Things you find when cleaning up...

Things you find when cleaning up...  My office has been a complete disaster ever since my mom died, just over a year and a half ago.  That's because her stuff is strewn everywhere in it, and I've been procrastinating – waiting, really, until it wasn't too awful while going through her things, trying to decide what goes where or to whom.  It's still an emotional roller coaster for me, but at this point I'm not sure it's ever going to get any better.  So I've begun the great office cleanup.

I've just barely started, and already I've found some things that were surprising, and some other things that brought me a nice big smile.

The biggest surprises so far came from skimming through my mom's voluminous medical records – hundreds of X-rays and a couple thousand pages.  Before I shredded these things I wanted to make sure no other papers I'd want to keep were embedded in them (as I have found things I've kept in some very odd places).  This time I haven't yet found any other papers – but I did discover two medical issues my mom had that I had never known about.  The first was from 1998: the detection of a tumor in her brain, 1.5 cm across (so roughly walnut-sized).  I found the X-rays, radiology reports, and a written recommendation from her GP to have surgery, despite it being (as he put it) “quite risky with a relatively high expected mortality”.  So far as I know she never had any such surgery, and I can't imagine how she could have had it in secret – so she must have declined (not all that surprising for her).  The second issue was from 2007, the detection of a lump in her breast and the diagnosis of benign but with a recommendation to have it removed.  Again, I don't know of any such surgery – but that kind of surgery could, I imagine, be done without my ever knowing about it.  On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me to find out she'd declined that surgery as well!  In any event, neither of these contributed in any way to her death, so if she did decline them, in hindsight it wasn't a bad decision.

In another box I sorted through, there were some of our personal papers.  One of them was a note from November 1990, from the owner of a motel in Trinidad, Colorado.  If you click the little photo at right, you can read it.  She's thanking Debbie and I for some things we left behind for her, her husband, and their dog.  Neither Debbie nor I remember the incident at all, though it does sound like something we'd do.  We remember the trip very well, though: we were taking a friend from San Diego to Colorado for surgery, and then back home.  We stayed in Trinidad for a couple of days waiting for our friend to be ready, and we must have stayed at Hannah's motel.  We have lots of nice memories of that trip, so this brought lots of smiles.

Also in that box was something very meaningful to me, personally.  I've removed identifying information because so far as I know the author of this letter is still around, and I didn't get his permission to use his name.  Friends of mine from the late '90s or early '00s will probably be able to figure it out, though. :)  This is a letter of recommendation written to help me find a job after I fired myself as the CEO of Previo in 2002, because we were winding the company down.  The author knew me better than any other Board member did, so his kind words were something I cherish.  I haven't looked at this letter for over 15 years now, so reading it this morning was almost like reading it for the first time.  I never did use the letter to help find a job, but I did lean on the author a couple of times as a reference.  Both times the prospective employer commented about that reference call being amongst the most positive they'd ever done.  Both times they hired me. :) 

Winter in Paradise...

Winter in Paradise...  I walked outside this morning into sunshine, most welcome after a week or so of being socked in (that's a shot to our southwest taken this morning; as usual click on it to embiggen).  The temperature is hovering around 20°F, though it's supposed to get above freezing today.  We'll see – the weatherman's track record is pretty dismal recently.  I wheeled our garbage can to the highway, as today is pickup day.  I'm surprised every week by just how much garbage we generate; on average that garbage can weighs about 50 pounds.  We're just trashy folks, I guess!  :)  After that I did my morning rounds of the bird feeders.  It's cold, so they're very active.  The whole time I was doing these chores I was looking around at the mountains that surround us – so beautiful this time of year!

I spotted a couple of strange things on our driveway that I cannot as yet explain (see the two photos below).  Those two photos were taken a few feet and a few seconds apart.  They're both on a stretch of driveway with identical exposure to sunshine.  Last night it looks like some meteorological phenomenon sprinkled ice crystals all over the driveway, which then partially melted together to form a rough, thin sheet of ice over the entire thing.  But in these two places (and only these two places), these two blobs appeared.  The one on the left seems to have thicker ice there; my theory is that there was water (from the day's melt) on the driveway that froze solid before whatever it was dropped the ice crystals.  The one on the right seems to have no ice crystals – it's as if they all melted.  One might suspect salt, but I haven't used salt even 100' from there.  I have no other theory at the moment.

As I walked toward our barn, there was a commotion in our back yard.  It seems there were three spaniels who badly wanted my attention.  That handsome fellow staring me down and demanding a scritch is Mako.  Bored with the proceedings is Ipo, the furthest one in the photo.  And curious Cabo is carefully smelling all the vegetation at the bottom of the fence.  Sure doesn't take much to make them happy.  If you need to be loved, and needed, get a dog...

Turning around after taking that photo, I was standing under the flag that my mom made a few years ago.  It's hanging about 12' high, above my barn's big garage door on its east side.  I especially cherish the sight of that flag on mornings like this, lit by the low sun in the east.  Of course it always brings my mom to mind.  Often, as it did this morning, it also gets me to pondering just how much our country's government has changed since that flag was last the official American flag.  And that got me to thinking, once again, how fortunate we are to live in a part of the country where the general feeling is that our freedoms are being eroded and that they must be defended.  So, so different than California...

Just before I went in to start working on cleaning up my office, I took this photo to our northeast.  I stood on our property when I took this, but the field in the photo belongs to our friend and neighbor Tim D.  You can see part of our backyard fence at right.  On the left side are some deer tracks, and on the right a small dog or a fox (the latter is quite likely).  I love these winter scenes, and I especially enjoy trying to figure out what wildlife have visited us by identifying their tracks.  This morning as I took out the trash and fed the birds I was able to spot quite a few: deer (lots!), a large dog, that fox/small dog, several house cats, a muskrat and a weasel (in our irrigation canal), some small rodent (most likely a vole), and I think a raccoon.  There are also, as you might expect, about ten bazillion bird tracks in the snow, especially around our feeders.  I can't identify any of them. :)

The number of curses per minute...

The number of curses per minute ... has declined to its normal level (hear zero) around my office, because I finished doing our 2017 income taxes.  Yesterday the level was quite high. :)  Our taxes were complicated by the sale of my mother's home (and the empty lot next to it) last year.

This is the earliest (in the year) I remember ever getting my taxes done.  Just two days after I received the last bit of tax documentation.  Woo hoo!

Except for the two rather large checks I have to write, I'd be a pretty happy guy right now. 

But I sure wish I had the simple flat tax that my friends in Estonia have...

I just...

I just ... walked back into my office after running some errands.  It's time for me to get back to work on our taxes, not exactly my favorite chore. :)  As I poked the woodstove fire back to life, there was a loud rumbling (and I knew what was coming!) and then an enormous whoompa! as a ton or so of wet snow slid off the second story roof of my barn and down onto the first story.  The entire barn shakes when that happens, including (to my surprise) the concrete floor of the first story.  The trusses are holding, though, much to my relief.  I'm a bit surprised that there aren't visible “dents” in the first story roof from these falls!

Solution implemented!

Solution implemented!  The freezing UPS problem I devised a solution for is now fixed.  Yay!  And I did it exactly the way I had planned.  That hardly ever happens.  :)

The first photo below shows the shelf I installed, with the bottom of it being 10.5 feet above the garage floor.  The hangers that the 2x6s are sitting on were that leftover garage storage kit that I had.  In that first photo, between the two boards and a bit to the left you can see the 4" hole I sawed through the garage ceiling.  There's a matching hole in the second floor's floor.  The second photo shows the UPS all wired up and running.  I'm writing this post on a computer powered by that UPS.  It works!

The primary purpose of this project was to locate the UPS in a space that is temperature controlled – a sort of Goldilocks temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.  The barn's garage suits that bill perfectly.  In the winter it's heated, never getting colder than 65°F.  In the summer the excellent insulation in my barn plus the thermal mass of the 8" thick concrete floor keeps the temperature below 80°F most of the time, and the highest it's ever been is 84°F.  That's well within the UPS's operating temperature range.  My freezing UPS problem should be gone, and hopefully I didn't introduce any new problems while doing that.

There's a secondary benefit though, one that I hadn't even considered.  The UPS has rather loud fans, and now they're running down in the garage where a bit of extra noise will mean nothing (as there are many noisy things down there already).  That means my second floor is now back to it's basically noiseless state: nice and quiet for working, no noise to mess with my music.

Win!

Solution devised...

Solution devised...  A solution for my frozen UPS problem, that is.  Immediately below my UPS's current location is the 12 foot high ceiling in the barn's “garage” (where I keep my tractor, ATV, and some other equipment).  There's no wall anywhere near there.  I remembered that I had one of these ceiling storage kits left over from another project.  After a little investigation, I figured out that this would work very nicely to make a little “under the ceiling” shelf of sorts high above my “garage” floor, well out of the way and safe from anything stupid I might do with the tractor.  Installing that shouldn't be very difficult, other than having to do the work at the top of a tall ladder.  Once that shelf is in place, then all I need is a roughly 4" diameter hole in the ceiling (and floor above) to route the power input and output cables through.  I think the biggest challenge will be simply putting the UPS up there – the thing is a monster; weighs about 60 or 70 pounds.  I have to do some thinking about how to (safely) hoist that thing up there.

So now I have yet another project, this one with a bit of urgency as we have some cold weather in the forecast!

The cat...

The cat ... soon to be formerly known as “Tigger”.  This is the cat we adopted yesterday.  She seems reasonably content with her lot, but definitely not pleased about the presence of all our other cats.  At the moment only two of our other cats can actually come into contact with her, but they can all watch each other ... which they are. :)

Morning, deer...

Morning, deer, and a few other things...  When there was just barely enough light to see this morning, I looked out to our bird feeders to see if they were empty.  I spotted this deer scrounging the seed that birds had kicked off the feeders and not yet cleaned up (eventually they get everything edible).  I couldn't see well enough to tell if it was a buck or a doe – the bucks have lost their antlers by now, so the only way to tell is by getting a good view of their nether regions, or the back of their head (where you can see scars on a buck).  From its behavior (feeding alone), I'd guess this is a buck, but that's just a guess.  This one is being relatively polite and not knocking down my feeder.  Good deer!

The photo looks like broad daylight only because I've manipulated the exposure to make the deer more visible, and corrected the white balance to eliminate the blue twilight cast.  This is actually a good demonstration of the iPhone X's low-light capabilities, stabilizer, and telephoto – this was very low light, long exposure (1/15th), no flash, hand-held, on 2x optical telephoto.  Pretty amazing for something that weighs a few ounces and is the size of a thick postcard...

We got an email from an old friend last night, a woman I worked with through the '90s and up to '02.  She's 70, her husband a little older, and they're just now retiring.  They sold their small farm for cash, only to discover that the buyer was a gang-connected drug and gun dealer.  They went through a series of physical and legal adventures, including flying bullets, when finally this bad actor was arrested, arraigned, agreed to a plea deal for 15 years in federal prison.  Her (long) email reads like a précis of a script for a Hollywood production.  Holy cow!  And this sweet lady is someone who, if you were to meet her, you would think was primarily occupied with crafts and homemade shortbread.  I'm going to reply to her shortly, but right at the moment about the only thing I can think to say is “Holy shit, woman!”

Thursday we dropped off our little Munchkin (the male kitten who fell into our casement window a few months ago) and Ipo (the sweet female field spaniel whose owner didn't want her, and we adopted) at the veterinarian's to be neutered.  We picked them up in the afternoon.  Munchkin was back to his normal self within an hour or so of getting home.  One of the vet techs brought Ipo out to us, and while she was waiting for us to finish the paperwork she sat down in the lobby with Ipo – who was wiggling her butt to beat the band, and just loving all the attention from the vet tech.  I'm not sure she really wanted to go back home with us. :)

Yesterday afternoon we were relaxing at our kitchen table after a very filling meal at La Unica.  Debbie was reading about the animals up for adoption at the Cache Valley Humane Society (she does this almost daily).  She spotted a cat named “Tigger” that reminded us both of our beloved Maine coon Halala Pala, who died of cancer a few years ago.  Then we read the description and discovered that Tigger was 12 years old – and we knew that cats of that age are nearly impossible for organizations like the Humane Society to adopt out.  So we talked it over for a minute and then decided to go get her.  Which we did!  The staff at the Humane Society was delighted that someone came in specifically to get Tigger.  They tested her for FeLV (negative!) and in an amazingly short time we walked out with Tigger in a carrier.  She's now ensconced in her own little queendom carved out of our cattery, where she'll get as much time as she needs to get used to us and the other cats.  We found out that she was an indoor-only cat, the only pet of an elderly lady who has become unable to care for Tigger.  I'll post some photos when she's willing to come out of hiding...

A wintry drive...

A wintry drive...  Our neighbors Gary and Elayne S. own a gigantic 4WD pickup, and yesterday after lunch together we went on a drive around the north side of Porcupine reservoir with them.  It was just stunningly beautiful along the whole drive.  The scene at right is looking west over the reservoir, toward the dam.  We saw some deer, rabbit tracks, some chickadees, and an eagle.  Gary did a few Brodies along the way on the icy road, scaring the bejeezus out of Elayne – and I think he was a bit disappointed that he didn't manage to frighten Debbie. :)

Gary and I took note of the water level in the reservoir: it's only about 10' below full.  I don't think we'll have any problem with a water shortage for irrigation this year, which is great news.

They took us to a new (to us) eatery: Sabores.  It's tucked away off the main drag in Logan, behind the Beehive Grill.  We were both astonished to find another great place to eat in this little town.  Debbie and I have been missing good Thai food, and when we spotted Pad Thai on the menu we both ordered it.  It was excellent!  Debbie ordered dessert, and when they brought it out we were a bit shocked.  It was tres leches (three milks) cake (a common South American dessert), and it was a huge chunk.  Also delicious!  Between the four of us we managed to put it all away.  We'll be back to Sabores – that was a real treat, especially with friends for company...

Well, this I didn't expect!

Well, this I didn't expect!  When I went out to my barn office this morning, I was surprised to find that my iMac Pro was powered down.  After I powered it back up, I noticed that the Ubiqiti WiFi node in my office had also powered down over night, though it came back up on its own.  Then I discovered that my little Mac Server (a Mac Mini) also had powered down and come back up – as had all my networking gear.  It looked exactly as though I'd had a power outage – but I have a (really nice) UPS running all of it.  WTF?

My UPS isn't actually in my office – it's just outside my office, in the storage area part of the second floor of my barn.  That part of my barn is unheated.  Looking the the UPS logs, I discovered an event around 3:30 am this morning: temperature too low, at 9°F.  The thing shut down because it got too cold!  This is a new experience for me – all the temperature problems I remember seeing in electronics was because it was too hot, not too cold.

So now I have a new project: to move my UPS down into the heated part of my barn.  That's just 2 feet below where it is right now. :)  This will mostly involve drilling a couple of holes (for the input and output power) and building a shelf for the UPS, high on the wall of my workshop.  Not a project I was expecting!!

Another titanium artifact...

Another titanium artifact...  This is made by the same folks who made the titanium dice.  This is a key-chain clip, 6 cm (about 2 1/4") long.  It's made from a solid titanium blank, laser-cut.  The jagged-looking cuts form a spring, and it works beautifully.  The angled end prevents the sprung part from moving outward, and the force to move it inward is perfect, a few ounces.  Once again, I marvel that it's possible for an ordinary person to buy something like this...

Scenes from winter in Paradise...

Scenes from winter in Paradise...  By request, at right is my snow plowing rig: my Kubota B26 with a 400 lb. weight on the back and the hydraulic tilt blade in front.  I had it out again this morning, scraping off the two new inches that fell last night.  The forecast for last night? Zero inches.  It's still snowing intermittently this morning; it won't surprise me a bit if I need to go out again later today.

After I get back from my visit to the dentist. :(  Just a routine cleaning, but still ... not my favorite activity.

I took this yesterday to give you an idea just how much snow we got.  That trash can has the salt we use to keep our sidewalk and porch free of ice.  It sits under the stand of pine trees in our front yard – and it still accumulated that much snow!

When I went out this morning to fill our bird feeders, several species went right on feeding despite my presence: chickadees, juncos, house finches, and goldfinches.  I take that as a sign of hunger.  Our nearby honey locust had a swarm of birds perching in it: magpies, pigeons, grackles, and about a dozen red-winged blackbirds.  As soon as I left the area of the feeders, those red-winged blackbirds flew down in a group and started browsing on the cracked corn I'd scattered, as well as picking through the sunflower seeds smaller birds had pulled out of the feeders.  I sure hope they're ok through this snow and cold – they look very much out of place.

Yesterday afternoon we took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon to Hardware Ranch.  For me, the scenes of snow-on-rock were quite beautiful (below).  But darned near everything on that drive was beautiful: the stream, the contrast of red osier dogwood against the snow, the snow in the trees, and the broad vistas of snowy mountains.  Up near Hardware Ranch we saw several groups of deer, including one with about 40 members.  We also saw a few isolated deer, most likely bucks who have lost their antlers.  At Hardware Ranch itself there were hundreds of elk, picking through the night's snowfall to get to the hay beneath...

Red-winged blackbirds are here...

Red-winged blackbirds are here...  This is a couple of months early for them.  It must have been our warm spell that brought them, and they arrived to 18" of snow.  Not exactly blackbird happiness!  They're swarming our feeders; I suspect they'd be starving if not for what we're putting out...

A very German case...

A very German case...  The little aluminum “suitcase” at right holds a pair of binoculars that we just bought.  The case cracked me up – I'd be able to identify it as German even without seeing the logo. :)

We've been looking for stabilized binoculars with high magnification and big objectives, to give our ancient eyeballs the best wildlife viewing we possibly could.  We already own a pair of stabilized Canon 18x50s – great magnification, fairly bright, so-so optics, so-so stabilization.  We also have a pair of stabilized Fujinon 14x40s – so-so magnification, so-so brightness, very good optics, fantastic stabilization.

I finally located something that promised to be a combination of the features we prized the most: these stabilized Zeiss 20x60s.  We've only had them out on one outing so far, but our impression so far is that we have a winner.  The magnification beats the Canon by a little.  The objectives collect 44% more light than the Canon; they are super-bright.  The optics are simply magnificent; the best I've ever looked through.  The stabilization is great, but very, very different than our other stabilized binoculars.  For starters, the Zeiss stabilizer is totally mechanical – no electronics, no battery, and (we quickly noticed) totally silent.  Unlike the electronic stabilizers, the Zeiss stabilizer doesn't seem to interact with panning or tilting the binoculars at all.  In that sense, they act just like unstabilized binoculars.  On the other hand, for the small tremors and vibrations that plague us when using unstabilized binoculars, the Zeiss stabilizer works perfectly.  On the other other than, for large perturbations, the Fujinon's stabilizer works better – which makes perfectly good sense for their target market: mariners.  On the whole I find the Zeiss stabilizer perfectly adequate for our needs – and I really like the absence of batteries and noise.  Zeiss' target market (for these binoculars) seems to be hunters and military, and those with deep pockets – these are damned expensive binoculars.  We had to think long and hard before plunking down our cash, and what tilted us toward it was that wildlife and bird watching is such a big part of our enjoyment of Utah.

Lazy Susan shelves...

Lazy Susan shelves...  In our kitchen cabinetry there are two corner cabinets in the same corner: one below the counter-top, the other above.  When we bought the house, there were plastic Lazy Susan rotating shelves in both of them.  These worked, but not all that well.  For starters they weren't quite level.  The white plastic the shelves were made of looked cheesy and were quite flimsy.  Another thing we didn't like is that all the shelves rotated at once (the supporting rod had rotating joints at the top and bottom, and the shelves were all fixed to the rod).  The worst problem, though, was that the lowest shelf scraped against the cabinet bottom as you rotated it.  So one day last week when I looked at them for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that something better might be available, if the sizes happened to be standardized.  Maybe even something made from wood.

So I did what I always do in such circumstances: I went to Amazon and searched.   In no time at all I found two made from wood, one 30" in diameter and one 18" in diameter.  Could our shelves be that size?  They were!  I ordered them, and a couple days later they were in my hands.  It took just a couple hours to install both of them, including removing the old ones.  The biggest challenge I had was cleaning – because the back corners of those cabinets hadn't been cleaned in probably 15 years.  Maybe even more. :) Much scrubbing was required!

You can see the result in the photo above right.  They're great!  The shelves rotate independently, they're perfectly level, they don't scrape the cabinet, and they're wood.  That was a quick win of a project!

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...  I have no interest in dice or anything generally done with them.  But these dice, which I purchased recently, are absolutely fascinating to me – because of what they're made from and how they were made.  The material is titanium, pure titanium.  They are machined from a rough block – with the machining done on a CNC milling machine with accuracy in the 0.0005" range.

When I was a kid, such an artifact would not have been possible to make at any price, much less the $39 I paid for this pair.  Pure titanium was available, but in a very limited number of shapes, in small quantities, and very expensive.  Machining titanium was just barely possible, with the most expensive of tools, a very high running cost (because of the need to replace bits), and of course it would be done manually.  Titanium parts were used only for the most exotic needs where no other material could possibly do the job.  The intricate engraving on these dice would have challenged the very best machinists – and it would have taken many, many hours.

But today, for the price of a nice meal out, I can hold these in my hand.

These are silly, useless objects – but – I marvel, I do...

Weather forecasters have the best job...

Weather forecasters have the best job...  They never have to be right!  Two days ago, our forecast called for 1 to 3 inches of snow yesterday and last night.  As of this writing, we're at 18 inches – and it's still snowing.

Now mind you, this is actually a good thing – we need the precipitation, especially for snow pack up in the mountains around us.  We're fervently hoping they got a similarly unexpectedly great amount.

Yesterday morning when it started snowing, the temperature was in the high '40s, and the ground hadn't been frozen for a week.  Consequently the first 3 or 4 inches that fell turned into a thick layer of slush, especially on our driveway where it was about 2 inches thick.  The forecast called for a hard freeze last night, around 20°F (which it did) – so I decided to plow the driveway even though it was still snowing hard, in the hopes of getting that layer of slush off before it froze into solid ice.  Checking this morning, it appears that I succeed in that: we've got about 4 inches of powdery snow sitting on the driveway.  That should plow off very nicely.  I'll be out plowing in an hour or so, and tonight the forecast calls for another 1 to 3 inches – so I expect to be out plowing tomorrow as well.  If I'm to believe the forecast, we won't see above-freezing temperatures until next Sunday – a huge change from the warm spell of the past two weeks or so...

The two photos below are from yesterday afternoon, about halfway through the snowfall.  We have quite a few branches so heavily loaded now that they're at risk of breaking...

Blogiversary today...

Blogiversary today...  On this day thirteen years ago I made the first post on this blog.  I haven't posted every single day, but I'm close to that.  This post will be the 13,914th post since I started this thing.  When I started, way back in 2005, blogs were “the next big thing.” That hasn't worked out quite as many people thought it would, but it's worked fine for me.

If you're a regular reader (as about five of you are! :) then you already know this blog is mainly aimed at friends and family.  But, you might say, that's what Facebook is for!  And I say: a pox on Facebook!  I can't stand the damned thing.  I have an account there, but it is almost completely unused.  These days all I use it for is to see posts that people ask me to look at (generally by sending me an email link).

Nevertheless, it's hard for me to accept that I've been doing this for thirteen years, and that I've written almost 14 thousand posts.  Crazy!

Not all news is bad...

Not all news is bad...  This is the name of a daily email newsletter that I signed up for a year ago.  I look forward to getting it every day – it never fails to cheer me up after reading the news each morning.  It's free, and I've never been spammed from the site.  You can sign up here...

Sisyphus tracks...

Sisyphus tracks ... a couple new ones: