Just called...

Just called ... Young's Lobster Pound in Maine to order lobsters for our Christmas dinner (Lobster a l’Americaine is the planned entree).  A woman answered the phone there, and my ear was full of that Maine accent – surfacing all kinds of wonderful memories.  I'd have been happy to talk with her for a few hours, just to hear that accent, but unfortunately she was obviously busy (lunch rush was just starting for them).  She recognized our surname, so obviously she's been working there for a while – don't think any of the clan has been there recently...

Baby, it's cold outside...

Baby, it's cold outside...  Just 9°F (about -13°C) right now.  The snow the melted on our driveway is now solid ice, so it's slippery out.  This is the kind of weather that fills our ERs with broken bones.  Be careful, everyone!

Last year at about this time...

Last year at about this time ... I noticed that very few people seemed to think of December 7th as having any particular significance.  That surprised me, living as I do in an area that's very pro-military and generally more aware of history than was the California I escaped from in 2014.  So this year, for about the past week, I've been informally polling many people I run into to see what their awareness of December 7th is. These short conversations are all happening spontaneously, so I don't have any formal records of the results.  I have spoken with roughly 30 people, many of them clerks at cash registers and my fellow waiters-in-line.  The ages of people I spoke with varied from teenagers to octogenarians.

The results were consistent with my observations from last year.  I found just one person who knew that December 7th was the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.  Just one.  That person was a woman, perhaps 50 years old, whose father was there (and survived) – a medic working out of the hospital on base.  As you might imagine, she reported December 7th was a somber day of remembrance at her house.

I was able to speak further with many of the people who didn't know what happened on December 7th.  I'm not happy with what I discovered while doing that: more than half of them had no idea that Japan had ever attacked the U.S.  A significant number of these people clearly thought I was some kind of kook for believing such nonsense, though only one of them actually verbalized this (a young woman who looked like she needed to holler for help).  Something so momentous, so full of consequence, that happened just 76 years ago has nearly been erased from the memories of our citizens.  This immediately leads me to wonder about similarly consequential events from the more distant past (say, the Civil War, or the War of 1812) ... but I think I won't probe that, as I'm already depressed enough about my Pearl Harbor “investigation”...

I'm less surprised now, though, about our apparent inability to learn from the lessons of history.  One can't learn from history one doesn't know!

Veteran's discounts...

Veteran's discounts...  They are very common around here, not so much in the San Diego area where we used to live, though a few national chains offered them.  Dozens of local stores and restaurants offer discounts for veterans here, including Home Depot (10%), Walmart (10%), Lowe's (15%), and several others we regularly patronize.  Most of them don't advertise the discount – you have to ask for it.  Some local locations of national chains (Lowe's is a good example) offer discounts where the national chain does not – I attribute that to the generally pro-military attitude that is the norm here.

Generally speaking these stores have either just taken my word for having served in the Navy, or they ask for my DD214 as proof of an honorable discharge.  Recently a clerk in Home Depot told me about a better alternative, one that I hadn't known about: it's possible to get a Utah driver's license with a “veteran’s indicator” on it, and the stores will take that as proof of being a veteran with an honorable discharge.  The DMV also requires your DD214 for proof – but you only need to carry it the one time.

So a couple of days ago I visited our local DMV license division office.  Just as on the first time, my visit was stunningly pleasant and convenient.  There was no waiting.  None.  The employees were uniformly pleasant, helpful, and engaged.  One was even quite entertaining!  There was no useless, stupid paperwork.  None.  In just ten minutes I had my photo taken, my signature captured, my application filled out, my $18 fee collected, and I was out the door with a temporary license in hand and a promise of my new license with veteran's indicator within 10 days.  The last time they told me 10 days it actually only took 4 – we'll see what it takes this time.  As a reluctant veteran of dozens of painful, boring, confused hours in California DMV locations, this contrasting experience in Utah still just blows my mind...

We love living in northern Utah...

We love living in northern Utah ... for lots of reasons.  But this week we've discovered a few new reasons.  First, we found out that on most Thursday evenings the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holds rehearsals, and the public is invited.  For free.  We're planning to go on the evening of December 21st.  Second, a local friend told us about a famous Christmas light exhibit at Willard Bay State Park, a 40 minute drive from home.  We're going to go see this one night this week, and also stop in to see Ogden's Christmas Village (we saw this during the day on Sunday, and it was beautiful even then).  Finally, a repeat of last year, we were invited to the local LDS ward's Christmas party on Thursday evening this week.  We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the party last year...

The key to efficient snowplowing...

The key to efficient snowplowing ... isn't finding the route for your snowplow that scrapes all the driveway/parking lot surface most efficiently.  In fact, that's almost irrelevant.  The key, my fellow snowplowers, is finding the route that most efficiently pushes all that snow to somewhere where you can pile it up.  The periphery of my driveway is roughly 50% places where I can't pile snow (because of trees, etc.), and 50% places where I can.  The entire trick to getting the snowplowing done quickly is to plot routes for the snow I scrape to those allowable depositories.  It took me a while to figure that out the first year I plowed snow up here.  Now it's second nature...

Paradise ponders: snow day edition...

Paradise ponders: snow day edition...  We just had our first “real” snow of the season, with about 4" on the ground.  I took this photo off our deck this morning, by the light of our backyard floodlights.  As you can see, the dogs have already been out exploring!  :)

My writing this morning is accompanied by the happy slurping sounds of five dogs simultaneously attacking their morning kibble.  I'm in the kitchen, and I just put their dishes down.  The three puppies are in their crates drying off, as they're soaked from their outdoor adventures.  The kitchen is full of an ... interesting ... aroma comprised of roughly equal parts kibble and wet dog.  Next up: doggie bananas.  There will be much wiggling...

After that, I'm headed outside for the seasons first battle against the snow: there will be much plowing, shoveling, and salting.  Also, I need to feed the birds ... the feeders look low...

Paradise ponders, a day of beginnings edition...

Paradise ponders, a day of beginnings edition...  I spent a surprising amount of time yesterday working on a plan – for building a “rack” for my computer equipment.  It seems like such a simple thing – basically a set of wooden shelves – but to make it look the way I wanted it to, and to have the features I wanted, that took more design work than I'd anticipated.  Then to make it strong, without a back on it (because I want free space for cables), was another bit of a challenge.  So yesterday I made an outline of all the things I needed to do, and parts that I needed.  That resulted in a shopping list, some of which went on order online, some of which I ran down to Tractor Supply and bought.  I love tractor supply for routine hardware (nuts, bolts, etc.), because they sell it all by the pound, very reasonably.  This morning I started on the actual fabrication: planing one wide face of the nine Douglas Fir 4x6s that the rack will use, and then planing both narrow faces of three of those 4x6s.  You can see the result of that at right.  If you know anything about cabinetry or furniture building, you may well be surprised to hear I'm using ordinary, common-grade Douglas Fir lumber – but I've built quite a few quite nice pieces of furniture over the years with just those materials.  However, this rack is the most ambitious of these projects by quite a good margin.  It will be interesting to see how it turns out!

The special features I'm looking for in the rack are its appearance (rustic, heavy), largely hidden power strips and cable-ways (these will all be attached to the back of the rack, onto 3.5" wide sides of 4x6s, and so mostly out of view unless you peek in from the back or sides), and a couple of steel bars on the underside of the top frame piece.  The latter will be used for magnetically mounted wooden cases for Raspberry Pi computers and other electronics.  The smaller stuff is actually slightly challenging to house, as they're so light that the cables attached to them move them around!  The magnets should stop that.

We had another beginning yesterday, too – our contractor (finally!) showed up again, and began work on a retaining wall and three walkways.  The rock has been delivered: 18 tons of beautiful stone.  Six tons of that are flag stones that are roughly 2" thick, the rest are mostly thicker and smaller pieces that will be dry-stacked to form our short retaining wall.  There's also a pile of rock fines in our driveway, along with some road base and pea gravel; all of that for the bedding for the fence and walkways.  Yesterday the workers cut the pathways out of our lawn with a sod cutter, and today they're digging the trenches for the bedding to go in – and actually starting on the bedding.  At the rate they're going, I could imagine there might be one of the walkways installed by this evening, but I'm probably dreaming. :)

Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...

Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...  We did lots of running around today: to Home Depot for parts (they had everything I was looking for), to the dry cleaners to pick up our quilt we had cleaned, to the barber shop for me to lose about 3" of hair (where I still have any), to the grocery store for turkey-and-biscuit fixings, to the post office, and then to Valley View Granite where they've been storing part of a slab we bought three years ago to make our bathroom vanity.  Every single stop involved an enjoyable interaction with one or more people, which is one of the joys of living here – so many gosh darned nice people, wherever you may go.

We've long had plans to use that leftover granite slab – beautiful rock that Debbie located while we were building our new bathroom in 2014.  We had to get it shipped from San Diego to Tremonton, where Valley View granite is, and then they worked with us to get us exactly what we were looking for.  They did spectacularly good work; that vanity top is the centerpiece of our very pretty bathroom.  But it only used about 1/3 of the slab we bought – the prettiest 1/3, but the remaining 2/3s was still beautiful rock.

So today we drove down there to claim our slab remainder, and to start the process of fabricating shelves from it.  Those shelves are going to go in my office, where I'm in desperate need of storage space.  They'll make gorgeous shelves!  I'm going to make wooden corbels from 4x6 sections to hold them up; it should be an attractive combination of materials.

While we were in Tremonton, we had ourselves a little lunch, at a restaurant we've never been to before: The Grille.  We both had the smoked pulled pork sandwiches.  Debbie got hers with fries, I got baked beans.  The sandwich came with a very fresh cole slaw, the sauce the perfect blend of sweet and acid.  For me the highlight of the meal was an unlikely one: the baked beans.  These are obviously homemade, with lots of meat (cubes of ham, pieces of bacon, and bits of beef) and veggies (mostly onions and green peppers).  The sauce had a smoky barbecue flavor.  I could easily have made a meal of a big serving of those beans!  But the smoked pulled pork was also excellent, as was the bun it was served in (homemade, we think).  The sandwich came with a selection of six different sauces to put on it; I liked the plain barbecue, and Debbie liked the “barbecue ranch”  – a 50/50 mix of barbecue sauce and ranch salad dressing.  We were both very happy with that meal, and I strongly suspect we'll be back there again when something takes us to Tremonton...

When we got home this afternoon, I installed two shelves that I purchased from an Etsy shop.  These arrived yesterday, and I got them up in about an hour, right over my desk.  They're made from reclaimed wood – barn rafters, in this case.  They came with a matching steel invisible mount, which was easy as pie to put up.  The biggest challenge was making them level. :)  I'm very glad to have even this little bit of storage – when you have none at all, a couple of square feet feels rather luxurious!

Paradise ponders: kitchen lights, roast turkeys, and delicious pasta edition...

Paradise ponders: kitchen lights, roast turkeys, and delicious pasta edition...  I completed a nice little project yesterday: installing a new lighting fixture to brighten up a formerly rather dim corner of our kitchen, right where we have our little kitchen table.  That's a place where we typically spend several hours a day, so the dim light was something we weren't very happy about.  The perfect place for a new light would have been directly over the kitchen table – but there was no obvious way to get power to that location unless we tore up a whole bunch of wallboard.  One day a couple weeks ago it dawned on me that there was a power outlet near the floor right next to one side of the kitchen table.  That meant a straight shot up to the top of the wall, presumably with empty space between studs – so it should be possible to “fish” a wire through that space to a light.  That would give me power – but how do we control the light?

What I needed was some kind of remote switch, where the electronics for the switch could be hidden inside the wall, near the light.  I searched all over Amazon and found nothing that looked like it might work.  Then I tried eBay, and bingo! – a remote-controlled relay, controlled by RF through a little transmitter.  At $13.95, I could hardly complain about the price.  In fact, that's so cheap I was worried about it being junk – though the photo looked like a well-made device.  I took a chance and ordered it.  It came very quickly, and I opened it up to see if it matched the photos.  It did, in every respect – and with the opportunity to make a close inspection, I'm actually pretty impressed with its design and construction.  The relay is a hard-contact relay, which made me feel better about hiding it in the wall: those old-fashioned relays are more likely to fail than a modern solid-state relay, but much less likely to burst into flames under any failure mode.

So yesterday I dragged out my tools and started making holes in the kitchen wall.  To Debbie's credit, she didn't panic when I took out my oscillating saw and attacked the wallboard. :)  The only real challenge to the project was getting the wire from the outlet down low to my new hole up high.  I used a fiberglass rod “fish” to get through a new hole in the outlet's box to my new high hole; that worked out quite nicely.  The rest was just screws and wiring.  When I got it all hooked up, I took out the remote control – and it all worked on the very first try.  That's $13.95 I'm very happy to have spent!

While I was working away on the new light, Debbie was roasting a turkey.  It was finished not long after I finished putting the light up.  That turkey wasn't for our meal: we're going to debone it, use the carcass for soup stock, and cut up the meat for sandwiches and for addition to some turkey tlapeno soup.  Yum!  What we had for our dinner yesterday was some pasta and sauce we bought last week from Caputo's, dolled up with burger, ground pork, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms.  That was some darned good pasta!  We ate about a quarter of the gigantic batch Debbie made; the rest is all vacuum-packed and frozen now.

This morning we're headed down to Salt Lake City to raid MacBeath Hardwood.  I've never been there, but it looks like a place I will actually enjoy shopping in.  We'll likely stop again at Caputo's, at the very least to pick up another panettone (we got one last week that was simply outstanding).  I suspect we'll also be grabbing some lunch down there...

Paradise ponders: overdue updates edition...

Paradise ponders: overdue updates edition...  First, Kalea the kitten: he's doing great!  As you can see in the video at right, having nearly starved doesn't seem to have dampened his spirits at all.  Lifting our spirits: the wonderful news that he is FeLV-negative and that our vet could find no other health issue to be worried about.  That means he's cleared to join the horde of cats in our cattery, and we've already started to introduce him, under supervision.  One thing we can see already: exactly like Konani before him, this little guy is completely and utterly fearless.  We suspect he's seen enough really scary things to be ... unimpressed ... with the posturings of the milquetoasts in our cattery. :)

Last week Debbie and I journeyed down to Salt Lake City to get a recall issue in our Model X taken care of.  The issue was of almost zero importance to us (the left back seat might accidentally fold down in a sudden stop) as we only rarely have any passengers in ours, and the rear seats are almost always folded down.  But we did it anyway.  It took longer (over three hours) than we expected, but when we got our car back to our surprise it had been detailed.  They hollered at me for not having replaced my tires yet, and tried to sell me a set of the same kind shipped on our car.  I turned that down, and instead went (on Friday) to our local Les Schwab's and had a set of Toyo tires installed: much heavier tread, stronger sidewalls, longer tread life, less money, and I got to patronize a vendor who has treated me very well in the past.  Once again they provided great service, alerting me to a slightly bent wheel (not a current issue, but might become one) and doing a fantastic job of balancing the wheels.  The 22" wheels considerably limit the selection of tires available, especially because the rear tires are a different width than the front tires (this makes it challenging to find matching tires).

On that same trip, we had lunch at Bambara's, a new place for us.  Short review: it's excellent, and we recommend it.  We both had their silky corn bisque, and we were very glad we did – that's one outstanding soup.  Debbie had a seared ahi nicoise, which she devoured while making happy noises.  I tasted the fish; very good, it was.  I had a chicken club sandwich with bacon and roast tomatoes on homemade ciabatta bread; also excellent.  One big surprise for me: the fries that came with it were outstanding, and I am not normally one who gets excited about fries.  Just as much fun as our food was our server, Brad.  We were there after normal lunch hours and he wasn't busy, so we got to have quite a nice conversation.  The whole experience was most enjoyable.

Before lunch we spent a couple hours at the Utah Museum of Natural History, concentrating on their Viking display.  It wasn't crowded, a pleasant surprise.  The display was very well done, and most educational.  Debbie and I both came away with a very different impression of the Vikings than we'd had previously.  My big takeaway was the quality of their craftsmanship – they made some truly beautiful things of wood, bone, and metal.  Debbie's big takeaway was how small they were – she was expecting them to look like Thor in the Marvel series, and the truth is they were more the size of my dad (who was a small man by today's standards).

I'll wrap up with a less cheerful review: Jimmy John's “gourmet sandwiches”.  This is a place that was highly recommended to me by several local acquaintances, but I'd never tried it before – mainly because whenever I felt like a sandwich I'd go to Logan's Heroes, which has about the best sandwiches I've ever had in my life.  But for some reason I can't recall, a few days ago I decided to try Jimmy John's.  The most positive thing I can think of to say about the experience is ... at least I know now that I need never think of going there again.  Oh, and I didn't actually get sick, and the service was amazingly fast.  Self-serve at the local dumpster would be fast, too – and probably just as good.  And have more meat.  And fresher bread.  And cheaper.   You get the idea...

Paradise ponders: this 'n that edition...

Paradise ponders: this 'n that edition...  A few days ago Debbie and I took a drive over the mountains west of Clarkston, Utah – there's a pretty road there that we quite enjoy.  I took some photos along the way, of Debbie meeting a couple of horses:

A day earlier I caught this nice sunset over the field north of our house, with our valley dark but the Wasatch Mountains to our east still lit.  We'll have lots of beautiful sunrises and sunsets in the winter months...

And finally, here's the current state of my fan controller computer. :)  This is sitting on my desk right now, beeping and booping away. The larger board is a Raspberry Pi 3B computer.  To the right and below it in the photo is a small board with four bits of digital I/O controlled by a PCA9536 chip.  One of those bits is attached to a relay.  I'll use one for a signal switch input, and two for LED outputs.  The small board to the right and up from the Pi is a two-channel 4-20 ma sensor receiver, based on an ADS1115 A/D converter chip.  That chip is a mind-boggler for this ancient electrical engineer: it's a delta-sigma converter with 16 bits of resolution, handling up to 8 conversions per second.  On the same chip is a 4 input multiplexer and a precision voltage reference.  That's far better performance than the refrigerator-sized, million-dollar units I worked on in the Navy in the '70s - and this one cost about $4 and is the size of the head engraved on a U.S. dime.  The blue circular widget above the Pi is another little marvel.  The three leads on the top go to a standard PT100 thermistor for precision temperature measurement.  The electronics in the blue widget linearize the thermistor and produces a 4-20 ma signal proportional to the temperature measured.  I'll have two of those thermistors, two of the blue widgets, and the two-channel 4-20 ma sensor receiver - total price under $40, giving my little Raspberry Pi dual temperature measurements accurate to +/- 0.5 °C (roughly 1 °F).  What an amazing world we live in, where just about anybody can afford to make something like this!

Paradise ponders: post-Thanksgiving pain edition...

Paradise ponders: post-Thanksgiving pain edition...  Our b'stilla yesterday was, we think, the best one we've made yet.  I did some research yesterday on the web, looking for advice on making them, as our past efforts, while good, didn't taste quite like the version we had at the restaurant.  I found a post allegedly by a Moroccan woman who was ranting about how Americans screwed up b'stilla. :)  She had two criticisms: one was that Americans crushed their almonds instead of grinding them (something she apparently thought was pretty close to heretic), the other was that Americans used too much water when cooking the chicken and vegetables, leading to watery broth.  Well, both of those were definitely possibilities for us – we crushed our almonds and quite likely used too much water. 

The almond rant particularly interested me, as the Moroccan woman went to some trouble to explain why it mattered.  According to her, unless you ground the almonds they wouldn't express any oil, which provides a key element of flavoring for the b'stilla.  Our crushed almonds (toasted) were always dry as dust, so I was really curious if grinding them would actually result in what she said: something akin to crunchy peanut butter.  So I whipped out our meat grinder (which we haven't used in years) and ground up our toasted almonds.  The result was ... exactly as she described: just like crunchy peanut butter, and very oily.  As directed, I mixed that with sugar and cinnamon, and the resulting concoction was way different than anything we'd used before when making a b'stilla.  And the resulting dish, I have to say, bears out that woman's rant.  I also measured the water we used very carefully, and in fact we ended up with ingredients that matched the recipe.  I think we might have done it right this time!

And there are leftovers!

The carrot salad was not what we remembered, but it was pretty good nonetheless.  This recipe had cayenne pepper in it, and we won't do that again.  Even without the pepper, though, it wouldn't have matched our memory.  We'll keep searching for the right recipe.

The chocolate mousse also came out wonderfully.  I modified Julia Child's recipe slightly (gasp!): I eliminated the coffee (going for pure, unadulterated chocolate flavor) and I increased the butter from 6 ounces to 8.  It was pretty much perfect. :)

Our little canine friends were not left out, either.  They got several treats yesterday: an extra banana (3 for 5 dogs, instead of 2), milk on their kibble, egg yolks, and the cream leftover from making the mousse.  They were all quite happy with that! :)

My brother Scott, Debbie, and I played a traditional family game last night: Oh, Shit.  Scott won. :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!  Here in Casa Loco (aka Bin of Loonies and House of the Hopeless), we have a great deal to be thankful for.  Things that come right to mind, in no particular order:

• Debbie and I are both in age-adjusted good health.
• We live in a wonderful place, surrounded by admirable and tolerant neighbors.
• We're blessed with an assortment of friends who watch out for us, and make us smile.
• We're not worried about money (this is a huge change for us in the past four years).
• Our animals are all healthy and happy.
• Our several friends who have had recent health scares are all feeling much better.
• Our immediate families are all healthy and at least sometimes happy.
• It's a beautiful day today, and our holiday meal is being prepared.

My brother Scott will be down for Thanksgiving dinner with us.  We have a non-traditional menu: the main course is a b'stilla (a traditional Moroccan holiday dish, a kind of pigeon pie - though we use chicken), a Moroccan carrot salad, and chocolate mousse for dessert.  We've made the b'stilla several times before, using a recipe given to us by the Moroccan restaurant where we first had the dish.  It's full of rich food (eggs, almonds, butter) and exotic flavors (cinnamon, especially) Americans don't often associate with chicken.  The carrot salad we're making this year is a different recipe than the one we've used in the past; the jury is out on that one.  I make the chocolate mousse from Julia Child's recipe (the best I've ever had), using Callebaut chocolate.  If you love chocolate, you should make that mousse – it's not complicated, and it's been a favorite of ours for years.

We're planning to be near-comatose by around 5 pm.  I hope you are too!

Remembering...

Remembering...  It was four years ago on this day that my father died.  I have many good memories, but the feeling of loss is still very strong.  Much more about him here...

Paradise ponders: sculpture progress edition..

Paradise ponders: sculpture progress edition...  We heard from the artist who is working on a sculpture for our back yard – the clay statue is coming right along!  Two views:

Our notion is to build a water feature in our back yard that includes the sculpture.  We've got some thinking and planning to do!

Paradise ponders: moderated temperature, kittenly progress, and bigeye tuna edition...

Paradise ponders: moderated temperature, kittenly progress, and bigeye tuna edition...  Yesterday I finished up all the remaining “mechanical” work on my office temperature moderation project.  Part of that work involved making cover plates to go over the three big rectangular holes I had earlier cut into the OSB in the storage part of my barn (photo at right shows two of these).  These were more fun than you might think, as I had to cut a 10" diameter hole in each of the cover plates.  I used my bench scroll saw to do that, and it made very short work of it indeed.  The rest of the work involved putting insulation around my office door, and then wiring up the blower.  Once that was all finished I lit off the blower, shut off my heater, and let it run all last night.  This was a test of sorts, as the outside temperature got down to 17°F last night.  This morning when I got into my office at 6 am, it was quite comfortable inside.  The temperature measured 68.3°F, which had me a bit puzzled at first: it was actually warmer in my office than the 64.8°F of the first floor.  Then it dawned on me that I'm sucking air from the ceiling of the first floor, not the 5 foot high area where the thermostat is set to 65°F.  To test that theory, I got my precision thermometer up on a ladder with me and measured the temperature at the ceiling: 73.6°F.  That got me to wondering what it would be on the floor of the first floor, so I measured it there: 62.1°F.  So there's an 11°F gradient between the floor and the ceiling of the first floor – much more than I'd have guessed.  On the other hand, there's nothing circulating the air down there, so there's every opportunity for a gradient to be established in a relatively stable way.  That observation led me to turn on the ceiling fan in my office; we'll see what that does to the measured temperatures there.

This morning I've started writing the software that will eventually control the new fan, based on the algorithm I've described in a previous post.  This would be a trivial exercise in daemon construction but for the fact that I'm going to allow some nice monitoring capability.  That requires me to write the daemon multi-threaded – a new experience in C programming for me.  I've also got another challenge: a parts delivery is late and prevents me from actually bringing up the Raspberry Pi I bought for this purpose.  So I'm writing a bunch of software that I won't be able to debug for several days, at least.  This is not my preferred modality – I like to write a little bit, then test, fix, and repeat...

The little kitten is doing very well.  We may have settled on the name “Kalea” (pronounced ka-LAY-ah), which is Hawai'ian for “full of joy”, but I wouldn't count on that. :)  It's eating like a little piglet, and spends a lot of the time sleeping.  All signs of stress have disappeared.

Yesterday at Macey's we spotted some scrumptious-looking bigeye tuna.  We bought about 20 ounces of it, and today my lovely bride made us a mess of poke with it (my bowl at right).  Oh, man, was that good!  That's raw fish in a soy-based sauce flavored with a bit of sesame oil, with avocado, green onions, and some sesame seeds for garnish.  That big-eye tuna disappeared mighty quickly!

Paradise ponders: temperature moderation progress, kitten settling in, and great customer service edition...

Paradise ponders: temperature moderation progress, kitten settling in, and great customer service edition...  Debbie and I took a nice drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon yesterday.  We spotted several groups of deer, and noted that the bucks are back with their harems.  We also spotted a large herd of elk just north of the Hardware Ranch enclosure – they're coming back for the winter.  It won't be long now before they're all in the enclosure and the kids are taking horse-drawn wagon rides out to see them.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon working on the return for my office temperature moderation project.  I had a question from a reader about how I cut those rectangular holes in the OSB.  The first photo below shows the beginning of such a cutout, in this case through the second-floor floor sheathing.  I started with a 1/2" hole right in the middle.  Then I used a battery-powered skill saw to cut a couple of chunks out, as you see in the first photo below.  This gives me access to make the square cuts, and I ended up with what you see in the second photo.  To put the return in, I had to make four of these rectangular holes: on the inside and outside sheathing of my office wall, on the second-floor floor, and on the first-floor ceiling.  These all had to be in perfect alignment, which meant much careful measuring.  Once the holes were cut, however, the rest was a piece of cake; in the last photo you see the completed return.  Well, almost complete.  Today I'm going to cut some OSB to make covers for the rectangular holes I cut, with a hole for the ducting.  This will let me refill the holes with insulation and button it all up nicely.  Then I really will be done!

Debbie is working on a name for the new kitten, which she thinks is female (it's surprisingly hard to tell with kittens).  We have an appointment for it at the vet next Tuesday.  Meanwhile it's in one of our isolation cages, with a soft bed, a clean litter box, and an unending supply of food and water.  It looks quite content. :)

I had a great customer service experience last night.  I'd ordered the little camera at right to put in our cattery, so Debbie could watch over the kitties while she was upstairs or away from home.  It didn't work at all out of the box, which of course was very disappointing.  I followed their directions in case of trouble, and fired off an email to their customer support describing my problem.  Then I went to bed.  This morning when I got up, I had a very nice email from Connie – directly reassuring me that if the camera really didn't work they'd send out a new one.  But first, she asked if I could try an alternative microUSB cable.  I did, and that solved the problem.  I let Connie know, and instantly she reimbursed me for the cost of the replacement cable.  Very nice service, and about as easy a problem resolution as I could imagine.  What makes it even more impressive is that the company (Wansview) is in China, as is Connie, and she's Chinese.  Her English was excellent (as so often is not the case), and her service attitude admirable.  Kudos! 

Paradise ponders: first air and fallen kittens edition...

Paradise ponders: first air and fallen kittens edition...  I made good progress on my temperature moderation project yesterday.  The first photo below shows the door (a hatch, really) for the plenum box I finished yesterday, and the next photo shows it installed, with chest latches holding it in place.  The last photo shows the completed plenum box, with the flexible duct leading up to the boot (and on the other side, the grill for first floor air to get into my office).  When I light it off, I can't hear the fan at all – wonderful!  Last night I left the fan going all night with the second-floor heater turned off.  When I checked it out this morning, my office temperature was 64°F, same as my first floor.  That wasn't really much of a test, though, as the coldest it got outside was 55°F!  :)  Tomorrow night it's forecast to get down to 20°F – that will be a real test!

This morning, as I was drinking my morning tea, Debbie called up from the cattery, saying there was something there I needed to see.  That turned out to be a little kitten, to all appearances healthy except for a complete lack of body fat – that little thing was hungry.  Small as it is, it put away two cans of wet cat food in mere seconds.  Debbie found it in the well of one of our basement windows – apparently it wandered over to our house, perhaps attracted to our cats visible in the basement windows, and tumbled down.  You can see in the photo at right just how small it is.  We don't know if it's male or female yet; we're waiting for it to settle down a bit before we handle it too much.  It's already accepting being held and stroked, so I don't think that's going to take long.  It's going to the vet next Tuesday for a checkup, and of course we're hoping it's FeLV negative...

Paradise ponders, moderated temperature progress edition...

Paradise ponders, moderated temperature progress edition...  I actually got to work on my project yesterday!  It feels ... unusual ... to have an uninterrupted day to work on a single thing.  Focus!  It's a good thing!

The first photo below shows the blower I installed on the ceiling of the first-floor “garage” section of my barn.  I did that well over a year ago, and it's just been sitting ever since.  That's a very conventional squirrel-cage blower, running on a fractional horsepower synchronous motor (so very efficient), blowing straight up.  Above that exhaust port on the blower is a rectangular duct I built out of wood, leading through the ceiling (which has 8" of insulation in it).  The second photo shows what's directly above that blower, on the second floor of my barn.  This is out in the storage section of the barn, which is uninsulated and unfinished.  You can see the top of the wooden duct I built, and the beginnings of the plenum box.  That box is made of 1/2 OSB skin with 2x3 stringers, and stuffed with insulation.  One the inside you can see the “rails” I fabricated to hold a standard 16x25x1 filter (and you can see that filter installed on the last photo).  The next thing I built was the top of the box, a slightly complex assembly (fabrication in progress on the third photo).  Finally, in the last photo you can see the almost-complete plenum box – only the front door remains to be built, and that will be my first job this morning.  Once that's complete, the downstairs blower will pressurize this plenum box, and filtered air will exhaust through the 6" duct connection on the top.  The next step after that will be to install a “boot” in my office and connect it to the plenum box with flexible insulated ducting.