I know, I know… It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Here it is mid September already? Where the heck did the summer go?
It was an incredibly busy summer here. Busy in a good way, though. The gardens were spectacular this year, but everything except the tomatoes and squash are finished up for the season and we’ve been working on cleaning out the beds.
We processed the last of the beets and carrots this past week. We have enough carrots, beets, peppers and beans in the freezer to last us for at least a whole year, I think.
The tomatoes just don’t want to stop, though. The darned things are still producing like crazy and we’ve already put up something like 30 or 40 pints of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, marinara sauce, bloody mary mix, etc. More than enough to last us an entire year. But the darned things are still going.
We just picked these yesterday and by the end of the week we’ll probably have two times this many ready to pick.
We can’t use them any more so whatever we’re getting from now on is going to the local food pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They said they’ll take whatever extra we have.
That’s the celery in there. That bed is 4 ft wide and 8 ft long and it’s almost solid celery plants except for the onions around the outside
We put in a whole bed full of celery more or less as an experiment and even that was wildly successful. And the flavor was amazing. We used a lot of it ourselves in sauces, froze some, and gave the rest away.
One thing I am really going to miss is smelling the sauces simmering away all day. There were days when walking into the house was like walking into an Italian restaurant with the whole place filled with the aroma of basil, thyme, garlic, onions and tomatoes simmering away.
Now that the canning season is finally over things aren’t quite as hectic here.
MrsGF and I both got in to get our flu shots and the new Covid vaccine. Covid is rearing its ugly head once again. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing. Local hospitals and clinics are requiring people to wear masks when coming in their buildings again, etc. It’s getting nasty out there.
This was going to be a dishwasher review. But I’m turning it into a rant instead because I hate this thing so much I can barely bring myself to use it at all.
So here’s what happened. Our 5 year old LG dishwasher took a dump. The pump went out. Cost of a new pump plus labor was going to be around $500. So screw that. I can get a decent new dishwasher for that, I told the service dude. He said I don’t blame you at all. I wouldn’t pay that either.
Let’s get a Bosch, a certain person who shall remain nameless because, well, they’re family and I don’t want to get them mad at me, told me. Excellent machines, they told me. Eldest son and his wife have one. They had to wait almost an entire year to get theirs but it was worth it, they told me. And it’s on sale for only $1000!
$1000? For a dishwasher? Pay me $1,000 and I’ll wash dishes by hand for the next two years.
No, we need to get this, I was told.
So we got it.
I hate it.
No, that is not a strong enough word. I loathe it. The 3rd shelf is utterly useless. The racks are laid out so badly that it’s almost impossible to load the thing up. It’s like the racks were designed specifically to make it as difficult as possible to efficiently put dishes in it. The controls are on the top of the inside of the door. Why? What’s the point in that? To make me have to open the damned door up just to see if I remembered to set the right cycle? And if you open the door for more than about 2 seconds and close it again, guess what? It shuts itself off if you forget to hit the “start” button again.
It doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. Instead you’re supposed to scan one of those stupid codes and it takes you to a video they had to make specifically to show you how to load the damned thing. I’m sorry, you shouldn’t meed an effing video to show you how to load a dish washer. Scanning another code takes you to another video that shows you how to clean the filter.
Ooo, how thrilling!
Supposedly this is the best dishwasher made in its price range according to the New York Times. It isn’t. I suspect money changed hands in order to get that recommendation. It’s not even close.
When MrsGF isn’t around I don’t use it at all. I wash dishes by hand because I hate that bloody thing so much.
So this is what the branch of the Manitowoc river near here looked like last year.
And this is what it looks like now.
Here’s how another stream I cross over regularly on the bike looked like last year.
And here’s the same stream now.
As you can tell we’re no longer under drought conditions here in Wisconsin. Finally. We’ve had enough rain now to pretty much replenish everything and make up for the months long drought we had up through this past winter. Everyone around here, especially the famers, were afraid that the drought was going to continue.
Rainfall has been a bit above average and weather has been relatively cool, but growing conditions have been pretty good.
So, Cat…
I ordered one of those walking harnesses for Cat One because, well, why not, right? You don’t really take cats for walks of course, cats take you for a walk. They go where they want to go and if they don’t want to go where you want, they’ll just sort of lay there and your cat walk turns into a cat drag, I suppose.
But if you’re the patient and willing to follow where the cat wants to go, it can be fun.
Sort of, I guess? Or so they tell me.
I don’t think she’s ever seen grass before.
We got to the bottom of the stairs of the front porch and she smelled something that really got her interested and there we stood for a while as she smelled, and smelled and smelled. And then, of course, started eating grass. Then she went over into the hosta bed and tried eating one of the hostas. Fortunately one nibble was enough and she swore off those for life.
Then a truck came down the street and the next thing I knew I was holding an empty harness. She was just gone. I mean like instantly gone, and instantly, without occupying the intervening space, she was up on the table on the front porch trying to get in the window.
How the hell did she even do that? The harness is one of those ones that has a collar around the neck, and a strap that runs around the chest right behind the front legs, and it hadn’t been loose. It had actually been a bit snug. All the straps and buckles were intact. She was just instantly gone and up on the porch.
Apparently cats can teleport now? Why didn’t someone warn me about this?
Just a nice, simple promotional image, I told them. Farming related, grouchy old man, a farm animal or two, maybe a corn field. And this is what they come up with. Sigh…
Well we got absolutely hammered by the winter storm that rolled through here. Intense, heavy wet snow of up to 14 inches in some areas around here. Plus 60 MPH winds creating blizzard conditions. Even worse the snow clung like glue to power lines, poles and trees, dropping them like kindling all through this part of the state.
The result was wide spread power outages that took out power to 200,000 or more people. Entire counties were were blacked out. The entire Door Peninsula was blacked out. As of 10 AM this morning, there were still something like 60,000 people without power and some could be waiting another 24 – 48 hours before the lights come back on.
Our power went out at 4:23 yesterday morning. I sleep with a fan running in the bedroom to mask household noises that sometimes wake me up, so I woke up when the fan shut down. I wasn’t surprised at all to find the power out when I looked outside and saw the snow flying sideways driven by high winds and sticking to everything like glue.
We’d planned for something like this when we put in the solar power system, so all I had to do was throw a couple of switches on panels in the basement and everything in the house was energized again. By 4:35 I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and the entire house working normally.
It was considerably different in the rest of the town. There wasn’t a single light anywhere in the entire town. It was spooky. It was a really odd feeling to be sitting there comfortably, having coffee, some toast, reading the local weekly newspaper, with the entire surrounding down completely black.
This was the first lengthy blackout we’d experienced since we put the system in and it worked even better than we’d thought. We’d put in enough batteries to keep the house functioning more or less normally for about 24 hours in case of a blackout, and it exceeded our expectations. We still had about 75% battery capacity left when the power finally came back on after about 14 hours.
And just to make sure our backup to our backup, the old Generac gas powered generator and the battery charging system would work properly I tested that too and used it to recharge the batteries back up to 100% and that worked too.
The weather, I mean. I’ve never seen a winter like this before in Wisconsin. December was abnormally warm. January started out warm, then we got hit with this…
Actual real winter!
Now my back yard looks like this…
For weeks now it’s just barely been dipping below freezing at night, and during the day the termperatures have been getting warmer, and warmer, and warmer. For the last few days our high temps have been in the mid-40s. And by the middle of next week it’s supposed to hit the 5os here.
We have flowers starting to come up. The vegetable gardens are going to need to be weeded here pretty soon if this keeps up. The grass is starting to grow.
This is February. In Wisconsin. January and February are our coldest months. We generally get weeks of below zero weather here this time of year.
All of the ski and snowmobile trails are closed and have been closed all season except for that one snowstorm we had. Ice fishing? Forget it. What little ice there is out there on the local lakes is now so rotten they’ve had to resort to using airboats to go out to rescue the few damned fools who’ve tried to venture out on the ice.
The sturgeon spearing season is supposed to start on Lake Winnebago on Feb. 10. Usually there will be about 6,000 ice houses out there and hundreds of trucks and ATVs. This year? If this keeps up it’s entirely possible we won’t have a sturgeon season at all.
Took me over an hour to dig the solar panels out from under about 3 feet of snow. Great fun.
After one of the warmest Decembers on record, the weather has finally taken a more winter like turn. We got about 5 – 8 inches of snow last week Tuesday into Wednesday. Followed by a full scale blizzard a couple of days later. And now this week we’ve had below zero temperatures. I’m not complaining. This is actually pretty normal for us. Which brings me to this little mini-rant…
What really frosts my cookies is how the local news outlets go almost into total panic mode whenever we have more than a couple of inches of snow or the temperatures get close to zero. This is Wisconsin, for heaven’s sake! We deal with this Every. Single. Year. This isn’t Georgia or North Carolina where an inch of snow shuts everything down because they don’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal with it. If you listened to some of the television weather reports here leading up to this relatively minor snowfall you’d think we had a category 5 hurricane bearing down on us. All things considered, this “storm” was pretty much a total bust. It caused some slight delays, we had to fire up the snowblowers and snowplows for the first time for a few hours, and that was about it. I have literally driven motorcycles in weather worse than what we had.
I sometimes wonder what the heck has happened to people. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm? The farm doesn’t shut down for bad weather. Never. The chores still have to be done, the cows still have to be milked and fed, the young stock still has to be cared for, the manure still has to get hauled out, no matter how cold it is, no matter how much snow is on the ground.
Solar Stuff
Speaking of weather, one of the problems with Wisconsin is that from about, oh, November through the end of February we rarely see the sun at all. So if you’re running a solar power system you’re SOL as they say. I don’t think we’ve seen the sun for more than a few hours since mid-November. And after the power flickered and even went out for a couple of minutes during the snow storm I figured I’d better check the state of my battery bank just in case I had to switch over to that. And found that the batteries were down to 48V instead of the 53 or 54 they should have been at. That meant they were down to about 60% capacity. Oops?
Well considering we haven’t had sun in two or three months that shouldn’t have been surprising. I had the batteries in standby mode all that time so they were using a bit of power to keep the BMS operating. I should have just shut them down completely but I’d neglected to do that. I don’t have provisions for charging them from the grid at the moment, so that meant I had to drag out the big old Generac and fire that beast up. It’s out there right now dumping about 30A at 240V into the charger that’s topping up the batteries. And yes, I know it’s too close to the house but I got CO detectors all over the place and it’s only for a few hours so stop clutching your pearls and wringing your hands.
That’s the problem with solar power. In ideal conditions, on paper, it’s fantastic. In the real world there are some serious issues. Like what do you do when there’s no sun?
Fly Me To The Moon
Or maybe not? NASA finally admitted that it’s goal of getting humans back on the moon anytime soon was not going to work. The date for an actual manned landing looks like it’s being pushed back to at least 2026. And I’ll be utterly astonished if they manage to do it even then. It’s proposed schedule was always completely ridiculous.
They’ve done exactly one test flight of their outrageously over priced rocket and it seems to work. But everything else they need? They don’t have any of the other bits and pieces they need to make it work. None. Zero.
They don’t have a lunar lander. They don’t have lunar rated spacesuits. They don’t have anything they need except the launch vehicle. Space X’s starship is an essential part of the planned mission, and Space X hasn’t even managed to get one into orbit yet much less prove the vehicle will do everything it’s supposed to do, including robotic in-orbit refueling of other spacecraft.
Plus no one has yet explained to me exactly why we need to land people on the moon in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’d dearly love to see us putting people on the moon again. But ultimately what are they going to do there? Science? The Mars rovers have proven over and over again that we don’t need to put people at risk just to get scientific data. Putting some kind of colony on the moon? That’s a complete pipe dream. For God’s sake, why?
Exploiting the moon’s resources? What resources? As far as I know there isn’t anything, not one single thing on the moon that we need badly enough to go to the expense and risk of putting people up there. Nothing. Zilch.
Other Stuff
I’ve got two or three things on the bench I want to talk about in the near future. There’s an SDR sitting there in the box waiting to be played with. There’s a cheap video microscope that I just got that needs to be put together and fiddled with. I just got a new set of electronics tools from IFixit that I want to talk about too.
grouchyfarmer 