Yes I’m Still Alive!

I know it’s been ages since I wrote anything here but that’s because it’s been crazy busy here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. The gardens were spectacularly prolific this year and dealing with all of that has been a struggle for me and MrsGF. It’s October 4 as I write this, it is 91(F) degrees out there, and we’re still harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Plus the brussel sprouts are now starting to come on strong and we have something like 15 big butternut squash ready to pick that we’re going to need to deal with.

We’ve given up trying to process the stuff ourselves. We ran out of freezer space and canning jars long ago. We’ve been giving it to two or three of the local food pantries and they’ve been very grateful to get the stuff. The food pantries have been struggling to keep up with demand over the last few months as it is, and because of recent funding cuts the demand has only been increasing. We took about 40 lbs of tomatoes to one pantry and about 15 pounds of jalapeno and bell peppers and our friend who volunteers there said it was all gone within a couple of hours.

Still the end is here for both the tomatoes and peppers. We’re going to do one last picking of both and then the plants are going to get yanked. The tomatoes stopped blossoming some time ago and the existing fruit is almost done developing. The peppers are still flowering somehow but have slowed down to where there’s no point to keeping it going. We’re going to wait until the weather cools down a bit before we tackle all of that though.

Speaking of weather, it has been seriously strange. It’s the first week of October. It should be in the low 50s at the most, with temperatures getting down close to freezing or even a bit below that this time of year. Instead we’ve been locked in this streak of hot weather for weeks now with daytime highs pushing well into the 80s or more. Normally we might get a few days of warmer weather this time of year, but not this warm and not for this long.

When I haven’t been puttering in the garden I’ve been busy cranking out a whole new line of hopefully amusing drinks coasters and re-drawing the artwork on the old ones to reprint some of those. Looking at the artwork on some of those first ones I made makes me wince today. So before re-printing any of those I’ve been cleaning up the artwork or even re-doing it entirely.

I also have other stuff in the works, like engraving coins, making specialty tokens and quite possibly custom glassware and other goodies. Thanks in part to a new acquisition, that weird looking thingie over there on the left.

That’s a Wecreat Lumos 3W infrared and 10W blue diode laser that comes with a flatbed conveyer thingie and a rotating thingie that I have yet to play with but will hopefully get set up yet this weekend.

It definitely is not going to be replacing the Falcon laser engraver/cutter. This one is entirely inappropriate for jobs I use the Falcon for. This one is going to be for specifically doing metal engraving and, hopefully glassware and jewelry.

Keep an eye out for a full blown review of the Lumos in the future. It is both enormously useful and great fun to use, and enormously frustrating at the same time. Which seems to be about par for the course for these things.

It’s main use here is for metal. Even as we speak it’s engraving “challenge coins” for a small scale production run. It’s not fast, true. I wouldn’t want to have to use this to try to crank out a significant number of items. But for a run of a dozen or so items it’s not too bad.

Anyway, more about that later as I said.

The new EG4 12000XP inverter is more or less installed and working just fine. It’s still in “testing mode” so to speak as you can see in the photo because we haven’t finalized the wiring. Those of you who are yelling at the screen about the wiring not meeting code and all of that, I probably know the NEC better than you do and I should point out that when that photo was taken we were still testing and hadn’t yet finalized the wiring. So before you launch into some kind of rant about it in the comments, just don’t.

There were some teething issues with the 12000XP, but they were minor. The first was it wasn’t “talking” to the batteries. That turned out to be a communications configuration error that was quickly corrected. The second was an odd glitch where the AC side would trip out with an overload error if there was power coming from the solar panels, and if the batteries were at 100% SOC an if there was an AC load of more than about 200W. And only if all three of those criteria were met. That turned out to require a software update and as soon as the firmware was updated it was working just fine indeed.

Now we just need to get the new solar panels up on the garage roof. They’ve been sitting in the garage since February waiting for eldest son to clear up some time on his calendar to work on it because MrsGF won’t let me do more than climb a step ladder after she caught up up that tree last spring stringing up an antenna.

And that’s about it for now. Thought I’d better post something to reassure the people who thought I was dead or something. Hopefully the Lumos review will be coming up in the near future.