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.
I suddenly realized this morning that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much going on. Now that the fall cleanup is all done, the gardening season is wrapped up and all that, the solar system is more or less working, etc. I haven’t had much to really talk about. And now I do. So here we are.
Let’s get this vexed business out of the way. (Vexed means mildly pissed off, by the way.)
Doesn’t this look like fun?
Here’s the deal. I have my old gaming computer sitting on the workbench right now. After it went Pffft a couple of years ago I replaced it with an MSI gaming laptop, shoved the old one in a corner, telling myself I’d get around to looking at it “real soon now”, and it’s been there ever since until I started cleaning out my radio shack/mad scientist’s lab/workshop the other day. This thing wasn’t cheap. There’s a pretty hefty Core i7 processor in there, a decent Nvidia Geforce graphics card and 32G of high speed RAM. Even by today’s standards it would be a pretty decent computer so it would pay to spend some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It would make an excellent auxiliary computer to run the laser engraver, 3D printer and amateur radio equipment and the like.
What happened was that we were in the middle of a late fall thunderstorm. A nasty one. In the space of about 5 minutes we had multiple momentary power failures and brownouts, and the computer just stopped working. So I have no idea of what’s all wrong with it and I can’t diagnose what’s wrong because the power supply doesn’t actually supply power any more. I suspect the power supply may indeed be the only thing wrong with it. So the first thing to do is get a working PS for it.
And, of course, I don’t have one on the shelf. Need a power supply for a TRS-80 Model II? I got one. Need a power supply for a Ti 99/4A? I got one. But not for this thing. And they want something like $150 for one, and I’m not willing to drop $150 on a PS for a computer that might not work anyway.
So I decided to take a stab at fixing the thing’s power supply.
Power supplies are not complicated beasties, all things considered. I used to repair power supplies for laser scanners, cash registers, and misc. equipment all the time back in the bad old days when I was a technician for a POS company. (No, not POS as piece of s**t, POS as in point of sale equipment)
So I yanked the sucker out. It was indeed dead as the proverbial doornail. So popped off the screws and took off the cover and…
What? Seriously? The damned thing is glued together?
Yeah, they glued everything. Great bloody gobs of rock hard glue or epoxy deliberately gluing the components together to make it damn near impossible to repair. Take a look at this:
That big coil is glued to the capacitors, which in turn are glued to each other. The other coil there is glued to two more capacitors. in the left center you can see another glob of glue where another component was glued to something else. I couldn’t even get the fan connector disconnected until I spent five minutes with an Exacto knife, a small screw driver and a pliers chipping away at the muck to free the connector.
Why would they do this? Someone suggested that they did it to prevent parts from coming loose in shipping. That’s nonsense. This thing is built like an efwording tank, for heaven’s sake. I could drop it off the roof of the house and the only damage would be a slight dent in the heavy steel case it’s in. Gluing down the connectors, maybe that would prevent the connectors from coming loose. But why in the world would you glue capacitors to coils? Or transistors to inductors? The only reason I can think of is to deliberately make the thing virtually impossible to repair so you have to buy a new one.
Now I could go off on a rant about planned obsolescence and manufacturers deliberately making equipment impossible to repair to force you to keep buying new instead of just fixing a broken item, but I will refrain from that. At least for now. Perhaps at some future date when I feel in the mood for a good rant I’ll delve into that.
So what did I do? Ordered a new power supply, of course. It’s the only way I can fully test the stupid thing, and if it does still work, which I suspect it does, I’ll need one anyway.
Growing Lettuce. In December.
So we have this sort of small, portable green house thingie that we use in the early spring for starting seeds before the weather is nice enough to plant stuff outside. Last spring we upgraded a bit, adding a heating pad and grow lights so we could keep it in the basement instead of having to move all the furniture around in the living room to make space for it in front of the windows. That worked out quite well, by the way.
So MrsGF and I got to thinking, we have this green house, we have grow lights, we have that heater, and we have lettuce seed left over, so why not try growing lettuce down in the basement?
So we did. And well, damn, it seems to be working. Within just a few days of setting it all up and planting some lettuce seed in a few pots with some potting mix, dozens and dozens of little lettuce plants popped up.
Hopefully in another week or two they’ll be big enough that we can have some fresh lettuce.
And A New Radio Receiver
On the electronics front I just got this little beastie in a couple of weeks ago, a Mlahit software defined radio receiver. SDRs have been around for years now but I’ve never had one before because I frankly wasn’t all that interested in them. I have enough old fashioned analog radios or hybrid radios to play with to want to dabble with these things as well. But I’ve been curious about these things for a long time so I saw this one and it looked reasonably good and the price was fairly cheap so I bought one on impulse. I haven’t had time to do more than play with it a bit. sometime in the next week I’ll have time to take a closer look at it and I’ll talk more about it then.
Solar Update
The solar power project has been … Interesting? Oh, nothing has gone wrong with the equipment. It’s still working exactly as it is supposed to. What’s interesting is that our electric bill has been literally cut in half ever since we put the system in, even though we haven’t used it that much. It’s been so cloudy here the last few weeks that we haven’t even been able to use it at all for several weeks now. So I haven’t even had the system switched on except for a few days in November.
But our electric bill was still half what it was last year. So what the hell is going on?
When we decided to put the system in we took a close look at how we use electricity here and made some very minor changes. We went through the house and replaced the few remaining incandescent and fluorescent lights with LED lights. We put all of the electronics in the house on power strips. You may not know it but almost all of your electronic equipment like your TV, radio, etc. never actually turn off. The displays may go dark, but they’re still drawing power. We bought a combination countertop convection oven/air fryer that works so well we almost never use the oven in the conventional stove any longer. We’ve become better at turning off equipment and lights when they aren’t really needed. All little things like that which haven’t altered our lifestyle but which, when you add them all up, have made a huge difference in the amount of electricity we use.
So oddly enough the solar power system has, in a way, been successful even when we aren’t using it because it caused us to reevaluate how we use energy in the house and make relatively insignificant changes that have cut our energy usage dramatically. Last year in November our electric bill was $310. This year it’s $157.
So even though we haven’t been able to switch the house over to solar on a regular basis, it is still, indirectly at least, responsible for cutting our utility bill in half. Weird out things work out sometimes.
Postscript
Just before I was going to publish this the new power supply for the computer arrived and… Yeah, it’s still dead as a doornail. I’m afraid the MB is cooked. I’m not even sure if I can salvage any of the parts out of the thing. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort to dig into it further. Right now it looks like that right before the original power supply failed it dumped a huge power surge into the computer’s motherboard and other equipment connected to the PS. Oh, well…
Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters the gardening season has pretty much been wrapped up. All the gardens have been cleaned up, we’ve done some minor maintenance work around the outside. The last crop of the season, the brussels sprouts, have been harvested. The chest freezer is full right up to the top with tomatoes, squash, green and wax beans, beats, carrots, a variety of peppers, etc. MrsGF blanched and froze the sprouts yesterday. The shelves down in the basement are full of jars of tomato sauces of various types along with pickled beans and pickled beets.
We probably have enough vegetables canned or frozen to last us through the whole winter without having to buy anything from the grocery store, which not only helps the budget but gives one an enormous feeling of satisfaction.
There were no real surprises out in the gardens this year. Some things did better than we thought, some did worse.
It was a rough year overall for gardening because of the drought. We had to resort to watering the vegetable gardens just about every single day. We have 2, 30 gallon barrels and a 50 gallon barrel connected to diverters on the rain gutter system on the house and garage so we normally have rain water to carry us through a short dry spell. But this year the barrels were empty for most of the summer. I’m actually surprised that we didn’t lose a lot of plants this year because of the heat and drought.
The biggest disappointment was the tomatoes. They were a yellow variety called something like Amish Yellow Slicers or something like that. They tasted very good indeed but production was woeful. Small fruits, extremely tough skins, and around the end of August the fruit stopped growing, and even stopped ripening entirely even though the plants themselves looked healthy.
Carrots were another disappointment. We tried something different, carrot seeds that had been “pelletized” so to speak. Carrot seeds are extremely tiny. It’s impossible to just plant a single seed without resorting to using a tweezers and a magnifying glass. So usually there’s an enormous amount of waste because clumps of carrots have to be thinned out. With this pelletized stuff each seed in encapsulated in some kind of biodegradable stuff, about the size of a small pea. And it would have been a nice idea. If it had worked. It didn’t. Almost none of the pelletized seeds came up.
Onions were good flavor but smaller than normal. We expected that though because of the harsh conditions over the summer.
Every year we like to try growing something new that we’ve never tried before. This year it was the brussel sprouts in the lead photo. They are one very strange looking plant. They developed a massive stalk as big around almost as my arm, and about 4 feet tall. And the sprouts themselves just sort of pop out of nowhere wherever a leaf stem attaches to the stalk.
The research MrsGF did on them before we planted them was that it was best to wait until after the first frost to harvest them, so that’s what we did.
Certainly they tasted good, much, much better than the commercial ones we’ve been buying frozen. The commercial ones sometimes have a rather bitter, even nasty flavor, to be honest. These though were amazing. No bitterness at all, very mild flavor.
Still I’m not sure they’re worth growing. We like them but we don’t like them that much, if you know what I mean. And since they’re basically a mutant cabbage of some sort, they are subject to the same problems cabbage has, including some nasty insects you have to watch out for.
Electric/Solar Stuff
On the solar power front… Ah, well, this is Wisconsin, isn’t it? That means we get days, even weeks where we may never actually see the sun. We’ve been going through one of those periods of cloudy weather and it is very irritating. I think we’ve had clear skies perhaps one day out of the last fourteen. Grrr…
I really, really need more solar panels. But with the roof scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two it doesn’t make sense to put 20 solar panels on the roof only to have to take the down just one year later to replace the roof and then have to mount them all again. So the lack of PV means I can’t switch the house off grid as often as I’d like as well. Oh, well. I knew that before I went into this and we decided to do it anyway so all we can do is live with it until we get the roof done and can then permanently mount enough solar up on the roof to adequately feed the system. Until then we’re limited.
Otherwise the solar system has been working just fine when we’ve been able to use it. Haven’t had any issues with it at all. Plus it’s reassuring that we don’t have to panic about keeping the sump pumps, furnace, freezer and fridge running during a power failure. Even without solar, as long as the batteries are full we have enough stored power we have enough power to keep the house running for a long time without having to resort to trying to start the Generac backup generator. Trying to start that thing in cold weather is royal pain in the neck.
And let’s throw in a Christmas cactus just for the heck of it.
MrsGF’s Christmas cactus always blooms right around Thanksgiving, and it’s right on schedule this year. I noticed the other day that it was just starting to form flower buds. In a week or so it’s going to be covered with flowers.
Antenna
The HGR-QRO PreciseRF antenna continues to work amazingly well. I’ve always liked magloop antennas. They have serious drawbacks, are fiddly to get tuned, etc but damn they work well when everything is set up right. Especially for their size. I already had a MLA that I used for portable operations that I liked very much, it couldn’t handle more than a few watts of transmitter power.
The most impressive thing about this antenna is the low background noise level. I’m still amazed at the huge difference in the background noise levels when comparing it to my OCFD antenna. Ever since I got my license ten years ago I’ve had background noise levels running S5 – S8 or even higher on the average day. It might dip as low as S3, rarely, but generally it’s been a pain in the neck. But with this antenna the noise level is essentially zero, while actual radio signals being received are as strong or stronger than they are with the dipole. And it works at least as well on transmit as my OCFD antenna.
Rant Time.
grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters.
The staff here at grouchyfarmer.com love a good rant more than anything else… Well, okay, so that’s not really true, I guess. They like pizza. Put out free pizza in the employee lounge and it’ll be gone in like five seconds. It’s like as swarm of locusts from some biblical plague on pizza day. And Joann has chickens. She has like twelve of the damned things running around here now and we’re thinking of staging an “intervention”. And maybe a fried chicken day. And our IT guy, Jeff, is the president of the local Black Pink fan club. We try not to talk about that. But generally speaking they do enjoy venting their spleens about whatever it is that’s sticking in their craw, so to keep ’em happy let’s get on with this.
EV Push Back
Certain persons (you know who you are) seem hell bent on to strangle this trend towards electrification any way they can. The problem they’ve been having is that by and large electrification makes a hell of a lot of sense even if you don’t take into consideration the whole climate change thing. There are some legitimate issues with EVs, but those are being dealt with. So they’re starting to just make crap up now.
I think it’s too late to stop it, though. While the doom and gloom crowd is doing its best to shut things down, everyone else is just quietly getting on with things because EVs just make sense. The claim that you can’t electrify heavy trucks? Guess what, it’s already been done. Volvo has been quietly producing electric trucks since 2019 and is currently ramping up production. Makers of farm equipment and earth moving machinery are moving in that direction. JCB, New Holland, CIH, Bobcat, and dozens of others that make equipment ranging from small to gigantic are moving towards electrifying just about everything.
And there are very good reasons why. Maintenance is much easier, for one thing. And a hell of a lot cheaper. No more engine oil changing, no more engine oil filter changing. Ever. No expensive exhaust systems and catalytic converters to mess with. If you’re a major freight carrier with thousands of trucks on the road like Schneider, the potential savings on oil changes alone would be astronomical.
I have to close this off with a sad note. We lost our beloved cat Meg yesterday after a short illness.
Thank you Meg for being a loving companion for almost 17 years. We miss you.
So people have been wondering what’s going on with the solar power system. We’ve been keeping track of our energy usage, of course, so we just got the bill for August and here’s the results.
Last year it was pretty hot and we used the AC a lot so our electric usage in August last year was 1,971 kWh.
This August, which was even hotter, our electric usage was 1,074 kWh.
So we cut our electric usage almost in half, during a month that was even hotter than 2022 was. And that’s only running the system part time. I’m pretty darn pleased with that.
grouchyfarmer 