Catching Up: Signs Finished, Solar Stuff, Flowers Everywhere, Engraving Lighters, Silly Cats, No More Hip Pain Somehow?

MrsGF finished up the last of the welcome signs the other day with about three coats of all weather polyurethane. We did four all together. We’re keeping one and these three are already spoken for. They turned out pretty nice I think.

We hit a milestone with the new EG4-12000XP inverter. We hit half a megawatt of production earlier today! We’re going to need every watt we can get out of that system because the big central AC unit is still on the grid and it’s been going for something like 3 weeks straight now since we shifted into this hot weather pattern. We decided to leave it on the grid because while the 12000XP would have enough oomph to handle it, I suspect it would would discharge our batteries to a point where I would become uncomfortable overnight. It’s the old style AC system, but it’s only a few years old so replacing it isn’t in the cards at the moment. If we’d known better at the time we would have gone for a heat pump system which is much more energy efficient but at the time we weren’t even dreaming of putting in whole house solar. I looked into it but a heat pump system would have been around twice the cost so I never seriously considered it. Oh, well. Live and learn, as they say.

Our electric rate here isn’t bad, about 20¢/KWh, which is cheap when compared to what those poor buggers out in California are getting hit with thanks to Newsome and the California legislature being owned lock, stock and barrel by the utility companies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes… (cough cough), I mean “campaign donations” and lobbying $$ they pay out every year. But the handwriting is one the wall, as they say. Thanks to the huge amounts of power the massive data centers being built here in the state are gulping down now and will gulp down in the future, the utilities are going to have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new generating facilities, substations and high tension power lines to feed them, and you can be damned sure that if Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and the others building those facilities have anything to say about it, it’s going to be us consumers who are going to foot the bill, not them.

But on to a more pleasant subject. Laser engraving.

I had no idea but apparently Zippo lighters are still a thing with some people? I thought that with the rate of smoking going down every year the market for lighters would have shrunk as well but I guess I forgot about the people who smoke “recreational substances”, shall we call it? That’s still illegal here in Wisconsin but all you have to do is nip across the border to Illinois, Minnesota or Michigan if you want to light up.

I did the first one with the brewery logo on it to give to Kyle, one of the owners. And then I started playing around using the Lumos Flex from Wecreat and the fiber laser and wow, it does a nice job engraving stainless steel! Doesn’t take long, either. With the IR laser in my old Lumos it would have probably taken half an hour to do something like this. With the fiber laser it takes about 4 minutes. It actually eteches right into the metal so that design isn’t just discoloration, it’s actually etched in there and will never wear off. I’ve done about four of these for various people to give as gifts and they keep telling me I should put these up on Etsy or somewhere, but no thanks. I do not want to get into that rat race. Plain, genuine Zippo lighters cost me about $18 each. In order to make it worth my while I’d probably have to charge $35 – $40 for one and I don’t think anyone would be silly enough to pay that.

And then we got flowers! Wow, do we have flowers! Here are a couple.

As for the rest of the gardens I’m too lazy at the moment to go out and get pictures so you’ll have to settle for a description. The tomatoes are going gangbusters. They’re already loaded with green fruit. We have 6 plants this year. We were only going to put in 3 but we had 3 or 4 volunteers pop up and MrsGf didn’t have the heart to just pull them so she transplanted them to a better location and they’re looking just as good as the ones we grew from seed ourselves.

The carrots are thriving and we really need to thin them out. The beets? We’ve already been picking some and eating them. They’re doing fantastic. The celery is looking beautiful this year. When I’m mowing the lawn I can’t help but snip off a stalk to nibble on when I’m riding on the mower. If you’ve never grown celery yourself, please give it a try. You won’t believe how intensely flavored the home grown varieties are when compared to the commercial varieties they sell in the grocery store.

The onions are getting to the point where we’re thinking of starting to pull some and curing them off and putting them in storage.

We have a few zucchini plants as well and they’re producing beautifully. The nice thing about zucchini is that it has almost no flavor so you can slip it into anything and nobody will notice they’re eating something healthy. Tonight I’m going to do a zucchini-mushroom stir fry with lots of garlic and onions and parmesan cheese.

I’m eagerly awaiting the tomatoes. Absolutely nothing compares to the flavor of a ripe tomato fresh off the plant from the garden.

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, the hip! Almost forgot about that. I suffered for something like 3 weeks with pain in my right hip that was almost excruciating at times when I bent my leg the wrong way. It started to oh so slowly get better over time. But then the other day I woke up and got out of bed and suddenly realized that the hip didn’t hurt. At all. It was like someone just threw a switch. There’s a bit of soreness there but that’s because the muscles in the leg are stiff from not being used normally for so long.

So what happened? I have no idea. MrsGF thinks it might have been a pinched nerve and I suppose that’s possible?

Anyway, I’m still taking it easy because I’m terrified of doing something that might bring it back. But otherwise things are back to almost normal. I’m even back on the bike again but I’m keeping the riding limited to just a few miles and at a relatively slow pace for the time being.

Let’s see… Oh, almost forgot! Silly cats, right?

That’s Charlie over there in her new favorite stot to sit. If I scoot forward to type on the computer and there is any space at all between me and the back of the chair, she’ll squeeze in there. She is an absolute sweetie. I’ve never seen a cat that loves people as much as she does. She belonged to our daughter in law’s aunt but she had to move into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so we volunteered to take her in and we’re so happy we did. She’s getting up there, about 14 or 15 years old now, and she has a heart murmur and a benign cyst on her neck that puts some people off but doesn’t seem to bother her at all. The cyst is inoperable because she can’t tolerate anesthesia. They tried once and her heart stopped and she almost died so unless it’s a genuine emergency neither we nor her vet are willing to try it again.

And that’s about it for now!

Hm? Oh, oh, wait… Oh no… That’s not a 3D printer on a truck heading this way, is it? No, it couldn’t be. I swore I’d never buy another one, didn’t I? I seem to distinctly remember saying that, didn’t I?