fall – grouchyfarmer

It’s Autumn. Time for a Fall Catch Up.

On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.

The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.

But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.

Below is what it looks like now.

I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.

Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.

MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.

The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.

The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.

We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.

We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.

We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.

But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.

The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.

The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!

That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.

Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…

There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.

E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.

The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.

Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.

And that’s about it for now!

Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.

I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.

New Computer, Movies, Fall, and Stuff

That’s the new one on the right. Smaller than the old one was but unlike the old one it actually works.

I hate moving to a new computer and try to avoid it as long as I possibly can, which is why my MacBook Pro up there on the left has been still limping along despite it being about 10 – 12 years old and having a wonky screen that sometimes made me open and close the lid a dozen times before it was readable. That Macbook gets used a lot. It lives in the kitchen where it’s used for emails, reading the news, looking up recipes, sorting photos and writing this blog. That it’s lasted this long is a bit of a miracle. My attempt to replace it with the iPad were very awkward. I could have done it but the iPad was just too clumsy, the software uncooperative with the way I liked to do things, and too limited in its capabilities. The iPad is great for must messing around, playing games, reading and things like that, but despite Apple’s efforts, it just isn’t a full blown computer. It’s basically an oversized iPhone without the phone.

I originally was not going to get another Macbook Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I love the things. I love the whole Apple “ecosystem”, as they call it. But Macbooks are expensive, and I wasn’t willing to spend $1,500 or more for one. But…

I’ve had really good luck with refurbished computers. I’ve bought several over the years for various reasons. You can often pick up a refurbed computer that’s only a few years old for a fraction of the original retail cost. And that’s what I did here, I picked up a three or four year old refurbished Macbook Pro for a third of the cost of a new one. And it’s pretty darned nice. It arrived in a plain cardboard box with nothing but the power supply/charger, which was fine too. And upon opening it, well, the thing looks like it is brand new except for a very small dent in the lid which doesn’t seem to hurt anything.

Biggest problem with adopting a new computer is moving all my stuff from the old computer to the new one. But Apple makes that easy too. Just connect the two laptops together with a USB cable, start up a migration assistant app, and a little over an hour later everything on the old computer was on the new one. I had to verify a few things like passwords and log in information, but that was about it. When it was all done the new computer looked and worked pretty much exactly like the old computer did, with a few minor differences because some of the apps I used were now newer versions.

There are two things I don’t like about the new one. The keyboard is without a doubt the worst laptop keyboard I’ve ever had to use. I’ve typed on everything from 1960s era IBM keypunch machines (seriously, I’ve had crank out those ancient punch cards to program computers once upon a time) to the original (and excellent) IBM PC keyboards, to a variety of cheap slush boxes, to the excellent mechanical keyboards made today, and everything else imaginable. And I’ve never seen a keyboard that was this bad before.

The other thing I don’t like is that this thing only has USB-C ports. One of the things I’ve always found irritating about Apple is that they often are obsessed with form over function. They get what they think is a good idea into their heads over there and run with it, and the hell with whatever anyone else thinks, wants and even needs. Now USB-C is, probably, a good thing. But millions of us out here are still using devices that require the original USB plugs. And a lot of us are photographers who need to transfer photos to computers with SD cards. And Apple has given me neither of those. Grr… So I’m going to have get a stupid adaptor to hook things up or read SD cards from my camera.

Movies: Warning, Thor Spoilers

I want to talk about movies for a while. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, to be honest. I hate going to theaters. My idea of a good time is not being sandwiched in between a bunch of people who haven’t bathed in three weeks, who are constantly checking their cell phones, munching on snacks they smuggled in, and talking all through the quiet parts of the dialog.

I also think that a lot of the most hyped movies out there are, frankly, crap. I hated the Lord of the Rings, but to be honest I thought the novels were even worse. Avatar? I couldn’t make it more than half an hour into that thing before I bailed out. And and my feelings include a lot of Marvel movies.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was just plain nasty. The only bright spot in the entire movie was Awkwafina, who plays Simu Liu’s sidekick. The whole movie was just one cliche after another. But perhaps I’m jaded because I watch a lot of Chinese television where they’ve been making much, much better martial arts style movies and television series for decades. I thought the editing was badly done. It looks like large bits of the movie were left on the cutting room floor.

The biggest problem is trying to take a complex story like this one and squeeze everything into a two hour block of time. Often story elements that are necessary to help the movie and the characters make sense are left out, and that’s what’s happened here. The characters are never given enough time to really develop well enough that I wanted to care about them. And I don’t like Simu Liu, to be honest. I’ve seen him in other things, including the Canadian series Kim’s Convenience where he was, frankly, more of a distraction and even an annoyance than a necessary part of the show. In the Ten Rings he just never seems, oh, comfortable in the role? It’s like he’s trying way, way too hard to adapt to a role he just isn’t suited for.

Basically if you want to see how a movie like this should be done, go find the Wu Assassins on Netflix.

I did, however, like the Eternals. I thought that was well done, despite the bad reviews it got.

But then we come to Thor: Love and Thunder. And oh dear lord… There is a phrase in the entertainment industry, jumping the shark, which refers to the writers and producers having totally run out of ideas for a series and introducing ever increasingly bizarre elements to the story to try to keep viewers interested. What they’ve done to Thor is even worse than jumping the shark. They brought in the kids. Children. They’ve Disneyfied the thing.

I knew the Thor series was eventually going to end up being wrecked, the whole story line I mean. Once you take a story arc that is about love and loss, death, mass murder and literally genocide, and try to make a comedy out of it, you are heading down a dark, dark path from which there is no return. And ultimately you end up with TLT. They’ve – they’ve Disneyfied it, heaven help us. They’ve completely run out of ideas and now are trying to turn it into a kiddie show.

They took the tragic story of Jane Foster and turned it into a five minute soap opera. They shoveled a bunch of kids into the story for “reasons”. And end up with Thor’s new partner becoming, drum roll please, an eight or nine year old girl. Yes, apparently Thor’s new partner in running around the universe slaying monsters, killing off bad guys, enduring horrible tortures, watching mass murder and genocide, is going to be a tiny little girl wielding a magic weapon? Seriously?

Some parts of the movie aren’t bad. The special effects are decent, there’s some snappy dialog. This could have been a fairly decent movie. But a lot of the jokes fall flat to the floor and lay there twitching waiting for someone to put them out of their misery. The only good part about the movie was the screaming goats. Maybe Marvel could spin off the screaming goats into their own series of movies?

Fall

It’s definitely fall up here in Wisconsin. Temperatures last night were down in the 30s. The days are much shorter. Most of the birds have fled for warmer climates. We cleaned all the vegetable gardens out the other day. Good thing, too, because MrsGF and I are sick of dealing with the stuff. Our pantry has enough canned beets and various types of tomato sauces and pickles to last us probably two years. The freezer is full to overflowing with more tomatoes, peppers, wax beans, green beans and beets.

There are still some wild flowering plants out there when I bundle up and head out on the bike, but not many. It’s still pretty green out there but I can see that this isn’t going to last long. The grasses and other plants in the more wild areas around here are starting to dry up and turn brown, and a lot of trees are starting to turn color.

We had to turn the heat on in the house days ago already as daytime temperatures struggled to hit 50 degrees even with the sun out.

I like autumn, even though it means I have to bundle up to get out on the bike and I usually get home with cold feet and even colder hands. Getting out in the crisp, autumn air is worth it. After the heat and humidity of the summer it feels refreshing, cleaner, out there.

Of course winter will be here before long, but that’s all part of the cycle of life.

Stuff

With the number of outdoor chores and projects dwindling it means it’s just about time to open up the wood shop again. I haven’t even been in there except to grab a tool since spring. I still need to finish taking down the old suspended ceiling, replacing the old fluorescent ceiling lights with LED lights and doing a general cleanup before getting started with wood projects again.

I need to get my vertical antenna down and checked over before the snow flies. It got smacked by a tree limb in the spring and I think there’s a loose connection up there somewhere. I’ve been using the dipole antenna all summer, but I would like to get that vertical working properly again as well because the dipole is probably going to have to be replaced or at least taken down and have some repairs done as well in the near future.

And speaking of doing stuff, I need to shut this down for this time and actually go get some work done!

Autumn

Autumn is finally here. With temperatures in the low 80s or even higher and high humidity for large parts of September, we were beginning to wonder what the heck was going on. But we’ve had a couple of hard frosts now and daytime temps are about where they should be for this time of year, around 45 – 50 degrees, and at night down in the mid 30s. It’s something of a relief after the hot, humid summer we had.

And the mosquitoes? OMG — they were horrible this year, especially starting in August and going through September. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. Walking through the grass would cause clouds of the little blood suckers to rise up around you. Getting close to any kind of bush would result in an immediate attack by swarms of the things. The bug repellants did no good at all. Deep Woods Off and the others we tried didn’t seem to deter them in the slightest. My wife’s sister and her husband started to wear their bee keeping suits just to go out in their garden to pick berries or tomatoes. Even the hard core environmentalists I know were so fed up they were resorting to chemical warfare and fogging their bushes and yards to try to get any kind of relief.

And while it seems we’re finally getting a dry spell, it was raining almost every day for the first two weeks of October. There is still water standing everywhere. Down by the old stone bridge where the river is usually almost completely dry this time of year the water is 4-6 feet deep and running fast, and it’s well over it’s banks in some places. But at least the farmers have been able to get out and get their soybeans off around here.

We still haven’t gotten all of the gardens cleaned up yet, but there’s no rush on that. We’ll probably get most of that done this weekend unless something comes up or the weather gets nasty.

The sedum — what amazing plants those are. This time of year the color is absolutely astonishing, running from a brownish red to a deep, rich burgundy. And if you get out right after sunrise in the morning and see the flowers covered with frost crystals, wow, they look absolutely magical.

Speaking of mornings — My body and I have this argument going… I want to sleep until about 6 AM. It wants to get up around 4:30 for some stupid reason. It isn’t a big deal, more annoying than anything else. But, well, why? MrsGF thinks it’s because I spent so many years having to be up around 4:30 or 5 AM to do chores on the farm, but that’s silly. I haven’t actively worked in farming for ages now. In my last job I worked 2nd shift, working until 11 PM and not getting up until about 8 in the morning, and I had absolutely no problem at all with that. I liked it, in fact. But now that I’m retired and could sleep late if I wanted to, my body decides it needs to be up at 4:30 again? Sheesh… My doctor says maybe that’s all I need to sleep. Everyone is different. Not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. If I’m healthy, which I am (sort of) and I’m not getting tired during the day, and I’m waking up feeling refreshed and comfortable, well, don’t worry about it.

Let’s see, what else — Oh, someone asked me about the new iPhone XS Max and was wondering if it was worth all the hype and what it was like to actually use. After living with this thing for a month or so now, it is a pretty slick piece of equipment.

The camera is quite good. Not up to the standards of a dedicated mid-range or high end camera, but for a phone? Yeah, it’s good. It has a semi-decent real telephoto lens, up to 4X. Color rendition still seems a bit off to me, but that’s a personal opinion.

As a media device it’s excellent. The sound quality out of those tiny little speakers is, frankly, astonishing to me. I have no idea how they get sound like that out of something that tiny. I sprung for the AirPod thingies, Apple’s wireless ear buds. I find those astonishing as well. To me the sound quality is amazing. They were ridiculously easy to set up. Just bring them near the phone and they automatically link up. I didn’t need to do anything. No issues with those as well. But whenever I use ’em I’m always worried one of them will fall out of my ear and I’ll break it or lose it so I’m always nervous when I wear them outside. Are they worth $150? Hell no. The sound quality is good, but not that good. To my ears the sound quality isn’t any better than the $40 wired earbuds I used with my old iPod.

The screen is absolutely fantastic. Crisp, clean, outstanding color rendition, incredibly high resolution. Streaming movies or TV on this thing is a joy. It isn’t as nice as, oh, a 40 inch high-def monitor, but for a device this small it’s wonderful. I find myself reading my Kindle books on it all the time now because I don’t get eye fatigue from trying to read a fuzzy display. And for the first time the auto-brightness functions that are supposed to adjust the brightness of the display to suit viewing conditions actually works on this phone.

So it has a good camera, it’s a fantastic portable media player, how does it work as an actual phone?

Badly. I’m sorry, but as a phone it just isn’t very good. Cell reception is horrible. And I’m not the only one who’s been having this problem. There have been a lot of reports that cellular reception with the XS models is pretty poor. Frankly if the phone didn’t have WiFi calling I probably wouldn’t be able to use it as a phone at all here in the house. But that being said, WiFi calling is amazing. Just flip a switch in the settings and it turns on, and talking to someone on the phone is as clear as if they were in the room with me. But still, it isn’t, well, a cell phone then, is it? It’s using VOIP and damn well should sound that good.

Face ID – everyone knows by now that the new iPhones starting with the 10 series unlock by facial recognition. This seemed to freak some people out for some reason, but I’m not going to go down that road. The question is does it work, and the answer is definitely yes. Even wearing my bike helmet and wrap around sunglasses it recognizes me. Occasionally there will be an issue for some reason, but then it just goes to the standard PIN number unlocking system.

Wireless charging – the model I have, the XS Max, supports wireless charging and charging stations are available for well under $40. The one I have cost all of $24 and seems to work pretty well. Just put it face up on the pad, wiggle it around until you feel the phone buzz, and it starts to charge. The only issue here is that it won’t charge when it’s in a case, and who in their right mind doesn’t put a $1,200 phone in some kind of protective case?

But maybe the whole issue of needing a case is becoming unnecessary. I’ve seen tests where the XS phones have been drop tested and they’re pretty impressive. The ones that I’ve seen show the phone surviving drops of 4 feet or less on a concrete floor with no damage at all. In one test they kept increasing the height of the drop and it wasn’t until they dropped it from over 10 feet that there was any damage at all, which was slight. And the phone wasn’t actually destroyed until they dropped it from 20 feet down a stairwell to a concrete floor.

I’m sure as hell not going to try that, though. Nor am I going to test the water proofing. The XS is supposed to be pretty water resistant, but I’m not about to dunk it in a bucket of water to see if it really is.

The question is, is this thing worth the cost? This is, after all, one hell of an expensive piece of equipment. The model I have goes for around $1,200 retail. The only reason I can afford the thing is because I don’t buy my phones, I lease them and get a new one every 18-24 months under the leasing plan. So is it worth it? Frankly, no. You can get a phone that does pretty much everything this one does for half the cost or less. It wouldn’t sound as good, wouldn’t have the beautiful display, wouldn’t be as fast, but it would work just fine and do everything you need a phone to do.

But that being said, despite the reception problem, holy cow it’s fun to play with. It’s so fast, the display is so good, the sound quality is so good, that I find myself using it more and more.

Autumn and Garage Sale Find

We’ve finally moved into more typical autumn weather for Wisconsin. The heat and humidity were finally pushed out of the state and we’re going through more typical weather for this time of year. We still haven’t had a frost yet as of Oct. 6, but that will be coming soon. But even fall couldn’t arrive in a typical fashion. After a few days of crisp, cool weather with temps in the low 50s, the heat and humidity pushed back in for a day, with temps up in the mid-eighties with high humidity, triggering more rain and storms which we didn’t need at all. The Manitowoc County fairgrounds got hit by what was either straight line winds in excess of 75 mph or a weak tornado.

It may be October but there are a surprising number of flowering plants still bopping along as if it were still summer. I’m still seeing a huge number of bees, both native bees and honey bees. That’s kind of unusual for this time of year, but as long as the temperatures are still warm enough for them to be active and there are still food sources out there, they’ll be around.

I found this thing sitting in the basement the other day and had no idea where it came from.

I learned that eldest son found it at a garage sale for $5 one day and picked it up and, of course, it ended up in my basement. Well, I’m claiming this one for my own because I’m fond of old Hallicrafters equipment. I have two restored Hallicrafters short-wave receivers from the 1940s-1950s era and I love the things. This one looks like it’s in good enough shape cosmetically that it might be worth restoring. I haven’t done any research on this model yet, but judging from the way it looks I’d say it’s from the late 50s or early to mid sixties.

Once upon a time you couldn’t give away old tube radios. Thousands upon thousands of them ended up going to the landfill because no one wanted them. Now they’re turning into collectors items. Sort of. Prices on these things are all over the place depending on the brand, model and age.

There are issues with restoring old radios like these. Some of them pretty serious and if you don’t know what you’re doing, they could even be life threatening because of the dangers of electric shock. Depending on the radio and the design, some of these things had potentially lethal voltages floating around inside of them. So if you don’t know much about how these things were made and the potential dangers, don’t go fiddling around inside of them without educating yourself first.

The other issue is you can’t just plug these things in and turn them on if they haven’t been used in a long time. When it comes to these old radios, there is no such thing as “mint” condition except when it comes to the external appearance. You will always need to replace components inside with modern equivalents. Capacitors are the biggest issue with these. Those old caps will fail. There is simply no doubt about it. Usually the first thing you do with one of these is go through it and replace all of the capacitors right off the bat.

Another issue is finding things that can’t be easily replaced with modern equivalents, like vacuum tubes. Under normal operation vacuum tubes are amazingly long lasting. I know guys running old amplifiers, receivers and transmitters that are from the 1940s and 50s and are still running the original tubes. But they do fail sometimes, and finding replacements is a problem because they haven’t been made in decades. If you have an old tube radio, chances are good the tubes will still work unless the radio was abused or had some kind of electrical failure. But if you have a bad one, finding a replacement tube could be a problem.

Anyway, when I get some time I’ll open this one up and see what it looks like inside. It might be a good candidate for restoring.

GF Procrastinates Again But For Good Reasons

I was supposed to be tearing down all my radio equipment so I can move the new desk into the office. I should wash the car and get that ready for long term storage. I should get the snowblower out and check that over and… Well, hell, look at that photo up there. If your Saturday looked like that, would you hang around the house and do chores inside on what is probably going to be the last nice day of the year? So a lot of the chores got pushed aside to take advantage of the amazing weather because according to the predictions for this coming week, the weather is supposed to be pretty much bleh.

It was absurdly nice, temps in the mid to high 70s, gentle breezes, warm, golden sunshine. It was absolutely glorious out.

Well, to be fair we did get a lot of work done. MrsGF and I were up shortly after dawn working on the flower beds, digging out the annuals that are long past their prime, taking down the decaying sunflowers, raking leaves. We completely filled the box of our elderly full sized Dodge truck and hauled it down to the compost site. And the trees aren’t even bare yet. The pear and maple trees haven’t even started to shed, so we’ll probably end up doing that at least twice more. I even got up on the roof and cleaned out the rain gutters full of leaves.

I admit that everything starts to look drab and dreary and brown this time of year, but even those browns are beautiful in their own way. The dark branches of the denuded trees make amazing patterns against the sky and landscape, and with the foliage starting to die back and the leaves drop, you begin to see things that you didn’t notice before, hidden behind the lush summer growth.

And there is still even a bit of color left out there if you go hunting for it. If you watch carefully there are still some plants that haven’t realized that it’s the end of the growing season and you’ll see a spark of yellow or purple or red peeking out through the grasses that are slowly starting to dry and turn brown.

I don’t understand people who think the fall is a dull, drab season. Yes, the egrets and herons are gone, as are a lot of the song birds. The spectacular flowers of summer have faded, dried up and disappeared. But they’ve been replaced by a new world with it’s own little secrets, it’s own hidden treasures. All you have to do is look.

Of course I admit it would be a lot more pleasant if I didn’t have allergies. The mold index is sky high right now according to the morning news. But I knew that already, a fact demonstrated by my watering eyes, stuffed up head and other irritating symptoms. I sound like I have a perpetual cold this time of year.

Let’s see, what else? Not much, really. MrsGF thought I might hit 1,000 miles before the end of the biking season, but I’m going to be short of that. With the weather getting colder getting out on the bike is more irritating than enjoyable. I did hit 752 miles yesterday, and I’ll probably get over 800 yet this season before the weather shuts me down. But I doubt if I’ll get much more than that. That’s fine. I had no specific goals in mind.

Time to wrap this up.

It’s Been Too Nice. We’re Getting Paranoid.

It has been suspiciously nice out the last few days. And it’s going to keep being nice. Daytime temps have been up in the high 60s to low 70s, sunny. The weather people are telling us it’s supposed to stay like this. At least for a while. And even get nicer. It could hit the low 80s in some parts of the state over the next few days.

We are suspicious of this. Up here in Wisconsin, Mother Nature has a long track record of lulling us into a false sense of security with ridiculously nice weather right before she dumps about 3 feet of snow on us. We still remember back in the 1980s when she hilariously dropped 11 inches of snow on us on May 10th. So whenever the weather is too good to be true we start getting paranoid up here because Mother Nature has a warped and twisted sense of humor.

{I screwed up. So what else is new, right? I set up a new email address for this blog, and then immediately after doing that wrote down the wrong email address in the blog. Sigh. The email address is actually old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com }

I’ve been taking advantage of the pleasant weather and have been out on the bike. Even when I’m on a route that I’ve been on dozens of times before, I never know what I’m going to find. I discovered these guys sprouting up along the trail I sometimes take.

Mushrooms are, well, they’re just weird, okay? Bizarre shapes and colors. Some are delicious while others will kill you. I suspect they’re a plot by Mother Nature to kill off those of us who survived the May blizzard.

Screen Shot 2017-10-19 at 6.56.35 AM — Not a mushroom.

Then this guy showed up. Funny looking mushroom, isn’t it? Friendliest mushroom I’ve ever seen, really. Never had a mushroom slobber all over my face before and want me to scratch his ears.

The pleasant weather has also meant I’ve been procrastinating terribly about chores I should be doing, like cleaning out the rest of the gardens, tearing down the radio room so I can move the new desk in, and meeting friendly golden retrievers out on the road.

Speaking of biking, why in the world am I sitting around here babbling along like this when I could be out there right now?

I Like Autumn But…

Screen Shot 2017-10-15 at 7.03.55 AM I really do like autumn, but even I have to admit it gets a bit dull around this time of year, visually speaking. The rich greens, the brilliant flowers, the bright sun of summer is rapidly fading into the dull browns and dreary cloudy skies of fall.

It’s been very cloudy and rainy here of late, which hasn’t helped much. That means I can’t get out on the bike as much as I’d like. Biking in temperatures in the high 40s and icy cold rain isn’t exactly my idea of fun, you see. I suppose it’s time to dust off the treadmill and start pounding out miles while binge watching Netflix or Amazon. It’s exercise, yes, but it’s not really the same as biking through the countryside.

Screen Shot 2017-10-15 at 7.01.00 AM I am fortunately not one of those people who suffers from Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD) but I know quite a few who are, and it’s easy to tell who they are this time of year. They tend to start to get grumpier and more irritable as the days become shorter. But even so I still find myself digging through my photos and lingering on things like bright, sunny scenes and and brilliantly colored flowers. Especially on days like today when it’s 7:30 AM and it looks like it’s going to be another one of those dull, cloudy days with rain. Ick…

We’re currently ramping up to the annual insanity that is Halloween around here. I have nothing against the holiday. I rather enjoy it. But it does seem to have gotten totally out of hand. Mrs. GF and I are convinced that they’ve started bussing kids in from the entire midwest and releasing them on our little town every Halloween, because we know there aren’t that many kids in town. Heck, the entire school district doesn’t have that many kids as we get running up to our door.

Anyway, I was at the local Walmart to get a prescription filled and while I was waiting I thought I’d see if they had some deals on Halloween decorations. It’s a little over two weeks away and I figured they’d be running closeouts on the stuff.

Screen Shot 2017-10-15 at 7.00.24 AM — Let’s stick another flower in. No real reason why. Just feel like putting a flower here.

I was wrong. The entire Halloween decoration section was gone. It was replaced with Christmas decorations. The only Halloween stuff they had left were those massive bags of cheap, crappy candy that is apparently made out of flavored chalk.

Christmas decorations? Really? It’s October 15, for heaven’s sake!

I really should have expected that, though. Retailers don’t live in the same universe you and I live in. In their world time is a strange and mysterious thing that has no basis in reality. A couple of years ago I needed to get a winter coat. It was January, it was -20 degrees out, and I’d just ripped my heavy winter coat by snagging it on something. So it’s January. In Wisconsin. It’s -20 out. You’d think that here in Wisconsin you could buy a winter coat, right? Good luck. Swimwear? Yes. Shorts? Yes. Sandals? Yes. Winter clothes? No. I finally made the 25 mile drive to the “local” Fleet Farm and got one there. Sheesh…

I suppose I should wrap this up and go do something. We’re still in the process of cleaning up the gardens. The non-producing peppers got yanked yesterday, I need to take down the old sunflowers outside the kitchen window. The birds have pretty much gotten all of the seeds out of them and they’re looking pretty bad. It’s raining right now but maybe the weather will cooperate later.

Oh, almost forgot. We have email now! If the nice Mr. Google cooperates and everything is working, you can reach us at ~~wis.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com~~

Oops – it’s old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com. Sheesh, can’t remember my own email address. Sigh.

If I remember to ever actually check the account. If it actually works because I haven’t actually tested it yet.

Yes, you really need to put the “wis.” part in there.

Garden Clean Up Time

One of the issues with the iPhone camera is it doesn’t give any kind of sense of perspective. That pile of vines is actually about waist high and the bed behind it is 8 feet deep and 12 feet long.

Although you sure can’t tell it from the weather (70 degrees here at 7AM) it really is autumn and we’ve been working on cleaning up the gardens periodically for a while now. The weather this morning was great, cloudy and kind of drizzly but warm and shirt sleeve comfortable, so by 7:30 I was out working on cleaning up some of the remaining beds, including the squash.

We’d put in acorn and butternut, only about 4 plants, and we were curious to see how it would work because we’d never tried to grow them before. And the location isn’t ideal, either. Tucked away behind the west end of the garage they really only get sun in the afternoon and evening, plus there’s a tree back there that does some shading.

They started out beautifully, turning into big, healthy plants sending vines everywhere and setting a lot of squash. Alas, I think a combination of the shady conditions plus the very damp weather we had this season kept them from producing as well as they could have. We’ve been eating squash from there for a few weeks now. Very nice stuff and very tasty. But the squash themselves were small, and then because of the damp conditions and shaded location they started to get what MrsGF thinks is powdery mildew, which together prevented them from doing as good as they should have.

The vines were almost completely withered so I cleaned everything out this morning and gathered up the remaining squash.

As an experiment I think it went pretty well, all things considered. Yes, there was a mildew problem and probably too much shade in that spot, but we still got some delicious squash out of the deal. They are so good when roasted with some brown sugar and butter.

The peppers — holy cow have they taken off! They struggled all summer long, those poor plants, and that was largely our fault because we crowded them too much. I did some drastic thinning, taking out more than half the plants, and almost immediately the remaining ones responded with ridiculous amounts of fruit.

We plant mostly poblano (which is my personal favorite), sweet banana peppers, and sweet bell, along with the “mystery” peppers, which turned out to be habanero which are so bloody hot no one we know will touch the things.

Interestingly enough, no one will admit they planted habaneros. MrsGF swears she didn’t raise them. I certainly didn’t put them in there. So where did they come from? Crazed hot pepper fiends sneaking around late at night and slipping them into people’s gardens?

The ones I picked this morning will get washed, diced up and frozen for use later. We generally just mix them all together, with the poblanos more intense flavor helping along the more bland sweet bells. The mix is great in fried potatoes, mac and cheese, soups, etc.

MrsGF is off this morning to her sister’s place to get “a lot” of grapes. I’m not sure how many grapes are in “a lot”. Could be anywhere from a few quarts to a 5 gallon bucket full. If there are enough of them, she’s going to make jelly out of them. The vines these come from are probably close to a century old, and they’re still producing like crazy most years.

Yes, I know, grape jelly is dirt cheap in the stores. But comparing Welch’s to the jelly that comes from these grapes is sort of like comparing Busch Light to, oh, New Glarus Staghorn Octoberfest. They are both technically beer, but the difference in quality is several orders of magnitude apart.

Streets, Autumn, Photos and Barns Abandoned

They finally finished paving the street in front of the house the other day! We were very glad of that. The dust from the trucks rolling past over the unpaved sections was getting onto everything. We couldn’t open the windows on that side of the house. For a few days I couldn’t even get the Corvette out of the driveway because after they did the final grading there was a 5 inch drop at the end of the driveway that would have ripped the front splitter off the nose of the car.

We have an open front porch tucked into the side of the house which is a great place to sit and have a coffee and read on warm days, which is now covered in a thick layer of dust. I’m going to have to get out there with the car wash brush, a big bucket of soapy water and the hose and give it a good scrubbing. There’s so much dust you leave footprints when walking across the decking, the window sills are thick with the stuff, and even the poor plants out there should get hosed down.

Colder weather and rain have slowed things down as far as biking is concerned. I manage to get out most days still, but I know the time is coming when the bike is going to have to hang up in the garage and it’ll be back to the treadmill (ick). Still, when the weather does cooperate, it is absolutely beautiful out there in the countryside.

These crisp, cool autumn mornings are amazing. Now that it’s cooler there is less moisture and haze in the air, making everything seem more crisp and clear and brighter. There’s something about the quality of the light as well that changes because the sun is at a lower angle in the sky. The result is that on some mornings everything just seems to glow with this lush, rich, golden light that seems almost impossible to capture with the camera.

There is something magical, mystical about being out in the woods on mornings like this, at least for me. The sounds, the smells, the crystal clear air. Everything seems more — more alive, more vibrant. With the brilliant greens now fading into browns and reds and dull orange, the woods begins to transform itself in that endless cycle of life, dormancy, rebirth…

It becomes a place of wonder and takes on an almost spiritual quality. It makes you wish you were a poet because only a poet could adequately express what you are seeing in mere words.

But then time presses, and you have to leave and you know, hope, you will be back soon to feel that breathtaking beauty, the astonishing complexity of nature, that golden light…

Gads, after writing all that guff switching to this is going to be a jolt. Going from the beauty of nature to, well, to this… Yet another abandoned, collapsed barn. This one is just outside of town and it caved in about a month ago, and I decided to take a picture of it when I was out on the bike the other day.

It hurts when I see this happening, but it is happening more and more often. The whole countryside around here is dotted with abandoned barns in various states of collapse. I keep thinking of the pride, the hope, the joy the original farmers who put it up had as they watched the timber frame going up, the roof being put on, the side boards being nailed into place. A new home for their cattle, storage for the feed. The barn was the center of the farm, it’s heart.

But I know why it happens, why they are abandoned. Farming has changed drastically in the last few decades and these old barns are completely useless for modern farming. They’re the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong, well, wrong everything when it comes to modern farming.

And they are incredibly expensive to try to maintain as well, and even more ridiculously expensive if you want to restore one. The wood they are made of was once so abundant it wasn’t worth much. Even if you could find a 10X10 oak beam these days, you couldn’t afford it. And the long, wide, solid wood boards the siding is made from? You can’t afford those, either. So they don’t get repaired because of the huge cost, and there’s no incentive to repair them in the first place because they aren’t useful any more. So they sit, empty, the roofs leaking, timbers rotting, boards falling off, until, at last, this happens.

The big, red barns that dominated the countryside around here are, within another few decades, going to mostly be gone except for the few that are being maintained by people who can afford to do it.

It’s sad, but at the same time it is, I suppose, natural evolution at work. I still wince and shake my head when I see it happening, but I know why it is happening. So there is a feeling of deep nostalgia, but understanding and acceptance as well. Life moves on.

Beautiful Mornings and Silliness

We’ve had some breathtakingly beautiful mornings here recently, and I took full advantage of it, getting out on the bike whenever I could.

We had some very odd weather here recently. Well, to be fair, the weather all spring and summer was a bit odd. The summer was remarkably cool and wet, and when fall finally hit, that’s when it seemed summer finally arrived. We had mid to late September temperatures well into the high 80s and flirting with the mid 90s here away from the lake. We ran the air conditioning more in late September than we did in July and August put together.

But then things started to get back closer to normal with daytime temps around 60, and night temps down in the low 40s, which makes for great biking weather.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when the weather starts getting really cold and the snow flies and I can’t get out on the bike. Back to pounding the treadmill I guess. Ick.

Banging Your Head On The Table Dept: Windigo Fest

Screen Shot 2017-10-02 at 6.58.03 AM The city of Manitowoc, in its never ending quest to try to get someone, anyone, to come to town and spend some money, is putting on a Windigo Festival on Oct. 6-7. It looks like it could be a good time but I doubt if I’ll get over there because I have stuff on the schedule for both days.

But in a classic example of “why we can’t have nice things”, someone, of course, had to take offense at the town’s attempt to have some fun and drum up some business. Why? Because of, well, Satan apparently.

This person, who owns a very small and utterly insignificant shop in downtown where the festival is going to be held, has gone totally ballistic over this thing. Apparently the person harangued the city council for a considerable amount of time about how this festival was evil incarnate, was a satanic plot to corrupt the youth of the city, how it would lead to the evils of witchcraft and plunge the city into the corruption of sin, bring a host of demons down upon us, God would curse us and the Chicago Bears would beat the Packers…

Oh brother…

It gets worse. The “windigo” is, supposedly, a Native American monster of some sort that would run around and eat people. This person claims it is actually satan himself, and went on and on about satanic worship, demons, etc. for quite a while.

According to this person, pretty much everything about the fest is “satanic”.

The parade they’re going to have is running north to south down the street. That’s “satanic” because normally traffic runs from south to north. Exactly why having the parade route go in that direction is “satanic” is something I’m not really clear about. I mean I’ve read the Bible and I don’t really recall there being any verse that says “And lo, the City of Manitowoc shall route all traffic on Eighth Street from south to north, for routing traffic from north to south is the devil’s work”. And since 10th street two blocks over runs from north to south, does that mean 10th street is satanic and everyone who drives it worships the devil? They weren’t real clear about that one.

Even the dates of the festival are “satanic”. October 6 and 7? Yep, that’s satanic too, it seems. Six plus seven is thirteen, you see, and thirteen is the devil’s number.

The only reason I know about this is because the local paper decided to spend way, way too much time on this nonsense. And while I admit I found it mildly amusing, come on, really? This nonsense should have gotten exactly zero press coverage.

Anyway, if you go to the festival, make sure you say “hi” to Satan. He’s supposed to be hanging out over there. Haven’t seen him in a while. Last time I saw him was when he was in his guise as a state legislator and he sat down next to me at breakfast at a local restaurant.