photography – grouchyfarmer

Autumn

The weather here in NE Wisconsin was absolutely beautiful for a few days and I took advantage of that and got out on the bike for a while. But that’s changing fast. They’re now talking about a possibility of snow for us by next week. Sigh…

Jalapeno peppers still growing outside in mid October? Yep. Actually they’re doing better now than they did all summer. I didn’t get more than a dozen or so peppers of both plants during the summer but now the dopey things are covered with flowers and baby fruits. Go figure…

But that being said we have no right to complain. The fall weather has been pretty darned nice. We still haven’t had a hard freeze. We’ve had a few mornings when there was frost on the ground but not enough to really cause any damage. We still have flowers growing around the house and I have two jalapeno pepper plants that are still in flower for heaven’s sake.

Some of the flowers that have survived this fall so far are a bit surprising, like the alyssum. This little cluster of flowers popped up in the spring all by themselves, which surprised me a great deal. But I was very pleased to see them because I love those tiny little flowers, not just because they’re beautiful but because some types of alyssum are amazingly fragrant.

Getting out on the backroads and trails on the bike this fall has been great fun. I’m really going to miss being out there every day once winter hits. It’s been especially interesting out there because I’ve been seeing a lot of reptiles and amphibians out there, far more than usual. I’ve seen dozens of snakes, usually grass snakes and the like. We have two of those little beauties living in the backyard. Unfortunately they’re fast little buggers and my attempts to get them on camera haven’t been very successful. I’ve seen quite a few of them out in the wild as well. Unfortunately I’ve also seen quite a few of them flattened on the roads as well because some of them have a habit of sunning themselves on the roadway.

I’ve seen quite a few turtles out there too, including Fred, who is a regular sight down near the stone bridge that goes over the river.

Almost any sunny day I’d find Fred sunning himself on his favorite spot. He’s a cute little guy, maybe about six inches across with beautiful markings. I’ve managed to get about six or seven fairly decent photos of him.

Most of the migrating birds are gone now. I’ve seen a few cranes still hanging around but those will be gone soon. Ducks and geese are mostly gone. I’ve seen very few birds coming to the feeder in the yard as well. I haven’t had to refill in it some time now. But this time of year the seed eating birds are finding more than enough to eat out there in the wild.

Let’s see, what else? MrsGF and I are sketching out plans for major changes to the gardens now that those big trees are down. Now that the area back there is getting full sun it opens up a lot of options. We want to move two of the raised vegetable beds over to that area because they’re now getting shaded out by a fast growing maple where they are now. The area where the beds are now may become occupied by a garden shed because we need the storage space. We want to put a large decorative raised bed where the stump from the ash tree is located, one that matches the existing bed we have now that surrounds the little maple.

That’s not going to be a cheap project, though. If we do everything we’ve been thinking of it’s probably going to end up costing us in the neighborhood of $5K when it’s all said and done.

We’re still waiting for the garage door company to get the new doors in so they can replace the 30+ year old garage doors and openers. They’re in pretty rough shape and I don’t think they’ll last the winter.

Let’s wrap this up with a siamese cat because why not?

Meg, we’re not sure how old she is but she’s at least 16, maybe 17, and an absolute sweetheart. This foot rubbing thing is fairly new with her but I’m told it isn’t uncommon with kitties. She’s turned into quite the lap cat. If there is a lap anywhere in the house, she will find it and sit on it. She has this thing now where when she’s on my lap she likes to climb up on my chest and rub her face in my beard which is cute but that cat’s claws are like little razors and when she gets relaxed she starts doing this kneading thing it gets a bit interesting.

Oh, almost forgot, the new vacuum thingie. It’s a Shark self emptying robotic vacuum. Normally I wouldn’t have bought one of these but I got the dopey thing on some kind of sale on Amazon for less than half the normal retail price. It was marked down to $200 or so from $500, and I admit that it was sort of an impulse buy.

Now we had a robot vacuum before, one of the early Roomba machines, and it was utterly horrible in every single way. It was incredibly noisy. It couldn’t deal with even 1/4″ tall thresholds between rooms, couldn’t deal with, well, it couldn’t deal with anything, really. It fell down the basement stairs twice. It would just stop dead in its tracks for no apparent reason. And even worse it was damn near worthless at actually cleaning anything.

This one is actually surprisingly good. It maps the rooms as it cleans so it can develop a more efficient pattern of movement. It doesn’t just scurry around at random. It’s been able to negotiate even the rather steep threshold between the dining room and living room. It wanders back to its dock and recharges itself when it needs to and when the battery is topped off it picks up where it left off. And best of all it empties itself! The bin on the dock has to be dumped every couple of weeks or so but that’s no big deal. It hasn’t fallen down the basement stairs yet. And best of all it does a pretty darned nice job cleaning the floors.

I’m not quite sure what in the world it’s doing under the sofa, though. It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time under there when it’s cleaning. Since it has wifi I suspect it’s looking at porn while it’s under there.

Anyway we’ve had this thing for a couple of weeks now and we’ll see how it goes. So far we like it. Even the cat doesn’t mind it.

Let’s Talk About Drones: DJI Mini 3 Pro

This is pretty much what I look like when I try to make myself sit down and figure out how to use my video editors.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’ve been messing around with drones for many years now. I don’t talk about them a lot here because there’s not much point to it when my internet speeds are so slow it takes an hour or more to upload a 1 minute video. Well, that and the fact that I’ve been too lazy to actually figure out how to use my video editing software. But that may change in the future. In any case I wanted to talk about this new one.

I’ve been flying drones all along, though. Sort of. They’ve ranged in size and capabilities from massive camera drones with high res cameras to tiny little indoor toys that aren’t good for much more than annoying the cat (and MrsGF). And drones have gotten very interesting in the last year or two as the manufacturers have been shrinking them in size while at the same time making the cameras and software much, much better.

Which brings me to the DJI Mini Pro 3 which I just got a few weeks ago. It’s fairly new and it is, well, wow. It’s replacing a DJI Mavic Mini (which I absolutely hated for reasons I won’t get into. I wished I’d never bought the thing. Despite rave reviews about the M2 it was utterly horrible in almost every way.)

Before I talk about the Pro 3, let me talk about drones in general for a moment if you’ll put up with stuff you may already know.

As soon as drones hit the market, it seems every jackass, jerk, and (insert unflattering term of your choice here) in the world bought one and started using them in ways specifically calculated to endanger people, aircraft and just generally piss people off. This is why the rest of us can’t have nice things.

The result of all of this was, of course, a whole host of rules and regulations coming down from the FAA and other government agencies, and even requiring a type of pilot’s license in order to operate some types of drones. I’m not going to go into the specifics about all of the rules and regulations. You can find all that out for yourselves in about ten seconds with a simple Google search. But what I do want to talk about is the 250 gram rule.

The FAA, in its infinite wisdom, came up with the 250 gram rule which basically says that any drone weighing 250 grams or more has to be registered with the FAA and must be prominently labeled with a registration number. So the drone makers have been trying to squeeze more and more sophisticated stuff into drones in the under 250g category figuring that people aren’t going to want to go through the hassle of registering the drones.

Sidenote: I should point out that registering a drone with the FAA is not difficult. You go the FAA website, plug in some information, pay the nice people five bucks, and you get a registration number you have to stick on the drone. It’s easy, fairly fast, and I’ve done it myself.

This has resulted in some absolutely amazing equipment turning up in the last few years in this category, with the Mini Pro 3 being at the top of that list.

This thing is really, really nice. Almost too good to be true, really. Every time I fly it I find it hard to believe they’ve crammed so much capability into a drone this small. And when I say small, I mean small.

The whole drone, when folded up, fits in the palm of my hand. And the whole package, including batteries and controller, can easily fit into a small backpack.

I’m not going to get into the actual operation of the drone. Like most modern drones in this price range it’s simple to fly. You can find dozens of videos on YouTube demonstrating it in actual use so there’s no point in me duplicating that information here. It even has some autonomous operation functionality. It can, for example, automatically follow a moving target around when that target is selected with the controller. I’ve highlighted myself, and then walked all around the backyard and around the house and the drone maintains a specific distance and height, following me wherever I go, keeping me centered in the field of view of the camera.

It has some really useful features as well, like object avoidance. Take a look at this thing in the photo on the right. Those “bug eyes” above the camera and the black spots on the bottom of the drone are sensors for the object avoidance system. It’s damn near impossible to run this thing into a tree or pole or anything else for that matter. Once it gets within a couple of meters of an object it might possibly hit alarms go off on the controller along with a visual indication of where a potential obstacle might be located. And it will simply refuse to get any closer to an object when it gets too close. I’ve tried. I had it hovering about 5 feet off the ground and tried to walk into it. It backed itself up away from me when I got within a couple of feet of it. I tried flying it into a tree (slowly, ready to stop if it didn’t work). It got within about 3 feet of the tree and simply stopped with the warning signals going off.

It has excellent battery life too. On a full charge I can fly it easily for 20 minutes before it starts yelling at me that the battery is getting low. There is an extended range battery that’ll give me up to 40 minutes of flight time, but that battery will nudge the weight of the drone over 250g.

But since I’m a photographer my real interest in these things is as flying cameras, and the camera on the 3 is excellent. Let’s look at a video first, if I can get this thing to put in a Youtube link

That’s one of the first videos I shot with the 3 when I first got it and I think the quality is pretty darned good. Especially considering it was windy with gusts up to about 20mph and the poor little drone was bouncing up and down all over the place. Despite that the video is surprisingly smooth and steady.

Still images taken with the camera are just as impressive.

You should be able to click on a photo to see a larger version. That’s Hilbert from about 350 feet up.

Overall I really like the Mini 3 Pro and you’ll probably be seeing images and maybe short videos from it in the future.

Does it have any issues? Sure it does. Nothing is perfect.

It feels cheap and flimsy, to be honest. But that’s probably because they’ve had to shave off weight wherever they could to keep it under 250g. So the plastics are as thin as they can possibly make them. I haven’t actually measured temperatures, but the drone and batteries seem to get very warm to the touch. The drone will get hot to the touch just sitting there while turned on. I’m not sure if that’s going to be an issue in the future or not yet.

Getting the battery out of the drone is often difficult and I’m not sure why. It’s like it is getting wedged into the compartment somehow. I think that what’s happening is that as the drone and battery heat up during use the plastic expands making it more difficult to get the thing out.

Getting at some of the options on the controller is unnecessarily awkward. To get at one set of options, for example, I have to swipe down twice on the screen. Swiping down the first time seems to do absolutely nothing, but if you look close a bar will appear on the top of the screen. Put your finger on that bar and swipe down again opens the options screen. Why do I have to do it twice? No idea.

DJI will sell you the “Fly More” kit which gives you a couple of extra batteries, a nifty charger to plug the batteries into, and some extra props. Oh, an a case for everything. Don’t bother. It isn’t worth it. The drop in battery charger and batteries and props can be bought individually. The case is utterly worthless. It’s a generic soft sided camera case you could pick up for $5 at a thrift shop. Personally I’d spend the extra money for the extended range batteries anyway, even though they push the drone over the 250g limit. And as for a case, get something like this:

They’re not that expensive, especially when you consider you’re lugging around a drone system that’s more than $1,000. The one up there in the photo is about $50 and is waterproof (it will actually float), hard sided to protect the equipment, and has room for everything including batteries, props, etc. I can either strap it to the luggage rack on the bicycle or carry it with a shoulder strap.

The most frustrating thing has been trying to find time to take it out and actually fly it, but now that fall is here and gardening related stuff isn’t occupying so much of my time I’m hoping I’ll have a chance to get out with it more.

Another issue I’m going to have to deal with is the amount of data this thing generates. One day’s worth of messing around with the drone resulted in about 50 gigabytes of video and still photos. Sheesh… Most of that will eventually just get erased but I’m going to need extra storage space for the Macbook if I’m going to be editing videos with it. I have a 4TB external SSD on order for the Macbook so I’ll have some space to play with. I could use my gaming system down in the basement. That has more than enough storage space but that’s a windows box and it’s also used to drive the laser engrave, 3D printer, my amateur radio equipment and for stuff like this I’m more comfortable using the Mac. We’ll see.

New Project, weather, and the ever popular Stuff

Weather here the other day was about as good as it gets. It was so nice out that I ended up staying out on the bike for a lot longer than I intended just because it was so beautiful out there.

Temperature was about 70, almost no wind, brilliant sunshine. Ended up putting about 20+ miles on riding around in the countryside just looking at nature, watching birds and animals. I wasn’t the only one out there. I’m not a fast biker because I’m having too much fun looking at stuff and finding little “hidden treasures” here and there as I ride along. Like, well, this…

I was rolling down one of the trails and these brilliant purple flower were so bright I could see them from half a mile away, standing out against the dull green grass that’s starting to die back.

And turtles. Seeing turtles around here used to be pretty rare. In all the hours I used to spend in the woods and along the rivers and creeks when I was a kid and teenager, I never, ever saw a turtle. Or a snake for that matter. But in the last few years there seems to have been an upsurge in the number of reptiles and amphibians around here. We have frogs all over our backyard, there are massive bull frogs in the neighbor’s pond, tree frogs in our bushes, toads in the undergrowth. I’d never seen a tree frog in my life until just a few years ago. Now we got these guys hanging around here. This little guy was sitting up on the window shutter outside the house one day and scared the heck out of me.

He’s a tiny, tiny little thing, hardly an inch long.

I’m thrilled to see these little guys hanging around here because if these little fellows, and the toads and turtles etc. are thriving it means the environment around here is fairly healthy.

One thing this year was very curious. No mosquitos. None. Well, okay I did get bit once, but that was it. Once. All summer. Usually by mid summer around here you don’t want to go outside at all in the evening or you’ll be swarmed by the little buggers. This year, nothing. Even in the early evening when mosquitoes are at their worst, nothing. I have no idea why. All of the frogs and toads out there might contribute to that but it was still remarkable.

And the new project. Well, sort of new. it is both new and very, very old, this project. One of the things I salvaged from the farm right before we sold it was my father’s old workbench. Which had been his father’s workbench before he took over the farm.

I’m not entirely sure how old this thing is, but it is very old. I know for a fact that it is well over 100 years old because my father remembered this thing from when he was a kid.

Look at the dovetail joint there on that corner and that scalloped edge there. Someone did a lot of work on this thing.

That square thing you see on the front there? That’s a wooden bolt. Seriously.

This thing wasn’t just a slab of wood on legs, either. This thing was a rather elaborate and very well made workbench for a woodworker or carpenter, and hand a lot of fancy features. And it was obviously made by someone who knew what they were doing with dovetail joints, scrollwork, those wooden screw vises and other goodies. And it is massive and very, very heavy. The top is one solid, 3 inch thick piece of hardwood. My son and I got it out of the garage where I’d been storing it yesterday and set it up on sawhorses so I could start working on it, we we figure it has to weight at least 200+ pounds.

Was this thing handmade by someone or was it a commercial product? That I don’t know and I don’t really care. It’s one of the few artifacts from the farm that I feel nostalgic about and I’m hoping I can clean it of about a century of grease, oil, grime, old nails, etc. and restore it to a usable condition and turn it into the main workbench in my woodshop.

Stuff Time

Computers: I do most of my writing on a 12 year old Macbook Pro that lives in the kitchen. I’ve mentioned this before, I believe. It’s been having some nasty problems with the video display for a long time now, but wiggling the lid back and forth or closing it and opening it a few times generally brings things back. But it’s been getting worse and worse. I was going to start using an iPad for all this stuff, but, yeah, that hasn’t worked so well. The iPad is nice, don’t get me wrong. I use it all the time, but not for this kind of thing. Trying to edit photos, write, cut and paste, using the iPad is, to me at least, ridiculously awkward.

So I went looking around for Macbook computers and guess what? If you’re willing to take a chance on older, refurbished equipment, well, damn these things get cheap. Relatively speaking. I picked up a refurbed Macbook Pro with decent specifications that’s about 3 years old for a bit over $500. So we’ll see how that goes when it gets here.

Drones: The DJI Mini 3 Pro drone I got a few weeks ago is bloody amazing. I’m going to take a closer look at it here in the near future. I only have a few hours flight time on it so far but the camera, the flying characteristics, the software, everything about it is, to me at least, amazing. But more about that later, maybe.

Gardening: We’re going to be moving two of the raised beds to a new location with better sunlight. Now that the big ash tree is gone it opens up much more space to full sunlight. We haven’t settled on a new location yet but that’ll be coming up pretty soon. We’re thinking of putting a small garden shed in the spot where the two raised beds are now. More about that as things progress.

We’re still harvesting tomatoes and peppers. Both seem to actually like the somewhat cooler weather we’ve been having. We stopped watering the darned things because, well, we were hoping they’d die, really, because we already have omre produce canned and in the freezer than we know what to do with.

I’m thinking about talking about so-called “solar generators”, unless Chris over at Off Grid Ham beets me to it. I’ve been getting interested in these things recently as an alternative to gas powered backup generators. But there are a lot of problems with these things, starting with the fact that they are most definitely not “solar generators”. And anyone who calls them that should be sued, frankly. What they are is a battery in a box. Period. That’s it. Oh, there are some electronics added to regulate power, put out 120V and that kind of thing. But they are neither “solar”, nor are they “generators”. The other problem with these things is the advertising, which often is blatantly misleading and even out right lies.

But while I’m interested in these things, the question is, am I interested enough to overcome my innate laziness to do the research?

That’s about it for now.

Fall Catch Up

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.

And that’s about it for now.

Lost and Found Photos

Sometimes I lose photos. I try to keep all of my photos from my various cameras and other devices in folders that are collected into one master folder that is then backed up to multiple devices (and to the ‘cloud’). But sometimes I’ll move photos into a temporary directory for sorting or cropping or something and forget about them, especially if I’ve named the directory something odd. That’s where I found these, in a folder on my old Macbook Pro labeled something like “110-24”. What the hell was I thinking? I have no idea. And I should add that these were not taken by me, they were taken by my youngest son when he spent a few weeks out west doing geology stuff. Anyway, I’m very glad I found ’em. So without further ado, here we go… Oh, you should be able to click on an image to see a larger version of the photo. Maybe. I hope. If WordPress cooperates…

And that’s about it for now.

Stuff coming up – I got a new drone, a DJI Mavic Mini 3 Pro that I want to talk about. MrsGF refinished our dining room table and it turned out amazing so I want to talk about refinishing furniture. And gardening stuff… Sheesh, we cut way back on the amount of veggies we planted this year. Didn’t matter. We put in 3 tomato plants instead of the 6 we had last year, and we actually have ended up with more tomatoes than ever. We only put in 2 cucumber plants, and we’re up to our eyeballs in cukes. The butternut squash plants are starting to die back now and the squash are freakin’ huge. The peppers went a bit bonkers too. Only thing that didn’t do very well were the jalapeno peppers. I’m the only one who eats ’em so we only put two plants in pots on the front porch and that gives us more than enough to keep me happy. But this year for whatever year they didn’t do very well. The plants look healthy but they haven’t been producing much fruit. I have the laser engraver fired up again doing some stuff for a brew pub…

On the amateur radio front I’ve been finding FT8 to be more annoying than anything else so I’m moving to different communications modes like PSK31 and JS8Call. I may do a semi-rant about that in the future even though it will probably bore you all.

And, of course, what the heck are we going to do with the space that was opened up when we had the old ash tree taken down?

Catching Up, Internet, Drones, and More Photos From The Roadside

It is crazy busy around here this time of year. Between processing pickles, tomatoes, carrots, beets, beans and other produce from the garden, keeping up with the grass and landscaping, plus family stuff and everything else going on, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done it seems. The woodshop has been shut down since mid-spring. I haven’t even been in the woodshop except to grab a tool or some screws or something. The 3D printer and engraver have been gathering dust. I did get my dipole antenna fixed, so that’s something. MrsGF is tackling the massive job of refinishing our big old dining room table. Stuff just keeps piling up.

Then we had internet problems. Sheesh… We were suffering multiple outages a day, often as many as a dozen or more, lasting from a minute or so up to 10 or 15 minutes. Rebooting the modem and WiFi didn’t do any good. In fact just waiting without rebooting and the service would come back by itself. We finally got Spectrum, our ISP, out here.

I know that it is something of a fad to complain about customer service these days but Spectrum was great. I got a technician in an online chat within a few minutes and they immediately set up an appointment to get a service person out here. It took a couple of days to get someone out here because they’re short on staff just like everybody else out there. But he showed up exactly on time. He ended up replacing just about everything. New cables, new box on the side of the house, new cables coming into the house, new cable modem, etc. We moved the access point from a spider filled corner of the basement to the office where it’s much easier to get at. Took him only an hour or so to do all of that and we’ve had no problems at all since then. Good job, Spectrum.

Drones: If you’re a long time follower of this nonsense you may remember that I used to fly drones, ranging from those goofy little toys that are really only useful for flying around a room and annoying people, up to a massive camera drone. But then the FAA had a hissy fit and decided that not only did you need to register bigger drones you needed a pilot’s license to fly ’em, I said the hell with that. I got rid of the big drone, flew the tiny ones until they broke and gave up on them because the tiny drones that didn’t need to be licensed and registered were all pretty much junk.

Not any more, though. I’ve been keeping an eye on the drone market and in the last couple of years there have been some very, very good camera drones in the 250 gram size that have been looking very, very good. Drones in that weight class avoid a lot of the registration and licensing requirements in many jurisdictions. And if something does go wrong and it crashes, it’s so small and light weight that it isn’t going to do serious damage to anything. Unlike the big camera drone I used to fly that weighed pounds and was about 2 feet across.

So I got one, a DJI Mavic Mini Pro 3 and I’ve had it out for a few brief flights and, well, damn the thing is good. Technology has made some astonishing advances in the years since I last fiddled around with drones. The flight technology, the duration of flights, their capabilities and intelligence have all improved enormously. And the camera is absolutely amazing. Here’s an example

This one is of the old stone bridge that’s on my regular bike route, taken with the drone hovering about 2 meters above the river. That photo is about as good as it gets, really.

This one is my neighborhood, looking straight down from about a hundred or so feet in the air.

Anyway, more drone stuff will be coming up in the future. Let me wrap this up with some photos from the roadside. I’m out biking almost every day and I take a lot of photos. Here are a few.

And now it’s time for me to get back to work.

Photos From The Backroads and a New Bike

That’s my Giant 24 speed. That turned out to be a heck of a good bike. Aside from a few broken spokes and replacing the tires when necessary it’s worked perfectly for thousands of miles.

The new bike first: When I started bicycling when I retired it surprised the family a lot. They all figured the bike I bought would end up gathering dust in the garage. Here we are several thousand miles later and I’m still at it, and it was time to replace my old bike with something a bit better, and that’s it up in the first photo. It’s a Specialized Vado and it is very, very nice. Hydraulic disc brakes, built in lights, great front suspension, a fancy built in computer system, a cargo carrier on the back I can strap stuff to. And best of all, a motor.

Yes, it’s an ebike. I still have to pedal, I still get my heart and respiration rates up, I still get back from a long ride with my legs pleasantly tired. I have the thing set up so I do most of the work but when I get to a steep hill the motor gives me a boost to help me get up the hill, or gives me an extra burst of speed to get away from dogs that want to eat me. I’m no spring chicken. I’m sixty-eight this year and while I’m in pretty good shape I’ve been getting twinges in my knees trying to power up hills and I’ve been having to drop down a gear or two to get up ’em.

The Vado is, frankly, amazing. And it is well suited to the type of riding I do which is, I must admit, pretty leisurely. I make a lot of stops to take photos and I’m out there not so much to get exercise but to enjoy nature. I watch birds and animal life, look at the vegetation, watch the sun coming up, stop to take pictures and that kind of thing. The Vado is perfect for me. I’ve had it for about a week and I have over a hundred miles on it now and I love it. I did a twenty mile ride the other day that would have left me exhausted on the other bike. I’ll take a closer look at the Vado later after I’ve lived with it a while long.

When I’m out on the road on the bike I’m constantly stopping to take photos of stuff I find interesting, things that you don’t see when you’re zooming past at sixty mph, so here are a few.

I live about a 4 mile ride away from an extensive trail system. It runs more than 20 miles north all the way to Green Bay, and from a little town called Forest Junction it also branches off to the east to the town of Brillion. This is the trail that runs to Brillion.

These grow wild in the ditches all over around here and I suspect most people don’t even see how beautiful they are because they’re zooming past at 80 mph or too busy trying to text, talk on the phone and eat a cheeseburger at the same time.

I found this stunning flower growing along the side of one of the trails. I took about a dozen photos of it from different angles.

This is another “weed” that grows all over around here. But up close it has one of the prettiest flowers I’ve ever seen.

I’d stopped at a small parking area for a nature reserve to get a drink and found this lonely little guy hiding in the tall grass. I thought it was one of the loveliest things I’d seen. There’s something about the symmetry of those petals surrounding that central pod that I found very striking.

And of course I had to include queen anne’s lace. The stuff grows everywhere in the ditches along the roads around here. Those intricate little flowers that make up that lace like structure are amazing.

Another “weed” you’ll find growing along the roads around here.

A thistle, one of several varieties that grow around here. They’re considered a “noxious weed” around here but the flowers are this rich purple-lavender color and so beautifully delicate that I find myself photographing them a lot.

This is, I think a verbascum or mullein. Maybe. My father called it wild tobacco which seems to be a fairly common name for it. When I was a kid I’d see this stuff all over the place. On the farm it would grow along the makeshift roads we had around the farm to access the fields and sometimes along cattle trails. It can be a spectacular plant, growing up to three or four feet tall.

This is the river down by the old stone bridge and that white thing you see out there is a pelican. I watched this guy swimming around feeding for several minutes.

And that’s it for this time. Hope you enjoyed the photos.

BTW: You’re more than welcome to leave comments in the comments section. Or you can reach me at old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com.

Frosted Roses and GF Gets Excited

I generally get up a little before dawn and just for the heck of it I went outside not long after sunrise and found our roses covered in frost and got these photos before it melted. Just cell phone images because by the time I’d have got in the house, got out the good camera and got back out the frost would have melted. These aren’t as good as they could have been I suppose, but I like them. You should be able to click or double click on the images to see a better resolution version.

Oh, the excited part? Once you scroll down past the photos I’ll tell you about that.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for amateur photographers. You don’t need to go traveling to exotic places to get really interesting photos. Just look around in your backyard.

Now, the fun part. One thing I’ve done for years now is fiddle around with 3D printing. I’ve had a Flashforge Creator Pro 3D printer for years now, although my son has had it for some time using it to print parts for a laser engraver/cutter and other stuff.

I’m getting a new printer, the brand new Flashforge Adventurer 4 that just hit the market this fall. Flashforge came out with the Adventurer 3 shortly before this one came out and this is basically the same thing only with about twice the build capacity as the 3 version. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on this one.

This is supposed to be a more or less ‘turnkey’ printer, just unpack it, put in the filament and start printing right out of the box. The extruder can also operate at a wider range of temperatures meaning it can use just about any type of filament on the market. I liked my old Flashforge a lot but it is definitely showing its age and its inability to work at the higher temperatures that some types of filaments require limited it to using only ABS and PLA. The print quality of this thing is supposed to be outstanding from the preliminary information I’ve dug up.

Supposedly there are some issues with things like WiFi connectivity and cloud access. Neither of which I care about in the slightest. I don’t want a printer connected to the “cloud” in the first place and my preferred method of getting files to the printer is via a flash drive, not over the network.

Anyway, this puppy is supposed to be here within the next seven to ten days so keep an eye out for that in the future.

Fall Catch 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.

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.

But enough, time to wrap this up.

Catching Up: Wow It’s Been Busy

The late summer is always a busy time for us because it seems that all of the vegetables we’ve been nursing along since early spring all come ripe at the same time and all have to be dealt with right now. We probably have enough wax beans and green beans to last us two years, and enough various tomato sauces to last us almost that long. On one Saturday alone MrsGF and I processed more than 40 pounds of tomatoes to turn them into tomato soup. Plus we did salsa, chili sauce and spaghetti sauce. And that was from just three plants.

Food made with our home grown vegetables always seems to taste better. We don’t buy any canned tomato products any more because the flavors of the grocery store stuff seems flat, insipid and often just plain nasty when compared to what we make ourselves. And often way, way too salty and way too sweet.

But the beans have been done for weeks now. We probably could have gotten another couple of weeks of production out of them but we were so sick of beans we just pulled them out. Tomatoes are pretty much at an end now as well. But the peppers are still going strong and will probably keep going until we get frost. We put in a variety of sweet bell and banana type peppers. We thought we’d have enough to make pickled peppers, but almost all of them have been going into various sauces.

We were only going to put in 3 cucumber plants because I’m the only one who likes to eat them fresh. But somehow we ended up with 6 plants and they went a bit goofy on us and took over the whole garden behind the garage. MrsGF made four different kinds of pickles plus some relish, enough to last us more than a year, and now we’re giving the things away. They’ve started to slow down but they’re still blossoming. I hate to pull out and compost plants that are still healthy and producing but I’m thinking of just pulling them out this week and being done with them.

It’s hard to see in the photo but there are also a half dozen tomato and pepper “volunteer” plants hidden in that mess of cukes somewhere and now those are bearing fruit.

MrsGF and I both love squash but our attempts to grow the stuff haven’t been all that successful. Last year we had powdery mildew that pretty much wiped them out. This year, though, wow… We planted in a more sunny location, worked in hundreds of pounds of compost before we planted, made sure they were well watered during the drought, and it paid off beautifully. The plants are starting to come to the end of their lifetime now, and we’re seeing dozens of massive butternut squash under the leaves. And I mean massive squash. Some of these things are a foot and a half long, and they all look absolutely beautiful.

We picked one yesterday and we’re going to make that one this week and see what it tastes like. Hopefully they’ll taste as good as they look. We’ll probably end up cutting them up into cubes, roasting them and freezing them for use later.

All the sunflowers got knocked down when we had a storm roll through here, but the other flowers and decorative plants made it through the summer fairly well. We’ve had no shortage of flowers out in the gardens this year.

It was a struggle to keep some of this stuff alive during the drought. We were careful to keep the vegetable gardens well watered but we occasionally neglected the ornamental plants. Still most managed to survive and even grow reasonably well until the rains finally came in August.

We have three roses out there in the gardens now and all of them came through the drought and even looked pretty good. We had something, we aren’t sure what, trying to eat the climbing rose, and MrsGF finally resorted to dusting it with something and that seemed to take of that problem. She only had to treat it once.

The hot, dry weather was not kind to the hostas out front, though. Some of those poor guys are looking pretty rough.

This poor guy looks pretty rough but it will survive just fine.

The giant large leafed varieties did a lot better than the more traditional looking narrow leafed types. The variegated varieties seem to have fared worse than the solid colored ones. This time of year the hostas start to look pretty rough anyway. They’ve all flowered now and are going to seed so there is no need for them to keep putting energy into the foliage, I suppose. They’re getting ready to go dormant for winter anyway.

With all of the gardening and harvest stuff going on I haven’t had a lot of time to putter in the woodshop. I haven’t done any wood turning since I produced these two bowls down below…

I love the grain on padauk, and it’s wonderful stuff to work with. It’s not cheap but I think the results are worth the expense.

More padauk. Once it’s finished this stuff almost glows.

this is MrsGF’s favorite. This little one was made from wood salvaged from the old pear tree in the backyard.

I do have some projects in mind, though. I picked up this piece of wood down below at a shop a few weeks ago. Paid way too much for it but I loved the grain and color. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

I’m also trying to adjust to a new computer. I have three main computers, an iMac, a very old Macbook that I use mostly for email and reading the news, and my primary computer, a “gaming” computer my son built for me which I use for just about everything else, including amateur radio, photo and video editing and video streaming and other stuff. The gaming computer was taken out during a severe thunderstorm a few days ago. I think the power supply got fried. I’d been having problems with it for some time and knew it was going to have to be replaced, so I already had a replacement ready to go for a couple of months. Still, it’s a hell of a lot of work to have to try to redo that whole system.

The new one is a fairly high end MSI 17″ gaming laptop which works great for things like video and photo editing and pretty much everything. But I still need to install all my amateur radio software, hook up all the radio gear to it, etc.

But it also gives me a chance to tear everything down and rearrange everything to make things more convenient and less chaotic.

That’s it for now.