Paradise ponders: all kinds of stuff edition...

Paradise ponders: all kinds of stuff edition...  I hardly know where to start on this one!

I guess last night, when we had a beautiful scene on the Wasatch Mountains to our east just before the sun dropped down below the Wellsville Mountains to our west.  The photos below were shot from my office windows.  Gorgeous, it was...

Yesterday morning, bright and early, the fellows from Golden Spike Electric showed up to finish the job of wiring our filling station.  All that had remained was wiring the explosion-proof “whip” to connect the pumps to power.  The photo at right shows the completed unit.  It all works just great!  We filled the diesel tank of my tractor (7 gallons) in under 30 seconds.  And no clumsy 5 gallon cans to deal with!  Woo hoo!  There are some leaks that showed up after we pressurized the system with the pumps, but the plumbers who did the job will be here soon to fix those.  We have our own filling station, off-road diesel and ethanol-free gas!

I worked for several hours yesterday wiring up the pump controller in my cedar shed.  That also involved several hours of looking for parts, mostly 8 gauge wire in the appropriate assortment of colors.  That wasn't so easy to find!  The first photo below shows the controller mounted to the wall, cover off.  If you're not familiar with these controllers, they're interesting gadgets.  This model takes up to 40 amps single phase 60 Hz 240 VAC as its input, and provides up to 30 amps three phase variable frequency 240 VAC as its output.  The output frequency is controlled by a pressure sensor, and the output is intended to drive a centrifugal pump.  In my case that will be a 5HP pump, and we're going to keep the pressure at a constant 65 PSI.  The device is based on switching technology, making it both quite small and remarkably efficient (>95%).  It's controlled by a computer (of course!), and has several interesting programmable features.  Of interest to me are two inputs that can be used to enable/disable the pump, and an output that can tell some other device that the pump is running.  There's also a serial connection that can provide much more detailed information.  The second photo below shows the finished installation.  Input power comes in on the lower left, output through the flexible conduit that will connect to the pump when it's delivered.  The pump will sit on the pad you see below and right of the controller.  That pad is sitting on 1" thick anti-vibration pads, which hopefully will keep the vibration from the pump down to levels that won't shake my cedar shed apart!  :)

Debbie and I took our friend Michelle H. out to lunch at the Black Pearl, where we all had sushi (perfect for a blazing hot day like yesterday was!).  She'd never had sushi with raw fish before, but she had one bite of Debbie's roll that included a layer of hamachi.  She liked it. :)

The sprinkler guys worked hard all day long, and got a lot done.  I'd say they're well over half-way finished with the trenching and pipe installation.  Our yard looks like some mutant gopher is wreaking vengeance upon us – trenches are everywhere!  Toward the end of the day they went to test a new section but couldn't get any water.  With a little investigation, we discovered that the Paradise Irrigation Company had turned off the water while they de-mossed the canal (something they do several times each summer).  They neglected to warn us, though, so we were taken by surprise.  It's back on now...

In the afternoon, Debbie spotted some really dramatic looking clouds and rain to the north of us.  I looked at the weather radar and saw that it was pouring up there – so we decided to chase the storm.  We hopped in the Model X and zipped northward, never making it closer than the outer edge of any storm.  No matter, the dramatic lighting made for some beautiful views.  We went up to the Cherry Peak ski resort (first time either of us had ever been there), and the drive back was full of views to the west.  The valley was brightly lit, intermittently through broken cloud cover.  Where we were was in cloud shadow.  It was around 7 pm, so the sun was low and the slanted light made for some very dramatic lighting of the valley floor.  On the way home we stopped at Aggie's for an ice cream cone.  That was a nice way to end the day...

Paradise ponders: visitors, MacBook Pro OOB, sprinkler progress, and pump mount edition...

Paradise ponders: visitors, MacBook Pro OOB, sprinkler progress, and pump mount edition...  We had a nice surprise yesterday: Dave and Barb H., old friends of ours from Debbie's San Diego agility days, were in the area and decided to drop by our house for the afternoon.  They drove their enormous (40' long!) RV, towing a jeep, up to our place from Farmington.  We had such a nice visit with them!  Lots of talking, showing them the homestead, and then driving around south Cache Valley with them.  When they got ready to leave, they loaded up their five dogs (who had been carousing in our back yard), and they promptly took over the cockpit (at right). :)  We were said to see them go...

When I got my new MacBook Pro on Saturday, I took a few snaps as I unboxed it and set it up (below).  As you may already know, Apple is famous for their “out of box” (OOB) experience – opening a box containing one of their machines is exciting and almost sensuously pleasurable. Every last little detail, right down to easy ways to remove tape and even the smell are carefully engineered.  Each product has an entire team of people devoted to getting the OOB experience as good as it can be gotten.

In my case the MacBook Pro arrived via UPS in a plain brown box, rather like sex toys or pornography are delivered.  In the case of Apple, the ordinary appearance is to refrain from attracting thieves, not out of any concern that the recipient might be embarrassed.  As is typical with Apple products, a tiny little “zipper” broke the tape holding the box shut, and the inner classic white Apple box was revealed.  That box was shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, easily removed.  The exposed box then opened right up, revealing the MacBook Pro nestled in a molded cardboard holder.  Upon removing the laptop, I exposed the power cord, power brick, and manual.  I plugged the power brick into the wall, attached the power cord to the MacBook Pro, then powered it up.  In the last photo you see the first setup screen – I was all ready to go.  Apple did it again!  I'd have to give them an “awesome!” were I grading their OOB experience...

The sprinkler contractor has been working hard, and now with a fully functional trenching machine he's making great progress.  Our yard south of our house is now a maze of trenches that look like they were laid out by madmen.  One guy is trenching, the other is laying pipe into the new trenches.  In the last photo below, you can see the newly graded piece next to my barn.  We decided today to irrigate that area as well, and to plant grass there.

This morning I stopped in at Glen's Electric to pick up the pump mounting pad and the constant pressure controller (a variable frequency drive for the pump motor tied to a pressure sensor).  Then I built a wooden frame (using most of two 8' 2x6s and two 8' 2x4s) to hold the pump mounting pad, and to provide for the anti-vibration pads to go between the wooden frame and the floor of my cedar shed (photos below; finished mount in the last photo).  This was easy and quite a bit of fun, as I got to use both the miter and bevel capabilities of my miter saw to their fullest.  The finished product is significantly over-built – that pump won't be wandering off on its own! :)

The Epstein incident...

The Epstein incident...  This was passed along by long-time reader Simi L.:

The Epstein Incident

Epstein was a renowned physician who earned his undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees in his home town and then left for Manhattan, where he quickly rose to the top of his field.

Soon he was invited to deliver a significant paper, at a conference, coincidentally held in his home town. He walked on stage and placed his papers on the lectern, but they slid off onto the floor.  As he bent over to retrieve them, at precisely the wrong instant, he inadvertently farted.

The microphone amplified his mistake resoundingly through the room and reverberated it down the hall.

He was quite embarrassed but somehow regained his composure just enough to deliver his paper. He ignored the resounding applause and raced out the stage door, never to be seen in his home town again.

Decades later, when his elderly mother was ill, he returned to visit her.  He reserved a hotel room under the name of Levy and arrived under cover of darkness.

The desk clerk asked him, "Is this your first visit to our city, Mr. Levy?"

Dr. Epstein replied, "Well, young man, no, it isn't. I grew up here and received my education here, but then I moved away."

"Why haven't you visited?" asked the desk clerk.

"Actually, I did visit once, many years ago, but an embarrassing thing happened and since then I've been too ashamed to return."

The clerk consoled him. "Sir, while I don't have your life experience, one thing I have learned is that often what seems embarrassing to me isn't even remembered by others. I bet that's true of your incident too."

Dr. Epstein replied, "Son, I doubt that's the case with my incident."

"Was it a long time ago?"

"Yes, many years."

The clerk then asked, "Was it before or after the Epstein Fart?"

Father's day...

Father's day...  I'm not a father myself, unless you count all the dogs and cats we've shared our life with over the years.  But each year on this day, especially for the past four years (since my own father died), when I see all the ads for “Father’s Day” pop up, I think of my dad.

It's been over three and a half years now since he died, and ten years since our last trip together.  Despite the passage of time, nearly every day something happens that makes me think of him.  Usually it's some little thing, and nearly always the memory catches me completely by surprise.  For instance, yesterday while I was fixing a gate to our enclosed back yard, I had a vivid memory of my dad showing me how to fix a much smaller gate in a customer's yard.  The customer was a sweet little old lady in Princeton, NJ, named Mrs. Dickinson (not sure I've spelled that correctly).  She had a walk-through gate about 3' wide in the fence on the south side of her back yard.  That gate had come off its pins, much like the gate I was fixing yesterday.  I was perhaps 12 or 13 years old, and it was a mystery to me how to fix it – but that's the job my dad gave me.  He watched me puzzling over it for a while, then gave me a tiny little hint – and then I was able to work the rest out for myself.  My dad was good at teaching that way – mostly he let me try to figure things out on my own, then when I made mistakes would gently let me know how I might have done things better.  On that gate, for instance, I remember that it hung slightly off-level when I thought I'd finished.  He demonstrated the tilt for me (by letting a screwdriver roll on it), then challenged me to fix it.  I was able to figure that out.  Most of the “teaching” really was letting me figure it out, as opposed to anything resembling a lecture.  By the time I was ready to learn about electronics (and later, programming), figuring things out on my own was the norm for me ... due in no small part to my dad's challenges to me.

All of those thoughts were in my head yesterday as I fixed that gate.  That may be a funny way of remembering my dad, but it seems to work for me...

Paradise ponders: much ado about something or other edition...

Paradise ponders: much ado about something or other edition...  So many things all happening at once!  Last night, Debbie and I headed down to Salt Lake City to meet up with our friends Dave and Barb, who are up here for an agility competition.  We went to Red Iguana (of course!) and had a delicious meal with great company.  We really enjoyed that.  I'd forgotten to plug the car in to charge, so we headed down there with a marginal battery state, figuring we'd use the Salt Lake City supercharger if we needed to.  But when we got to the restaurant, we'd used just under half the charge I had before starting on the trip, so we should have enough to get home.  Right?  Well, we did, though there sure wasn't much juice left in the battery when we rolled into the garage.

Mark T. showed up at 7am and went to work trenching for sprinklers.  He spent the last couple of days fixing some problems on his trenching machine, but now it's working just dandy.  At around 8am, Ben (a roofer I engaged to fix our leaking balcony roof) showed up with his helper Vincente, and they got right to work.  As I write this they are installing the new flooring (after removing all the old stuff).  The floor is full of complicated shapes that must all be waterproofed, and that takes a lot of detail work, careful heat welding, and careful caulking.  The last fellow who did this work did an awful job.  Ben seems to be offended by such shoddy work, an attitude that I like a lot. :)   The work that he and Vincente are doing is beautifully done by comparison.  Ben was full of good ideas about how to make the result better, and I accepted all of them, even though that meant some minor modifications to our roof.

Debbie went back down to Farmington to be with Dave and Barb today as they compete.  She's texted me that she's having a wonderful time.  She saw a couple of new things down there that she's interested in.  One was a telephoto lens that fits on an iPhone.  Must have, she says.  The other is a woman competing on a Segway because her doctors said she can't run.  Debbie is thinking about that one, but it's a possibility.  I worry a bit about her falling from it.  Dave saw the woman on the Segway, too, and he called me and told me to order one for Debbie right now!  :)

I did a bunch of relatively small things this morning.  First I pressure-washed our deck.  It looks much better, but still has a film on it from the winter and spring mud.  Looks like sanding will be required to get rid of that.

Then I replaced the screen material on one (of twelve) screens in our sun room.  We're putting in heavy-duty "cat-proof" screening that's tough enough that we'd be comfortable leaving the sun room windows open for air when we're not there.  I'm also changing the mechanism that holds the screens in, from flimsy plastic pins to serious screws that would withstand a 20 pound cat hanging off it.  I did just one so that Debbie can see it, and if she's ok with it I'll be doing the rest of them.  I bought a new spline roller tool to do this, the highest rated one on Amazon.  There is a stunning difference in quality between it and the Home Depot $5 specials I've gotten before.  This one has roller bearings in the wheel, an ergonomic handle, and a well-designed wheel.  Instead of being a chore to put the spline in, it's a simple and straightforward operation.  I'm really glad I got that.

After that, I fixed one of our 8' wide gates to our fenced dog yard.  It had fallen off it's hinges after I hastily lowered a big load on the tractor (because I was tipping over!) and knocked it.  Fixing it was just a matter of adjusting the positions of the hinge pins and sockets.  All I needed was an adjustable wrench and a little patience.  Had it fixed in a half hour or so.

At that point I noticed that some of our bird feeders were depleted, so I filled them.  That gave me a chance to talk with Ben and Vincente, who were having a lunch on the lawn.  As we were talking, something most unlikely happened: a UPS truck pulled into our driveway.  We don't normally have Saturday delivery from UPS here, so I was a bit puzzled.  Turns out he was delivering my new laptop (which was supposed to have arrived yesterday)!  I'm making this post on that new machine, which I had up and running inside of 15 minutes after the UPS guy left.  :)

Here's something to ponder for a while...

Here's something to ponder for a while ... Internet penetration across the U.S.  It varies in ways that I find surprising and not immediately explainable.  The map is from this WSJ article.  There's a very high penetration both where we used to live in Southern California, and the semi-rural place we live now in northern Utah.  But where my sister lives (near Charlottesville, Virginia) is a relative Internet desert, and I don't really have any idea why that should be.  Then there's southern New Jersey, where my parents used to live – it has no data.  WTF, New Jersey?  The part of North Carolina where a good friend of mine lives (near Asheville) rather closely resembles the nearby Charlottesville, Virginia area – and yet there, the Internet penetration is high.  What on earth is going on here?  The WSJ article portrays this as largely a rural/urban divide, but their own map belies that.  I see lots of farming areas with high penetration, some with adjoining areas of low penetration.  My first instinct is to be suspicious of the quality of the data underlying this...

Awesome news of the day!

Awesome news of the day!  At least for those unfortunates like us who live a long, long way from the nearest Trader Joe's.  I've just discovered that Trader Joe's has a storefront on Amazon, with over 2,000 products listed already.  Woo hoo!

Paradise ponders: beautiful sunrises, shed lighting, and Mako neutering edition...

Paradise ponders: beautiful sunrises, shed lighting, and Mako neutering edition...  We had a rain storm on Monday evening that coating our mountain tops with a bit of snow.  On Wednesday morning the sun hit the Wellsvilles before it touched our valley floor, making for a beautiful sunrise (at right).  I was out working on the electrical wiring in the irrigation shed, and I got to watch it progress.  As Debbie likes to say, “We live in a postcard...”

And speaking of electrical work in the shed ... I've now finished all I can do until some more of the irrigation components show up (photo of some of the work at left).  I have a quad outlet installed next to the irrigation clock, and six bare bulbs (100 watt equivalent LED bulbs from CREE).  All of the wiring is in PVC conduit, and I'm quite pleased with the way it all came out.  Doing the wiring in the barn over the past couple of years may actually have taught me something!  :)

I took poor Mako into the vet this morning, as today is the day he gets neutered.  He was really excited in the office, because of the other dogs and all the nice people to meet.  When I weighed him in, he tipped the scales at 46.5 pounds – that little puppy has done quite a bit of growing, and it's all muscle.  One of the vet techs (Madison) tried to take him into the kennels in the back, but he was straining to get to me as I left.  Madison isn't much bigger than he is, so in the end they just both stayed in the same place. :)  It wasn't until I actually walked out the door that Madison made any progress toward the back!

Paradise ponders: wildflowers, healthcare market perturbations, and running-around-like-crazy edition...

Paradise ponders: wildflowers, healthcare market perturbations, and running-around-like-crazy edition...  I was so busy running around buying electrical parts yesterday (three separate trips to Logan!) and installing them that I never even went up to my office, let along posting on my blog.  That felt odd.  Because of all the running around, I didn't get much actual work done wiring up the shed.  I did manage to get one outlet box installed, though, and now the irrigation controller is powered up.  It connected to WiFi just fine, though not to the deck access point like I expected.  The first time it connected, it attached to the access point in my office – the furthest away from it!  The next time, it attached to the access point in Debbie's office, on the other side of the fuel tanks from the irrigation controller.  Weird!  I'm guessing that our wire fence is reflecting the signal somehow.

If you're one of the three crazy people who have been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I have pernicious anemia, and that I inject myself with cyanocobalamin (synthetic vitamin B12) as treatment.  In my case, the dose is 1 ml (milliliter), intramuscular, every two weeks.  If you do the math, that means I use 26 ml of the stuff every year.  When I was first diagnosed, 27 years ago, the standard form the drug was dispensed in was a 30 ml vial.  Back then, that vial cost about $15, and my insurance paid for all but the $2 co-pay.  The same exact drug was sold for veterinary use at about one third the cost per ml, though usually in (much) larger vials.  Bottom line: it was a ludicrously cheap treatment for a condition that would otherwise be fatal.

It's interesting to see how Obamacare has perturbed the price of this (formerly) cheap drug.  Obamacare forced insurance companies to cover only short-term prescriptions for drugs.  Somehow this was supposed to save money, though I have never understood the rationale.  For most drugs that meant a limit of 30 days worth, but for some (though not cobalamin) it is 60 days.  Now consider my pernicious anemia – for 30 days I need two 1 ml doses, or a total of 2 ml.  The drug companies could no longer sell cobalamin in 30 ml vials if they wanted insurance companies to pay for it.  So the drug companies, quite reasonably, responded by packaging cobalamin in a way they had never previously done so: in 1 ml vials.  If you're not familiar with ml, that's a teensy tiny amount of the drug – about the same as the ink in a standard ballpoint pen.  The container is, quite literally, several times as costly as the drug that it contains.  If I were to purchase cobalamin in this way, I'd pay a$10 co-pay for each of the 26 doses I needed per year.  That works out to a $260 out-of-pocket annual expense for me – 130 times what I paid when I was first diagnosed.  I'm not sure I want to know what the insurance company pays as their portion.

That just seemed ludicrously wasteful to me, and way more expensive than it really ought to be.  I seriously considered just buying veterinary cyanocobalamin, like this one: $10 for 250 ml.  No prescription needed, and theoretically the same exact drug.  I talked it over with our local pharmacist, a very friendly fellow, and he suggested that I special order a 30 ml vial through him instead.  That would cost me $145 out of pocket, just over half what the insurance co-pay would cost, and it's human-grade stuff (though I suspect it's really all coming out of the same cyanocobalamin faucet somewhere).  So I did – I paid about $5/ml for the same drug that costs $0.04/ml if you're buying it for your horse.  Sheesh.  Nice job at reducing costs, there, Obamacare!

On Monday afternoon, Debbie and I took a drive out to Hardware Ranch.  We didn't see much of the usual wildlife, but we did get a treat: two bird families are nesting inside the wall of the Hardware Ranch visitor center.  One family are flickers, getting to their nest through the frame of an east-facing window.  The other is a small hawk (unidentified), entering through a hole below a large light on the east wall of the visitor center.  The two entrances are less than 20' apart.

And then there were the wildflowers!  We spotted the blue ones first; they are so bright you can see them from 100' or more away.  When I walked out in a couple of hillside meadows, I saw many more.  This was truly a delight for me.  Some photos below.  There's a very pale violet lupine in that mix, but most of them are flowers I don't know.  I also stumbled across a sage with a gnarled trunk that looks like it's 1,000 years old.  The leaves on this species are particularly pungent when crushed.

Paradise ponders: quarter-rounds, expert electricians, LED lighting, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...

Paradise ponders: quarter-rounds, expert electricians, LED lighting, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...  Today the electricians from Golden Spike Electric showed up, as promised.  They went right to work installing an electrical subpanel in my cedar shed and running a circuit to the pumps in our little filling station.  I helped a little bit by installing some solid wood inside the cedar shed for them to mount components on.  As always, I was really impressed with the quality of their work.  They are a great example of the sort of craftsmen one can find up here in Utah, and that we never seemed to be able to find in California.  They couldn't quite finish the work today, though, as the explosion-proof “whips” they needed for the final connection to the pumps weren't available from the local electrical supply shop.  They've ordered the whips in from a supplier in Salt Lake City, and they should be here sometime in the next few days.  Meanwhile, though, I can now proceed with wiring up the shed to get ready for the irrigation components.

The first electrical item I'm putting up in the shed is some lighting.  We went down to Home Depot this afternoon to see what was available, and I found some 4' long strips, 3200 lumens at 4000k (bright white).  They look just about perfect for my application, so I got four of them to mount up on the ceiling of the shed.  That should fix me up with lighting!  Then I'll install a few outlets, with one dedicated for the irrigation “clock”.  Progress!  I also bought six more 100W equivalent bulbs for inside our house, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the price for these has dropped to under $14.  When I first started buying them, three years ago, they were almost $30.  I'm guessing it's less than five years until they're down to price parity with a high-quality halogen bulb of the same light output...

In between helping out the electricians, I put quarter-round trim all the way around the floor of the shed.  That gave the new flooring a nice, finished look.  The 45° cuts for the corners sure were a breeze with my “chop saw”.  All the times I've done similar trim work, I did it with a hand saw miter box.  The chop saw does a beautiful job by comparison, far better than I could ever do by hand.  Plus, it's easy!

I'm very sore all over today from moving the hay yesterday.  I thought I'd sleep like a log last night, but my aches and pains kept me awake half the night.  Oh, well...

Finally, this afternoon I put up the last Ubiquiti access point, in my shop.  The screen shot at right shows the lovely “green board” in the Dilatush WiFi Empire – all eight access points are up and running just fine, and we have rock-solid WiFi signals everywhere I've checked, inside every room in our house and barn, plus in our back yard.  Our Internet connectivity (both wired and wireless) here is now better than any business I was ever a part of.  Kind of mind-boggling, that is...

Paradise ponders: pipe, hay, floor tile, and drained cistern edition...

Paradise ponders: pipe, hay, floor tile, and drained cistern edition...  But first the important stuff: Debbie's big meal for today.  Debbie swears those things at right are quesadillas, but they don't look like any quesadilla I've ever seen.  But they were delectable, whatever their name might be.  Inside those tortillas was chicken, potatoes, cheese, bacon, onions, and almost certainly something else that I can't remember.  They were garnished with tomatoes and cilantro, and a heavenly sour cream-and-lime concoction that reminded me of Greek food.  My crazy wife made six of these things.  I managed to eat two of them, but only because I was ravenous.  She managed one and a half (which I'm quite impressed by).  We froze the leftovers; we'll see how well they reheat.  My lovely bride is on a roll with her cooking – two serious winners in a row.

I started my morning on my knees with a belt sander, smoothing out the joints on the floor in the cedar shed I built last week.  Just as I finished that, my friend and neighbor Tim D. came over and we moved irrigation pipe while watching the sun rise through beautiful puffy clouds over the Wasatches to our east.  While we were moving pipe, we noted Heath C. was over in his field picking up about 130 bales of hay by himself.  So when Tim and I finished moving the pipes, I went over to see if I could lend a hand.  A couple hours later, Heath and I had nearly finished picking up all the bales and moving them to a hay stack built on old pallets.  Another neighbor, Ryan P., saw us working and came over to lend a hand himself.  The three of us picked up the last trailer load of bales and got them all off the ground.  Heath's going to be back tomorrow with some tarps to cover the hay stack before the rains we expect on Monday night.  It felt good to help our new neighbor (Heath), but ... I was tired as could be after moving all that hay!

After all that, I went back to work on the cedar shed.  First I vacuumed the floor to get the sanding dust off, then I went to work installing the stick-on vinyl tile.  This tile looks for all the world like slabs of weathered spruce, and it even has the wood grain texture stamped in.  They're quite inexpensive (under $100 for 80 square feet), they look great, and they'll protect the plywood floor quite nicely.  Also, they're a breeze to install.  A couple of in-progress photos are below.  It's all installed now, and it awaits only some quarter-round trim around the edges to complete the job.

About midway through the tile installation, Debbie called me on my mobile to let me know that our house water pressure had gone to almost zero – just as she was getting ready to take a shower.  She wasn't particularly pleased by this.  I was afraid we'd had some disaster of the broken pipe variety, but then it occurred to me that I had turned on a single sprinkler a few hours before.  If our spring was filling slowly, that sprinkler might have outpaced it, and drained our 1,000 cistern.  So I turned off the sprinkler, told Debbie not to use any water, and went to look in the cistern.  The lid on the cistern is made of diamond-plate steel, and I couldn't budge it – not even with a 6' steel rod lever!  The thing is completely rusted shut.  I wanted to look and see if it was empty, and I could not.  That's another new project now, freeing the cistern lid.  Just what I need: another project!  I made another quick check of the water pressure, and it had come up substantially.  That bolstered my theory of the empty cistern.  We waited a bit longer, and the pressure came completely back to normal.  A couple hours later, Debbie took a shower without any problems.  I guess I won't be watering anything with our spring water any more!

Paradise ponders: wandering iPhones, big-eye tuna, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...

Paradise ponders: wandering iPhones, big-eye tuna, and ubiquitous WiFi edition...  Yesterday after we got home from having a lovely lunch at Los Primos with our friend Michelle H., Debbie realized that she didn't have her phone.  It's a really nice iPhone in an Otterbox case, and it's got her life on it, especially photos.  We searched everywhere, went back to the restaurant and asked, all to no avail.  Then I tried Apple's “Find my iPhone” app ... and it said the phone was offline.  Sheesh!  Not only did that mean we couldn't see where it was, we also couldn't lock the phone or take any other action to help find it.  Debbie's face was very long as she went to bed.

This morning we decided to check with the “Find my iPhone” app again, and this time it found it!  Immediately we had an address for its current location (just a few blocks from Los Primos), and we could lock the phone (which I did immediately) and put a message on it giving our phone number to anyone who might pick it up.  We got dressed, jumped in our car, and headed for the address in question. 

When we arrived, we quickly figured out that the building it was in was a four unit apartment building.  There were a couple of young Hispanic men outside, dangling cigarettes and looking generally a little rough.  When we started talking with them, though, they were sympathetic to our plight.  They were roomies in unit 2 in building, knew nothing about our phone, but suggested we try the other apartments.  Because the app was showing the phone in approximately the middle of the building, and we'd already talked with people from unit 2, I tried knocking on the door of unit 3.  A sleepy-looking young girl and her wide-awake parents answered the door.  The parent spoke only Spanish, but the girl spoke English well and acted as a translator for us.  We shared our story, again they were sympathetic, but they knew nothing about our phone.  So I knocked on the doors of units 1 and 4, but nobody answered.

What to do?  The app was showing Debbie's phone was right there, but we couldn't get to it.  I couldn't think of anything else that we could do, so I called the police (the Logan City police).  I was routed to the dispatcher in seconds, and he said he'd have a unit respond soon.  About two minutes later, a cruiser pulled up and a (very young) officer got out.  He was very friendly, and asked us a few questions to figure out what was going in.  He wasn't familiar with the “Find my iPhone” app, but it made sense to him and he decided to start knocking on doors himself.  He had exactly the same results with that effort that we'd had.  Then the officer asked if we could cause the phone to make some sound, so we could see if we could hear where it was.  I remembered that the app had exactly that feature, so we tried it out.  Immediately we all heard a “pinging” sound, and we quickly narrowed that down to a locked storage closet associated with unit 4.  The phone was there, for sure – all of us were now positive we had the right place, and further that we'd narrowed it down to a single apartment.

At that point the officer started working on locating unit 4's occupant.  The other people (we had a little crowd there) knew the guy's name and that he was generally at work (in construction) until the late afternoon – but they didn't have a phone number and didn't know who he worked for.  The police officer wasn't sure he was communicating accurately, so he called for another officer to help translate.  At the same time, he got more information on unit 4's occupants by running the plates on their vehicles in the parking lot (identified by some of the other people there).  That ended up getting him on the phone with a relative of the fellow we were actually looking for – and that relative called the guy we were actually looking for, got him to drive back to see us, and then he called the police officer back to let him know what was going on.  Sure enough, a few minutes later an older Hispanic gentleman came driving in, walked straight to the locked closet with our phone, unlocked it, and with a big smile gave it back to Debbie.  Turns out that he'd eaten at Los Primos yesterday as well, and when he climbed back into his truck he noticed the phone lying on the parking lot pavement.  He's not a tech-savvy guy, so he brought it home, locked it up, and was planning to have his (more tech-savvy) son help him locate the owner tomorrow.

This was a three-way win, with lots of smiles all around.  We won, because we got Debbie's phone back (in perfect condition, too!).  The Hispanic gentleman won because he succeeded in getting the phone back to the happy owner (you should have seen his grin!) – and he got a big hug from Debbie.  The police won because they were able to help a citizen retrieve their property without even ruffling any feelings, much less causing a ruckus – lots of smiles from them, too.  That was a very pleasant way to start out our morning...

We just finished our big meal for the day, a scrumptious dish that Debbie made up on the fly after we stumbled upon some great-looking fish in Macey's, of a species we had never heard of: bigeye tuna.  The fish looked like ahi, and we see that it's closely related to the yellowfin tuna that we know as ahi.  That photo at right is my share of the piece we bought.  Debbie cooked up some brown rice as a base, with broiled fresh asparagus on that.  She seasoned the seared fish with a bunch of her low-sodium seasoning collection, plus sesame seeds (an inspired choice!).  Then she topped that with some grilled green onion slices and a half an avocado.  My oh my was that dish tasty!  We're gonna have to have that one again...

After helping my friend and neighbor Tim D. move irrigation pipe this morning, I've spent the time we weren't retrieving Debbie's phone or eating installing more Ubiquiti Unifi mesh access points.  I am determined to have rock-solid WiFi in every room of our house and barn, and in the parts of the yard we regularly inhabit as well.  I started out with four of these access points, and I was very pleased with the results on them – so I bought four more, which is what I figured I needed to get coverage everywhere we want it.  The screenshot below shows the Unifi controller's view of our Dilatush WiFi Empire right now.  The “Shop” one shows disconnected because I haven't installed it yet.  Six of the green ones are in our house, and they're all working great!  Rooms (or places within rooms) that formerly had shaky WiFi signals now have full strength signals.  Our entire back yard has a strong signal.  All of the access points have between 250 and 400 mpbs bandwidth in both directions.  It's ridiculously good!  :)

Paradise ponders: another crazy day edition...

Paradise ponders: another crazy day edition...  I got up a bit early today, getting all my morning chores finished before 6 am so that I could help my friend and neighbor Tim D. move irrigation pipe this morning.  We got to share the sunrise and the setting full moon, along with our usual companionable conversation.  Moving irrigation pipe isn't something I ever thought would be something I looked forward to, but ... I do.

After Tim and I finished, I cranked up my tractor and headed a half mile or so up the road to pick up the pipe cart I'd arranged to borrow yesterday.  You can see it, attached to my tractor, in the photo at right.  I loaded up 26 pieces of 3" diameter aluminum irrigation pipe, lengths varying from 10' to 40'.  Most of my pieces were around 30' in length, but I had a few oddballs.  All but one piece has fittings on them, and most have sprinklers (usually with risers) on the female fittings.  I couldn't get the cart very close to the places where I had pipe piled, so I ended up moving each piece 50' or so to pile it on.  Then I drove to the corner of Heath's field (in the photo) and unloaded it all.  That was much easier, as the cart was alongside where he wanted it piled.  I'm really glad to see my old beat-up pipe going to someone who can really use it.  Heath will be here tomorrow setting up a couple of water lines on his pasture, just as soon as the baler is finished picking up the windrows you see in the photo.  After finishing all this, I was especially appreciative of the kindness of Mike C., who lent me that cart.  This would have been a far more difficult task without that handy little thing!

The contractors were here to work on the filling station today, and ... they finished!  The three photos below show what it looked like at different times today.  I've got a bit of woodworking to do in order to allow the nozzles to be racked, and the hose to move smoothly.  My electrical contractor will be here on Monday to hook up the power, and at that point we should actually have a working filling station.  It only took about 10 months!  At the end of this month we'll be traveling up to Kalispell, Montana again to pick up some more metal work we've had done.  Among the goodies on that trip will be the (lockable) door for the filling station.  Once that's one, our masons will be able to put all the rock veneer up around it (on their schedule, of course!).  Then it will actually be finished...

Our sprinkler contractors were also here, and they've now installed (if I'm counting correctly) 7 of the 22 total zones our system will have.  The part of the yard they're working on looks like hell – trenches and piles of dirt everywhere, and great big holes every once in a while where the valve boxes are going.  I have to keep convincing myself that the end result will be good, because it sure doesn't look like it right now!

My office air conditioning got repaired today.  The problem turned out to be a simple (and relatively inexpensive) one: the refrigerant had leaked out of the unit.  All they had to do was refill it, fix the leaking connection, and now my office has the feel of a meat locker.  Lovely, that is!

Debbie and I went up to Tractor Supply this afternoon to buy birdseed (we're going through about 40 pounds a week right now, I think because the parent birds are busy feeding babies).  While there, I spotted the ... thing ... at right.  It's a $200, 6' tall, sheet metal rooster.  Why?  This one store has eight of them in stock.  Are there really eight people in the area who would buy such a thing? 

Paradise ponders: remembrance edition...

Paradise ponders: remembrance edition...  My mom died one year ago today.  It's a lot easier for me to think about this today, but still painful.  This morning as I walked out to my barn, I looked up at the flag she made, now installed on my barn (at right).  I often look at it and think of her, but knowing the date today it stopped me in my tracks for a few minutes, just thinking about what my day was like a year ago.

That morning our phone rang about 1 am.  It was my mom's hospice nurse, a friendly and ever-helpful young woman.  The call woke me up, of course, and while I was still half asleep she gave me the news that my mom had died – peacefully, painlessly, in her sleep.  As I worked myself out of my grogginess, it occurred to me that this poor nurse must have to make calls like this often – how awful!  I started a conversation with her about this, and she told me that these calls were by far the hardest part of her job.  She loved caring for the people in hospice ... but letting her patients' loved ones know that her patient had died was really tough for her.  I told her that I admired her courage – I'm not at all sure I could regularly do that – and that I, for one, appreciated the way that she did her job.  I was able to tell her, truthfully, that my mom thought she was one of the nicest people she'd ever met.  And I seconded that opinion.  I've talked with her several times in the ensuing year, each time because she was calling to see how I was doing...

I had another busy day yesterday.

My replacement router arrived, and I was able to bring it up, completely configured, within just minutes.  It worked on the first try after installing it, and my office IT situation is back to normal.  Yay!  Even better, when I contacted Amazon (where I had purchased the failed router), they told me they'd be happy to refund the amount I'd spent on it, no questions asked.  They just want the old one back, and they'll pay for the shipping.  That kind of customer service keeps me in the mode I'm in these days: the first question I ask myself when I want to buy something – anything – is: can I buy it on Amazon?

The laptop I'm using to write this post is a five year old Macbook Pro.  It still works just fine, but it's a bit short on storage (just 500GB) and the battery life isn't the greatest (about 2.5 hours).  The most recent versions of the Macbook Pros are considerably better on both counts: 2TB of SSD storage, plus around 10 hours of battery life.  That's good enough to finally tempt me into getting a new one.  I put mine on order this morning; should be here before the end of the month.

The sprinkler contractor is making good progress.  The first two zones were pressurized yesterday – first water!  The first two photos below show one of the solenoid valves that control the zones, along with a drain (open in the fall, closed before first irrigation in the spring).  The third photo shows a set of sprinklers going.  Yay!

Because the sprinklers are going in, I now have about 20 lengths of sprinkler pipe that I no longer need.  A new neighbor of ours (Heath C.) bought a 2.5 acre lot about a quarter mile north of us.  He and his family are pinching pennies to save up the money to build a house on that land, but he needs sprinkler pipe to keep his land green.  I offered him my pipe, and he eagerly accepted – though he swears he's going to find a way to pay me back (I wouldn't take any money for my old, beat up pipe).  I noticed a pipe cart (for behind a tractor) parked up on the land of someone I know.  This morning I stopped by his house to see if I could borrow the cart, and he said “Of course you can borrow it!”  So tomorrow morning I'm going to run up and grab that cart, haul the pipe over to Heath's, and then take the cart back.  This will give me much pleasure, to give back a little to the neighborhood that has been so kind to us...

This morning my friend and neighbor Tim D. started moving irrigation pipe for the first time this year.  Debbie spotted him out there by himself (he's 74 and just had back surgery!), so she called me to go out and help.  That's always fun to do with Tim – lots of companionable conversation and smiles.  Amazingly enough, none of the sprinkler heads were plugged up by anything.  That rarely happens!

Yesterday morning I took a nice walk, on my usual route, with Cabo.  Our little valley is so beautiful this time of year.  There's still a bit of snow on the highest peaks, but I suspect that will be all gone within a week.  Green stretches right up to timberline now.  In a week or two, some of the mountain grasses will start turning brown, so things won't look quite as verdant up there.  In the valley and on the lower hillsides, though, the irrigated fields will be a beautiful green all summer long...

Yesterday and today my filling station contractor is hard at work mounting the pumps.  I've been helping a bit, on the wooden mounts we needed for the pumps.  Once that's done (should be any moment now), the rest will just be plumbing.  On Monday my electrical contractor should be here to put in the explosion-proof electrical feed for those pumps.  At that point we should have a grand filling station!  Toward the end of the month the steel door for the filling station should be done.  It's lockable, so we'll be safe from the predations of any unsavory characters who might decide to liberate some fuel.  That's fairly unlikely around here, but you never know...