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?
I’m bored and waiting for the cable guy to come and fix my internet, so I’m going to complain talk about e-scooters for a while.
Oh, and I should warn you right up front that there will be sarcasm.
So let’s look at the abomination that is the e-scooter. Yes, I said abomination because that is what a of a lot of people think of them in the cities that they have infested. At least the ones who have had to jump for their lives off a sidewalk to avoid being run down by one of the things.
Some people are looking at the problem of “the last mile”. This refers to one of the problems with public transportation. Let me explain.
In the dreams of the more progressive city planners out there, personal transportation should work something like this: First you’ll take a high speed train (which doesn’t actually exist) to the city to a central depot (which doesn’t exist) where you will get on a subway or a light rail system (which doesn’t exist in the vast majority of cities in the US) to another depot somewhere in the city (which doesn’t exist) where you will get on a pleasant, clean bus (which doesn’t exist) that totally isn’t covered with the vomit, blood, feces, urine and body parts of the people who were on it the night before, that will take you to a bus stop (which doesn’t exist) near your final destination which is within easy walking distance (it isn’t).
Sidenote: The more practical of you out there will have several rather serious objections to these dreams of how personal transportation should work, even if you ignore the fact that most, if not all, of the infrastructure needed for all of this doesn’t actually exist, its cost to build would be mind boggling, that it would take decades to build, and that there would be thousands of lawsuits trying to stop it before anyone even turned over the first shovel full of dirt. The problem is, well, it doesn’t seem that anyone has actually bothered to take into consideration the reason why people want to go to town. All these city planners seem to think that I’m going to get on a train, go to, oh, Green Bay, take a bus around town, get back on a train and then immediately turn around and go home again. No. The only reason I want to go to town is to go to the shops and get out again as fast as possible. I want to get groceries, stop at Fleet Farm to get a new tire for my lawnmower, buy a cat tower that my cat will never actually use, and then scurry back to the house to spend two days recovering from the trip. The problem with these public transportation systems is what the hell do I do with all my stuff? There is no way in hell I am going to be able to lug all of that stuff along with me on a bus or commuter train or any of the methods of transportation they want to push me onto.
That last bit, the distance between where your bus drops you off and your final destination, is sometimes known as the ‘last mile’. And that last mile really often is a mile or more. In some cases a lot more. So that last mile is a real problem because people look at this whole plan and say wait a minute, why the hell should I go through all of that nonsense when I still have to walk a half hour to get to my destination? I’ll just skip all of that crap and take my car and be done with it.
And the entrepreneurs out there are dealing with the lack of infrastructure by simply totally ignoring all of it and concentrating instead on the last mile because that’s where they figure they can make huge gobs of money at very little expense. So a bunch of them sat around brainstorming one night and what they came up with was a… Wait for it… A scooter. A rental scooter.
A rental scooter? What? Seriously? A fricken scooter? Yeah, a fricken rental scooter. But wait! It’s special! It’s an e-scooter! (Waits for hushed ooos and aahs to die down) It’s like all “green” and stuff because they stuck an “e” in front of the word scooter. It’ll work. Seriously. Really. Trust me…
Take basically what is little more than an upscale version of the kid’s toy that seems to have been designed specifically to make sure emergency room doctors are fully employed, strap a motor and battery to it so it can zip along at 20+ mph, and there you go. It ain’t exactly rocket science. My kid literally made one of these back in the 1990s out of parts from an old office copying machine. Seriously. Granted it didn’t work very well but it worked. Sort of.
I have to admit that on the surface at least it doesn’t seem to be an absolutely horrible idea. Maybe? The idea is that they leave these things in appropriate places around the city. The user uses an app to unlock and pay for using the scooter. The user gets to their destination and then just leaves it there where, hopefully, someone leaving that destination will need a ride and then go through the same process to take the scooter elsewhere. Then at the end of the day someone with a truck will run around town, find all of the scooters, throw them into the back of the truck, take them to a central warehouse somewhere to recharge them, and then get them back on the streets before the morning rush starts.
Only it hasn’t actually worked all that well. First of all some of the companies never bothered to tell the cities they were moving into what they were doing. The city went to bed one night, got up in the morning, started to watch the morning news while having a nice cup of coffee, and immediately was deluged with complaints from people wondering what the hell was going on with all of these stupid scooters laying all over and people riding them at 20 mph down the sidewalks and running over small children, pets, and less than agile pedestrians, and the city says what? Wait a minute, what scooters?
Some of our more enterprising citizens went “Ooo, free scooters!” and snapped them up, stripped them of every resellable part they could, and tossed the remains off the nearest bridge into the river. Or they just tossed them off the nearest bridge without stripping them of parts because, well, hey, this is Wisconsin. It’s boring up here. We have to make our own entertainment. And I’ve ridden one of these things and after going half a block on the stupid thing I wanted to throw it off a bridge myself.
Building owners found their entrances so cluttered with the damned things that people couldn’t get into the shops or offices, and that even the sidewalks were blocked by abandoned scooters. Poor pedestrians out walking their little doggies or trying to walk down to the shops to get a coffee had to quickly learn the fine art of running for their lives or be run down by some loonie on a scooter zipping between walkers at about a zillion miles per hour. And if you think I am exaggerating this, I assure you I am not. This is exactly what happened when these things hit the streets. I have a lot of friends who live in Milwaukee and this is what happened down there when these things were dumped on the city almost literally without warning.
I won’t go through all of the nonsense that took place in Milwaukee when the e-scooters moved it. Let’s just say that it was real interesting. After a lot of threats of lawsuits and other ridiculousness they are apparently now back on the streets, but only in certain zones and with restrictions on how many can be in each zone. And, Milwaukee being Milwaukee, they want their cut of the action, too. Companies are apparently going to have to pay the city $50 per scooter, twenty-five cents per trip, and if a city employee has to touch one of the things to move it out of the way, the scooter company will have to pay a $25 fee. Considering none of these scooter companies seems to actually be making any money in the first place, yeah, that’s going to work real well.
Sidenote: The comment above may make it sound like the city of Milwaukee is desperate for money. That’s because it is. They’ve managed to so thoroughly screw up the city’s employee pension plan that within a few years pretty much most of the entire city budget is going to have to go to paying off the pension system.
Milwaukee and a lot of other cities wanted to ban the things completely. But there were threats of lawsuits, warnings that the city wouldn’t look ‘environmentally friendly’ if they tried to ban them, etc. So the city caved in and permitted them, but it did ban them from using sidewalks ( a ban which almost everyone ignores, by the way). This meant that e-scooters now had to ride on the streets. Streets which look like this:
Now do I really have to tell you that shoving what is basically a kiddie toy with a motor on it out onto streets that look like this is not a good idea? Streets and roads here in Wisconsin are utterly horrible for the most part. Wisconsin roads and streets cause about $650 damage to the average car driver every year. And now you want to push scooters onto those same streets? Scooters have tiny, tiny wheels, no suspension, not very good brakes, and are unstable to begin with. And now you’re going to dump them onto streets full of cracks, potholes, expansion joints, rocks, mufflers that fell off of cars, etc? Oh, and do I need to mention thousands of car drivers who are already pissed off by, well, everything, I guess judging from the way they drive?
And speaking of safety, according to a study published in the journal of American emergency room doctors, e-scooters have an injury per mile rate that is two hundred times higher than any other vehicle. Two hundred times.
Then let’s talk about money. These scooter companies have literally burned through billions of dollars of venture capital since this nonsense began. They might as well have just taken all of the money, put it in a big pile and burned it because to the best of my knowledge none of them has actually managed to make a profit. Several have gone bankrupt. Others are “right sizing”, pulling out of markets where they haven’t been able to bribe (cough cough, typo there, sorry) convince city officials that they are a “good thing” and should be allowed to operate virtually without regulation. Bird’s stock value was, when it first went public, selling for about $21 a share. The last time I looked back in June, it was hovering down round $0.50 per share. Yeah, half a buck a share, and the stock exchange was threatening to delist them. I hope you didn’t invest your kid’s college fund in the e-scooter business.
And people are still pumping tens of millions of dollars into these companies in the hopes that somehow, some way, they can make a buck off this whole scheme.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against electric vehicles. I love electric vehicles. I have an e-bike that I’ve put 500 miles on in less than 2 months. If Ford ever gets their act together and actually produces the electric version of the F-150 in sufficient quantities that I could actually buy one without being on a two year waiting list, you’d probably see one of those sitting in my garage as well. But these stupid scooters? No thanks.
Being stuck at home, not being able to travel, is getting more than a little frustrating. I’ve found myself going back through my photo archives to try to deal with the frustration of having all our travel plans shut down. Here are a few. Some of these I might have posted before
If you’re like me, you’re ready to scream because of the 24/7 fear, panic and everything else you’re seeing on the news and internet. So here’s some photos to distract you. Well, if my internet connection stays up, that is. It’s been down a half dozen times already today.
Yes, it’s a dead horse. No, not a real one. This was a tourist trap in S.D. that we stopped at that apparently bought up all of the movie props from Dances with Wolves. Although I don’t remember there being a stuffed dead horse in that movie.Skunks in S.D. are very friendly, it seems. This little stinker wasn’t much more than a baby and decided I was his mother and began following me around. He couldn’t understand why I retreated very quickly.Ooo, it’s orange!We found some odd things when we cleaned out the buildings on the farm, including a complete 1940s or 1950s era bowling machine.I had no idea eggplant flowers were so pretty until we grew some one year.I don’t need to tell you these are cats, do I?The big telescope and its little brotherOverlooking the MississippiDorms at my old college.Copper Falls park in north western Wisconsin. Beautiful place. Highly recommended. Somewhere in the Big Horn mountains. I think.
That’s enough for now. I’m pushing my luck with my internet connection here, I think. It went down three times while I was uploading photos.
It’s about 3 AM, I can’t sleep, I’ve been sorting through old photos, so why not post some? I’ve been all over the US on the motorcycle over the last, oh, fifteen years or so, usually with MrsGF but sometimes alone. Here are some of the photos.
Coast of Maine near PortlandManitowoc WisconsinDevil’s TowerThese two are Portland, Maine. I have very few photos of the town itself for some reason. Oh, and those cobblestone streets are utterly horrible on a motorcycle.My backyard.Apostle Islands. Don’t remember which one.I was in Sundance, WY and went outside the motel in the evening, and this little stinker came prancing up to me in the parking lot and started to climb my leg demanding I pay attention to her.The Badlands in South Dakota. I’m fascinated with the place and have stopped there a dozen times or more when I’m in that area. I must have hundreds of photos and none of them really express how astonishing the place really is. Little Bighorn National Monument. The white markers show where the US troops bodies were found. Red granite markers show where the Native Americans remains were found shortly after the battle. I’ve been there three or four times and it is a very somber place. The whole area has a very strange feel to it.
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.
I just realized this is the first time in something like 10 or 11 years that I didn’t go out west. I’ve been in the habit of going out to western South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming for at least a week every year. Sometimes twice a year.
I thought of that this morning when I woke up sneezing, coughing and wheezing from allergies and, possibly, an early season cold. About the only time I’m not sneezing, coughing and wheezing from allergies has been when I’ve been west of the Mississippi. Apparently the combination of common plants here that trigger all this nonsense don’t live out there.
It was funny, really, the first time I was out in the Black Hills. I’d been out there for a few days and woke up one morning and realized something was wrong. Something was missing — the stuffed up head, watery eyes and other symptoms from the allergies were gone. Amazing. And about the time I rolled into western Minnesota on the way back, the symptoms also returned. Sigh…
Silly, isn’t it? With all of the amazing things to see, all of the fun things to do out there, what I remember most fondly is not sneezing for a week…
The eclipse was a bust for us. We were up on Washington Island on Monday and not only was it very cloudy, it didn’t get all that dark, either. MrsGF caught a glimpse of the very end of it but that was it.
The image is dark because it was eclipsing out when I took it.
We were on the island to visit a lavender farm up there, Fragrant Isle. If you want to know more about them here’s a link to their website. Interesting place and it is indeed, well fragrant.
My experiences with growing lavender myself have been disappointing. I’ve tried a couple of times with poor results. Wrong type of soil here, I’m told. Of course I didn’t try very hard because I don’t really like it all that much. I don’t think it’s a very good looking plant, and to be perfectly honest, I hate the smell of the stuff. But everyone is like “Ooooo – Lavender!!” so I just stand in the background and try not to inhale and let them enjoy themselves.
Anyway, I like Washington Island. I don’t get up there as often as I’d like because it’s about a two and a half hour drive from here, plus a ferry ride, so about the only time I can get up there is if I have at least an entire day and can get on the road by 6 AM, or can spend the night up there. It’s an interesting place. It has a permanent year around population of about 750 people or so, it’s own K-12 school system, own power plant. Once upon a time there was a lot of farming and commercial fishing going on up there and it was a fairly thriving little community, but commercial fishing has fallen off to almost nothing, and except for a few speciality things, farming has dwindled to nothing up there as well. They mostly survive on tourism now. While it hasn’t turned into the tourism insanity that’s struck (and pretty much ruined) Door County, that kind of thing has been sneaking in over the years.
One of my favorite spots up there is this little lake. It’s well off the beaten track, hard to find, and as a result no one goes there and it’s still unspoiled. And quite! It’s astonishingly quiet. Absolutely no noise at all. No cars, no ATVs, no jet skis, and because it’s well off the flight paths, not even any planes overhead. It’s probably one of the last really quiet spots left in the state, where you can sit for an hour and hear nothing except the frogs, crickets and birds.
Been playing around with taking panoramic photos once in a while. This is an over view of a marina north of Sturgeon Bay taken from the top of an abandoned quarry across the road.
Anyway, that’s how I spent “Eclipse Day”. No eclipse sighted, but we did have a very pleasant mini vacation.
the background and try not to inhale and let them enjoy themselves.
One of my favorite spots up there is this little lake. It’s well off the beaten track, hard to find, and as a result no one goes there and it’s still unspoiled. And quite! It’s astonishingly quiet. Absolutely no noise at all. No cars, no ATVs, no jet skis, and because it’s well off the flight paths, not even any planes overhead. It’s probably one of the last really quiet spots left in the state, where you can sit for an hour and hear nothing except the frogs, crickets and birds.
grouchyfarmer 