photography – Page 8 – grouchyfarmer

Catching Up

As you can see from that image up there, farmers around here are facing some serious challenges as they try to get their harvest in this fall. Right now they’re harvesting corn for silage and generally they have an extra tractor or two out in the field to help pull out the harvesting equipment or trucks when they get stuck. It isn’t like this everywhere. There are a lot of fields that aren’t this bad. But we have a lot of fairly low land around here and it’s still saturated with water from all the rains.

MrsGF and I were down in Madison last Friday and a lot of buildings in town were still sandbagged and there were work crews all over repairing the roads that had been damaged from the flooding down there. I’ve heard estimates of damage in excess of $200 million. This is nothing compared to those poor people in the Carolinas, of course. What they’re going through down there right now after the hurricane is horrifying.

Speaking of MrsGF, over the weekend she braved the mosquitoes to start cleaning up the gardens. She got a lot accomplished but we still have a lot left to do. All of the tomato plants were yanked out, finally. The squash were disappointing. We got a couple of nice butternut squash, but that’s about all. Hardly worth the effort of planting them, really. Not sure what happened there. We had a great crop of them last year. The acorn squash never really developed at all. All we had were a few very immature squash that ended up in the compost pile.

On the plus side, the tomatoes and peppers were wildly prolific this year. The freezer is full of containers of chopped peppers that will probably last us two years, and we probably have enough tomatoes, tomato sauces and soup canned to last us a couple of years as well. I’m really glad I picked up that big pressure canner. We can double stack jars in it and do about 16 pints in one batch.

The canning is finally done. We could put up more pears. The tree, despite the damage from the storms, was incredibly productive this year. We gave away 5 gallon pails full of the thing, gave boxes of them to friends and family, and there are still hundreds of pounds of pears out there. They’re mostly over ripe now. The problem there is when they hit the ground they are immediately swarmed by bees and wasps so anyone who is allergic to bee or wasp stings really needs to avoid our place until the weather gets cold.

There was some damage down along my favorite riding trail from the storms too. Some pretty good sized trees dropped right across the trail near the wooden bridge. The agency in charge of maintaining the trail works with some local people who harvest the wood from fallen trees, so hopefully this will be taken care of in the next week or so and the trail will be open again.

Other stuff…

The reason we were in Madison was so MrsGF could talk to the pension people about financial planning and insurance for when she retires in March. She’s very much looking forward to it, but she’s also nervous about it too despite all of the pre-planning we’ve done. But we’ve been planning this for a long, long time and we’re pretty sure we have everything set up right.

One of the very few perks left to her job after the state got done gutting the benefits and salaries of state employees is that she can convert her accumulated sick time to pay for Medicare supplemental insurance after retirement. The woman pretty much never takes a day off, so she has quite a bit of unused time on the books. Enough, it looks like, to cover our supplemental insurance for about five years after she retires.

The New Phone Story…

I haven’t actually bought a cell phone in ages. I lease the things for a small monthly fee, and at the end of the lease period turn them in and get new ones. The actual cost for the phone averages out to be about the same whether I buy it outright or lease it. So about every two years or so I get a new one and turn the old one in.

So when the lease on my iPhone 7 got close to ending, I decided to get a iPhone 10. Only they screwed up the shipping address and it ended up being shipped back to the warehouse because UPS couldn’t find me, despite the fact UPS is here about 3 times a week anyway.

Turns out this was not a bad thing, because meanwhile Apple came out with the iPhone XS, and I now have the brand new XS Max in my hot little hands for not much more than what the 10 would have cost me. And holy cow, is it nice!

I bought into the whole Apple ecosystem, as it’s sometimes called, long ago. It isn’t so much Apple’s equipment that’s so good, it’s the software and the thought that goes into the little details that makes the whole Apple system so addictive.

Like setting up the new XS. I took it out of the box. I took off the protective covering. It turned itself on and immediately found my old phone, copied all of my data over to the new phone automatically, copied all of my apps over, everything. All I had to do was respond to a few prompts. In about 15 minutes the new phone had everything copied over; apps, phone lists, email, photos, everything, without me having to do anything. The only thing I had to do manually was get online to activate the cell phone itself to transfer my phone number over to the new phone.

The XS Max is, well, wow… Just wow… That display is amazingly good. I’ve been streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime video to it and that is without a doubt the best small video screen I’ve ever seen. And the sound? How the hell do they get sound like that out of those tiny, tiny little speakers in there?

I also ended up getting those dopey AirPod things, the wireless earphones. Yeah, they’re expensive but, well, also just wow… The sound quality, especially the bass, is amazing. Again, I don’t know how they get bass response like that out of those tiny little things. Sorcery, I suspect.

The AirPods themselves are an amazing piece of engineering and Apple has made using them ridiculously easy. They paired with the phone by themselves. They turn themselves on when you put them in your ear, turn themselves off when you take them out. The case is also the charger. Just drop them in and they recharge. The case itself has its own battery to recharge the pods. Just remember to plug the case into the phone’s charger once in a while to keep it’s internal battery topped off.

And then there’s the camera. Or, rather, cameras, because there are three of them, one of the front and two on the back. That camera is probably going to completely replace my Fuji except for telephoto use. I’ve always been dismissive of cell phone cameras but even I have to admit that the camera in this thing is better than my dedicated camera.

People are claiming it’s too big, but it actually isn’t any bigger than my iPhone 7. What is bigger is the screen because it now occupies the entire front of the phone. There is almost no bezel at all on this thing.

The face recognition thing — As you may know starting with the iPhone 10 it uses face recognition to unlock the phone. Just pick it up, it instantly takes a look at your face and if it recognizes you it turns itself on. Otherwise you have to enter an unlock code. So far the system seems to work flawlessly. It recognizes me even when I have my biking gear on; helmet, sunglasses, etc.

I’m old enough that I am still a bit in awe of the technology that we have access to today. When I was a kid we didn’t even have a dial phone. You turned a crank that rang a bell at the telephone company office and an operator asked you who you wanted to call. We didn’t get a dial phone until I was in like third grade. Now I have what basically amounts to a supercomputer in my pocket.

Anyway, I want to experiment with the camera over the next few days and see what it can do. Watch for a post in the near future with more info about that.

That’s it for now…

Oh, almost forgot. I have a Q&A article in the works now to cover some of the questions I’ve received here, so if you have anything you want to ask about farming, amateur radio, gardening, etc. you can get hold of me at old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com

Fall, Pears, Water, Cold (the sneezing kind) and Stuff

Alas, that photo up there was an all too common sight around here as we got bombarded with rain for a two or three week period. Things are finally starting to dry out, but a lot of rivers are still at flood stage, there’s still a lot of standing water, and that one storm spawned something like 17 tornadoes across the state. Damage estimates are still being made, but I wouldn’t be surprised in if they hit $200+ million between the flooding and the wind.

Here in Calumet County we got lucky. Things could have been a lot worse. Aside from soaked and flooded farm fields, damage here was fairly minor. Most of the more serious storms went to the north or south of us. Mostly south. The southern half of the state really got hammered.

We weren’t entirely unscathed, though. Our poor pear tree suffered major damage one night when two of the main branches came down. I’m going to wait until the pears are picked before I go up there to see how bad it really is. We’re hoping that the tree can recover from this, but I don’t know. It’s hard to tell right now how badly it was damaged because the foliage is so thick.

Screen Shot 2018-09-09 at 5.38.03 AM.png — Nice weather at last!

Still, the weather had gotten much better, with sunny conditions and temperatures more typical of early September in Wisconsin. Daytime highs have been in the low 70s and night time temps have been in the 48 – 55 degree range. It’s been really quite pleasant after the extraordinarily hot and muggy weather we had all through August.

The bees have certainly been enjoying themselves. We’re seeing them all over the place. Just about every flower at the house is covered in bees, mostly bumble bees and native bees, which is really nice to see.

Just as conditions change so I can finally get off the allergy meds, of course I come down with a nasty cold. At first I thought the symptoms were from going off the allergy meds. I’ll often get a rebound effect when I stop taking it. But no, definitely a cold. Coughing, sneezing, wheezing, sore throat from the coughing and congestion will be the norm for the next few days, it seems. I can’t take decongestants because I have high blood pressure, and the so-called cough remedies, well, they’re virtually useless anyway. So all I can do is wait.

I’ve taken to sleeping in the recliner to keep from bothering MrsGF otherwise I keep her up at night too. And in any case, when I lay down all the garbage from my head seems to drain down into my throat and makes the coughing all the worse. Still, it seems to be getting better. Only woke up once during the night last night and managed to sleep six hours. Would have been seven if the dopey siamese hadn’t started demanding breakfast at 5 AM.

The good news is the tomato plants are finally giving up the ghost and we can put the canning equipment away. MrsGF finished off the last of the tomatoes yesterday, putting up about 22 pints of chili sauce.

Well, we call it chili sauce but there is no actual chili in it. It’s a mixture of tomatoes, onions and bell and banana peppers with a bit of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. It tastes utterly amazing and we use it in almost any kind of dish that calls for tomatoes, either as a base for the sauce, or as a flavor enhancer.

The Wisconsin 55 tomato variety we tried this year was a bitter disappointment. Very few fruit, and the ones we did get were soft, often discolored and not a very good flavor. The Early Girl variety, on the other hand, were absolutely spectacular.

We put in 3 cucumber plants this year and, well, we might as well have not even bothered. I don’t think we got more than 6 cucumbers off them all season long and a lot were misshapen. They were disappointing as well.

The squash look pretty good. We’re going to get several nice sized butternut squash and I noticed that there are some acorn out there. But the acorn are very late this year and I’m not sure if they’re going to amount to much.

Let’s see, what else… I had to get new tires put on the bike. I have to admit I know pretty much nothing about bicycle tires. I got about 1,500 miles out of these and I don’t know if that’s about average or not. I ran it up to the bike shop to get them replaced. I could do it myself but I’m terrible with bicycle tires. I always end up wrecking the inner tubes when I’m installing them. Took the guy at the shop all of 45 minutes to change both tires, adjust the derailleur, adjust the brakes, lube it, etc. Would have taken me half a day to do all of that, and it would have involved the use of much foul language, I suspect.

That’s it for now. It’s 6:30 AM, the sun is finally up and I’m thinking of taking the bike out for a few miles despite the cold.

A video experiment not sure if this is going to work

Let’s see if I can do videos on this thing… I keep forgetting the iPhone can do pretty good videos.

Wow, seems it actually worked. Well, if I can put up with the 350 kbs upload speed. 350 kbs? Really? I’m supposed to have 7 mbs upload according to the info the cable company keeps sending me. A wee bit of discrepancy there…

Screen Shot 2018-08-14 at 6.41.43 AM.png

Went to the antique farm equipment and steam engine show at Chilton on Sunday. It’s an annual event they do every August and it’s always interesting.

Oh, and in case you can’t play the video for some reason, here’s a picture of a butteryfly so this hasn’t been a complete waste of time for you:

Screen Shot 2018-08-14 at 6.31.36 AM.png

Gardening: Tomatoes!!! We got Tomatoes!!!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen our tomatoes look quite this good. The plants are amazingly lush and have gotten absolutely enormous. The two Wisconsin 55 plants are about 4-5 feet across and would be probably 4 feet tall if the weight of the fruit wasn’t pulling the stems down. The tomato cages have proven woefully inadequate and have started collapsing. It’s ridiculous. The other variety we planted are Early Girl, a smaller tomato, but they’re just as lush and prolific as the 55s are.

And judging from the color, it looks like what MrsGF and I are going to be doing by the end of the week is processing tomatoes into sauce, soup, and just canning/freezing them.

I got the first ripe one of the season yesterday. I saw it peeking through the dense canopy of leaves, a flash of red, did some digging around and there it was. I still get a bit excited when I find the first tomato of the season. I found a total of three yesterday. The rest are still pretty green but they’re coming on fast.

I’ve also found, alas, a few with blossom end rot. But only a few, maybe three or four. The rest look pretty good. Blossom end rot hits tomatoes and peppers both, and is apparently linked to a calcium deficiency in the soil. We were thinking maybe starting to save eggshells instead of putting them in the compost going down to the compost site and try an experiment with crushing them and soaking them in water and using that to water the plants next year. MrsGF said the nuns did that at the convent back when she was almost a nun. Yeah, seriously, MrsGF was almost a nun. How I “stole” her from a convent has apparently become part of the family oral history. Sigh…

The banana peppers are in full production and are just as loaded with fruit as the tomatoes are. We’re starting to chop and freeze them. They’re easy to deal with. Just clean ’em, dice them up, stick them in freezer bags or an airtight container and chuck them in the freezer and pull out for omelets, soup, sauce, pizza or whatever when needed.

There were supposed to be sweet banana peppers. Emphasis on the word “supposed”. Some of these stinkers are downright hot, with a few pushing the heat level of jalapeno peppers. The flavor is amazing, but the heat is something some of the family members don’t care for, so we’re going to have to use these with some caution. We have a few sweet bell peppers, but they don’t look like they’re going to produce very well this year for some reason.

MrsGF put in 3 squash plants this year in the garden at the back of the garage and they’re pretty much taking over everything back there like they did last year. The vines grow astonishingly fast. We’re constantly pulling vines out of the lawn, out of the raspberries, out of the rhubarb… They look like they’re doing pretty good too. We’re seeing some nice sized squash already and lots of baby squash just starting to develop.

We have 3 cucumber plants grown from seed and they haven’t been very successful this year. Very spindly vines and very few cukes. But that’s not a real issue because I’m the only one who really likes to eat fresh cucumbers anyway. As long as I get enough to make a fresh cucumber salad once in a while I’m happy.

Other stuff — I worked out a deal with Eldest Son on my Honda Goldwing. With her back and knee issues it’s almost impossible for MrsGF to get on and off a motorcycle any more, so the Wing has sat mostly unused since I got it. I’ve had it since 2013 and it has a whopping 3,400 miles on it. Sigh… So I worked out a deal with ES. I don’t want to give up on biking, so we’re doing a swap, his Honda VTX, which is really a one person bike, for the Wing plus some cash and other stuff.

We worked out the deal last winter but we still haven’t gotten around to actually swapping bikes, so the Wing is still parked in the garage. We were going to do the swap at the end of July but… Well, the Wing had a bad battery and the VTX needed new front fork seals so here there you go… The shop he goes to has a 2 week backlog for repairs. Oh well…

We used to do a lot of motorcycling, MrsGF and me. We took our BMW literally all over the country. We put about 50,000 miles on that bike in the few years we owned it and had a lot of fun. Then I traded it off on the Wing and– well, the problem was not long after that I got the Corvette too and, well, you tell me which you would rather do, go on a long trip on a motorcycle in the heat, cold, rain, etc, or go in a convertible Corvette which is comfortable, has a top you can put up to keep the rain out, air conditioning (it was 107 degrees when youngest son and I were out in SD with it), and a decent sized trunk.

Fuel economy better on the bike? Yeah, well, you’d be surprised at how poor the milage is on these big touring bikes and how good it is on the Vette. The Wing gets, at best, 34 mpg cruising at 55. Add MrsGF, our clothes, the trailer, and we’re lucky if we get 30 MPG on the thing when fully loaded. And milage goes down fast as the speed ramps up. The Vette gets about 25+ if I don’t get silly.

Well, to be fair, the Vette has it’s own ‘issues’, so to speak. Like tires costing $500. Each. And oil changes costing about $100+ because it holds about 8 quarts of high end synthetic (i.e. expensive) oil. The only reason I can afford to operate it is that I don’t drive it much. And it sounds like a jet fighter taking off when you put your foot down because of the headers and Borla exhaust and, well, that part is more of a plus than a minus…

There’s an urban myth about this car setting off car alarms with the exhaust noise if you really rev up the engine and let it snort and, well, turns out it isn’t an urban myth. Not, of course, that I’d know about something like that from personal experience. Nope, not at all…

Still More Stuff!

Weather news has been pretty boring around here, which isn’t a bad thing. Mostly it’s been hot. Like large parts of the country (and apparently large parts of the world) we’ve had unusually warm weather during the last couple of weeks, but that seems to have moderated.

What’s been interesting is the lack of storms here. We haven’t had a single thunder storm here all season. At least not one that amounted to more than a few distant rumbles. Storms have gone all round us, north, south, etc. But pretty much nothing has rolled over the county since the start of storm season. It’s been so odd that people are starting to wonder what’s going on.

There is an old theory floating that because of our location between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan, some kind of updrafts or downdrafts or some other curious effect caused by the two lakes does something to keep storms away. I’ve heard this theory before and it is nonsense, really. All it takes to debunk it is a quick glance at past weather data. If you look at the historical data you quickly see that this area is just as prone to severe weather, thunder storms, and tornadoes as the rest of the state.

The garden is going gangbusters. The hot temperatures and high humidity have everything growing like crazy. The tomatoes up there in the lead photo are absolutely lush and loaded with young fruit. The pepper plants (what in the world are we going to do with all the peppers we planted? What were we thinking?) are loaded with blossoms an young fruit. The two squash plants are looking good. The cucumbers look a bit ragged, but I’m the only one who eats fresh cukes around here anyway so if they don’t do good no one cares. Lettuce, we have so much lettuce we’re getting sick of it and the onions are now big enough that we can stop buying from the store and just run out to the back yard and pull a couple when we need them. Green beans are looking good after a few issues earlier in the year. Even the parsley, which got in very late, is up and looking good. We have sunflowers starting to blossom. It’s a great time of the year.

Keeping up with watering is a pain. It’s been pretty dry over the last couple of weeks and we have to water everything almost every day now. But that’s not unusual for this time of year.

Out on the trails it’s been beautiful, but the hot, humid weather makes it a bit troublesome. I carry about 2 quarts of water with me when I go out and go through at least half of that by the time I get back. Depends on the temperature and how hard I push it. I’m not a ‘power biker’ by any stretch of the imagination. I’m lucky if I keep up an average speed of 8 – 9 mph when I’m out, and I rarely go more than 10 – 15 miles. And there are always surprises, like that photo above. That, believe it or not, is a flock of about 30 pelicans having some kind of feeding frenzy on the river down by the old stone bridge on Irish Road about 4 miles out of town.

I never expected to see pelicans way out here. They generally stay close to the bigger lakes, like Michigan and Winnebago. Seeing a whole flock of them feeding in a tiny river like this was quite a surprise.

This was another surprise:

This goof is probably the one that scared the hell out of me the other day when it bounded up onto the trail right in front of me a week ago. I’ve been seeing an unusual number of deer out in the open this summer, even in broad daylight. According to the old timers it’s because the mosquitoes and biting flies are absolutely vicious this year and it’s driving the deer out of the woods. Judging from my own experience, that’s probably true.

The mosquitos this year are horrible. If I get within 5 feet of the tomatoes or raspberries or other fairly dense vegetation after about 5 pm and I see clouds of the damned things come swarming up out of the plants and heading straight for me. It’s gotten to the point where I’m considering chemical warfare. I don’t like using insecticides for a lot of reasons, but it’s gotten so bad it’s impossible to go in the backyard. And considering West Nile Virus is popping up all over the place, well… I start eyeing those cans of foggers on the shelf and it’s damned tempting.

Out on the trail it’s gotten bad too. I can’t stop anywhere in the shade or I get swarmed by the things. Out in the sun on the road where there aren’t any trees or bushes it isn’t too bad. But on the trail itself you don’t dare stop for more than a few seconds.

Speaking of biking… It looks like I’m going to have to put new tires on the bike by the end of the month. They’re starting to look a bit worn. I have to admit I don’t know how many miles you’re supposed to get out of a set of bike tires, but I have about 1,100 miles on these now.

Yeah, that’s right, 1,100 miles. I’m a bit surprised by that. The odometer reads 1,000 miles, but I put over 100 miles on the bike before I put the odometer on it, so 1,100 is probably pretty accurate. If you’re an avid biker that probably doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a 64 year old grouchy old fart who hadn’t been on a bicycle since 1980? That’s kind of surprising.

Speaking of biking, I’m going to get out for a while before it gets too hot.

It’s Been Busy…

MrsGF had last week off so we took some time to go wandering around in between getting caught up with chores and gardening. We headed down to Fond du Lac, a small city on the southern end of Lake Winnebago. I’ve always liked the town. I used to spend a lot of time down there, and so did MrsGF. When I was a technician working for a POS company I had three clients I worked with down there, two grocery stores and a commercial bakery, and MrsGF worked there too for a while when she was with Aramark for a few years.

We rarely get down there now so we just wandered around town for a while looking at how things have changed over the years. It’s still a very pleasant town, but it’s had it’s problems over the years, along with just about every other city in the country. Like most small cities, trying to keep it’s downtown district from falling apart has been a problem. Fondy has been fairly successful. There are very few empty storefronts, and while you won’t see any big name retailers down there, most of the shops seem to be doing fairly well financially.

We’re lucky enough to live near Lake Winnebago. The lake is big. It’s 30 miles long and ten miles wide at it’s widest point. It’s a hotbed of activity all year long. During warmer weather boating (both sail and power boating), water skiing, swimming and fishing keeps, including some big fishing tournaments, keeps the place busy. In winter the lake has ice boating, snowmobiling, skiing and, of course, ice fishing. At the peak of the ice fishing season, there will be thousands of people out on the ice trying to catch perch, bluegills and, of course, 6 or 7 foot long, 200+ pound sturgeon.

We stopped at Pipe, a small town along the eastern shore with a wonderful little park and boat launch area. Alas, you could have gone surfing on Winnebago that day. There were 4 or 5 foot waves crashing into the shore and lots of whitecaps out there, and very few people willing to brave the waves to try fishing.

Back at home things are growing like crazy, but it was a bit iffy there for a while. We went through a very dry period where we had to water everything on a daily basis, to it being way too wet after we got deluged with about 6 inches of rain in two days.

One sign that summer is here is the lilies are coming into full bloom now.

This pink one has over a hundred blossoms on it. MrsGF didn’t believe me when I told her that so I dragged her outside and made her count them herself.

The real show stopper is this one, though:

The color on this one is so intense it almost glows in the dark.

And the pear tree — good grief…

The tree is so heavily laden with fruit that I think we’re going to have to get out there and snip some of them off or the branches are going to break off from the weight as the pears mature.

More Stuff!

Almost as soon as the weather got warmer the bike got pulled out of storage and I was out on it. It took me a few days to get back into it again, but it was easier than I thought it was going to be. Apparently doing the treadmill every day during the winter kept me from completely falling apart and it wasn’t long before it was comfortable to be back in the saddle and putting on more than a few miles.

This is an amazing time of year to be out in the countryside biking around. Everything is lush and green, everything is in flower this time of year. I sometimes struggle between the temptation to keep going to put on some miles in a reasonable amount of time and the temptation to stop every few hundred feet to take photos of some neat plant or flower as I rid around the backroads.

I wish the trail in the lead photo up there was a bit closer, though. The start of the trail is about four miles from town, but once you get on it, it runs for more than 30 miles all the way to Green Bay, with branches leading off into towns like Brillion.

This year I’m trying an app for my phone called aprs.fi. It uses the phone to tie into the APRS system. Automatic Packet Reporting system. It uses the phone to send and receive little bits of data back and forth to a network. It’s been used by amateur radio operators for many years now to send information, and one of its uses is position tracking. A lot of VHF/UHF transceivers have APRS capabilities built into them, and some transceivers have GPS built into them as well. They can be set up to periodically transmit the position of the radio to permit it to be tracked by others using the system.

MrsGf has a similar program for her iPhone plus the FTM-400DR transceiver in her car has APRS and GPS capabilities. The local ARES group she belongs to is just now looking into using APRS to track members of the group when they’re out in the field. Since APRS/GPS capable transceivers are still pretty pricy they’re looking at the APRS applications available for smart phones. Some work pretty well, others have problems, some serious. The one I use is aprs.fi and it seems well above average in it’s utility and capabilities. When the group was out doing volunteer communications for the Elkhart Lake Triathlon over the weekend a couple of people were using using some of the apps and I was able to track their positions in near real-time on a map.

I had it running when I was out on the bike Saturday and used it to plot my course when I did about 11 miles that morning. You can see the plot in the screen capture.

The question is why would I want to do this? Well, I’m out on the bike, on backroads or trails, and you never know what happens. Accidents, health issues, any number of things could happen that would incapacitate me. Yes, they can use the cell phone to try to find me, but trying to find the exact location of a cell phone is an iffy thing and often very inaccurate. The APRS app uses the phone’s GPS system so it’s much more accurate than trying to use the cell phone system to do the locating.

Certainly it’s a great technology for emergency services and ARES/RACES organizations should almost certainly be looking into it as a way of tracking their operators when they’re out in the field.

Let’s see, what else… The gardens are doing well. We’ve had to do a lot of watering. It’s been pretty dry around here over the last couple of weeks. Temperatures have been fairly cool after the heat wave we went through a few weeks ago.

They drag me into the clinic every 6 months so I spent the whole morning doing that. To make a long story short, everything checked out fine. All the numbers were where they are supposed to be. BP is still higher than it should be, but it’s no where near as bad as it was a year ago so I’m happy about that. And they’re delighted I’ve taken up biking. I think everyone was afraid that once I retired I was going to end up sitting on my butt all day in front of the radio or computer or television and it kind of surprised everyone that I started doing that last year.

The next thing I want to do is put together a low-power (QRP) transceiver that I can throw into a backpack and take out on the trail with me. I think it would be great fun to sit out in the woods or on a trail somewhere with an antenna strung up in a tree and trying to make contacts with just a couple of watts of power.

Catching Up

I suppose I could talk about how Mike Pence not only killed NAFTA but drove a stake into it’s still quivering heart last week, or how the latest round of that popular game in D.C, Trade Wars, is going to decimate the agriculture economy, but that’s just too damned depressing. Besides, if you want to read about that kind of thing there are only about five hundred million websites out there where “experts” are pontificating and bloviating.

No, it’s spring. Everything is in bloom, as you can see from the closeup of the lilac there up at the top of this. I’m rather pleased with how that image turned out. MrsGF keeps telling me I should start printing some of these and trying to sell ’em, but well, that would mean I’d actually have to do some work.

Almost everything we planted is doing well. Tomatoes are doing great. One variety we planted called Wisconsin 55 (I think) is already starting to blossom. The peppers are doing pretty good. Even the two blueberry bushes MrsGF picked up seem to be doing pretty good. Even the spindly and sickly looking cucumber plants that looked like they were dead are starting to take off.

And the weather has been — well, I was going to say good, but that’s not really true. The weather has been odd. In late May we had temperatures well up into the mid-90s that broke records all over the state. And caused dozens of incidents of highways buckling from the heat. And in just the space of a few days we went from conditions being too wet to conditions way too dry. We haven’t had any significant rainfall in weeks now. Other parts of the state did get some rain, but it always seemed to evaporate before it got to us. We have to water everything almost every day. It’s rather discouraging. If it’s this bad this early in the season, what is it going to be like come August? We did finally get some rain over the weekend, about half an inch.

Still, it’s hard to complain when I see stuff like this when I walk out the door:

And I’ve finally been able to get the bike out and put some miles on on a fairly regular basis. I’d almost forgotten how delightful it is to get out in the country on the bike this time of year. A lot of people don’t understand why I enjoy it so much. It isn’t the exercise, it’s getting out in nature and being able to hear the birds and frogs, and seeing the little treasures along the roadside like these tiny little flowers:

Amateur Radio Stuff

Field Day is rapidly approaching. I think it’s June 23-24. It’s an annual event that has been going on for ages in the amateur radio community. The idea is to get us troglodytes out of our basements and the dark corners where we usually huddle over smoking soldering irons, and play with all kinds of technologies that range from 100+ year old telegraph keys to ultra-modern mesh networks, satellite communications and bouncing radio signals off the moon, and set up our gear in parking lots, parks, and even fields in the middle of nowhere, and hope we don’t burst into flames like vampires from the exposure to the sun.

Alas, I’ve never participated because MrsGF and I are usually gone of vacation at that time of year because of how our schedules work out. It’s great fun, though. So if you see a bunch of very pale looking people stringing up wires in trees, standing around tables laden with strange looking equipment, don’t worry. It’s just us making a rare excursion into the daylight.

Along The RoadSide

I was finally able to get the bicycle out on the road the other day. It felt great to be out on the road on a warm, sunny day again. Unfortunately I also quickly found out that bicycling takes an entirely different set of muscles than jogging on a treadmill does. It’s going to take a while before I’m comfortable doing 10 or 15 miles, but it was worth it. The frogs were singing, the sun was bright, and the wild flowers alongside the road had me stopping every once in a while to take photos.

So, here’s some photos… Oh, click one of the photos to start a slide show of the full size images.

Indoor Tulips & Assorted Stuff

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MrsGF has been just as sick of looking outside at the brown wasteland that is March here in Wisconsin as I have, so she shoved some old bulbs into pots and put them in a sunny window a few weeks ago and this is what we have now. Great fun to see tulips starting to pop open again.

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That’s not to say that there aren’t things growing already. She was outside looking things over yesterday and discovered that the chives are already six inches tall over in their protected corner. They’re always the first things to spring up and they’ve been ridiculously prolific. We put those in shortly after we bought the house so they’ve been going strong for almost 20 years now.

The big question now is sod, as in how are we going to get rid of it. There is a pretty big section of lawn we want to rip out to expand one of the gardens here, and getting rid of

This was the little Massey. Fun, useful little tractor but keeping it in town was a bit ridiculous

the sod is always a pain in the neck. I sold my tractor a couple of years ago. After selling the farm we kept the little Massey for a while, but keeping it was a bit silly. It was mostly in storage over at the farm of a friend about 8 miles from here and there it sat until we needed it perhaps for one afternoon a year. So keeping it and its trailer was ridiculous. So it looks like I’ll resort to the good old fashioned dig it up with a shovel method as soon as the frost is completely out of the ground.

MrsGF and I were sorting through seeds and tentatively making plans earlier this morning. We were thrilled when Eldest Son gave us literally a whole shopping bag of seed packets for Christmas, but we have to be realistic. We can’t grow all of it as much as we’d like to. And there are quite a few that we don’t really like or couldn’t use. Neither of us like melon all that much, and it takes up a lot of space, so those got set aside. Same with eggplant. Don’t get me wrong, eggplant is a perfectly delightful vegetable. But that one summer our eggplant was so ridiculously prolific that we got so sick of eating eggplant that we can’t really stand looking at them any more.

We brought up the little portable greenhouse rack we use to start seed and MrsGF is in the process of starting trays of seeds even as I write this.

Amateur Radio Stuff

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the FT8 mode over the last couple of months. Even with my seriously bad antenna system I’ve had a couple of hundred contacts and have managed to hit something like 35 different countries, including some really long distance contacts with Hawaii, Alaska, Japan and Tasmania.

I’ve even started playing with PSK again and have made a few contacts with that mode as well. Unlike FT8 you can actually chat with people using PSK. Unfortunately it seems most PSK users have jumped ship for FT8 and seeing a PSK signal on the bands has been a rather rare thing. Even more annoying is that the powers that be decided that on 17 meters the frequency recommendation for FT8 mode is the same one as the PSK allocation, so PSK on 17 meters is a lost cause because the frequency is swamped with FT8.

antenna I’m hoping to get this puppy up in the air this spring. It’s already mostly assembled out in the back yard and we have all the hardware for mounting, including the tilt-over base. It’s a GAP Titan multi-band vertical antenna that should help to give me a significant boost over the OCFD I currently have hanging out there now. This one is going to replace the Comet 250 vertical I have and which is… Well, let’s face it, the Comet isn’t that good of an antenna. It can only handle about 240 watts and to be perfectly frank I’m amazed the thing works at all.

I also have a 40 foot antenna tower laying out in the backyard that will hopefully get set up sometime this summer. Of course I said that last summer, too. And the summer before that…