Category: weather

It’s Iris Time! Plus Assorted Stuff!

Yes, it’s iris time again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you must know by now that I absolutely love irises. We have a whole garden devoted almost excolusively to irises. And they’re just coming into full flower now. Here are a few photos from earlier today.

And for no reason at all, here’s a silly cat image I stole borrowed from Pete over at https://beetleypete.com/ If you enjoy posts from a retired English gentleman who occasionally puts up very silly images, posts some delightful fiction and chats about life in general in the small town of Beetley, in Norfolk, go check it out. He is a lovely, gentle soul, with a wry sense of humor.

Other stuff:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on this…

It is, heaven help me, a cat riding a T-Rex through the deserts of Utah. Thats going to be engraved on a 37cm X 25cm panel inlaid into a gift box MrsGF is making. Sometimes the stuff I come up with when I sit down with Photoshop makes me wonder what’s wrong with my brain. But never mind.

BTW: If any of you out there would be interested in that image up there let me know and I could make it available for downloading here. I think. Maybe. It would be as a standard .PNG file that would be suitable for importing into a laser engraver. If you’re interested let me know at theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com. I never really intended to set this up to download files but if people are interested in stuff like this I’d probably set up a separate page here with just a listing of downloadable files for laser cutting/engraving.

If you have comments or questions you can reach me at that email address as well.

Weather

The weather has been, well, odd, to say the least. Over in Two Rivers about 20 or s0 miles from here where friends of ours live, they had an intense and highly localized storm that leveled half the trees in the city the other day. Parts of the town were without power for three days. They estimate they had straight line winds up to 80 mph. Meanwhile just a few miles away they got nothing but some rain.

Temperatures have been highly erratic here. One day we have a high in the 50s, the next it can be well over 80. Yesterday it hit 92 here. Now it’s getting cooler and we might struggle to hit 65 by the end of the week. They were predicting thunderstorms last night but those fizzled out before they even really got started. We got about a tenth of inch of rain and that was it.

It’s very, very dry out there. We’re going to have to start watering the gardens already tomorrow.

Weather patterns are changing drastically all around the world. I have friends and family scattered around the globe and what I hear from them is often downright frightening. In India where my niece’s husband’s family is from, this May has been one of the warmest on record with temperatures pushing 113F in Delhi. One of my best friends lives in Barcelona half the year and they’re seeing temperatures pushing up to 100F or beyond. Even in the UK temperatures have been pushing up into the 90s.

Farming

With a name like grouchyfarmer I suppose I should talk about the ag industry at least briefly. Even though I’ve wandered far away from farming long ago and have dabbled in everything from writing to electronics to arts and crafts, I’m still a farmer at heart and what I see going on out there in the ag world is heartbreaking. Especially since all of the problems farmers are having right now are due entirely to decisions being made by power mad, greedy politicians who only care about enriching themselves and clinging desperately to their little bits of power and influence.

Farm bankruptcy rates are up by 50% or more in the last year, and look like they’re going to get even worse as time goes on.

Diesel, the fuel farmers use in their equipment, has gone up more than 60%, from about $3.47 to $5.60. Even as high as $7.50 in some places like California.

Fertilizer prices have spiked up 61% as well, and exactly at the wrong time when planting season is here and young plants need to be fertilized to get strong growth.

Meanwhile prices farmers get for two of their primary crops, corn and soybeans, have plummeted to the point where it looks like most farmers around here aren’t even going to be able to break even.

Dairy farmers are doing a bit better, but they have problems too. I know some farmers around here who are working 18 hour days because all of their hired help basically packed up and fled, even if they were in the country legally. Word is out that if you’re Hispanic, even if you’re in the country legally, you’re going to be swept up, detained for weeks if not months, and probably end up deported even if you have a green card. We used to have a fairly large number of Hispanic families here in town. Wonderful people who were hard working, honest, friendly and becoming part of the community. They’re all gone. All of them.

It’s going to be a hard year for farmers around here. A very hard year. And the tragic part of it is that this is 100% the fault of that bunch of sniveling, greedy, power mad politicians in DC. And I mean both political parties are at fault here. Democrats and Republicans both are more concerned with maintaining their little bits of power, trying to suck up ever more money from corporations and oligarchs through this system of legalized bribery we call a campaign financing system, that they’ve entire forgotten that they are supposed to be the representatives of the people in their home districts.

Okay, rant over. I swore I was not going to get political here in this blog and for the most part I’ve kept that promise. But when I see the sheer crap that is going on in Washington and here in Madison in the state legislature… Never mind. Enough.

Astronomy

It’s been so long since I talked about it here that you’ve probably forgotten that I’m also an amateur astronomer. That’s one of my telescopes down there, my 11″ Celestron.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I just have too many interests and hobbies and I’ve started to do a bit of triage. I’ve pushed aside some things like tinkering with electronics and a few other things to have more time to devote to the things I enjoy the most. So I’m able to spend more time with photography, art, the whole engraving thing and yes, astronomy.

My interests have changed a bit over the years. I’ve become more interested in astrophotography than in direct visual observation, especially photography of deep sky objects. The Celestron is a fantastic telescope but there are “issues”. It’s size and weight are one. That sucker is big and it is heavy. The optical tube assembly weighs in at around 60+ pounds and I’m not exactly a spring chicken any more. Trying to maneuver that thing up and down the stairs, getting it set up on its mount, etc, well I’m just not physically capable of wrestling with that thing without risking dropping $5,000 telescop down the back stairs. So it’s gone to live with my eldest son who is planning on using it as the core for a fixed observatory set up in his back garden with a small building with a roll off roof, concrete pier, power, internet, etc.

Meanwhile I have a new telescope on order that should be here by June 7, they tell me.

And as you can see, it is something entirely different from the Celestron. It doesn’t even look like a telescope to be honest. For one thing it is exclusively an astrograph telescope, it does photography only. It doesn’t permit visual observation at all. In fact I don’t even have to be near it to operate it. It is controlled by a tablet computer or app on a cell phone via WiFi or bluetooth so I no longer have to endure the clouds of mosquitoes that we get around here. Just set it up after dark, turn it on, and then sit in my nice, air conditioned house controlling it entirely by computer from the kitchen table. Or if I take it out to my sister in law’s farm to get away from the light pollution, from inside of my car.

I admit that I’m taking a bit of a chance here. I find it hard to believe that a scope this small and this cheap can get the results I see in the reviews of this thing. Supposedly this thing can get good images of even difficult deep sky objects like the Horse Head nebula in just a few minutes, even in relatively poor conditions. And it’s only about $600 compared to around $5,000 for something like my Celestron. It sounds too good to be true.

After I’ve had a chance to get it set up and have figured out how to use it, I’ll talk about it more.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Time for me to get out of here!

Updates & The Ever Popular Stuff

Okay, let’s get caught up with some stuff. Like…

Solar Update

The new solar panels are doing better than they have any right to, really. At least when the sun is shining, which hasn’t been often, alas. We’ve had lots and lots of clouds ever since the guys put them up back at the end of April. In case you missed the details, I now have 10, 420W bifacial panels up on the roof of the garage to replace the 2KW of cheap, 220W “Amazon Special” junkers that were leaning up against the back side of the garage.

These suckers start producing significant amounts of power as early as 8 AM if the sun is out. And even if it’s cloudy I’ve seen them producing as much as 1KW of power. If the weather would cooperate we’d be able to take the house almost completely 0ff-grid indefinitely, running off the battery bank at night and producing more than enough solar power in full sun to recharge the batteries and run the house.

This is a good thing because We Energies, our utility, has gotten totally out of control. We’ve had 6 rate increases since 2020, and there’s no end in sight. I just got notification in the mail today that now we’re looking at a 16% rate increase over the next two years. And I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and several other companies are building mega sized data centers here in Wisconsin and our current electrical infrastructure simply cannot handle the new loads. Not even close. The company is buiding two entirely new generating facilities just to handle the increased load, and even with that they aren’t going to have enough capacity and are going to have to buy power from other utilities to try to make up the difference. It’s going to require also a massive expenditure for upgrading the transmission lines, new sub stations, etc. The company claims that the data centers are going to be paying for that but us consumers don’t believe that for a minute. We’ve been misled and lied to far too often to believe anything these utility companies tell us any more.

Laser Update:

I have an upgrade for the Lumos laser from Wecreat on order.

If you’re interested in my original “kinda review” of the Lumos you can find it here.

They just came out with a drop in replacement laser head for this thing that upgrades the diode laser to 15W and replaces the 3w infrared laser with a 20W fiber laser that’s capable of doing 3D embossing of metal. It’s ridiculously simple to replace the head. Just remove a single bolt and the whole laser head lifts right out of the base. Drop the new one in and bolt it down, then download a new version of their software and it’s good to go.

Or so “Pamela” at Wecreat tells me. It turns my standard Lumos into a Lumos Flex for less than half the cost of what buying the new Flex would cost me. It’s going to be probably 3 weeks before it gets here. It is, they tell me, being made right now. Once it gets here and I’ve had a chance to try it out I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cats and Laundry

This is an older photo and I don’t recall if I’ve posted it or not before. Doesn’t matter. Even if I did it’s worth running it again. Damn you should have heard her purring! She was so happy the whole bed was quivering.

Ooo! Warm laundry right out of the clothes dryer!

Weather

The weather here in NE Wisconsin has been exceedingly irritating. It’s the second week in May and we’re still getting temperatures down in the mid-20s at night. The other morning I got up and the grass was solid white with frost. I’m surprised that anything at all is growing out there.

The little greenhouse we have set up in the basement where we start our seeds is overflowing with plants, but we don’t dare put anything outside yet because if we do there’s a good chance a frost will hit and we’ll lose all of them.

We’ve gotten some rhubarb. That’s at least been doing pretty well. And the chives, of course. But chives are like weeds once they get established. I don’t know what variety we have out there but it is incredibly hardy. We’ve had them thriving out there in a corner that faces the SW and we’ve had fresh chives coming up while there’s still snow on the ground.

Stuff

I’m still making those silly coasters when the mood strikes me. Making these things is almost addictive.

When I first started this a few years ago I tried to make them all related to brewing, pubs, taverns, beer, etc. But that got old fast. Mostly because there really aren’t that many beer/drinking/brewing related jokes out there that will fit on a space as small as a coaster. And a lot of the ones that are floating around aren’t really all that funny, IMO.

So I started to slip in more snark and sarcasm and just plain silliness and no one seems to have minded so I’ve continued down that path, slipping in a more brewing appropriate joke as I’ve thought one up or found one I could steal.

Damn that’s a horrible photo. What the hell happened to the auto focus on this stupid phone?

And then there’s this over there on the right. I had no idea that Zippo lighters were even still a thing, but apparently they are quite popular and allegedly “collectable” with certain persons.

Not hard to do. With the IR laser in the Lumos it takes about 15 minutes per side, half an hour or so per lighter, to do the engraving. It does a pretty good job of doing a nice, relatively deep engraving that isn’t going to wear off rubbing against someone’s car keys in a pocket or whatever.

I was surprised at the cost of these things, about $18 each. I don’t think they’re worth it, personally. I suppose what you’re actually paying for is the brand name, not really the product itself.

Custom engraved lighters pop up on places like Etsy. A genuine Zippo, engraved, runs anywhere from $35 to as much as $70.

One thing I might try is something like this over there on the left.

Yes, that is actual real color on a piece of stainless steel. That is not inked or painted or stained or anything like that. The Lumos can indeed do color engraving of stainless steel using just the laser alone. Something to do with frequencies and diffraction patterns or something? Maybe?

I’ve only experimented with this a few times because it is a pain in the neck to get everything set up right. And the type of steel seems to have a great deal to do with how well it works. I’ve gotten decent results using these stainless steel cards. But I tried doing the same thing on these bare metal “Altoids” candy boxes I get cheap off Amazon and make into holiday/birthday gift card boxes, and the results have not been encouraging there.

What it boils down to is that to do color on one of these lighters would require experimenting and burning test patterns into one or more actual lighters to figure out what settings I’d need to get the colors I want. I’m reluctant to burn through two or three or more $18 lighters just to experiment.

The Blizzard of 2026: Storm Update. Video from my front porch

Well it’s been an interesting couple of days. The storm started yesterday around noon. It’s about 10 AM Monday right now. The blizzard warning has been extended to 4 PM today. There was a few moments of a lull in the wind so I went out on the front porch with the Gopro and took this:

So that’s what it looked like a few minutes ago. And that was during a lull in the wind. The winds just kicked back up to about 30 mph+ so I came back in fast. There are times when it’s so bad I can’t even see the house across the street.

Every city, town and county around here, including ours, has declared a state of emergency and I think the governor put the whole state under a state of emergency. All secondary roads throughout this county and most of the others around us are closed. They’re telling people do not drive. Don’t even think about driving. If you do try driving and get stuck, you’re on your own. Not even tow trucks are being allowed out on the roads.

Everything, and I mean everything is closed. Outside of town visibility is literally zero and I’ve been hearing reports called in from people living out in the country of 6 – 8 foot high drifts across the roads in some areas.

Snowpocalypse!!!

If the weather reports are to be believed we’re going to get hit hard from Sunday afternoon through Monday morning. It looks like the worse of this storm is going to hit us directly with a combination of freezing rain and heavy snow, with the possibility of up to 24 inches of snow total.

All the towns around here have already declared states of emergency and put on street parking bans into effect, businesses are already announcing closures, etc.

The thing is, though, I’m not sure any longer if I can believe anything the weather reports tell us. They’ve completely blown just about every forecast for significant weather events here for the entire winter. Predicted “massive snow storms” have turned into an hour or so of a rather gentle rain or a light dusting of snow.

Anyway, we’ll see. Come Monday if you see a selfie pop up here of an old, overweight, white haired bearded guy standing up to his eyebrows in a snowdrift, you’ll know the weather service finally got something right.

We’re about as ready for it as we can be here. The snowblower is gassed up and ready to go. The batteries for the solar power system are fully charged and those can carry the house for about 24 hours if the power goes out, and if that’s not enough, we have the old Generac generator and extra gasoline to recharge the batteries if we need to.

If we do get hammered, I am not optimistic about what’s going to happen to our power. Just some 50 mph wind gusts down in the Milwaukee area yesterday or the day before knocked out power to over 20,000 people. The last time we had a significant late season snowstorm it knocked out power to almost the entire northern third of the state for days in some areas. Sherwood, a small town about three miles from here, didn’t have power for 3 or 4 days, for heaven’s sake.

Catching Up. Bored… So bored… Records. And Solar Update

Wow, has it been that long since I posted anything? Sheesh… Well the fact of the matter is that there really hasn’t been much to talk about until now. Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters we’ve been… bored… so bored…

That started to change though beginning with this nonsense just below.

Yeah, snow. I know, I know, this is Wisconsin and snow is something we just live with. Or, rather we did. Snow has been a scarce commodity around here until just this past week. Winter resorts are literally going bankrupt because we pretty much haven’t had a real winter until this past week.

But then in the middle of February, now first we get hit. We got close to a foot and a half of snow in just about a week, and then the cold hit, with wind chill temperatures down around -35F and still air temperatures of around -10.

The local St. Vincent dePaul society where MrsGF and I both volunteer has been keeping me busy, though. Our primary fund raising method is a thrift store that the organization operates. We get donations of gently used clothing, furniture, appliances, cookware, etc. which we, in turn, sort, clean, and turn around and sell to the general public in the store. So they put me to work sorting, grading, cleaning and pricing a variety of stuff, including books, video games and vinyl records.

We don’t get a huge amount of vinyl records in. I suspect that most of them come from someone cleaning out Grandmother’s house after she moved into an assisted living center or has passed away, and they don’t know what to do with the stuff. We don’t mind.

You’d think it would be dull work but it’s actually quite interesting, especially the records. I’m not a collector or music fanatic or anything like that, but I do appreciate good music and I have a small collection of vinyl records and an excellent turntable. So I do like my music. My tastes wander all over the place from stuff ragtime, jazz and dance music from the 1920s and 30s, up to more modern stuff. I’m a creature of my generation, though, so my preferences run towards pop/rock music from the 60s and 70s.

My job is to sort through all of this stuff, check the condition of each record to make sure it’s playable. A lot of them aren’t. I’d say about 20% of them or more are so badly scratched or otherwise damaged that they go straight into the bin.

If they do look playable, they get run through that yellow thing over there on the right. If you dabble in used vinyl records at all you need one of these, or at least something like it. That’s a record washer. It’s filled with filtered water to which a record cleaning solution has been added. The record slides down into the tank just keeping the label out of the solution. It’s then clamped between two microfiber pads soaked with the solution and rotated around a few times. Dry it with a microfiber cloth or let it stand on a rack to air dry. It removes not just the dust and all that, it removes finger prints, dirt embedded in the grooves, etc. I’ve taken records that were unplayable and after running them through that thing they’ve come out sounding almost as if they were brand new.

Then I play them. Well, not all of them. I mean some of those records are the stuff of nightmares, depending on your musical tastes. But enough to determine if the record is in good enough condition to sell.

Then there’s pricing. We’re a thrift store, not an antique shop. We have a limited amount of storage and retail space, so we need to move product through the store as fast as possible. Plus we aren’t out to try to make a killing on some “rare” collectable. The rule of thumb we follow is that we take the average price an item sells for on the used market, and we charge 1/3 of that price. So if a record’s average selling price is, oh, $10 on eBay or one of the other pricing sources we use, we mark it at $3.

Not that I really need to worry about anything like that. The most expensive vinyl record I ran into so far was a rare special edition jazz recording from the early 1960s put out by, of all things, a high end paper manufacturer. The B side was pleasant, generic, 1960s style smooth jazz. The A side was something entirely different. Each track started out with a recording of a different printing press in operation, and then the musicians would come in, matching the tempo and tone of the printing press’s mechanical noises, blending into a smooth melody and eventually the mechanical noises would fade into the background leaving only the music. It was unique and actually worked surprisingly well. The album jacket was designed for a 2 disc set, but the second pocket wasn’t for another disc, it was for paper samples from the paper company. Alas, those were not in with the recording itself. I had a devil of a time finding any information at all about it. For a moment there I thought we might have something that might justify going to the trouble of putting it up for auction, but eventually I tracked it down and found that the last recorded sale of it was for only about $35.

The other day the manager of the store presented me with a whole stack of video game manuals. No games, just the manuals. I didn’t think they were worth anything. I was wrong, she told me. There apparently is a thriving market for just the game manuals. Oddly enough, sometimes the manuals alone sell for more than the actual game disc sells for.

And books… So many books… Modern mass market paperbacks and even hard covers just get shoved on the shelf for a set price. But we get a lot of very old, antique books as well. You’d think that a 120 year old book would be worth something, but most likely it isn’t. So many authors and titles that I’d never heard of before, and for good reason. Either our ancestors were very easily pleased, or publishers were putting out just as much pure crap as they are today.

Occasionally I’ll run across a gem, like a first edition of a popular author like Agatha Christie or something like that. But even those aren’t worth that much no matter what you might see on Antiques Road Show.

Solar stuff… You’re going to be hearing more about this later once the weather gets better. A big ass truck showed up at my front door yesterday and dropped this off:

Solar panels. Lots and lots of solar panels. Damn, those suckers were heavy. That pallet there weighs around 700 lbs. Fortunately the driver very graciously helped me wrestle it up the driveway and into the garage. Even better, all of the were intact with no shipping damage!

This spring or early summer the entire solar system is going to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Those are 430W bifacial panels that I got for a ridiculously cheap price, $109 each from Signature Solar. I don’t really care about the bifacial part, it was that price that got my attention. Even MrsGF told me I was nuts if I didn’t grab a bunch of them for that.

The south facing roof of the garage is going to get covered with those, the existing 2.2 KW of existing panels are going to continue living on the backside of the garage, and when all is said and done I should have about 6 or more KW of solar panels out there, which ought to really piss off the utility company because I should have enough power coming in now to be able to shut off the main breaker and run the house entirely on solar.

Since all of the existing PV wiring is going to have to be pulled out anyway, we’re going to scrap all of the existing wiring and re-do all of it. it’s going to be a pain in the neck but if we’re to meet building codes it has to be done. We’re going to need larger PV wiring, larger circuit breakers and fuses, run new conduit, etc. anyway so we might as well re-work everything, re-route the conduit into more convenient locations, etc.

Catching Up: Gardens, Flowers and a Norton. Wait, Did He Say Norton?

Weather around here has been odd, to say the least. We went from the dryest summer we had in decades with a full blown drought, to a dry, winter that was one of the warmest on record, to a cool, rainy spring and moved now into a muggy, rainy summer. The rivers around here that were literally bone dry last summer are full to overflowing and the ground is so saturated that even a light shower results in flash flood warnings being issued.

Crops out in the farm fields around here look, well, they’re horrible. There’s no other way to put it. Except for a few fields which are on high ground and well drained just about everything is stunted and looking pretty sad because of the almost non-stop rain we’ve been getting.

Still, here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters, the gardens are doing pretty much fantastic. The raspberries are in full swing right now. We don’t have a lot of them but the ones we do have are doing the best I’ve ever seen them. Big, lush, juicy fruits with intense flavor.

The cucumbers are looking great as well. They’re in full flower right now. All the varieties of peppers we put in are already starting to produce fruit and some are even getting big enough to pick here pretty soon. When I was out in the heat mowing lawn this afternoon I saw some banana peppers almost 5 inches long, just about the perfect size for eating fresh.

The flowering plants have been doing great as well. We tried something a bit silly with the stump from the old ash tree out back. We built a sort of retaining wall with round blocks of wood cut from the tree itself, filled it with dirt, and planted it with zinnias and wild flowers just to see what would happen. And this is the result.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enormously pleased with the results. Once the rest of the zinnias start to flower that’s going to be amazing.

Okay, the Norton. What’s a Norton, you ask? It’s a classic British motorcycle manufacturer. Back in the day I owned a 1968 750 Norton that I had a love/hate relationship with. It was temperamental, had one of the worst electrical systems ever devised by man, vibrated so badly every nut and bolt and screw on it had to be wired down so they didn’t fall off, was almost impossible to start when it got moody, and the exhaust system fell off on a regular basis. People would see me sitting at the side of the road having a smoke with the bike and stop and ask if I needed help. Nope, I’d say. Just waiting for the damned exhaust to cool down, and I’d point to the exhaust pipes laying in the ditch.

In other words it was pretty much a classic British motorcycle.

Great fun, that bike. I eventually sold it for $400. I heard later that two days after I sold it the new owner had neglected to follow any of the warnings I’d given him about preventative maintenance and the care and feeding of Brit bikes and had almost immediately run the engine tight. Sigh…

So that brings me to this.

Yeah. It’s a Norton. A 1973 850 Commando. Despite the way it looks, it is all there. The seat, gas tanks and everything else are all there. Somewhere. And apparently it’s mine. I guess. Maybe. It’s a bit up in the air at the moment. It belonged to my late best friend and brother in law John who died two years ago. I don’t know where he got it or what he was doing with it because he was strictly a Harley guy. His wife, also one of my best friends and my wife’s sister, wants to get rid of it. It was sitting in the garage covered with a sheet and since all of John’s friends are Harley guys, nobody seems to want to buy it or even deal with an old British bike. So it might be mine. Maybe? We’ll see.

Damn, I’m tempted…

Catching Up: Solar, Gardening, Flowers, New Computer and Stuff

All kinds of stuff have been going on here at the palatial headquarters of grouchyfarmer.com.

I believe I mentioned that we had to have the roof replaced a few weeks ago. I had to remove all of the solar panels before they came in, and, as usual, I’ve been exceptionally lazy and didn’t get the solar panels back up until today. MrsGF handles most of the household billing and she noticed the difference right away when our electric bill suddenly jumped up about $65, so she’s been after me to finally get them out of the garage and out in the sunlight. So we’re back to running on solar again. 🙂 Unfortunately we have a lot of clouds floating through here after a cold front came through so I suspect we’re possibly using almost as much battery power as we are solar. Still, even when a cloud passes over we’re still getting about 400 – 500W out of the panels.

I’m writing this on a brand new computer. I finally bit the bullet, got out the credit card and bought a new Macbook Pro to replace the rather elderly and beat up Macbook I normally write on. I use two computers. The Macbook lives in the dining room where it’s my primary computer for doing email, writing this blog, doing correspondence, accounting, tax stuff, budget projections, banking and sometimes simple photo editing.

The other computer is an MSI gaming computer with a high speed Core i7 processor, Geforce graphics card, loaded up with RAM and all those goodies. I occasionally do actual gaming on it, but mostly it’s a working computer that is hooked to my 3D printer, laser engravers and my amateur radio equipment. And because it’s screaming fast, all my Adobe editing tools are on it as well. Plus it’s ended up being my archive computer connected to multiple external drives with my video library, old radio show collection, etc.

My old Macbook was not long for this world, I suspect. It was so old and had been used so much the lettering was literally worn or chipped off most of the keys. So old that it couldn’t run my modern Adobe software. It was getting to be more and more of a pain in the neck to use so I got the new Macbook Pro with the new M3 Pro CPU and new graphics system.

Wow, what a difference! The new screen is amazingly good. And fast? Wow. I don’t think it’s quite as fast as my MSI gaming system but it’s damned close. Even better Photoshop and my other editing tools all work flawlessly and remarkably fast on this new one. So I’m pleased. Apple even makes it absurdly simple to switch to a new computer. Just start up a transfer utility on both computers, they link together wirelessly, and in less than an hour everything from the old computer was on the new computer, including all of my settings, passwords, favorites, photos, videos, everything.

Speaking of computers, I suspect Win 11 is going to be the last version of Windows I will ever run thanks to the crap Microsoft is indulging in now. If you haven’t heard about the company’s latest attempt at utterly destroying your life, Microsoft is starting to implement something it calls Recall. Basically Recall is the ultimate in spyware. It records everything you read, everything you type, every video you view, ever website you visit, every document you write/read, every email you receive/send, all of your banking information, all of your passwords. Everything. All of it easily searchable, and all of it unencrypted, at least according to people who’ve been able to try it.

That squishing, gasping noise you just heard is every scammer, every stalker, every hacker, every malware maker, every corrupt government, every abusive government agency everywhere in the world having a collective orgasm over the fact that some day soon, Microsoft is going to be recording literally everything that flows through your computer for your “convenience”.

But I’m wandering off topic, so let me get on with this.

The weather here has been a bit odd, but not so odd that it would be considered extraordinary. We’ve gone from drought like conditions to almost an overabundance of rain over the last month. Precipitation has been well above average and temperatures have been on the cool side. With only a few exceptions daytime highs have struggled to get above 70F. Fortunately we had enough dry days to let farmers get their crops it, but now they’re struggling to try to get their hay crops off the fields.

For gardeners like me and MrsGF it’s been pretty good. While temps have been a bit cooler than we’d like the abundant rain has eliminated the need to water stuff. And despite the cool temps things are growing well out there.

The onions planted around the outside of the raised beds have been doing amazingly well. They seem to thrive in this weather. All of our other plants are up and doing pretty well. We put in carrots, beets, celery, pole beans, cilantro, lettuce and onions in the raised beds and those are all doing quite well.

We have 6 tomato plants in the corner garden by the AC unit. They’re doing reasonably well. The parsley in front was a carry over from last year and even that’s doing quite well. The stuff is almost knee high. I didn’t think Parsley plants survived over winter but these did somehow.

We have about 11 or 12 pepper plants of various types in that narrow strip along the side of the house. We’ve been putting peppers in there for some time now and they do amazingly well in there. We probably over did it with pepper plants. I think we have something like 20 of the darned things all together, a mixture of sweet bell, banana peppers, jalapeno and I think there are a few pimento plants in there too. MrsGF and I both love peppers. We freeze them, can them, pickle them. One trick we tried that worked well was to keep them whole, cut the tops off and take out the seed core, and then freeze them whole and use them to make stuffed peppers.

And we got the first rose of the season!

I’m still out on the bike on the trails and backroads whenever the weather cooperates. I’m afraid my average speed when I’m out biking isn’t as good as it could be because every time I see some wild flowers I have to stop and take pictures.

That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that what should be a one hour ride generally turns into two hours.

The raspberries are just starting to bud. I’m really looking forward to that.

We don’t grow a lot of them. Technically I’m not supposed to eat them at all because I have diverticulosis and I’m not supposed to eat anything with seeds, but come on, who can resist fresh raspberries?

It’s been an expensive month here. New roof, new computer and now a new dishwasher as well.

That’s a Bosch 800 and it came highly recommended. Reviews I’ve seen pretty much consistently rate it as a top of the line dishwasher. My eldest son and his wife have one and love it. Me? I hate it.

Oh, okay, I don’t hate it. It works just fine. I just don’t like it very much. The small third rack at the top of the interior compartment is pretty much utterly useless, the racks are oddly laid out making it awkward to get dishes stacked into the thing, the removable silverware basket is half as big as it should be. But I’m told your silverware is supposed to go up in that stupid 3rd rack at the top, where it just sort of lays there and flies around whenever you pull the rack out, even if you carefully place the silverware in the provided slots.

Yes, it does a perfectly fine job cleaning dishes, but so did our old LG which cost half as much and did just as good a job at cleaning.

But that’s about it for now. I have way too much to do and too little time to do it, so I’m out of here for now!

Out And About

This is what a typical corn planting operation looks like around here these days. It’s a far cry from the ancient 4 row John Deere planter I used to pull!

Today and yesterday were both absolutely glorious. Brilliant sunshine, warm temperatures, pleasant breezes. I couldn’t have asked for finer weather. So I was out biking around the countryside instead of hanging around the house doing chores because, well, the hell with chores when the weather is this nice!

The farmers have been out in full force planting corn and harvesting first crop hay. We’ve had almost perfect weather for farming so far this spring. It’s about time they get a break. Out at my brother-in-law’s place they put in something like 350 acres of beans and corn in one day.

The sheer size of the equipment they use still seems astonishing to me. Shouldn’t be, I suppose. People have been farming like this for decades now. When I was still actively farming the biggest tractor we had was an Oliver 1655 with a whopping 70 HP that we payed $6,500 for. That tracked CaseIH up there is probably around 400HP and I suspect would sell for well over a quarter of a million, used.

Even something as simple as making hay has turned into an industrial sized operation with massive self propelled forage harvesters and an endless stream of semi-trucks.

But I wasn’t all that interested in agriculture, I wanted to get off the roads and on the trails because of, well, things like this…

It’s spring, after all, and everything is growing, is lush, is in flower. There are flowers almost everywhere I looked and the air was heavy with the most intoxicating scent of a world in full blossom.

But let’s take a peek at the backyard. We have a lot going on out there too.

Every year we try to do something different. This year it’s celery. We’ve grown it before as an experiment a few years ago and it did reasonably well. Well enough that we’re willing to take a chance on planting a whole bed of it this year. Yes, I know celery is pretty cheap but it isn’t the cost, it’s the flavor. Store bought celery is a sad, insipid and flavorless thing when compared to the home grown varieties. The flavor can be so intense that people who are used to the stuff they pick up at the grocery store find it a bit overwhelming, really. Hopefully it does reasonably well. I’m looking forward to this.

We have lots of other stuff in the ground now. Lots of onions. We grow onions around the outside borders of all of the raised beds. A lot of them will get shaded out and won’t grow that large once the other plants get bigger. Don’t care. Even the small onions taste wonderful. The onions won’t last long. They’re almost big enough now to start pulling some. Usually we get enough to eat fresh all summer long. We put in a mix of red, yellow and white onions just for a bit of variety.

We put in lots of beets and carrots this year as well. Again, beets and carrots are pretty cheap to buy. For us the big incentive is the flavor. You don’t know what a really good carrot tastes like until you’ve grown your own.

This corner garden up there in the photo is all tomatoes this year. We make our own tomato sauces, chili sauces, tomato soup, etc. and we actually used all of the home grown stuff and had to resort to buying some the other day and dear lord it tasted horrible!

I don’t have photos but as usual we planted the whole south side “flower garden” along the edge of the living room with pepper plants. We thought we’d gone overboard with bell and banana peppers last year. We didn’t, it seems, because the freezer is empty. We put in a mix of sweet bell, banana, and a new variety of jalapeno this year that is supposed to have all of the flavor of a jalapeno but with less heat. We’ll see how those go.

And to wrap this up, how about a lilac?

The lilacs are in full bloom all over town and the fragrance is absolutely amazing. Damn it’s beautiful out there, so why am I sitting in the house writing this? I’m going out to smell the flowers.

April Fools Surprise. Welcome to Spring in Wisconsin!

this is what it looks like outside right now. Actually it’s worse than that now. I took that photo up there in a bit of a lull. It’s snowing so hard I can hardly see the end of the block right now.

Latest weather report I heard says we could see 14 inches of this stuff by mid-morning tomorrow, along with winds of up to 40 – 50 mph.

Sigh…

Catching Up

Covid For Christmas – The Great Pi Famine -Lettuce In December – Weather – Dreams

Covid

So on Dec. 23 MrsGF got an unwelcome Christmas present, Covid. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine. She still has a nasty cough but she’s feeling much better and has been testing negative for two days now so we’re hoping it’s all over. Somehow I avoided coming down with it. I took precautions, staying in the basement most of the time, eating our meals separately, wearing N-95 mask whenever I was upstairs, etc. But even so I figured I’d come down with it too. Well, I still might. She’s been testing negative for 2 days now. They say that the incubation time for the current strain is about 2 – 4 days, so I’m not going to be able to relax much for another couple of days.

And me… I’m a hypochondriac. All through the pandemic, every time I coughed or sneezed or my head got stuffed up, I was convinced I had Covid myself. And I have some pretty nasty upper respiratory allergies on top of it, so I pretty much have mild symptoms that could be mistaken for the early stages of Covid all the time.

The Great Pi Famine

RaspberryPi 4. I’m still amazed that they can squeeze a complete quad core computer with 8 gig of RAM, hdmi video, sound, 4 usb ports and WiFi into a package this small. Storage on this one is a 128 gig micro-SD card.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I like to fiddle around with electronic gadgets and gizmos and tinker and build stuff. One of the mainstays of the electronic tinkerers out there as a controller of electronic equipment of all types has been a tiny little single board computer called a Raspberry Pi. They’re available in a variety of types ranging from tiny little units that are used as controllers for a variety of gizmos, to a full blown Linux computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi 4 and now the new, more powerful Pi 5. There are four things that make them attractive. They’re small. Very small. They are designed to make it easy to interface them to the outside world in order to use them to control robots, motors, actuators of various types, collect data from sensors, etc. And three, they’re relatively easy to use, easy to program and enormously powerful for their size.

And the fourth thing, they were cheap. Like really cheap. The Pi 4 which is basically a full blown Linux (using a variation of Debian) computer with up to 8 gig of RAM, built in WiFi, HDMI video, USB 2 and USB3 ports sold for about $40 or even less. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux to see if it could be a viable replacement for the ever increasing horror that is Microsoft Windows, a Pi 4 is an easy and cheap way to do it. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse, get yourself a good introductory book on the Pi computers, and away you go.

Sidenote: I was just reading an article the other day that illustrated just how much computing technology had advanced in the last few decades. Someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is six times more powerful than the original Cray 1 “super computer”.

Note that I used the past tense there. They were cheap. Then the pandemic hit, supply chain problems hit, demand for Pis increased because people were stuck at home and were looking for things to do, and, perhaps most importantly, the profiteers struck. Scalpers, profiteers, scammers and the like snapped up every Pi they could get their hands on, and then turned around and re-sold them for three, four times their original cost. I saw Pi 4s, a computer that sold for about $35 – $40 originally, being sold for $250 or more.

Pre pandemic I had a half dozen or more of the things laying around the house. But I gave them to a friend who was an electronics experimenter and solar power experimenter before the drought hit. Get them back from him? Yeah, well, he lives in Barcelona half the year so that ain’t gonna happen.

After the pandemic, when I couldn’t get them for a reasonable price any more, I switched to using Arduinos for the fiddling around I was doing. But while they and other microcontrollers are extremely useful and fun to play with, they aren’t computers.

But now prices have finally started to settle down. They’re still over priced when compared to what they were before the pandemic, about $75. But that’s cheap enough that I’m willing to get one and start playing around with it.

To make a long story short the nice fellow from UPS dropped one off here (two, actually) and I spent a couple of hours setting it up, updating the software and fiddling around with it last night. So you might be seeing some more stuff pop up here concerning Linux and the Pi in the future.

If you want to fiddle around with one of these yourself and you’re new to the Pi I’d recommend you get something like this from a company like CannaKit in the photo below.

No, I don’t get a kickback from CanaKit or anything like that. There are a lot of disreputable vendors out there, but I’ve bought stuff from CanaKit several times now and they provide exactly what they advertise, ship quickly and their prices, while a bit high, aren’t horrible.

It includes everything needed to get the thing up and running. The Pi 4, a power supply for it, HDMI cables to connect a monitor, a case for it along with a tiny cooling fan, heat sinks for the CPU and two other chips on the board, and a micro-SD card with the operating system pre-installed. It’s more expensive than buying a bare bones Pi but it has everything needed to get it operational. Just plug in a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor.

Lettuce In December

From about the end of may through September we had fresh greens whenever we wanted them out in the garden. All we had to do was go outside, clip off some of the lettuce mix we’d planted, and graze to our heart’s content. I really missed that. And then I was in the basement doing stuff and saw the little portable green house we used to start seedlings in the early spring with the grow lights and heater and thought why the hell aren’t we using that to grow some fresh greens? So we did. And this is what we ended up with.

We didn’t put in a lot because we weren’t sure it was going to work, but as you can see it worked very well indeed. We got more than enough for a couple of good sized salads plus a bit more. And yes, it tasted very, very good. 😊

Other Stuff

The PreciseRF magloop antenna continues to work surprisingly well for me. I was concerned about it’s survivability when set up out in the weather but it’s been holding up well despite the rain, snow and colder weather we’ve had. But the real test is yet to come when it gets really cold here. It’s been abnormally warm here all through December. Even now, on Jan. 3 at 4:30 AM, it’s 35 degrees out there. We’ll see what happens when it’s -30 and blizzard like conditions.

Weather

If we ever get cold weather, that is. Temperatures have been running well above normal here. I vividly remember one New Year’s Eve before MrsGF and I got married. When we got out of the pub where we’d spent the evening it was -34F with a stiff wind and everything, including the car, was frozen solid. We spent the night at a friend’s house and managed to get the car started the next morning, somehow.

It was brutally cold for weeks that January. On Jan 1 after I got back to the farm I had to put a new alternator on one of the tractors. It was so cold that the insulation on the wires the old alternator shattered when I bent them. I managed to get the tractor running well enough to pull it into the heifer barn and then close everything up. 30 or so young heifers put out a lot of heat and it was warm enough in there that I could get the job done. The heifers thought it was great fun. They were all crowded around watching me.

What’s Coming Up

I got a woodworking project going. This is a joint project by ES (Eldest Son) and myself. One of his hobbies is doing stained glass so I’m making a backlighted frame for a piece he did. That promises to turn out to be pretty interesting. More about that when it gets closer to completion. That’s still in the planning stage.

One thing, though, dear sweet lord has good quality lumber gotten expensive! I’ve been spoiled. Years and years ago I bought a whole pickup truck load of very good quality, kiln dried, white oak about 1 1/4 inches thick, 6 feet long and of various widths that ranged from 6″ up to 13″. That’s pretty much run out now so I had to actually go out and buy wood and prices of good quality, furniture grade hardwood are absolutely nuts.

I don’t really have plans for the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I wanted just to be able to play around with Linux and mess around with. If something develops from that I’ll let you know.

Dreams

Dreams are weird. At least mine are. I was up at 3 AM this morning and just couldn’t get back to sleep so I came out here dealt with my email and then started writing this up. I do vividly remember the dream I was having when I woke up. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are often extremely vivid and detailed. This one was like that.

MrsGF and I were having dinner at a rather fancy restaurant with a very nice young couple from India. I have absolutely no idea who they were or why they were in this dream. Nice people, though.

When MrsGF and I left we went out into the parking lot and the car, my Buick, was gone. We thought we mis-remembered where we’d parked it so I pulled out my phone to use the app that tracks my car. And my phone didn’t work. It had been infected with some kind of malware that just kept cycling through obnoxious ads over and over again.

There was a strip mall nearby and a T-Mobile store was there so we walked over there. They were about the close but a nice young woman kept the place open. She got me a replacement phone right away, restored all my stuff and got the phone working. We went back to the parking lot and activated the tracking app and yeah, the car was gone. We called the police and they found it, and the thief, rather quickly.

Elon Musk had stolen it. He’d been at the table behind us and had overheard me making disparaging comments about how utterly hideous his “cybertruck” looked so he’d gotten huffy, hacked the electronic systems in my car and took it.

Still, it’s better than the vivid, realistic dream I had about painting the garage. That was the entire dream, painting the garage. That was it. It was so boring that I bored myself awake.