grade right and to put gravel under the drip line, we had to move 68 tractor bucket loads of dirt or gravel.  I did the tractor work, and my brother leveled everything I moved.  The result is that we now have a very nice bed to put the sumacs in, though we still have one step remaining before we can actually plant: we need to roto-till the soil to break up all the great clods in the soil that I moved, and also (hopefully) to break up the compacted soil underneath that. 

It made me tired just to watch Scott do that work.  What he accomplished in a day would probably take me a couple of weeks – he's in fantastically good physical condition, despite being almost as ancient as I am. 

I suspect we'll both sleep well tonight :)

If there's no rain in the morning, Scott will be down to roto-till and plant.  Otherwise we'll wait until a few days after this storm passes...

We love living here!, part 39,368...

We love living here!, part 39,368...  Michelle H. comes over every week to do the “heavy cleaning” in our house, for over a year now.  She also takes care of our animals when we're away.  In that time she's become a good friend as well. 

A few days ago, Debbie told her about the frustration she was having with the diaper holders we use for Mo'i – they're not particularly well made, weren't really the right size, and they were losing their elastic.  Michelle offered to make new ones for us, and Debbie asked her if she could make a few.  Today Michelle stopped by with the result: nine of the most beautifully made diaper holders, exactly the right size, with great Velcro closures.  They're so much nicer than the commercial ones we bought!  The red one in the photo at right is all spread out.  It perfectly fits the diapers we're using, and around Mo'i.  And of course, she wouldn't take any money for them.

It's really pretty amazing to live in a place where we're surrounded by such nice people...

Obliterated mailbox update...

Obliterated mailbox update...  I just drove down to the post office to send my tax payment in by certified mail (the one time of the year I'm not happy to see our super-nice post master, Brent).  On the way I passed by the place where a car hit our neighbor's mailbox, and I saw what damage was done.  Well, the mailbox was indeed obliterated, but it's not quite the disaster I'd expected.  I thought (from its appearance) that his mailbox post was likely a square concrete post faced with artificial rock (basically stamped and dyed concrete).  It turns out that it's entirely made of plastic – it's a molded plastic thing that just shattered when it was struck.  So I'm guessing that the impact startled the driver this morning, who then turned right for some reason and ran down into the ditch and struck the other side.

Gary's mailbox should be easy and inexpensive to replace :)

Mom goose update...

Mom goose update...  She's still sitting on her nest in the tree, giving the stink-eye to anyone (or anything) who comes within a quarter mile or so.  None of my neighbors have ever seen or heard of a Canadian goose nesting in a tree, but we've heard from several people second-hand that it's actually quite a common phenomenon.  Tim D.'s daughter is a wildlife biologist who volunteers at the bird preserve on the northeast corner of the Great Salt Lake, and she told Tim that they see several such nests every year over there.  So it's just new to us, not especially unusual.  But still fun!

We're expecting the hatching to happen in the last few days of April or the first few days of May.  We're going to try to see what happens when the chicks leave the nest, but we'll be lucky as heck to actually catch that event...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We were sleeping in this morning when Debbie was awakened by a loud bang at around 5 am.  She poked me until I woke up, and told me there were some weird lights visible outside our bedroom.  I got up, found my glasses, and took a look – and saw headlights illuminating the field across the highway from us.  That's definitely weird!  Peering through my mental fog a little more, I noticed the shadow of someone walking around.  My first thought was that there had been an accident, or perhaps someone had hit a deer.

So I threw on my clothes, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out.  First thing I saw was a small car (a new-ish Nissan Versa like the one at right) nose down in the ditch, facing my neighbor's field; its driver-side door was wide open, and the air bag had gone off.  A short distance to the south there was an idling pickup parked, lights on.  I made sure nobody was still in the car, then walked toward the pickup.  A young man came out to greet me.  He had been first on the scene, and he helped the driver out of the little car.  The driver was fine, he told me, and was dialing for help as we talked.  The driver had “not been paying attention” (I'm guessing distracted by a radio, a phone, texting, or some such), had drifted off the road and struck my neighbor's (Gary S.) beautiful stone mailbox post.  I didn't see the mailbox, but I'm assuming it was obliterated.  Police had been called (and they're here now as I write).  So except for the damage to the car and to Gary's mailbox, all is well.  I thanked the young man for stopping to help and dealing with it so responsibly, but around here that is very much the natural order of things.

On Saturday Debbie and I had a late brunch at Angie's.  We drove there thinking we'd get a burger or sandwich, but when we arrived we saw that the special was baby-back ribs, and the soup was vegetable beef.  That settled it: soup and special for both of us.  Those ribs were scrumptious: generous portions of thick, meaty ribs that were fall-off-the-bone tender, and the sauce perfectly matching my tastes.  I detest the intensely vinegary, staggeringly sweet barbecue sauces that seem to be the new American standard – when I have something like those ribs, I want to taste the meat, not the sauce.  Angie's got it just right: enough seasonings to complement the meat's fine taste, just enough sauce to keep the meat from drying out.  We were so stuffed with fine food when we walked out that we didn't even consider going to Aggie's for an ice cream cone :)

I was expecting to help a neighbor (Alan L.) move some shrubs on Saturday, but we had to postpone that until he got the shrubs tied up, and (more importantly) got the gas line marked.  The shrubs are right over top of a place where I know there's a gas line buried, and there's no way I was digging there until that got marked :)

So I had a little unexpected free time in the afternoon.  We'd discovered last week that our FJ's battery had died, and I'd ordered and received the replacement.  It took me about an hour to replace it.  It's a little more complicated than you might think, for two reasons.  First, I had (years ago) fabricated a very sturdy steel box to contain it, and I had to disassemble that before I could remove the old battery.  Second, there are a lot of wires connected to the battery!  The original truck wiring had just one (very large) wire on each terminal, but the accessories I added meant about 10 more wires were needed.  All of this would have been completely unexciting except for one thing: the call of a raptor overhead.

When I heard the call, I got my head out from under the hood and looked up – and saw a bald eagle in a tight circle almost directly overhead, perhaps 120' up.  I watched, entranced, and saw it suddenly stoop nearly straight down to a point about 40' directly south of where I was standing.  That's a short distance into our south alfalfa field, where the eagle had espied a vole – and shortly after had a nice vole lunch.  I watched it catch and kill the vole, then fly off to the east out of sight – presumably to a nest or perch it has taken ownership of.

The battery seems (so far!) to have solved the electrical problem in our FJ.  From the symptoms, I was sure I had a slow electrical draw somewhere.  I'd tested the alternator myself, and knew it was fine.  But the problem turned out to be the battery itself – it could only hold a charge for an hour or so, then would crap out.  I have no idea what the mechanism of that failure mode would be (and I do know a bit about how batteries work!), so I'm still a bit skeptical that the battery was actually the problem.  I'm saving the old battery for a while until I'm certain we've actually fixed it.

After I got done with my (aaargh!) taxes yesterday, I was in no mood for anything else constructive – so Debbie and I watched a movie together.  We chose one that I'd read good reviews of, with an actress I like: Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock.  It's a film about an accident in space, and as such it's something I'd normally avoid – the Hollywood destruction of the laws of physics generally distracts me so much that I can't enjoy the movie.  The reviews I'd read applauded the film's technical accuracy, so I decided to give it a try.  There are a few places where they blew it, but in general those reviewers were right: the movie is quite realistic about how things actually work in space, to the point where I could actually enjoy the movie.  Some of the scenes in that movie were terrifying to me, and all of it kept my interest.  I have no idea how they filmed some of the scenes in weightlessness; they looked real, right down to the behavior of water and fire.  I'd watch it again.

If you want to get me in a bad mood...

If you want to get me in a bad mood ... it's easy.  Just get me on the day I make out the checks I being forced (by threat of imprisonment) to send to our incompetent government.  Aaargh!!!

And then there was just one...

And then there was just one...  I started out with three kids to tutor, and then one of them dropped out because of other obligations.  Now a second has dropped out, partly because soccer season has started, and partly (I suspect) from feeling behind.  That leaves me with just Abby (at right), a bright and highly motivated student.  That grin is because I told her to “say cheese!”.  She's picking up material rapidly – and now that she'll be the only one in class, I can throw material at her even faster.  She won't be bored :)  She and I had a fun class today, especially when she got to program interactively with me – something that's really only practical in a one-on-one scenario...

This is pretty cool!

This is pretty cool!  A map of the world that lets you find and listen to audio clips of the sounds found in any particular area.  If you're so inclined, you can upload your own sounds to add to the collection.  I could waste happily spend many hours exploring these things!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Starting with our last session, my neighbor's kids (Abby and Nicholas) are actually writing programs.  I created a little “sandbox” in a browser page for them to play around in.  Their first homework assignment was to modify a program I wrote that paints a hollow rectangle to paint a solid rectangle instead.  It will be very interesting to see (a) if they managed to do this at all, and (b) how they went about it.  We'll be talking about various approaches to this today, and then I'm going to give them a program that paints a solid circle – and their homework will be to paint a hollow one.

Yesterday and the day before at Tim's house, we dug the entire trench with the backhoe without hurting anything.  No broken gas lines, especially :)  However, there was one short stretch (about five feet) where we knew a power line ran.  We knew this because the first time we dug a trench here (last fall) we broke it with the backhoe, making a nice big spark and even some smoke.  So this time, we “skinned” the first foot off the top with the backhoe, then dug down carefully by hand, with shovels.  Somehow we managed to nick the wire anyway!  We were surprised how shallow the wire was, only about an inch under the trench we'd dug with the backhoe.  I hit the wire with the tip of my shovel and made a nice spark, and one of us (we're not sure who) scraped a piece of insulation off.  The conductor, though, wasn't harmed at all. 

Tim knows a local electrician (Curt) who was able to come out later in the day to fix the problem.  He cut the wire, threaded a piece of thick heat-shrink tubing over one end, stripped the insulation off an inch of each new end, then crimped on the biggest butt connector I've ever seen.  He had an enormous crimping tool that looked like it would crush 1" diameter steel bolts (and maybe it could!).  After that, he just pushed the heat-shrink tubing into the right place to cover all the damage we did, then used a torch to shrink it down to size.  In no time at all, the entire thing was patched.  When you know what you're doing, and have the right parts and tools, seemingly difficult problems can made into tiny ones.

Speaking of which, one of the things Tim needed to do to install his new pump wiring was to drill a 1.5" diameter hole through his foundation, about 18" below ground level.  We'd dug the dirt away from his foundation to expose the right place for the hole, but to do the drilling time hired a fellow (Ed) he knows.  Ed had the right tools: a small but very powerful electric drill motor with a water inlet, and a collection of industrial diamond-tipped drill bits.  The water inlet on the drill dribbled a constant flow of water into the inside of the drill bit, cooling it down (especially at the biting end).  It took him about 15 minutes to set up, then about 4 minutes to actually drill a perfect, smooth hole through 12" of concrete.  I have an impact drill that can make such holes, but I know from hard experience that it would have taken me much longer, I had a good chance of being stopped by a rock (the diamond blade goes right through them), and the hole would have been only very roughly round.  Also the noise of the impact drill is awful, while Ed's diamond bit was no noisier than an ordinary wood drill bit.  The nice hole it produced made it trivial to insert a piece of PVC pipe (to protect the cable from rubbing on the concrete).

Later today, after I've finished the kids' lesson for the week, I'm heading over to my neighbor Alan L.'s house to do some backhoe work.  He's got some big shrubs that need to come out, and the idea of hand-digging them he found intimidating for some reason :)

Attention!

Attention!  The world has not ended, Paradise is still here.  I just haven't had time for any ponders today, as I've been out digging a ditch (and filling it back in after putting a wire in it) at my friend and neighbor Tim D's house.

My mom called, and two readers emailed, wondering if something was wrong because I didn't post today.  Nothing wrong; just busy.

I'll be pretty busy tomorrow, too – tutoring two of my neighbor's kids in the morning, then helping another neighbor dig out some big shrubs and move some sand.  If my brother Scott is back from his trip tomorrow, we'll also be removing some barbed wire fence (from the west side of my property).

So don't be alarmed, dear readers, if the blogging is non-existent tomorrow :)

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders... 

Tim and I got about 2/3 of his new trench dug, and (the best part!) we have finished all the parts where we might hit things like buried gas lines, irrigation pipes, and wires.  It's all clear sailing from here.  If you look carefully in the photo at right, you can see my (orange) tractor in the distance.  The well, which is at the other end of this ditch, is about 15' further than the tractor.  I stood at the point where the ditch takes a short left turn to enter Tim's house.  It's about 130' all together.  The original trench that we dug in the same spot was 48" deep; the new trench is only 18" to 20" deep, which is why it's going so much faster :)  The tractor (a Kubota B26TLB, like the one at left) performed flawlessly all day.

We knocked off at around 2 pm because Tim had to go to an obligatory baseball game that his grandson was playing in.  Debbie and I decided to go have ourselves a lupper out, at Jack's in Logan.   There we each had a bowl of homemade cream of mushroom soup that was just outstanding, and then Debbie had a Cozumel mini-pizza (left), and I had their Teres Major mini-pizza (right).  Both were, as usual, wonderful:

As if that weren't enough, we then traveled (the long way around, because I got turned around) to the Aggie's Creamery to have some ice cream.  We both got the same thing (first time evah, I think) – a two-scoop cone with chocolate almond on the bottom and caramel cashew on top.  The tastiosity was quite high :)

On the way home we reflected about the high quality-to-price ratio of the meal we just had.  The total tab (Jack's and Aggie's) for our meal was $36.05 – that's soup, pizza, drinks, and ice cream for two, including a generous tip.  The food was all outstanding, front-to-back, the portions generous (we took some home), the service full of smiles and good cheer, the atmosphere friendly and even the other patrons were pleasant to be around.  I'd have been perfectly happy paying twice what we did – and in San Diego, I would have.  There's no way the San Diego ice cream would have been as good, though – and most likely not the soup, either.  The pizza would could probably find the equal of.

I love living here, in a postcard...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Checked the news first thing this morning to see if the election cycle was still completely insane.  Yup.  Tuning it out again...

My friend and neighbor Tim D. called yesterday morning.  We had a nice conversation (mostly about our tree-nesting goose!) and then he shyly revealed the real reason for his call: he needs my help digging another ditch.  Unbeknownst to us, on Tuesday he lost all water to his house.  After some troubleshooting with the help of an electrician, he determined that the wires powering the pump (running from his house to his well) were broken somewhere.  Somehow we must have done that when we replaced his water pipes last fall.  At the moment he's got a power line running over the ground so they have water, but we need to get that underground and protected (especially from his horses!).  So this morning I'm headed over there with my tractor, and we'll dig an 18" deep trench from his house to the well.  We're going to do it right in the top of the last (4' deep) trench we dug, to minimize the damage to his yard.

After Tim called, I headed out to my barn to do something I needed to do anyway: ready my tractor for some digging.  This coming Saturday I'm going over to another neighbor's (Alan L.) to help dig out some big shrubs (with my backhoe) that are impinging on his orchard.  I've had the backhoe dismounted all winter, to make snowplowing easier.  So I spent a couple hours putting it back on (pretty easy, actually) and then lubing it.  What a mess it is to lube that thing!  I didn't count them, but there are something like 50 zerk fittings (as at right).  I used my tractor a lot since the last time I lubed it, so every single one of these fittings was caked with greasy dirt.  That means I had to dig out the dirt around each one (with a stick), clean it with a rag, connect my grease gun, fill it with grease, disconnect the grease gun (sometimes a challenge!), and then repeat for the next one.  By the time I got finished with this, I was covered with grease from head to toe.  I had to strip, throw my clothes in the wash, and take a shower myself when I got done :)

Late yesterday we took a drive out to Porcupine Reservoir.  The main reason we went: we had spotted a paddock with a dozen or so very pregnant female goats late last week, and we figured by now they should have hatched.  They had!  I don't know why baby goats are so cute, but they sure are.  Too bad they don't stay that way :)  We didn't see much other wildlife, except for a rare sighting (our second time in two years) of a rabbit.  Yes, a rabbit.  For reasons we cannot fathom, rabbits are quite rare here.  The reservoir was not quite full, but it's level is only about 10' or so below the overflow point.  The irrigation water won't start being drawn until toward the end of April, so we've still got almost a month for it to fill those last few feet – and the snow in the high country has yet to melt...

The trailer goes to work...

The trailer goes to work...  I actually used it a bit yesterday, to pick up trash.  But this morning I used the trailer for its intended purpose, for the first time: hauling brush.  Prior to building this, I had two inferior choices.  I could use the small commercial trailer I have for the ATV (holds 1/3 cubic yard, and nothing over 30" long), or I could use the forklift on my tractor (great for big branches, but worthless for the smaller stuff that is the vast majority of the waste I produce when pruning).  Over the past couple of days I pruned three trees and two shrubs, making four good-sized piles of brush scattered around the yard.  With the trailer I was able to compress them all down into a single load, and take them to my brush pile without leaving a trail of trash behind me.

Success!

One of the trees (a red-leafed plum) and the two shrubs (unidentified, but I think they may be Syringa) were originally grafts – one plant was used for the root-stock, and the other for the more decorative above-ground plant.  All three of these have sprouted prodigiously from the root-stock, sending nearly vertical branches heading for the sunlight.  On the plum some of them had reached 8' in length.  On all three plants, when they were in leaf I couldn't see the trunk and didn't realize that I had sprouting root-stock.  Right now, with no snow and the leaves just starting to bud out, I could easily see what was going on.  It took quite a bit of pruning to get them all.  Between the three plants, I'd guess there were close to 100 of these branches, from 1/4" or so to an inch in diameter.  About half of them were too big to cut with the short-handled loppers I have (at right), so I had to saw all of them.  The plants sure look a lot better now!  The plum had been struggling, so I'm hoping that the roots will be devoted to nourishing the desired top-stock now, and it will get healthier...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Debbie and I drove up to Hardware Ranch (and on toward Ant Flats) last night, late enough so that the sun had just set when we got back.  For much of our trip, the sun was at a low angle, just over the Wasatch Mountains to our west.  This made for some interesting lighting.  We also took my spotting scope, and I tried for some wildlife photos.  Given that I was hand-holding the camera (as they don't make a holder for the iPhone 6S+ that I have), I'm pleasantly surprised by the results.  The photo at right was taken looking down toward the residences and barn at Hardware Ranch, from a corner of the “back” way up to the visitor's center.  We don't know what those trees are with the yellow branches, but we've been watching them get more and more yellow as spring approaches.

We spotted this raptor sitting on the ground about 150' from Ant Flats Road, sitting in grass nearly as tall as it was.  After looking at it for a bit in the binoculars, I set up my spotting scope to get a photo.  Naturally, that caused the bird to fly away – to about twice as far from me :)  The photos would have been much better if the little so-and-so had stayed put!  After considering its perch-on-the-ground behavior and its appearance, we're pretty sure this is a juvenile Northern Harrier.

At the 5M cabin (by a set of gorgeous waterfalls), Debbie spotted this pair of Sandhill Cranes; female on the left, male on the right.  She spotted them first as we were driving behind a little knoll that obscured them, and when we popped out from behind the knoll it took her several minutes to find them again.  I thought she had imagined them :)  These two were brightly backlit by the sun at a low angle (see their shadows), which is a difficult photographic setup, as my spotting scope was looking nearly into the sun.  I'm really surprised how well this shot turned out.

After we turned around and headed home, we spotted a large herd (around 50 animals) of elk on a hillside about a mile west of us.  At that point we were in the shade of the mountains alongside us, but the elk were around 600 or 700 feet higher than us, and brightly lit by the setting sun.  It was a pretty scene even by eyeball, and even better in the binoculars or spotting scope.

What a great drive that was!

Lingual papilla in Paradise...

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!

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...

Paradise trailers...  The last bits of painting were done yesterday morning (black on the metal parts).  This morning I assembled the sides onto the trailer for its debut piece of work: cleaning up the trash alongside the highway.  I took the photo at right just before I headed out to the highway to pick up the debris my fellow humans decided to toss out their window as they drove by.  I'm not too happy with them at the moment, as my back hurts from bending over about 10,000 times to pick up their crap.  I cleaned up about a quarter mile of one side of the road, along our property and my neighbor Tim's.   All together I picked up about half a cubic yard of beer cans and bottles, fast food wrappings, and a little bit of just about anything else you can think of.  That included a baby bottle, an empty box of condoms, a quarter of a front bumper, a CFL light bulb, and a bottle of Oxycontin with several pills remaining.

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...

Canadian goose nesting...

Canadian goose nesting ... in a tree!  This goose appears to be sitting on eggs in a nest about 40' high in a (I think) box elder tree.  The tree is on my neighbor's property, about 50' north of our property's edge.  We think the nest (which has been there at least two years) was an old hawk's nest. 

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!

How do cats land on their feet?

How do cats land on their feet?  Interesting slo-mo footage here...