The weather finally moved into a warmer, drier pattern here in east central Wisconsin and the plants responded by going nuts to make up for lost time. This is really the perfect time of year here, climate speaking. It’s warmer, sunnier, and the mosquitoes have yet to emerge to drive us back into the house.
We put #10 cans around new seedlings to protect them from wind and little creatures until they get well established. We’ve been doing that for ages now and it works quite well.
We made a lot of changes out in the gardens, but you can’t really tell unless you look closely. One thing we are doing again is putting peppers along the south side of the house. That narrow strip of ground between the house and the grass produced a fantastic crop of peppers of various types last year so we’re going to do it again.
We did something different this year with starting seedlings. We used to put a sort of mini green house in the livingroom in front of a south facing window to start seeds but the results were mixed. The seedlings were often spindly and weak and suffered from severe transplant shock. This year we set the mini greenhouse up in the basement with some inexpensive grow lights we got off Amazon along with a heating pad designed for seedling trays. That system worked amazingly well. The peppers, tomatoes and other seeds we started were all thriving in that environment.
Every year we like to try at least one new thing we’ve never grown before and this year it’s brussel sprouts. MrsGF and I both like them a lot so we thought we’d try growing our own and see what happens. They’re a late season crop, usually not harvested until after the first frost they tell me. Brussel sprouts have a bit of a bad reputation, but over the last decade or so the flavor has changed drastically thanks to new varieties that have been introduced. The new varieties have a milder, less bitter flavor, along with a better texture.
And it’s lilac season here in town. There are lilacs all over town, including in our backyard. It seems to be people’s favorite bush around here, and when they all come into bloom around the same time the whole town smells of lilacs. Another reason why I love this time of year.
Other stuff:
it’s hard to tell but if you look to the right of those factory buildings back there at the trees in the distance you can see how hazy it’s been around here.
–> We’ve been under air quality warnings for some time now because of smoke from massive forest fires up in Canada. Down at ground level it’s hard to tell but it’s especially easy to see early in the morning right at sunrise. Off to the east right now at around 6 AM it looks like there’s a thick haze up there. I feel sorry for those poor people up there. Huge areas of forests have burned off already, whole communities are under evacuation orders. It’s pretty bad.
The DNR hasn’t been helping air quality here either. They were doing this the other day…
They’ve been burning off marshes around here adding to the already poor air quality. I was told you could see the smoke from this one for 20 miles and could smell it over the entire county.
–> The biofuel industry is continuing to try to desperately to put off its impending demise as long as possible. We live in a world where it seems we are on an inevitable course to switch to electric powered everything, including transportation, garden tools and everything else that is currently being powered by the burning of some kind of fuel. And that means the entire biofuel industry is about to crash and burn because there isn’t going to be a market for its product any more. That hasn’t stopped them from trying to rake in as much cash as they can until the end comes. It looks like they’ve succeeded in pushing for an increase in sales of 15% ethanol blended gasoline and now they’re pushing for more mandates to blend biodiesel into traditional fuels. Diesel fuel is probably going to be the last gasp for this. Trying to make long haul trucks and trains to run off electricity has been difficult because of the huge power demands so those will probably remain for some time after automobiles and light trucks have gone full electric.
What they really need to be doing is trying to slowly and carefully shut down the whole biofuel system to avoid a massive financial crash that will ripple through the whole agricultural sector. Continuing to invest in biofuels at this point in time is sort of like someone heavily investing in horse drawn carriages right after Ford came out with the Model T.
Now that I’ve been actually using the solar power system for a few days I’ve run into a few interesting quirks. First the solar charging system. Other people with the EG4 6500EX inverter, or who are thinking of buying one, have been following along so I thought I’d warn you about this.
Up in that photo are 5 new 220W solar panels from Newpowa. I picked up 6 of those because I badly need more solar but I don’t have a lot of space to put them. These from Newpowa were the smallest size 200W panels I could find and that’s why I bought ’em. The charger in the EG4 is rated between 80V to 500V input from solar. That’s the minimum amount of voltage it takes to “trigger” so to speak the charger, and the maximum voltage it can handle from the solar panels.
Those five panels in series were putting out about 91 volts, which should have been enough to make the charger work properly. But apparently not. When I plugged them into the EG4 it looked like I was only getting about 450 – 500 watts out of panels that should have been putting out at least 75% – 90% of their rated capacity under the conditions I had that day. They were putting out half of what they should have.
I went back out, checked all of the connectors, all of the wires, made sure I had everything wired properly and couldn’t find any problems. The EG4 has two solar chargers so I plugged into the second one. Nope, same thing, I was only getting a little over 500W under full sun.
Grr, so now what… Could it be that 91V wasn’t enough? I had one more panel that I didn’t have room for. I shuffled things around and connected up all six panels and then checked. I was now getting a bit over 100V and…920W? Yeah, 920 watts. Adding that one panel, kicking the voltage up another 10V doubled the amount of power the panels were putting out.
So apparently that 80V lower limit on the solar charger in the EG4 isn’t quite accurate. I had to push 100V into it in order to get the charge controller to get it to work properly. So if you have one of these things and you aren’t getting the wattage out of your solar panels you think you should, check your voltage. If your panels are putting out less than 100V that could be it.
The other oddity is also related to solar charging. Before I configured the two inverters to work in parallel I was using one inverter alone for testing. It exhibits some interesting behavior. If I had the inverter physically turned off with the switch on the front panel and plugged solar power into it, it would turn itself on and start charging the batteries.
I personally find this a bit troubling. If I have a device that is physically turned off, I expect it to remain off. Period. Now I can understand why they might do this. If you’ve been using the system from battery only and drain the batteries down and shut the system off, it might then start to recharge the batteries automatically when it begins to get solar power. It turned on only the solar charger, not the inverter, so it wasn’t putting out AC so that was something at least.
Once I put the two units in parallel, that behavior changed. When I plugged solar into the turned off master inverter, it would still turn itself on with the power switch turned off. But it wouldn’t actually charge the batteries. It looked like it was in charging mode but it really wasn’t. It indicated it was getting only 47W of power out of solar panels that were putting out 500W. Eventually I figured out that both units need to be physically turned on with the power switch before it will now start actually charging the batteries. I find that disappointing as well. I’d prefer to be able to do what I did before, which was to use the unit to charge the batteries without having to switch the inverters on. Running an inverter while it’s just “idling” along without drawing power from it uses a small but still significant amount of power from the system. Each inverter takes somewhere between 70 – 90 watts of power, or 140W – 180W for the pair. And that’s 140+ watts that could be going into the batteries.
One last observation. These things aren’t exactly quiet. The fans on the EG4s run all the time the units are operating, and depending on the load on the units those fans quickly ramp up in speed. Tucked away in the basement this isn’t a problem but if you’re putting them near a living space some people could find the fans more than a little annoying.
One last thing about the solar system. I finally got the batteries mounted in the cabinet. And found that my existing battery cables going from the inverters to the batteries are too short because of course they are. So it’s time to get out the crimping tools and spend even more money on overpriced copper cable. Always something…
Gardening stuff
We moved the two raised beds from the north side of the backyard to the south side. In the previous location they were starting to get shaded out by a fast growing maple tree and a spruce tree. Growing conditions there were getting worse every year. Now that the ash tree is gone the area where we moved them now gets full sun all day long. Moving them was simple but took a lot of physical labor. Had to shovel out all of the dirt in them, drag them over to the new location and then shovel all the dirt back into them.
We’re doing some decorative work as well. An old, crumbling stone wall is being pulled out along the west side of the garage and being replaced with block, so we got a pallet full of blocks coming in the near future.
I’m not looking forward to that project. I am, at heart, a lazy person when it comes right down to it. I’ve developed an allergy to hard physical labor over the last few years. Still, it needs to get done.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, I found this while I was biking around the other day and I had to stop and take a picture of it.
We have some interesting people around here, including some who are pretty good folk artists. From the road I thought this was a real person for a brief moment when I saw the hi-viz vest.
And let’s finish up with a cat.
I love cats and cats love me, normally. But I don’t know what’s going on with this one. She stares at me, yells at me, glares at me and just barely tolerates my existence. I want to pet her and give her treats. She wants to shred my face. Sigh…
We had to take care of our youngest son’s cat for a few days while he was on vacation and she, being a cat, decided she owned the house.
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So, on Monday, May 1, this is what it looked like outside my front door at 5 AM.
Yes, that’s snow. Nice weather we get here. This is why I haven’t been talking about gardening and bicycling and drone flying and putting up photos of pretty flowers and all that stuff. We had two or three days of summer like weather in March with temperatures in the 80s, and ever since then it’s been like this… cold, wet, cloudly, and now snow. Welcome to Wisconsin. Sigh… The weather has since gotten a bit better. It’s still been so cloudy with occasional rain that we’ve been making pretty much zero solar power. Again, sigh… Of course I shouldn’t complain. I have a friend who lives about 100 miles north of here in the upper peninsula of Michigan and over last week or so he got 52 inches of snow.
What I wanted to talk about is that someone asked why I need two inverters bolted to the wall and not just one. Just one of those inverters can supply 6.5 KW of power, as much as my big Generac gasoline generator, and enough to run almost the entire house as long as we’re careful. So why do I need two of them?
Partly it’s a question of capacity. 6.5 KW is a bit close to the edge for us, so to speak, at least as far as normal daily life is concerned. We may complain about our electric bill but we do like appliances like our coffee makers, our convection oven, etc. With just one inverter there would be times we would be pushing over that 6.5 KW limit. Two inverters give us a comfortable cushion.
The biggest reason though is that we also need 240V power to run some of the appliances in the house. For that we need both inverters. Initially I’m not going to be hooking any 240 appliances into this system because I don’t have eno0ugh batteries and solar panels to handle it, but eventually that’s going to change so I wanted a system that could be switched over easily in the future.
WTF is 240V split phase?
The average person doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to know, what actually goes on in the electrical system of the house. As long as your toaster or computer or TV works when it’s plugged into the wall and the lights turn on when the switch is flipped, that’s all they care about. And for most people that’s fine. But if you want to switch your home to an alternative energy system you need to know what’s going on behind the scenes.
While most of the systems in your house run on 120 VAC, in all likelihood there are some that require more power than a normal 120V line can supply. Things like electric water heaters, clothes dryers, electric stoves, well pumps, etc. will often run on 240V, not 120. The amount of power these appliances require would overload the normal 120V wiring systems in the house. So let me explain what’s going on without this getting complicated.
Well it’s going to get complicated anyway but let’s see what I can do.
What you have coming into your house is two, 120V AC power lines, not one. The two lines can be combined inside your circuit breaker panel to give you 240V to power more power hungry appliances like HVAC systems and clothes dryers.
If you took the front panel off of the main circuit breaker panel in your house it would looks something like the one in the photo below.
Now you’ll notice a couple of things right away if you look at that photo up there carefully. Note that there are two rows of circuit breakers, not one. There is a reason for that and I’ll come to that in a minute.
The next thing I want you to look at is right at the top center of that picture. You’ll see three thick wires coming in from the top. One is black, the 2nd is marked with red tape, and the third runs off to the right of center and is marked with white. Those three lines are what comes in from the service panel attached to the outside of your house and which, in turn, is fed from the utility company. The black wire and the red are the two 120V lines coming into the house and the white is the neutral line.
In your panel are two metal strips called busbars that the two hot wires (sometimes called legs because why not) connect to. Each busbar runs the length of the panel. The circuit breakers in the panel connect to those busbars to get the power that they then send out to the wires that lead to the outlets, lights, etc. in your house.
The circuit breakers on the left side of the panel get their power from L1, and the ones on the right get their power from L2.. Each busbar provides 120V.
So how do you get the 240V? Look at the top of the right row of breakers and you’ll see what looks like two breakers that are joined into one by a bar that connects the two switches together. That’s a 240V breaker.
Well, sort of. It doesn’t actually give you 240V. What it does is tap into both of the busbars at the same times, and lets you run two, 120V hot wires to whatever device that breaker breaker powers. The appliance that circuit energizes can combine both to provide 240V or use the individual 120V lines to power individual circuits in the appliance.
So if you want to design an alternative power system to run your whole house through your existing electrical system, you need a system that provides 120V to both L1 and L2, a 240 split phase system as they call it. And no, I can’t just feed 120V from a single source into both busbars at the same time because L1 and L2 are 180 degrees out of phase with one another and that is important. Or so they tell me.
Okay, so what’s with this phase stuff? Well it gets even more complicated and there is a hell of a lot of misinformation out there about what’s generally called “240V split phase”. There are people out there who will try to tell you that you need 240V split phase to power two phase motors, only there really aren’t any two phase motors out there and there haven’t been in many, many years. Or they’ll tell you you need split phase for electronics which is total BS because almost all modern electronics run off DC not AC…
Okay, look, the reason you have split phase coming into your home… Oh, hell, let’s look at what they’re talking about first of all.
AC stands for alternating current, and it’s called that because it, well, alternates. It doesn’t provide a steady positive voltage the way DC does. It alternates from plus to minus at 60 cycles per second. If you were to hook an oscilloscope up to an AC power line what you’d see on the screen is something like what you see in the picture over there on the left.
If you could look at both L1 and L2 at the same time on an oscilloscope it would look something like the picture over there on the right. The two are 180 degrees out of phase.
Why do we even use this system? It would take me pages and pages to explain all of that so I’ll leave it to you to go scurry over to Wikipedia or somewhere and find out for yourself.
So you have two, 120V lines coming in your house and they are 180 degrees out of phase with one another. Sort of. Kinda. And that’s important for, well, reasons, all right? And the two lines can be combined to give you 240V to power bigger appliances. Or not.
Are you confused yet? I am.
But let’s get back to my setup here. Each of the inverters will supply 1 of the two hot lines needed to get 240. And the two inverters “talk” to each other over a communications line so their sine waves are 180 degrees out of phase when in the split phase mode. Which is important for, well, for reasons. Or so they tell me. That’s what we’re stuck with.
But at the moment I don’t want to run any of my 240V appliances off this system. First of all that equipment sucks up huge amounts of power which would drain my batteries fast. The second issue is that my central air conditioning system quite possibly would require more amperage than my batteries can supply. EG4 recommends having at least 5 batteries in order to supply enough amperage to start up a big HVAC system like mine and I only have 3 at the moment.
To make a long story a bit shorter, I have two inverters because I’ll probably almost certainly need a system that can provide more load capacity than a single inverter would give me, and I eventually may want to expand the system to get 240V if I ever get enough batteries and solar panels up to support it.
But I’ve bored you long enough with this. let’s get on with it…
Catching up
One of the things I ordered for this system was a battery cabinet to hold the batteries that has its own built in busbar system for connecting the batteries, and which is also lockable to keep people from fiddling with things they shouldn’t. That was on backorder and I got an email from Signature Solar telling me I could either wait, or they could ship me a slightly different model cabinet. Like everyone else they’re still having supply chain issues. I told them I’d take the different model and that should be here Monday. I jury rigged things together so I could test the inverters and charge the batteries but it can’t stay that way. Once the cabinet arrives I can get the batteries properly configured and start putting everything together.
I have more solar panels on order because my 800 watts of solar is woefully inadequate to keep 15 KWh of batteries charged. Those are supposed to be coming May 15 so I’ll need to build frames to hold all of those.
Gardening Stuff
The weather hasn’t been very good but we’ve managed to get some work done out in the gardens. Once things warm up and the skies clear up we’re going to be really busy. We’re taking out a crumbling stone wall and replacing that, moving two of the raised beds to a new location and a bunch of other stuff going out there. MrsGF has had her indoor greenhouse going down in the basement for weeks already starting plants that will get transplanted outdoors as soon as the weather permits.
Artsy/craftsy stuff
The brewery called me the other day, asking if I’d make more drinks coasters for them. A couple of good friends opened a brewpub, something they’d dreamed of doing for years. So they bought a building with an existing tavern that had enough room for them to put in their brewery and then… Then Covid hit. And somehow they still managed to pull it off and even managed to pay the bills during that whole mess. And now they’re doing pretty well.
Anyway a while back I found some super cheap plain drinks coasters made from wood and some from paperboard and for the heck of it I fired up Photoshop and made some graphics, putting their logo on one side and an allegedly humorous illustration on the other and then used the laser engraver to burn it into the coasters. i thought they looked a bit on the unprofessional side but they were fun to do so I did a few. I never thought they’d actually use them in the bar. But they did, and apparently the customers loved them. And stole them. Which was okay because it’s good PR for the brewery. So I’ve done dozens, maybe a couple of hundred of these things over the last couple of years and I just got a request for more so I got that going on. People are easily amused, I guess.
But enough of this. I need to get going here. I’ve probably put you to sleep already with all of this. I know I’ve nodded off a couple of times myself…
Technically it is still summer, but it’s the middle of September and it is sure starting to look and feel like autumn out there. I have to wear a jacket when I go out on the bike in the morning. Early morning temperatures are generally down in the mid-50s. Not bad, really, but chilly enough that it makes things a bit shivery without a bit of extra clothing. But then, this being Wisconsin, the next day we have to turn on the air conditioning by mid afternoon. When I was still working at the school district there were a lot of days when we had to run the aircon during the day and then fire up the boilers at night.
The growing season is over for some things here. We took out the butternut squash plants two days ago. Well, what was left of them. They’d been dying back for a couple of weeks now as they came to the natural end of their lives. But they left behind a massive amount of squash.
This is the second year we’ve had squash in the corner garden by the air conditioner, and the second year we’ve had a bumper crop. This area is amazingly prolific no matter what we plant in there, as long as we water it regularly. The corner faces south-west, so it gets direct sun almost every day. Plus the white siding of the house helps to concentrate the light and keep the temperature in that corner more moderated. We’ve also dumped a heck of a lot of compost in there as well over the years. We put parsley along the edge, a line of wax beans just inside there, and squash in the middle, and everything grew like crazy. We have enough beans to last us more than a year, and the squash…
A whole wheelbarrow full of the things. These will keep just fine for a while, at least until we have time to process them and get them into the freezer.
We pulled out the cucumber plants as well. We only put in two this year, but those were ridiculously prolific as well and we just didn’t know what to do with the cukes any more. We have enough pickles of various types on the shelves in the basement to last us probably two years.
We still have some beets and carrots left in the ground that need to get harvested and processed. Carrots will get blanched and frozen. The beets that ar eleft are really too small to do much with and will probably get eaten right away. Most of those are already either canned or in the freezer.
Some things are still going strong, though. My jalapeno plants were disappointing all summer long. i didn’t get more than a dozen fruits off them during the summer. But now the dopey things have decided to start to go crazy and they’re covered with flowers. Why? I have no idea.
We still have lots of flowers in bloom around here and some of them are pretty spectacular.
Let’s see, what else…
If you’ve been following this blog you know the big ash tree in the backyard came down earlier this summer. That area is finally cleaned out. I found a local fellow in Forest Junction who built his own sawmill and could use the massive log that was left. I didn’t get paid anything for it. Didn’t want to. I just wanted to see that log get used for something useful rather than end up rotting in an old gravel pit which is where it would have ended up. Depending on the quality of the wood once he starts sawing it, it could end up as molding and trim for local houses being built just a few blocks from here. Wouldn’t that be neat?
MrsGF and I still haven’t decided what to do with the area that the removal of the tree opened up. It was way too shady back there to grow much of anything. Now that the area is opened up to full sun we have a lot of options. We kept the stump intact and we’re thinking of doing something interesting with that. Ideas range from using it as the base for a garden bench to using it as a pedestal for a piece of artwork.
We should have new garage doors going in fairly soon. The existing doors, hardware and openers are over 30 years old and definitely showing their age. But as is all too common these days, supply chain issues are a bottleneck. The installer said we’re looking at a 2 to 6 week wait for all of the parts to come in.
That doesn’t really bother us, though. MrsGF and I are from a generation where we often had to wait for things. We didn’t grow up in this instant gratification society that seems to have developed over the years. To us the fact that you can order something online and have it arrive at your door within 48 hours or even less still seems a bit startling.
Speaking of businesses, I’ve had three different job offers in the last week alone, ranging from some recruiter who wanted me to do COBOL programming (I haven’t used COBOL since, oh, 1985 I think and I don’t remember how to do even the basics) to a local fellow who is a professional carpet cleaner who would have paid me embarrassingly large amounts of money for even a few hours of work per week, set my own schedule, work however long I wanted, etc. That’s how desperate people are for workers around here. Last night we went to a restaurant in the Fox Valley for our son’s birthday and they’re so short handed they don’t have wait staff at all any more. They’re somehow keeping open by just manning the kitchen and customers ordering at a counter, getting their own drinks, etc. We certainly didn’t have to worry about catching covid. We were the only people in the place.
Sidenote: One of Wisconsin’s more well known village idiots (cough, sorry, typo there) politicians came up with the perfect plan to solve the labor shortage. He wants to kill Social security dead and force all those lazy old people to go back to work. Of course now that he’s facing an election he has a good chance of losing he denies he said any such thing, but he did. And some of the things he’s said recently indicate he still thinks that way.
Enough of that, though. What else… Oh, I want to talk about drones in the near future. I got a new one which is pretty darned nice. I want to talk about bicycling in general. A lot of communities claim that they are “bike friendly” and they claim they would dearly love to shift people out of cars and onto bicycles. But they sure as hell don’t make it easy for people to do that. Now that the growing season is winding down I should have some time to start fiddling around in the wood shop again. I haven’t even been in there in the last few months. That all got shut down because of how busy we get during the spring and summer. I was in the process of taking down the ceiling in there to do some major remodeling and that’s been on hold way too long.
Let’s start out with heat. Yesterday it hit 95 here and today it’s supposed to be even hotter. The only thing we did outside yesterday was water the gardens in the evening. It was too hot to do much of anything except huddle around the air conditioner and today is going to be even worse. I know Wisconsin is known for things like ice fishing and snowmobiling, but we do get hot weather here, but only rarely does it get this hot. (Edit: I wrote the above at around 7 AM and it was already in the low 80s. It’s now late afternoon and my recording thermometer tells me we hit a high today of 101. Sheesh…)
Do I need to tell you that I am really, really glad I’m not farming any more when we get weather like this? Remembering what it was like to be out working in the fields or, even worse, milking cows in that crowded old barn, makes me shudder. I don’t know how the hell we managed to do it back then. We’d rush through milking as fast as we could and quickly get the cows down into the woods where there were springs with plenty of water and a lot of shade and it was much, much cooler. Of course today they can’t do that. The majority of cattle these days are crowded into feedlots and never see actual real grass or natural springs and streams in their entire lives.
I’ve been slowly working on cleaning up the mess that was left after they brought the trees down. That picture up there shows what I was left to deal with after they were done. And the picture below is what it looks like now.
As you can see considerable progress has been made in reducing the pile of wood. Considering I’m just one old guy with a chainsaw nibbling away at it when I get some time, I think I’ve made pretty good progress. There’s actually less now than what you see. Pretty much all that’s left out there is just the main trunk from the ash tree.
My neighbor came over with his little Oliver and hauled out three good sized logs that will hopefully go to a friend of his who has a small sawmill. The idea there is to slab them to eventually make table tops out of the slabs.
The gardens are looking good, but things are getting dry again. We’ve been watering all of the vegetable gardens almost on a daily basis, especially now that it’s got so hot and breezy. That hot wind really sucks the moisture out of the soil.
The carrots are looking absolutely amazing. We need to get in there and start thinning them out again so they have a chance to grow to a decent size. Why so many carrots? Well, why not? They’re tasty. The home grown varieties always seem to have much better flavor and are much sweeter than the ones we get in the store. And they’re easy to harvest, clean and freeze.
The beets are looking just as good. MrsGF and I both love beets. We like them roasted or made into harvard beets or just cooked up on a stove top with a bit of butter, salt and pepper.
And you can see that the onions to the right of the beets are looking good as well. We put in a lot of onions this year because I want to can pickled onions. We have a mix of white, yellow and red onions out there. And they’re delicious right now, young, tender, sweet but with a delightful spiciness to them.
We only put in three tomato plants this year because we still have a lot of tomato sauces on the shelves down in the basement. They’re looking pretty good and are just starting to blossom.
We put in pole beans again this year. We had good luck with them last year and they looking like they’re going to be just as good this year.
We also have some bush beans planted in the corner garden, along with some squash. The stuff does really well well but we really have to watch the moisture levels in the soil. This corner dries out very, very quickly. Those squash plants you see behind the line of beans will rather quickly grow and totally overwhelm that whole area if we don’t keep them trimmed back. It’s amazing how fast those squash vines grow once they get started.
We’re trying to plant pepper plants along the south side of the house this year. This is another area where we have to watch the moisture levels. that area dries out very quickly as well so they have to be watered every day as well. We were thinking of expanding this area out to about the end of the downspouts, more than tripling the size of the bed. We might do that this fall after the peppers are done.
Ooo, and I can’t forget the lily! They’re just starting to pop open and they look amazing!
Let’s see, what else…
We still haven’t really decided what we’re going to do in the area where the tree was. We’re still thinking of making a large decorative raised bed back there surrounded by stone or brick. It’s going to depend on how much work and money we want to sink into that area. We probably won’t do anything until at least this fall, maybe not until spring next year.
Woodworking projects are all on hold as I’m doing some major remodeling in the workshop. The 25 year old fluorescent lights, along with the entire ceiling, are coming down. Lights are going to be replaced with LEDs and I am not going to put another drop ceiling in there. The ceiling is pretty high in there and I’m thinking about building a lumber storage area up there. Right now my spare boards and things are sitting on pallets in the other part of the basement taking up a huge amount of floor space and it’s always in the way.
After a brief bout with unusual heat where temperatures pushed into the 90s (Appleton school district actually canceled classes last Friday because of heat) we’re back down to daytime temps in the 60s and low 70s, which is close to what we should be getting. The gardens are coming along nicely. We decided to put off increasing the size of any of the planting beds or making other major decisions until after the trees come down so we can better decide what we want to do out there.
The big decorative bed out towards the back of the yard is doing well. The irises are looking beautiful and so are the other plants that made it through the winter. It doesn’t look like MrsGF’s blueberry made it though, alas. We just haven’t had any luck at all when it comes to blueberries. Either they succumbed to some kind of fungus, even though they were supposed to be resistant to that, or they didn’t survive the winter.
The raised beds are looking very good indeed. Carrots and beets are all up and looking good and the garlic and onions are doing quite well. We put in a lot of onions this year. We use a lot of them, both for eating fresh, as an ingredient in tomato sauces and other recipes, salads, etc. And they just taste better than what you get at the store. Most of the varieties you see at the grocery stores seem to be moving towards types that don’t actually taste like onions any longer. They’ve decided that consumers don’t like tangy, spicey onions and they want varieties that are more mild, lack flavor, and even are sweet. If you like sweet onions, good for you. Everyone has different likes and dislikes. But I want an onion that smells and tastes like an onion. We had one bag of store bought onions come through here where I swear I thought I had Covid because I couldn’t smell them when I was cutting them up. They were so mild you could have eaten one like an apple.
The hostas in front of the house are looking really good this year. They seem to do quite well up in front even though the soil up there is really, really nasty.
And the goofy little Hens and Chicks up there that we scattered around the fence posts are doing pretty good too. They’re now moving all along the area between the cedar fence and sidewalk. They’re fun little things and seem to do good up there.
We have pole beans in this one. They did pretty good last year so we decided to plant them again. Along with more onions and some lettuce that I think we’ll be able to start eating in another week or so.
The corner garden has squash again this year, with parsley planted along the outside edge and, of course Mr. Spiny the cactus back there on the right.
Things are really dry here right now. We had to start watering the gardens yesterday. Our weather patterns here seem to have really changed a lot over the last few years. We’re getting more long periods without rain at unusual times of the year, unusual periods of extreme heat, less snow during the winter. Weather is highly variable, of course, but this seems to be a trend moving towards less predictable weather events.
Dr. Who – I must confess I’m something of a Dr. Who fan. Sort of. Or was, rather. My affection for the Dr. goes way back to the era of rubber monsters, all the “alien” worlds being filmed in the same rock quarry, and the utterly silly fellow with the long scarf and an addiction to jelly babies. Basically it was a kids show with a skimpy budget, often ridiculously silly plots, bad acting and, well, you name it. It was juvenile. It was fun.
But then came along Colin Baker as the Dr and he and the writing just rubbed me the wrong way. Baker came off, IMO, as utterly arrogant and, frankly, an asshole. And his sidekick, Perry, played by Nicola Bryant, quickly became known around the family as “Miss Cleavage” because of the often ridiculously low cut shirts she was dressed in to show off her, well, cleavage, for basically no reason 0ther than trying to “sex it up”, so to speak. I suspect they were trying to push up sagging ratings as high as the outfits pushed up Ms. Bryant’s anatomy.
That was the end of my watching Dr. Who until the reboot when Eccleston popped up as the new doctor and, well, wow. All of a sudden the show had an actual real budget with actual real special effects and actual real plot lines and good acting (mostly) and good writing (sometimes). And it stayed good for quite some time. But then the show started to suffer from what I call The Topper Syndrome. The writers weren’t satisfied with just writing good stories. Every new episode had to top the last one, they had to get bigger and more exciting and cover more and more crazy monsters and conspiracies and have bigger explosions and you just can’t keep that kind of thing up for very long without ‘jumping the shark’, as they say. That phrase means a show has so worn itself out that it has to resort to ever more bizarre and ridiculous stunts and gimmicks in order to try to keep it’s sagging ratings from sinking even further.
Then along came Jodi Whitaker as the first female doctor and I thought that, finally, the show was going to refresh itself, become more interesting, more entertaining, focus on story and plot and… And no, it didn’t. They utterly wasted Ms. Whitaker’s talents by bogging her down in one endlessly dull, and even insulting story after another. A lot of people attributed the flagging ratings and increasing criticism of the show to misogyny on the part of the Who fans, and even to racism and prejudice because the story lines now included persons who experienced physical and mental challenges and dealt with racism. I don’t think that’s true, though. I do think the show went over the top occasionally because it seemed it was going out of its way to be “inclusive”, but I think the real problem was that the writing was just plain not very good and the directing was even worse. As often as not Ms. Whitaker was made to look like some kind of overactive, over excited child hopped up on espresso and sugar instead of a thousand year old Time Lord.
So now we’re about to get a new Dr. Who, Ncuti Gatwa and I am very much looking forward to seeing him in the role. He’s young, just 29, and IMO he’s an excellent actor who I think can bring new energy, new poise and a new interpretation to the role. He’ll be the first black actor to take on the role.
What I find a bit curious is that they’re bringing back the Rose Tyler character, but she is not going to be played by Billie Piper who was the original in the series reboot. Rose Tyler is now going to be played by Yasmin Finney. Exactly how they are going to explain Rose Tyler changing from a young white female into a young black transgender woman is going to be interesting. I’m rather looking forward to that too.
Rumor has it that the “multiverse” is going to be involved. The multiverse has become just one of a long series of deus ex machina plot devices writers turn to when they write themselves into a corner. Dr. Who has already dabbled in that nonsense early on when the Rose Tyler character became too intensely involved with the Dr, so they conveniently trapped her in a different universe that she couldn’t escape from. Well, couldn’t escape from until the writers decided that she could.
One of the issues with the rebooted series is that they constantly introduce story lines that focus on the Dr’s companions, and the companions start to become more popular with fans than the Dr and they can’t have that so they have to get rid of companions or the show isn’t about the Doctor any more. So Rose Tyler ends up trapped in another universe. Amelia and Rory get trapped in the early 20th century for reasons that are never adequately explained and die of old age, Clara outright dies, but then is resurrected again immediately and somehow is still out there, somewhere, running around in a stolen Tardis, still dead but somehow still alive, Donna Noble, they had to get rid of her because she got too popular and somehow absorbed all of the knowledge of the Time Lords, so they erased her memory… But then plot holes big enough to drive a truck through and unsatisfying loose ends (like Clara, and the the Dr’s daughter (technically a sort of clone but that’s what they called her)) are, alas, rather common.
Here’s a lesson for you, if some dude in funny clothes shows up in a Tardis and wants you to go traveling with him, don’t go. It doesn’t end well.
We’ve been on a sort of weather rollercoaster here. We went from high temperatures in the low fifties to 91 degrees and humid on Tuesday, then back down to a high of about 60 on Wednesday, and today we’re supposed to be back up in the steam bath again today with temperatures up in the 90s. Sheesh. It’s been an odd spring.
I’m back out on the bike on a regular basis at least thanks to the warmer weather. It looks like farmers are a bit behind in planting this year from all of the unplanted fields I’m seeing out there.
It’s dry out there, folks. According to the statistics we’re reasonably close to normal rainfall, but actual ground conditions are not good. The entire state is under a burning ban and we’ve had wild fires popping up all over the state. Some parts of the state got some decent rainfall but it skipped around us. We’re going to have to start watering the vegetable beds here today or tomorrow if we don’t get some rain.
Now that I’m back on the bike again I’ve been down to the river at the old stone bridge about 4 miles from here and things look unusually dry down there as well. Water levels in the river are unusually low for this time of year. This branch of the Manitowoc River usually isn’t this low until mid to late summer.
The old stone bridge is a great spot to stop and get a drink and just watch nature. There’s almost no traffic on that road. I’ll stop there for ten or fifteen minutes, get out my water and stand on the bridge and just watch nature. There are at least two families of geese out there, a few muskrats swimming around, turtles and birds everywhere.
Here at the house the early spring flowers are popping up everywhere. The tulips are coming up now that the daffodils are coming to an end.
Out in the raised beds everything is coming up; onions, lettuce, carrots and beets and even the garlic is emerging now. The garlic we planted last fall didn’t make it through the winter, so we planted a different variety and hopefully we’ll get some by fall. We’ll see how that works out.
We talked to the tree service and let them know that it’s dry enough out here now that they can get in with their equipment so they’re going to be coming over next week to take out the two trees you see in the photo up there. The one on the right is a big old ash tree that’s starting to rot from the top down. Every time we get a good wind it sheds branches all over, some of them big enough to cause damage or injury if someone happened to be standing in the wrong place. The one on the left is an old maple that belongs to our neighbor. Almost the entire right side of the tree up in the canopy is dead so that one has to come down too. I hate to see trees coming down but these two are at the end of their lives and they need to come down before they do some serious damage or even hurt someone.
Removing the big ash gives us a lot more options for gardening as well. It shades out a huge amount of space in the yard making it difficult for growing anything except grass and weeds back there. Once that’s gone we’ll have a large area back there with full sun that give us a lot more opportunities for growing stuff. We have some general ideas about what to do with the space back there but nothing firm as yet. I’ll keep you posted.
With those trees coming down I also had to take down my OCFD antenna (off center fed dipole) and it’s a good thing I did because I found this:
Well, that’s not good, now is it? The antenna was just hanging on by a thread. Fixing something like this isn’t hard to do but it’s annoying. The problem area is only a few feet from the end so I could have just fudged it by cutting it off at the frayed bit and attaching that to the insulator. Cutting a couple of feet off of a 130+ foot long wire antenna isn’t going to screw it up too badly, especially since I use an antenna tuner anyway.
What caused the damage? The antenna was running to the cedar tree behind that small shed in that photo of the trees up there. It looks like my line sagged letting the wire down far enough so it was rubbing on the roof of the shed.
I really need to look into a different antenna configuration. That OCFD is just too long to fit completely in my yard. Fortunately both of my neighbors don’t mind if I run a line into trees on their property, but I need to try to figure out a different way of setting it up to try to keep it entirely on my property. I do have a vertical antenna which works fine, but that OCFD gives me more options. And it’s also my NVIS antenna for semi-local communications down on 75 meters and I don’t want to give that up.
Other stuff going on:
Now that the weather has turned nice I can finally finish up bringing down the dropped ceiling in the woodshop. I’ve been procrastinating on that because there is a lot of dust up there above those ceiling tiles and I wanted to put a couple of exhaust fans in the windows to suck it out of the house instead of having it plug up my air filters in the shop. That ceiling is getting bad. It’s been up for more than 20 years, and incorporates old fashioned fluorescent tube lights which are terribly energy inefficient. I already have new shop lights waiting to go in, LED versions which will use about a quarter of the energy and give better light.
I reviewed the LaserPecker 1 laser engraver a while back, and I now have its big brother, the LP2 sitting on the shelf and in use and I want to do a review of that. The hardware is very, very nice. It’s much, much faster, more powerful and has a lot more options, including a roller system that should be very useful. Unfortunately it shares the same major problem the LP1 had: the software is horrible. This is a professional quality engraver that is badly hampered by amateurish cell phone based operating software. There is PC based software for the LP2 which is what I’ve been using which makes it easier to use, but the program riddled with bugs and odd quirks. It’s sad, really, because the LP2 is a fantastic gadget. I’ve been doing custom artwork and engravings for a craft brewer and pub owner in Milwaukee and it does a great job.
On the wood lathe side of things I’ve had a really nifty bowl hollowing system sitting around for months now that I’ve never had an opportunity to really talk about here, so I need to put that in the que one of these days.
And one of these days I want to talk about the “metaverse”. What’s his name over at “Meta” as they now call FaceScam, uh, excuse me, Facebook, has stumbled across an idea that is at least 25 years old and has been done before with varying degrees of success (and more often failure), they’ve stolen that, claimed it as their own, and is now are hyping up a storm. Meta’s “vision” of this metaverse is, frankly, silly, childish, badly implemented, laughably cartoonish and doesn’t even take into account basic human nature. It’s really kind of sad, to be honest. I’ve seen Meta’s “virtual world”, which they call Horizons, and to be honest it looks like a badly rendered version of The Jetson’s cartoon show from the 1960s. To call it cartoonish is insulting to cartoons
I want to talk about cameras too somewhere along the line. I want to talk about “cryogenic” tools… Egads, look at that list… Sigh… I’d better get to work.
Well, maybe I’ll get to work later. Right now it’s sunny out, warm, there’s a bicycle sitting in the garage waiting for me…
The weather has finally started to turn! After one of the nastiest Aprils I can remember with almost perpetual clouds, cold, rain, mist and snow, it looks like we’ve turned the corner.
Daytime temps have been up in the mid to high 50s, even pushing a bit over 60. And we’ve had bright, sunny days. MrsGF and I have been spending a lot of time outside cleaning up after winter and things are starting to shape up nicely. The daffodils are all up and it’s delightful to see those bright yellow flowers out there.
We’ve even planted some stuff already, although that’s a bit chancey this time of year. We have a lot of onions out this year. One whole raised bed is all onions and some garlic this year.
And this…
That’s lettuce. Yes, lettuce. MrsGF said what the heck and put in a bit of lettuce just to see what would happen. I thought the ground was still too cold for the seeds to sprout but damn, look at that up there. Lettuce growing. In Wisconsin. In the first week of May. Outside. Sheesh…
Rhubarb is well on its way as well. It’s always the first thing to pop up out of the ground.
The irises are all up as well and looking beautiful. They’re early risers as well, so to speak. They’re about 8 inches or more tall already and looking very good.
Thanks to the old ash and maple trees back there we’ve had to clean up a lot of branches and twigs. Most of them went down to the town compost site where they’re chipped and turned into mulch but some of them went to feed the stainless steel fire thingie we picked up early last year. That thing was one of the best investments we made. It wasn’t cheap but it’s well made out of thick stainless steel. Beats the heck out of something like a firepit or one of those cheap sheet metal ones you get at the big box stores that rusts through within a year or two. Because of the clever venting system it has there is little or no smoke, and fires are fully contained so the chance of starting the grass on fire is virtually zero even in dry conditions.
Hopefully our big ash tree and the neighbor’s maple will be coming down soon. The two of them are definitely at the end of their lives. Large amounts of bark are coming off the maple along with branches and there is significant rot up in the ash tree where some of the main branches come together.
With the trees coming down soon I had to take down my OCFD wire antenna, and discovered significant damage on it where it must have been rubbing against something. Sigh… Always something. Fortunatley I found that before it got bad enough for the wire to break completely. I’ll have to fix that before it can go back up again. Grr…
So I only have the vertical antenna in operation right now and that has some issues as well, it seems. I’ve noticed that the SWR is fluctuating a bit. The meter indicates it’s fluctuating from about 1.12 to 1.16 during transmissions. I’m not sure if that is being caused by the antenna itself or feed line, or if it’s something in the meter on my Palstar antenna tuner. If I look at the SWR meter built into my transceiver I don’t see any fluctuations at all, but then that is a tiny, tiny flutter in the first place and that meter might not “see” it. I might be worrying over nothing but it still makes me a bit concerned.
The improvement in the weather means I can get out on the bicycle again. I love biking but not when the temperatures are down in the 40s. For the last few days I’ve been getting out every day for a half hour or 45 minutes to try to build up my endurance after a long winter of basically not doing much of anything as far as exercise goes.
That’s it for now. Time to get back out into the gardens!
Addendum – just got stung by a wasp. Damn that hurts! Wonder what I did to make him mad at me?
This is sort of a catchup post because I haven’t really had enough material to justify doing an update to the blog until now, so let’s get started.
It’s spring cleanup time. Or at least that’s what the calendar tell me. Outside, though, well, it’s been bloody cold and nasty. We had about only three days here where the temperature got above fifty. Mostly it’s been in the 40s, even dipping as low as the mid twenties at night. Not exactly my idea of April weather.
It’s still a mess back here but it’s starting to look a lot better. Spent almost an entire day cleaning up the yard.
It’s a mess back there in the yard, alas. MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up the debris left from the winter and it’s starting to shape up now finally. The old ash tree in my yard and the dying maple in my neighbor’s both have been shedding branches and bark all over. The smoke you see in the photo up there is because we lit the fireplace back there both to warm up and to deal with the twigs and sticks and bark that had come off the trees during the winter.
We’re probably going to do a major expansion of the corner garden in the photo up there. That’s prime growing area there in that corner. It faces the south west so it gets full sun almost all day long, with light being reflected off the white siding, and in that sheltered area it’s the first ground to thaw in the spring and the last to freeze in the fall, and it’s very well drained. We’re going to expand that area in a semicircle out past that post with the birdfeeder, and it’s going to extend along the right side of the house past the downspouts. That will more than double the amount of square footage we have there.
Back here hopefully within a couple of weeks that big tree will be gone. It looks relatively healthy but it really isn’t. It sheds branches like rain drops whenever there is a stiff breeze and up near the top of the tree it’s starting to rot where to large branches come together off the main trunk. It’s also an ash tree so I’m surprised the emerald ash borer hasn’t attacked it yet. If we don’t take it down soon a good wind storm will take it down for us. We already had a tree service come in to look at it, and as soon as it dries out enough for them to get their equipment in there without sinking into the ground it’s coming down, along with the neighbor’s dying maple.
Getting that tree out of there will also open up a large part of the yard to full sun so we can grow a lot more stuff. We aren’t quite sure what we’ll do with the area but we’ve been sketching out some preliminary plans for a large decorative feature. Maybe. Depends on how ambitious we get.
Antenna stuff: I finally got the new off center fed dipole up when we had a rare warm, sunny day. So I was up on the roof of the garage, then about 20 feet up a couple of different trees and, well, let’s just say it was an interesting experience.
Those of you who are amateur radio operators will undoubtedly note that it is not exactly the ideal configuration for an OCFD. It’s way too low to the ground, the two legs are running in a rather tight ‘V’ configuration instead of running out straight, etc. It’s only about 12 feet off the ground and it really should be something like 30 – 40 feet up. But you work with what you have. I don’t have a tower, don’t have tall trees, and I don’t have the space to string up a 140 foot long antenna in what is supposed to be the “ideal” configuration.
And guess what? Despite all of that, the antenna works just fine and dandy, thank you very much. According to the good ole boys I sometimes listen to down on 75 meters pontificating about antennas and other things, this antenna shouldn’t work very well in this configuration. Only it does. Since I put it up I’ve had contacts in California, the Carolinas, well, all over the continental United States and Canada, and according to PSK Reporter I’ve been heard in Europe and Australia as well.
Would it work better if it were in the “ideal” configuration, up above 30 feet with the legs extended properly? Probably. Don’t care. You work with you got.
Looks like I got this one up in time because my vertical antenna is now doing weird things. The thing got whacked by a fairly good sized branch from one of the trees and I think it knocked something loose so I’m going to have to pull that thing down one of these days and check that out.
Laser engraver: The nice delivery driver who brings me goodies from time to time just dropped off the Laserpecker 2 the other day. I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on this one after playing with the Laserpecker 1 for a few months. I have the LP2 up and running and it is very, very, very nice. It is much more powerful than the original, much, much faster, offers much higher resolution. The version I have here comes with the roller system in the box on the right. That allows it to engrave cylindrical objects like water bottles and the like. And most interestingly of all, the roller mechanism can be reversed and turned into a drive mechanism for the LP2 allowing it to travel along a board or tabletop or other smooth surface to make continuous long engravings. I haven’t set up the roller system yet and I’m looking forward to trying it.
And best of all, for me anyway, it is no longer tied to a stupid phone app to run it. You can still use a phone app, but there is actual real PC software that will control this thing. It looks like the PC software gives much better control over the engraver than the phone app did. Best of all I don’t have to fiddle around trying to get artwork I make in Photoshop imported into the stupid phone app. I can do everything right on the computer now.
Unfortunately the PC software has some serious problems with it. It’s riddled with bugs, odd quirks, difficulties in connecting the PC to the LP2 and other issues. Most of those can be worked around but frankly the PC software looks like it was never properly tested before being released.
The LP2 is most definitely not cheap. I can see a hobbyist spending $250 on the Laserpecker 1 to do the occasional engraving on an art project. It’s a fun little gadget that works pretty well and at that price you don’t need to use it a lot to justify the expense. The Laserpecker 2 package that you see here with the roller system will set you back $1,200. IMO this pushes it well outside of the hobbyist level product. In order to justify that kind of expense you need to have a serious application for something like this.
Anyway, look for a full review of the LP2 in the near future.
And that’s about it for this time. Now if only the weather would start to warm up…
Gads, I just realized how long it’s been since I posted anything and I am feeling a wee bit guilty. Where in the world did the time go? I was going to talk about gardening and working with resin and the new camera and a lot of other things but lots of other things always seemed more important… Anyway, let’s get on with this.
One of the things that’s been keeping us busy here is the usual autumn cleanup. The squash plants went absolutely bonkers this year. We’re enormously pleased with the production we got from the squash this year. MrsGF got some organic butternut squash seed in early spring. I think we had about 6 plants all together and conditions must have been perfect for them because we ended up with an entire wheelbarrow full of massive squash. I’ve only rarely ever seen butternuts this large before. And as for quantity, well you can see we for yourselves. I filled a wheelbarrow completely full with the things and there are about a half dozen more not in the photo up there. Quality is excellent too. They taste fantastic. MrsGF is saving the seeds from a couple of these guys for planting next spring so hopefully we’ll get the same results in the future.
We’ve scaled way back on the amount of vegetables we planted but we still had more than we could deal with. Nothing went to waste, though. Excess went to neighbors and family or we give it away at the local St. Vincent de Paul store.
I’ve been adding more compost to the raised beds to get them ready for next spring.
Cleaning up the gardens at the end of the season is a pain but it has to get done. We try to get that finished up as soon as we can because once September comes we never know what the weather is going to be like. We’re lucky enough to live just down the street from the town compost site. They do a great job of composting here and the end product is fantastic. And it’s free to town residents so you can be darn sure we take advantage of that.
Garlic planted about 2 weeks ago.
We’re experimenting with growing garlic. We use a lot of the stuff in cooking but the quality of garlic we get from the local stores isn’t very good. Usually the bulbs we find in the stores have obviously been in storage for a long, long time and has lost a lot of its flavor. We’ve tried growing garlic before and we weren’t very successful. One batch of ridiculously expensive organic garlic we planted didn’t even sprout. One batch we tried did grow, but the bulbs were disappointingly small. The stuff tasted so intense and so good though, and so much better than what we were buying that we still want to try growing our own. So half of one of the raised beds is now in garlic. Once cold weather hits the bed will get covered with mulch to protect it, then that will be removed in the spring and hopefully in mid to late summer we’ll have garlic.
The rest of this bed is going to be planted in all onions next spring.
Onions are pretty cheap so why do we grow our own? Flavor, of course. In their never ending quest to breed vegetable types that have longer storage life, are easier to harvest and which look pretty even after sitting in a cooler at the store for weeks, what plant breeders have done is also eliminate a lot of the flavor and aroma from their crops. The veggies are still good, still nutritious, but a lot of the flavor and aroma has been lost in exchange for traits commercial producers want. The same is true for onions.
That onion you buy at the store looks perfectly good, is certainly fine to eat, even healthy. But the flavor and aroma? It just isn’t there. Take a garden grown onion and a store bought onion from one of those net bags and slice each in half, and as soon as the knife slides through it you’ll be able to tell which one you grew yourself and which one you bought. Our home grown onions are pungent, rich in flavor, juicy and spicy. Store bought ones? Bleh… We never have any home grown onions last until fall. They’re usually all used up long before the end of the growing season.
And they are ridiculously easy to grow. Just snag some set onions in the spring, shove them about an inch into the ground, make sure they get enough water, and that’s about it. In a few weeks you’ll have green onions for salads or cooking, and a few weeks later they develop into utterly delicious, pungent, luscious bulbs.
Okay, I have to stop talking about food. I’m starting to get hungry!
Let’s see, what else?
Oh, they’re finally tearing down the old cheese factory here in town. This place has been an eyesore for decades. The parent company shut it down ages ago and pulled out, and it’s been left standing there and rotting away ever since and the company refused to do anything with it. It was a blight on the whole town. It sits right across the street from a beautiful town park, and on the main highway so the first thing people see when they come into town is this rotting old building. Not exactly a good impression.
After many, many years of trying to get the company to do something, anything, with this nasty mess, the town finally convinced the company to sell the thing and bought it from them. We got state and federal grants to cover almost all of the demolition and clean up costs. Once that’s done the town will put it on the market as a commercial development property and hopefully recoup the expenses involved. It’s a big parcel, almost an entire city block, and right on a main state highway, so we’re hopeful someone will come in and do something useful with it. If nothing else we’d much rather have it as greenspace than sitting there slowly rotting away.
Otherwise I have lots of stuff in the “to do” que. I got quite a few questions about working with resin from fellow woodturners, so I’m putting together a sort of beginner’s guide to using resin. I want to talk about the new camera. I might wander into a sort of game/social media experience called Second Life, a kind of virtual reality system. On the electronics side of things I might talk about how to protect yourself from lightning after losing my gaming computer during a storm a few weeks ago. I’d like to talk about, believe it or not, Chinese television and entertainment. (Yes, I watch Chinese television, heaven help me). Chinese videos are entertaining, silly, puzzling and, frankly, kind of scary.
grouchyfarmer 