nature – grouchyfarmer

Autumn

The weather here in NE Wisconsin was absolutely beautiful for a few days and I took advantage of that and got out on the bike for a while. But that’s changing fast. They’re now talking about a possibility of snow for us by next week. Sigh…

Jalapeno peppers still growing outside in mid October? Yep. Actually they’re doing better now than they did all summer. I didn’t get more than a dozen or so peppers of both plants during the summer but now the dopey things are covered with flowers and baby fruits. Go figure…

But that being said we have no right to complain. The fall weather has been pretty darned nice. We still haven’t had a hard freeze. We’ve had a few mornings when there was frost on the ground but not enough to really cause any damage. We still have flowers growing around the house and I have two jalapeno pepper plants that are still in flower for heaven’s sake.

Some of the flowers that have survived this fall so far are a bit surprising, like the alyssum. This little cluster of flowers popped up in the spring all by themselves, which surprised me a great deal. But I was very pleased to see them because I love those tiny little flowers, not just because they’re beautiful but because some types of alyssum are amazingly fragrant.

Getting out on the backroads and trails on the bike this fall has been great fun. I’m really going to miss being out there every day once winter hits. It’s been especially interesting out there because I’ve been seeing a lot of reptiles and amphibians out there, far more than usual. I’ve seen dozens of snakes, usually grass snakes and the like. We have two of those little beauties living in the backyard. Unfortunately they’re fast little buggers and my attempts to get them on camera haven’t been very successful. I’ve seen quite a few of them out in the wild as well. Unfortunately I’ve also seen quite a few of them flattened on the roads as well because some of them have a habit of sunning themselves on the roadway.

I’ve seen quite a few turtles out there too, including Fred, who is a regular sight down near the stone bridge that goes over the river.

Almost any sunny day I’d find Fred sunning himself on his favorite spot. He’s a cute little guy, maybe about six inches across with beautiful markings. I’ve managed to get about six or seven fairly decent photos of him.

Most of the migrating birds are gone now. I’ve seen a few cranes still hanging around but those will be gone soon. Ducks and geese are mostly gone. I’ve seen very few birds coming to the feeder in the yard as well. I haven’t had to refill in it some time now. But this time of year the seed eating birds are finding more than enough to eat out there in the wild.

Let’s see, what else? MrsGF and I are sketching out plans for major changes to the gardens now that those big trees are down. Now that the area back there is getting full sun it opens up a lot of options. We want to move two of the raised vegetable beds over to that area because they’re now getting shaded out by a fast growing maple where they are now. The area where the beds are now may become occupied by a garden shed because we need the storage space. We want to put a large decorative raised bed where the stump from the ash tree is located, one that matches the existing bed we have now that surrounds the little maple.

That’s not going to be a cheap project, though. If we do everything we’ve been thinking of it’s probably going to end up costing us in the neighborhood of $5K when it’s all said and done.

We’re still waiting for the garage door company to get the new doors in so they can replace the 30+ year old garage doors and openers. They’re in pretty rough shape and I don’t think they’ll last the winter.

Let’s wrap this up with a siamese cat because why not?

Meg, we’re not sure how old she is but she’s at least 16, maybe 17, and an absolute sweetheart. This foot rubbing thing is fairly new with her but I’m told it isn’t uncommon with kitties. She’s turned into quite the lap cat. If there is a lap anywhere in the house, she will find it and sit on it. She has this thing now where when she’s on my lap she likes to climb up on my chest and rub her face in my beard which is cute but that cat’s claws are like little razors and when she gets relaxed she starts doing this kneading thing it gets a bit interesting.

Oh, almost forgot, the new vacuum thingie. It’s a Shark self emptying robotic vacuum. Normally I wouldn’t have bought one of these but I got the dopey thing on some kind of sale on Amazon for less than half the normal retail price. It was marked down to $200 or so from $500, and I admit that it was sort of an impulse buy.

Now we had a robot vacuum before, one of the early Roomba machines, and it was utterly horrible in every single way. It was incredibly noisy. It couldn’t deal with even 1/4″ tall thresholds between rooms, couldn’t deal with, well, it couldn’t deal with anything, really. It fell down the basement stairs twice. It would just stop dead in its tracks for no apparent reason. And even worse it was damn near worthless at actually cleaning anything.

This one is actually surprisingly good. It maps the rooms as it cleans so it can develop a more efficient pattern of movement. It doesn’t just scurry around at random. It’s been able to negotiate even the rather steep threshold between the dining room and living room. It wanders back to its dock and recharges itself when it needs to and when the battery is topped off it picks up where it left off. And best of all it empties itself! The bin on the dock has to be dumped every couple of weeks or so but that’s no big deal. It hasn’t fallen down the basement stairs yet. And best of all it does a pretty darned nice job cleaning the floors.

I’m not quite sure what in the world it’s doing under the sofa, though. It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time under there when it’s cleaning. Since it has wifi I suspect it’s looking at porn while it’s under there.

Anyway we’ve had this thing for a couple of weeks now and we’ll see how it goes. So far we like it. Even the cat doesn’t mind it.

New Computer, Movies, Fall, and Stuff

That’s the new one on the right. Smaller than the old one was but unlike the old one it actually works.

I hate moving to a new computer and try to avoid it as long as I possibly can, which is why my MacBook Pro up there on the left has been still limping along despite it being about 10 – 12 years old and having a wonky screen that sometimes made me open and close the lid a dozen times before it was readable. That Macbook gets used a lot. It lives in the kitchen where it’s used for emails, reading the news, looking up recipes, sorting photos and writing this blog. That it’s lasted this long is a bit of a miracle. My attempt to replace it with the iPad were very awkward. I could have done it but the iPad was just too clumsy, the software uncooperative with the way I liked to do things, and too limited in its capabilities. The iPad is great for must messing around, playing games, reading and things like that, but despite Apple’s efforts, it just isn’t a full blown computer. It’s basically an oversized iPhone without the phone.

I originally was not going to get another Macbook Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I love the things. I love the whole Apple “ecosystem”, as they call it. But Macbooks are expensive, and I wasn’t willing to spend $1,500 or more for one. But…

I’ve had really good luck with refurbished computers. I’ve bought several over the years for various reasons. You can often pick up a refurbed computer that’s only a few years old for a fraction of the original retail cost. And that’s what I did here, I picked up a three or four year old refurbished Macbook Pro for a third of the cost of a new one. And it’s pretty darned nice. It arrived in a plain cardboard box with nothing but the power supply/charger, which was fine too. And upon opening it, well, the thing looks like it is brand new except for a very small dent in the lid which doesn’t seem to hurt anything.

Biggest problem with adopting a new computer is moving all my stuff from the old computer to the new one. But Apple makes that easy too. Just connect the two laptops together with a USB cable, start up a migration assistant app, and a little over an hour later everything on the old computer was on the new one. I had to verify a few things like passwords and log in information, but that was about it. When it was all done the new computer looked and worked pretty much exactly like the old computer did, with a few minor differences because some of the apps I used were now newer versions.

There are two things I don’t like about the new one. The keyboard is without a doubt the worst laptop keyboard I’ve ever had to use. I’ve typed on everything from 1960s era IBM keypunch machines (seriously, I’ve had crank out those ancient punch cards to program computers once upon a time) to the original (and excellent) IBM PC keyboards, to a variety of cheap slush boxes, to the excellent mechanical keyboards made today, and everything else imaginable. And I’ve never seen a keyboard that was this bad before.

The other thing I don’t like is that this thing only has USB-C ports. One of the things I’ve always found irritating about Apple is that they often are obsessed with form over function. They get what they think is a good idea into their heads over there and run with it, and the hell with whatever anyone else thinks, wants and even needs. Now USB-C is, probably, a good thing. But millions of us out here are still using devices that require the original USB plugs. And a lot of us are photographers who need to transfer photos to computers with SD cards. And Apple has given me neither of those. Grr… So I’m going to have get a stupid adaptor to hook things up or read SD cards from my camera.

Movies: Warning, Thor Spoilers

I want to talk about movies for a while. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, to be honest. I hate going to theaters. My idea of a good time is not being sandwiched in between a bunch of people who haven’t bathed in three weeks, who are constantly checking their cell phones, munching on snacks they smuggled in, and talking all through the quiet parts of the dialog.

I also think that a lot of the most hyped movies out there are, frankly, crap. I hated the Lord of the Rings, but to be honest I thought the novels were even worse. Avatar? I couldn’t make it more than half an hour into that thing before I bailed out. And and my feelings include a lot of Marvel movies.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was just plain nasty. The only bright spot in the entire movie was Awkwafina, who plays Simu Liu’s sidekick. The whole movie was just one cliche after another. But perhaps I’m jaded because I watch a lot of Chinese television where they’ve been making much, much better martial arts style movies and television series for decades. I thought the editing was badly done. It looks like large bits of the movie were left on the cutting room floor.

The biggest problem is trying to take a complex story like this one and squeeze everything into a two hour block of time. Often story elements that are necessary to help the movie and the characters make sense are left out, and that’s what’s happened here. The characters are never given enough time to really develop well enough that I wanted to care about them. And I don’t like Simu Liu, to be honest. I’ve seen him in other things, including the Canadian series Kim’s Convenience where he was, frankly, more of a distraction and even an annoyance than a necessary part of the show. In the Ten Rings he just never seems, oh, comfortable in the role? It’s like he’s trying way, way too hard to adapt to a role he just isn’t suited for.

Basically if you want to see how a movie like this should be done, go find the Wu Assassins on Netflix.

I did, however, like the Eternals. I thought that was well done, despite the bad reviews it got.

But then we come to Thor: Love and Thunder. And oh dear lord… There is a phrase in the entertainment industry, jumping the shark, which refers to the writers and producers having totally run out of ideas for a series and introducing ever increasingly bizarre elements to the story to try to keep viewers interested. What they’ve done to Thor is even worse than jumping the shark. They brought in the kids. Children. They’ve Disneyfied the thing.

I knew the Thor series was eventually going to end up being wrecked, the whole story line I mean. Once you take a story arc that is about love and loss, death, mass murder and literally genocide, and try to make a comedy out of it, you are heading down a dark, dark path from which there is no return. And ultimately you end up with TLT. They’ve – they’ve Disneyfied it, heaven help us. They’ve completely run out of ideas and now are trying to turn it into a kiddie show.

They took the tragic story of Jane Foster and turned it into a five minute soap opera. They shoveled a bunch of kids into the story for “reasons”. And end up with Thor’s new partner becoming, drum roll please, an eight or nine year old girl. Yes, apparently Thor’s new partner in running around the universe slaying monsters, killing off bad guys, enduring horrible tortures, watching mass murder and genocide, is going to be a tiny little girl wielding a magic weapon? Seriously?

Some parts of the movie aren’t bad. The special effects are decent, there’s some snappy dialog. This could have been a fairly decent movie. But a lot of the jokes fall flat to the floor and lay there twitching waiting for someone to put them out of their misery. The only good part about the movie was the screaming goats. Maybe Marvel could spin off the screaming goats into their own series of movies?

Fall

It’s definitely fall up here in Wisconsin. Temperatures last night were down in the 30s. The days are much shorter. Most of the birds have fled for warmer climates. We cleaned all the vegetable gardens out the other day. Good thing, too, because MrsGF and I are sick of dealing with the stuff. Our pantry has enough canned beets and various types of tomato sauces and pickles to last us probably two years. The freezer is full to overflowing with more tomatoes, peppers, wax beans, green beans and beets.

There are still some wild flowering plants out there when I bundle up and head out on the bike, but not many. It’s still pretty green out there but I can see that this isn’t going to last long. The grasses and other plants in the more wild areas around here are starting to dry up and turn brown, and a lot of trees are starting to turn color.

We had to turn the heat on in the house days ago already as daytime temperatures struggled to hit 50 degrees even with the sun out.

I like autumn, even though it means I have to bundle up to get out on the bike and I usually get home with cold feet and even colder hands. Getting out in the crisp, autumn air is worth it. After the heat and humidity of the summer it feels refreshing, cleaner, out there.

Of course winter will be here before long, but that’s all part of the cycle of life.

Stuff

With the number of outdoor chores and projects dwindling it means it’s just about time to open up the wood shop again. I haven’t even been in there except to grab a tool since spring. I still need to finish taking down the old suspended ceiling, replacing the old fluorescent ceiling lights with LED lights and doing a general cleanup before getting started with wood projects again.

I need to get my vertical antenna down and checked over before the snow flies. It got smacked by a tree limb in the spring and I think there’s a loose connection up there somewhere. I’ve been using the dipole antenna all summer, but I would like to get that vertical working properly again as well because the dipole is probably going to have to be replaced or at least taken down and have some repairs done as well in the near future.

And speaking of doing stuff, I need to shut this down for this time and actually go get some work done!

Lost and Found Photos

Sometimes I lose photos. I try to keep all of my photos from my various cameras and other devices in folders that are collected into one master folder that is then backed up to multiple devices (and to the ‘cloud’). But sometimes I’ll move photos into a temporary directory for sorting or cropping or something and forget about them, especially if I’ve named the directory something odd. That’s where I found these, in a folder on my old Macbook Pro labeled something like “110-24”. What the hell was I thinking? I have no idea. And I should add that these were not taken by me, they were taken by my youngest son when he spent a few weeks out west doing geology stuff. Anyway, I’m very glad I found ’em. So without further ado, here we go… Oh, you should be able to click on an image to see a larger version of the photo. Maybe. I hope. If WordPress cooperates…

And that’s about it for now.

Stuff coming up – I got a new drone, a DJI Mavic Mini 3 Pro that I want to talk about. MrsGF refinished our dining room table and it turned out amazing so I want to talk about refinishing furniture. And gardening stuff… Sheesh, we cut way back on the amount of veggies we planted this year. Didn’t matter. We put in 3 tomato plants instead of the 6 we had last year, and we actually have ended up with more tomatoes than ever. We only put in 2 cucumber plants, and we’re up to our eyeballs in cukes. The butternut squash plants are starting to die back now and the squash are freakin’ huge. The peppers went a bit bonkers too. Only thing that didn’t do very well were the jalapeno peppers. I’m the only one who eats ’em so we only put two plants in pots on the front porch and that gives us more than enough to keep me happy. But this year for whatever year they didn’t do very well. The plants look healthy but they haven’t been producing much fruit. I have the laser engraver fired up again doing some stuff for a brew pub…

On the amateur radio front I’ve been finding FT8 to be more annoying than anything else so I’m moving to different communications modes like PSK31 and JS8Call. I may do a semi-rant about that in the future even though it will probably bore you all.

And, of course, what the heck are we going to do with the space that was opened up when we had the old ash tree taken down?

Catching Up, Internet, Drones, and More Photos From The Roadside

It is crazy busy around here this time of year. Between processing pickles, tomatoes, carrots, beets, beans and other produce from the garden, keeping up with the grass and landscaping, plus family stuff and everything else going on, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done it seems. The woodshop has been shut down since mid-spring. I haven’t even been in the woodshop except to grab a tool or some screws or something. The 3D printer and engraver have been gathering dust. I did get my dipole antenna fixed, so that’s something. MrsGF is tackling the massive job of refinishing our big old dining room table. Stuff just keeps piling up.

Then we had internet problems. Sheesh… We were suffering multiple outages a day, often as many as a dozen or more, lasting from a minute or so up to 10 or 15 minutes. Rebooting the modem and WiFi didn’t do any good. In fact just waiting without rebooting and the service would come back by itself. We finally got Spectrum, our ISP, out here.

I know that it is something of a fad to complain about customer service these days but Spectrum was great. I got a technician in an online chat within a few minutes and they immediately set up an appointment to get a service person out here. It took a couple of days to get someone out here because they’re short on staff just like everybody else out there. But he showed up exactly on time. He ended up replacing just about everything. New cables, new box on the side of the house, new cables coming into the house, new cable modem, etc. We moved the access point from a spider filled corner of the basement to the office where it’s much easier to get at. Took him only an hour or so to do all of that and we’ve had no problems at all since then. Good job, Spectrum.

Drones: If you’re a long time follower of this nonsense you may remember that I used to fly drones, ranging from those goofy little toys that are really only useful for flying around a room and annoying people, up to a massive camera drone. But then the FAA had a hissy fit and decided that not only did you need to register bigger drones you needed a pilot’s license to fly ’em, I said the hell with that. I got rid of the big drone, flew the tiny ones until they broke and gave up on them because the tiny drones that didn’t need to be licensed and registered were all pretty much junk.

Not any more, though. I’ve been keeping an eye on the drone market and in the last couple of years there have been some very, very good camera drones in the 250 gram size that have been looking very, very good. Drones in that weight class avoid a lot of the registration and licensing requirements in many jurisdictions. And if something does go wrong and it crashes, it’s so small and light weight that it isn’t going to do serious damage to anything. Unlike the big camera drone I used to fly that weighed pounds and was about 2 feet across.

So I got one, a DJI Mavic Mini Pro 3 and I’ve had it out for a few brief flights and, well, damn the thing is good. Technology has made some astonishing advances in the years since I last fiddled around with drones. The flight technology, the duration of flights, their capabilities and intelligence have all improved enormously. And the camera is absolutely amazing. Here’s an example

This one is of the old stone bridge that’s on my regular bike route, taken with the drone hovering about 2 meters above the river. That photo is about as good as it gets, really.

This one is my neighborhood, looking straight down from about a hundred or so feet in the air.

Anyway, more drone stuff will be coming up in the future. Let me wrap this up with some photos from the roadside. I’m out biking almost every day and I take a lot of photos. Here are a few.

And now it’s time for me to get back to work.

Photos From The Backroads and a New Bike

That’s my Giant 24 speed. That turned out to be a heck of a good bike. Aside from a few broken spokes and replacing the tires when necessary it’s worked perfectly for thousands of miles.

The new bike first: When I started bicycling when I retired it surprised the family a lot. They all figured the bike I bought would end up gathering dust in the garage. Here we are several thousand miles later and I’m still at it, and it was time to replace my old bike with something a bit better, and that’s it up in the first photo. It’s a Specialized Vado and it is very, very nice. Hydraulic disc brakes, built in lights, great front suspension, a fancy built in computer system, a cargo carrier on the back I can strap stuff to. And best of all, a motor.

Yes, it’s an ebike. I still have to pedal, I still get my heart and respiration rates up, I still get back from a long ride with my legs pleasantly tired. I have the thing set up so I do most of the work but when I get to a steep hill the motor gives me a boost to help me get up the hill, or gives me an extra burst of speed to get away from dogs that want to eat me. I’m no spring chicken. I’m sixty-eight this year and while I’m in pretty good shape I’ve been getting twinges in my knees trying to power up hills and I’ve been having to drop down a gear or two to get up ’em.

The Vado is, frankly, amazing. And it is well suited to the type of riding I do which is, I must admit, pretty leisurely. I make a lot of stops to take photos and I’m out there not so much to get exercise but to enjoy nature. I watch birds and animal life, look at the vegetation, watch the sun coming up, stop to take pictures and that kind of thing. The Vado is perfect for me. I’ve had it for about a week and I have over a hundred miles on it now and I love it. I did a twenty mile ride the other day that would have left me exhausted on the other bike. I’ll take a closer look at the Vado later after I’ve lived with it a while long.

When I’m out on the road on the bike I’m constantly stopping to take photos of stuff I find interesting, things that you don’t see when you’re zooming past at sixty mph, so here are a few.

I live about a 4 mile ride away from an extensive trail system. It runs more than 20 miles north all the way to Green Bay, and from a little town called Forest Junction it also branches off to the east to the town of Brillion. This is the trail that runs to Brillion.

These grow wild in the ditches all over around here and I suspect most people don’t even see how beautiful they are because they’re zooming past at 80 mph or too busy trying to text, talk on the phone and eat a cheeseburger at the same time.

I found this stunning flower growing along the side of one of the trails. I took about a dozen photos of it from different angles.

This is another “weed” that grows all over around here. But up close it has one of the prettiest flowers I’ve ever seen.

I’d stopped at a small parking area for a nature reserve to get a drink and found this lonely little guy hiding in the tall grass. I thought it was one of the loveliest things I’d seen. There’s something about the symmetry of those petals surrounding that central pod that I found very striking.

And of course I had to include queen anne’s lace. The stuff grows everywhere in the ditches along the roads around here. Those intricate little flowers that make up that lace like structure are amazing.

Another “weed” you’ll find growing along the roads around here.

A thistle, one of several varieties that grow around here. They’re considered a “noxious weed” around here but the flowers are this rich purple-lavender color and so beautifully delicate that I find myself photographing them a lot.

This is, I think a verbascum or mullein. Maybe. My father called it wild tobacco which seems to be a fairly common name for it. When I was a kid I’d see this stuff all over the place. On the farm it would grow along the makeshift roads we had around the farm to access the fields and sometimes along cattle trails. It can be a spectacular plant, growing up to three or four feet tall.

This is the river down by the old stone bridge and that white thing you see out there is a pelican. I watched this guy swimming around feeding for several minutes.

And that’s it for this time. Hope you enjoyed the photos.

BTW: You’re more than welcome to leave comments in the comments section. Or you can reach me at old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com.

Tree Update, Gardens a Lily, and Heat

Let’s start out with heat. Yesterday it hit 95 here and today it’s supposed to be even hotter. The only thing we did outside yesterday was water the gardens in the evening. It was too hot to do much of anything except huddle around the air conditioner and today is going to be even worse. I know Wisconsin is known for things like ice fishing and snowmobiling, but we do get hot weather here, but only rarely does it get this hot. (Edit: I wrote the above at around 7 AM and it was already in the low 80s. It’s now late afternoon and my recording thermometer tells me we hit a high today of 101. Sheesh…)

Do I need to tell you that I am really, really glad I’m not farming any more when we get weather like this? Remembering what it was like to be out working in the fields or, even worse, milking cows in that crowded old barn, makes me shudder. I don’t know how the hell we managed to do it back then. We’d rush through milking as fast as we could and quickly get the cows down into the woods where there were springs with plenty of water and a lot of shade and it was much, much cooler. Of course today they can’t do that. The majority of cattle these days are crowded into feedlots and never see actual real grass or natural springs and streams in their entire lives.

I’ve been slowly working on cleaning up the mess that was left after they brought the trees down. That picture up there shows what I was left to deal with after they were done. And the picture below is what it looks like now.

As you can see considerable progress has been made in reducing the pile of wood. Considering I’m just one old guy with a chainsaw nibbling away at it when I get some time, I think I’ve made pretty good progress. There’s actually less now than what you see. Pretty much all that’s left out there is just the main trunk from the ash tree.

My neighbor came over with his little Oliver and hauled out three good sized logs that will hopefully go to a friend of his who has a small sawmill. The idea there is to slab them to eventually make table tops out of the slabs.

The gardens are looking good, but things are getting dry again. We’ve been watering all of the vegetable gardens almost on a daily basis, especially now that it’s got so hot and breezy. That hot wind really sucks the moisture out of the soil.

The carrots are looking absolutely amazing. We need to get in there and start thinning them out again so they have a chance to grow to a decent size. Why so many carrots? Well, why not? They’re tasty. The home grown varieties always seem to have much better flavor and are much sweeter than the ones we get in the store. And they’re easy to harvest, clean and freeze.

The beets are looking just as good. MrsGF and I both love beets. We like them roasted or made into harvard beets or just cooked up on a stove top with a bit of butter, salt and pepper.

And you can see that the onions to the right of the beets are looking good as well. We put in a lot of onions this year because I want to can pickled onions. We have a mix of white, yellow and red onions out there. And they’re delicious right now, young, tender, sweet but with a delightful spiciness to them.

We only put in three tomato plants this year because we still have a lot of tomato sauces on the shelves down in the basement. They’re looking pretty good and are just starting to blossom.

We put in pole beans again this year. We had good luck with them last year and they looking like they’re going to be just as good this year.

We also have some bush beans planted in the corner garden, along with some squash. The stuff does really well well but we really have to watch the moisture levels in the soil. This corner dries out very, very quickly. Those squash plants you see behind the line of beans will rather quickly grow and totally overwhelm that whole area if we don’t keep them trimmed back. It’s amazing how fast those squash vines grow once they get started.

We’re trying to plant pepper plants along the south side of the house this year. This is another area where we have to watch the moisture levels. that area dries out very quickly as well so they have to be watered every day as well. We were thinking of expanding this area out to about the end of the downspouts, more than tripling the size of the bed. We might do that this fall after the peppers are done.

Ooo, and I can’t forget the lily! They’re just starting to pop open and they look amazing!

Let’s see, what else…

We still haven’t really decided what we’re going to do in the area where the tree was. We’re still thinking of making a large decorative raised bed back there surrounded by stone or brick. It’s going to depend on how much work and money we want to sink into that area. We probably won’t do anything until at least this fall, maybe not until spring next year.

Woodworking projects are all on hold as I’m doing some major remodeling in the workshop. The 25 year old fluorescent lights, along with the entire ceiling, are coming down. Lights are going to be replaced with LEDs and I am not going to put another drop ceiling in there. The ceiling is pretty high in there and I’m thinking about building a lumber storage area up there. Right now my spare boards and things are sitting on pallets in the other part of the basement taking up a huge amount of floor space and it’s always in the way.

Weather, gardens, and Stuff

We’ve been on a sort of weather rollercoaster here. We went from high temperatures in the low fifties to 91 degrees and humid on Tuesday, then back down to a high of about 60 on Wednesday, and today we’re supposed to be back up in the steam bath again today with temperatures up in the 90s. Sheesh. It’s been an odd spring.

I’m back out on the bike on a regular basis at least thanks to the warmer weather. It looks like farmers are a bit behind in planting this year from all of the unplanted fields I’m seeing out there.

It’s dry out there, folks. According to the statistics we’re reasonably close to normal rainfall, but actual ground conditions are not good. The entire state is under a burning ban and we’ve had wild fires popping up all over the state. Some parts of the state got some decent rainfall but it skipped around us. We’re going to have to start watering the vegetable beds here today or tomorrow if we don’t get some rain.

Now that I’m back on the bike again I’ve been down to the river at the old stone bridge about 4 miles from here and things look unusually dry down there as well. Water levels in the river are unusually low for this time of year. This branch of the Manitowoc River usually isn’t this low until mid to late summer.

The old stone bridge is a great spot to stop and get a drink and just watch nature. There’s almost no traffic on that road. I’ll stop there for ten or fifteen minutes, get out my water and stand on the bridge and just watch nature. There are at least two families of geese out there, a few muskrats swimming around, turtles and birds everywhere.

Here at the house the early spring flowers are popping up everywhere. The tulips are coming up now that the daffodils are coming to an end.

Out in the raised beds everything is coming up; onions, lettuce, carrots and beets and even the garlic is emerging now. The garlic we planted last fall didn’t make it through the winter, so we planted a different variety and hopefully we’ll get some by fall. We’ll see how that works out.

We talked to the tree service and let them know that it’s dry enough out here now that they can get in with their equipment so they’re going to be coming over next week to take out the two trees you see in the photo up there. The one on the right is a big old ash tree that’s starting to rot from the top down. Every time we get a good wind it sheds branches all over, some of them big enough to cause damage or injury if someone happened to be standing in the wrong place. The one on the left is an old maple that belongs to our neighbor. Almost the entire right side of the tree up in the canopy is dead so that one has to come down too. I hate to see trees coming down but these two are at the end of their lives and they need to come down before they do some serious damage or even hurt someone.

Removing the big ash gives us a lot more options for gardening as well. It shades out a huge amount of space in the yard making it difficult for growing anything except grass and weeds back there. Once that’s gone we’ll have a large area back there with full sun that give us a lot more opportunities for growing stuff. We have some general ideas about what to do with the space back there but nothing firm as yet. I’ll keep you posted.

With those trees coming down I also had to take down my OCFD antenna (off center fed dipole) and it’s a good thing I did because I found this:

Well, that’s not good, now is it? The antenna was just hanging on by a thread. Fixing something like this isn’t hard to do but it’s annoying. The problem area is only a few feet from the end so I could have just fudged it by cutting it off at the frayed bit and attaching that to the insulator. Cutting a couple of feet off of a 130+ foot long wire antenna isn’t going to screw it up too badly, especially since I use an antenna tuner anyway.

What caused the damage? The antenna was running to the cedar tree behind that small shed in that photo of the trees up there. It looks like my line sagged letting the wire down far enough so it was rubbing on the roof of the shed.

I really need to look into a different antenna configuration. That OCFD is just too long to fit completely in my yard. Fortunately both of my neighbors don’t mind if I run a line into trees on their property, but I need to try to figure out a different way of setting it up to try to keep it entirely on my property. I do have a vertical antenna which works fine, but that OCFD gives me more options. And it’s also my NVIS antenna for semi-local communications down on 75 meters and I don’t want to give that up.

Other stuff going on:

Now that the weather has turned nice I can finally finish up bringing down the dropped ceiling in the woodshop. I’ve been procrastinating on that because there is a lot of dust up there above those ceiling tiles and I wanted to put a couple of exhaust fans in the windows to suck it out of the house instead of having it plug up my air filters in the shop. That ceiling is getting bad. It’s been up for more than 20 years, and incorporates old fashioned fluorescent tube lights which are terribly energy inefficient. I already have new shop lights waiting to go in, LED versions which will use about a quarter of the energy and give better light.

I reviewed the LaserPecker 1 laser engraver a while back, and I now have its big brother, the LP2 sitting on the shelf and in use and I want to do a review of that. The hardware is very, very nice. It’s much, much faster, more powerful and has a lot more options, including a roller system that should be very useful. Unfortunately it shares the same major problem the LP1 had: the software is horrible. This is a professional quality engraver that is badly hampered by amateurish cell phone based operating software. There is PC based software for the LP2 which is what I’ve been using which makes it easier to use, but the program riddled with bugs and odd quirks. It’s sad, really, because the LP2 is a fantastic gadget. I’ve been doing custom artwork and engravings for a craft brewer and pub owner in Milwaukee and it does a great job.

On the wood lathe side of things I’ve had a really nifty bowl hollowing system sitting around for months now that I’ve never had an opportunity to really talk about here, so I need to put that in the que one of these days.

And one of these days I want to talk about the “metaverse”. What’s his name over at “Meta” as they now call ~~FaceScam~~, uh, excuse me, Facebook, has stumbled across an idea that is at least 25 years old and has been done before with varying degrees of success (and more often failure), they’ve stolen that, claimed it as their own, and is now are hyping up a storm. Meta’s “vision” of this metaverse is, frankly, silly, childish, badly implemented, laughably cartoonish and doesn’t even take into account basic human nature. It’s really kind of sad, to be honest. I’ve seen Meta’s “virtual world”, which they call Horizons, and to be honest it looks like a badly rendered version of The Jetson’s cartoon show from the 1960s. To call it cartoonish is insulting to cartoons

I want to talk about cameras too somewhere along the line. I want to talk about “cryogenic” tools… Egads, look at that list… Sigh… I’d better get to work.

Well, maybe I’ll get to work later. Right now it’s sunny out, warm, there’s a bicycle sitting in the garage waiting for me…

Drought Is Over (at least for now), Gardens Going Crazy And a B Movie?

The drought, at least for us here in east central Wisconsin, is over following a week or so of pleasantly damp and relatively cool weather. We got some significant rainfall that’s kick started everything out in the gardens. Unfortunately that also includes weeds, but that’s the way it goes.

We don’t have a lot of raspberry plants, just a fairly small corner of the garden behind the garage. They’re so loaded with fruit this year we had to put up support posts with twine to hold the dopy things up. They’re just starting to ripen right now. This is probably the best crop of berries we’ve had since we put them in a few years ago. We won’t get a lot, but we don’t need a lot. I’m not supposed to eat them because of the seeds, but I can’t help but snagging a handful when I’m working outside. They’re beautiful this year, and sweeter than usual as well.

MrsGF and I both love beets but we’ve had trouble growing them. This year we decided to fill one of the raised beds with them and wow, that worked amazingly well. They’re about 1.5 – 2.5 inches across now and we’ve been harvesting them periodically for over a week now. We just clean them, throw them in a pot, bring them to a boil and then simmer for a few minutes, then plunge into cold water. That lets us slip that outer skin off easily and they’re ready to either freeze or cook up for dinner. They are so good when they’re fresh. Much richer, sweeter flavor. Mostly we just simmer them in water until tender and top off with a bit of salt and pepper. We both love harvard style with a sweet sour sauce as well, but these are so good you don’t need a sauce to perk them up.

We have one bed that’s just assorted peppers. I didn’t think these were ever going to amount to much. They looked healthy enough but just weren’t growing. But now that we’ve had the rainy weather they’ve started to take off. They’ve almost doubled in size in the last 10 days and are starting to blossom. We eat a lot of them fresh off the plants during the season, but most end up diced up and frozen for use during the rest of the year. They get used in tomato sauces, egg dishes, chili, curry, etc. I’m hoping we’ll have enough that I can put up a few pints of pickled peppers as well. I wish I could tell you exactly what’s all planted in there, but not even MrsGF remembers what she all planted in that bed. Which is okay. They all taste good.

Speaking of peppers, I have two jalapeno plants in pots on the front porch again this year. I only grow two because I’m the only one who seems to like them. Last year I put in a ‘no heat’ variety that they claimed tasted like jalapeno but didn’t have the heat. That was sort of true? Kind of? They did taste like jalapeno peppers and they were a bit milder, but I thought they were lacking a bit in flavor. This year I put in normal jalapenos and as you can see they’re starting to fruit. I picked a few for use over the 4th holiday when we had our sons over for a picnic. I’ve been eating them diced up in things like omelets or thinly sliced on a burger. I think they’re delicious. They are definitely not mild but I didn’t think they were that hot until I got my eldest son to try one and he nearly went through the roof. He loves spicy food but he turned bright red, started gasping and had to go walk it off. So a couple of observations. First, apparently I can handle hot peppers a hell of a lot better than I thought I could. Second, I’ve now been told by people who know these things that these peppers are really, really hot, a lot hotter than a normal jalapeno should be. So I’m going to need to be really careful with these when I cook with them so I don’t end up with MrsGF throwing things at me when she recovers from eating them.

The tomatoes have gone absolutely bonkers. In the last two weeks they’ve just about tripled in size and if you could peek in there you’d see dozens of tiny green tomatoes. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing them coming ripe in a week or two the way they’re going. BTW, there are only 3 plants in that bed up there. I am really glad we didn’t put in more.

It’s hard to see now but there are onions all the way around the edge of that bed. We’ve been doing that for a few years now, sort of double cropping. The onions get a head start and get fairly mature before the main crop in the bed gets big enough to compete with them, and by that time the onions are big enough to hold their own and keep growing slowly through the season.

Why grow our own onions when they’re so cheap in the store? Flavor, of course. Most of the commercial onions are decent, but they just don’t have the intensity of flavor that our home grown ones have.

Those are wax beans in front, with some squash plants in the back. The perspective of this photo is kind of weird. The leaves on those squash plants back there are literally as large as dinner plates or even larger.

This is our “super” garden. It is in a corner of the house where the living room meets the kitchen, and faces south and west. We’ve put hundreds of pounds of compost in this garden over the years and that, together with the good drainage and protected, sunny location generally means things grow like crazy in there. And this year is no exception.

Those beans… Dear lord, what are we going to do with all those beans? There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flowers on those bean plants in there. If half of those turn into beans we could probably fill up the entire freezer with the things. We love wax beans but I suspect we’re going to end up giving away half of these to anyone who’ll take ’em because we’ll never be able to eat all of these.

We also have pole beans in another bed and those look like they’re going to be just as crazy as the wax beans. That’s only about six bean plants in there. Sheesh…

We were only going to put in two cucumber plants because I’m the only one who really likes cukes. The seeds MrsGF planted out here didn’t sprout so she bought a few plants at a local nursery and put those in. And then, of course, the seeds sprouted as well, so it looks like we’re going to have an overabundance of cucumbers as well.

MrsGF is trying to grow blueberries because, well, why not, eh? We had two originally and haven’t had a lot of success with them though. First because we stuck them in a poor location, and when we transplanted them to a better location one didn’t survive so she bought another one. Then the original survivor had some kind of rust that was covering the leaves. We trimmed all of the infected branches off and didn’t think it would survive, but it did and looks pretty healthy. And the new one that we put in this spring has actual fruit on it. Not a lot but heck, even a few dozen berries is better than none.

On the decorative side of things we have these cute little dwarf sunflowers coming up now. along with a few other types in there including one variety that is such a dark purple it looks almost black.

The hot, dry weather didn’t do the hostas any good this year. The poor things look pretty beat up. They usually don’t start looking this poorly until September. Still they’re hanging in there and coming into flower which will hopefully attract the humming birds. I’ve seen a few humming birds but for some reason they aren’t coming to the feeder. I think they had a nest somewhere out back because I’d see them buzzing around back there, but I haven’t seen them for a while now.

Finally, how about a bee video because without bees none of this would even be possible.

Catch Up: Gardening, Flowers, Hollowing Tool, Logo Designs and Stuff

We’ve been getting rain! The drought finally seems to be over. We’ve received several inches of rain over the last week and will be getting more today. Things were getting bad, and not just for home gardeners like me. We’ve had enough rain now that the plants have completely turned around and things are actually starting to look lush out there. The tomatoes have tripled in size and in full blossom. We even have some baby tomatoes on them already. The squash are growing so fast you can almost see the vines getting longer. We have baby cucumbers developing. The raspberries are probably going to be ripe in a week or so. Wow, it’s amazing what a bit of rain can do.

The color on the lilies has been almost breathtaking this year.

The warm, damp weather has really jump started the tomatoes. They look beautiful this year.

The raspberries are so loaded with fruit this year MrsGF had to put posts with string to rest the canes on because the weight of the fruit was bending them in half and snapping off the canes. I’ve never seen that happen before.

Anyway, as you can see the gardens here have been doing very, very well of late. Yes, we were watering everything carefully during the drought and keeping an eye on soil moisture and all of that, but for whatever reason artificial irrigation never seems to give the same results as natural rainfall, at least not for me. Even though I was sure the plants were getting adequate water, once it started raining everything just started going crazy.

Possible Logo

I’m going to (well, maybe) start selling some of my wood stuff. I got an account with Etsy now, but haven’t gotten around to actually putting anything up for sale over there, and I’m thinking of putting up a separate set of pages here to showcase a few things for sale. Don’t worry, none of that will appear here in the blog except for a link to the sales site. I’m not going to spam you or anything like that.

But I needed to come up with a name for this for Etsy, and a logo or something to mark the bowls. Most of my bowls have a 2 1/8 inch mortise (basically a shallow hole) in the bottom. This is how I attach them to the lathe with a four jaw chuck. I like using a mortise rather than a tenon because unlike a protruding tenon which has to be removed, I can leave the mortise in place. That means that if something goes wrong with the finish or something else happens, I can easily reattach the piece to the lathe to rework it or refinish it. And as for the remaining hole, I thought why not use it for a logo? I got these thin, 2″ wooden disks which work really well with the laser engraver, so I came up with a name and logo that looks pretty good when burned into the disk.

Then just glue the disk into the mortise on the bottom of the bowl. I’m not sure if this is going to be the final version, but so far I’m fairly satisfied with it.

Hollowing Tool

One of the issues I’ve run into with wood turning is dealing with objects that aren’t actual bowls, but instead are what are generally called “hollow form vessels”, things like, well, this one down below here.

This thing is supposed to be hollow, and it is. Sort of. Kinda. But not much. I ran a 2″ hole into it with a forstner bit and then fiddled around with the tools I had to try to hollow it out, but it’s a damned poor job because trying to reach in there to hollow it out without damaging the small opening and without hurting myself is a pain in the neck, even with special tools. I have tools that claim they are for hollowing out forms like this, and for whatever reason they just don’t work well for me. I see guys on YouTube doing this stuff effortlessly. How the heck do they do that? I’ve tried using their techniques and tools and what I’ve ended up with is dangerous catches, broken bowls, broken tools, and a real mess.

So I spent way more money than I wanted to for this:

This is the “Simple Hollowing System” from Harrison Specialties. Harrison markets a line of lathe tools under the “Simple Woodturning” brand. I have some of their carbide tools and they are very, very good indeed. This system is supposed to make it relatively easy to hollow out even something like the bowl in that photo up there. This version comes with just about everything you need, including the system itself, the tools, cutters and even a laser guide system to prevent you from accidentally cutting through the side of a bowl as it is being hollowed out.

As you can see I haven’t even had a chance to set it up yet because it’s been so busy here, but hopefully I’ll be able to give it a try in the next week or two and I’ll talk about it then. I also want to cover the laser engraver in some detail as well in the future. So keep an eye out for both of those coming up.

Car Stuff

Let’s see, what else… Oh, almost forgot. I sold the Corvette. It was a very, very nice car, it was huge fun, but, well, even I had to admit that it wasn’t exactly practical. Basically it was a vehicle that I could only use about 5 months of the year, was a two seater, had very little cargo space. Oh, and did I mention that new tires for that thing were $500? Each. Yeah, it was over $2,000 to put a set of four tires on it because it ran high tech, high speed, run flat racing tires.

I bought, heaven help me, a Buick. Yeah, a Buick. It’s an Envision Avenir which is, according to Buick, at least, “the highest expression of Buick luxury” available. Here’s a photo swiped from Buick’s website because I’m too lazy to go out to the garage and take a picture of mine at the moment.

And I really, really like it. Well, of course I do or I wouldn’t have bought it. Duh.

The list of options on this thing runs two full pages of small type. Emergency braking systems (which I tested the first day I had it. Neighbor’s dog ran in front of the car when I drove into my driveway and the car stopped itself before I could even get my foot off the gas pedal. Wow), lane divergence warnings and even steering. Apparently if you wander outside your lane on the freeway the thing will actually steer itself back into the center of the lane you’re in. Automatic headlights, automatic cruise control that slows down or speeds up itself to match traffic, a 360 degree camera system along with radar systems to assist with parking. I won’t go into the whole list because it’s a bit ridiculous, really. Bumper to bumper warranty that covers everything, and I mean everything. With the package I got even the interior fabrics are covered. Tears, burns, stains, paint chips… All covered. Sheesh…

This thing is very, very nice. I absolutely love it.

And there’s another reason I went with it. It’s four wheel drive with good ground clearance. The roads here in Wisconsin are utterly horrible and getting worse every day. We have one of the worst maintained highway systems in the country. The roads around here are so bad you’re risking doing serious damage to your car if it doesn’t have enough ground clearance to get through the pot holes, cracks, gravel patches and other garbage we have to contend with. The Buick can deal with that a lot better than the Vette.

Why are our roads so bad? Go talk to our state legislature if you want the answer to that one. They can find billions to pay for building new freeways down around Milwaukee that no one wants, but they can’t find the money to maintain the highways, roads and bridges we already have. Those multi billion dollar freeway expansion projects are done by huge corporations that funnel enormous amounts of money into the campaign funds and PACs of our dear legislators down there in Madison. Meanwhile most road maintenance is done by local governments and small contractors who don’t have any influence at all with the legislature.

Let’s see, what else… I’m hoping to actually go fishing this year. Maybe. Every year I get my Conservation Patron license. That is an all inclusive license offered in Wisconsin that covers just about everything you can legally fish or hunt for in the state. At first glance it seems expensive, but when you consider that it includes almost everything, it is actually cheaper and more convenient than trying to get individual licenses. So I get the license every year and generally end up doing, well, nothing, because I don’t have the time. Spring turkey season came and went this year before I even remembered I had a spring turkey permit. Sigh… I think I went fishing exactly twice last year, and once so far this year.

I don’t deal with leisure time very well, I’m afraid. Heck, I’m retired for pete’s sake. I don’t need to constantly be doing something practical. But every time I start planning to go fishing there’s this little voice in the back of my head that’s saying things like “you know you really should be weeding the gardens, not wasting your time with this”, or “you should be spending your time finishing that jewelry box you started last week not sitting along a river waiting to catch a fish and wasting your time.”

Anyway, that’s it for now…

Tree, Spring Photos, Garden Tour, And Stuff

I’m not going to miss this tree too much. It’s been shedding limbs every time we get a 20 mph wind for years now.

The only big old tree we have left on the property is going to have to come down. I’m sad about that but it has to go because it’s rotting out from the top down where two of the major branches of the canopy come together. If we don’t take it down soon it will come down itself and quite possibly do some serious damage. So that will be coming down probably in August. That’s going to mean some big changes in the gardens around here. That tree is massive and it shades out a huge area which always meant what we could grow back there was seriously restricted because of the shade.

Right now I’m thinking of putting in another decorative feature like this one:

MrsGF looked at me like I was nuts when I first proposed it, but then she thought about it for a moment and said sure, why not. Neither of us want to end up with just a big area of nothing but grass back there. So we’ll see. Putting in that feature up there with the retaining wall blocks and all that was a hell of a lot of work and it wasn’t exactly cheap. I think I have about a thousand bucks sunk into that one garden when the costs of the retaining wall blocks, rock, plants and everything else is added up.

The two new raised vegetable beds are doing quite well. One of these days we’re going to get around to building a brick/stone wall around these to make them more decorative looking, but that’s in the future. We have three tomatoes in one, surrounded by onions, and pole beans and more onions in the other.

I highly recommend raised beds for vegetables. They work really well, are easy to keep weed free, easy to tend the soil, the height tends to discourage animals from getting into them. The biggest drawback is that they dry out rather fast and they need to be watered almost every day. Especially this spring because we haven’t had a decent rain in, well, a month or more, I think. It has been an exceptionally dry spring here.

The other two raised beds are doing well also. One has a variety of pepper plants in it. You can see that the plants have #10 cans with the bottoms cut out surrounding them. Those will be coming off this week yet. The cans are a great way to give the plants protection when they’re first transplanted into the garden. The other bed is all beets with more onions planted around the outside. We really, really like beets. We like ’em roasted, sliced, pickled, etc. They freeze pretty well also so we figure we’ll have enough to hold us through the winter with all of these.

Mr. Spiny, our pet cactus is still doing fantastic along the foundation wall. It’s hard to tell in this photo but there are three other cactus off to the left, started from pads we took off Mr. Spiny and stuck in the ground. The soil right along that wall is absolutely horrible and normally almost nothing will grow there. The cactus seem to love it, though. Makes a great conversation piece because people can’t believe that a cactus will thrive here in Wisconsin for some reason, even though Wisconsin does have some native cactus, including this one. There are some other types that are hardy here as well. You don’t need to live in the southwest to have cactus in your gardens.

If you want to grow your own, go for it. I will warn you that in early spring they will look absolutely horrible and you’ll think it’s dead. At least this one does. It’ll be laying flat on the ground, the pads looking all brownish and nasty. It isn’t, though. Once the weather gets a bit better the pads begin to turn green again and start filling out again.

The hosta garden in the front of the house came through the winter quite well and is looking pretty good. They still haven’t reached full size yet but will be getting there pretty soon at the rate they’re growing.

And then the flowers – holy cow have we got flowers this year!

Other Stuff

Yes, I’m still doing the wood turning thing. Below is a tiny little bowl I cranked out the other day from a piece of scrap walnut I had laying around. It’s only about 3 inches wide and 2 inches tall. Cute little thing. Useless for just about anything, but cute.

This one down below is a rework. This was a rosewood bowl that started to show microcracks on the surface about a week or so after I made it. So I put it back on the lathe the other day and reworked it.

It turned out that the cracks were surface defects that only extended a few millimeters into the body of the bowl. So I reshaped the bowl, put on a finish, and we’ll see what happens this time.

My experience with rosewood has been puzzling. I’ve made four pieces with Indian rosewood, and three of them exhibited what I’ve been calling microcracks, very, very thin, sometimes lengthy cracks that do not follow the grain of the wood and seem to be confined to the surface of the wood. I’m not sure why, either. The wood was dry and stable, didn’t exhibit any other defects. Someone said that rosewood is very oily and that perhaps the oils were evaporating from the surface causing the wood to shrink, and I suppose that’s possible. We’ll see what happens with this one.