Busy day

To put in our solar power system we have to build a support structure to hold the 15 big panels. We were instructed by the engineers to dig 10 holes to hold the uprights, two-inch galvanized water pipe. Nine of the holes were easy; the tenth couldn’t happen without either dynamite or a bulldozer. I sent an email to the county plan checker in the engineering department and he wrote back saying to put some foot-long pieces of reinforcing bar into some six-inch-deep holes in the rock, then pour concrete on the whole thing to hold up the pipe.

Four pieces of rebar will anchor one of our solar array legs. I hope the banana taffy I used to glue them in holds.

Today I drilled four holes in the rock with our rotary hammer drill. The drill bit had put many holes in many rocks before, and was a teensy bit dull. So that means it takes longer. Way longer. So here I am, leaning on this chattering machine, watching as not chips, but powder, emerges from the holes. Oddly, neither my hands nor my arms got sore and tired. But my gluteus maximus sure did. All of ’em.

Pure dance. The shovel handler tosses wet stucco up to the platform, while the plasterers spread it on the wall. This is the garage—the house is finished.

Meanwhile the stucco guys slapped another ten thousand pounds of concrete onto the house. Those guys work in a way that would make a Broadway choreographer jealous. Not a wasted motion, just smooth coordination between the guy who tosses sand and cement into the mixer, dumps it into a wheelbarrow, and tosses the mixture with a flat shovel onto the big flat boards on the platforms way up in the air where more guys are slathering it onto the walls. It’s quite a show.

Not to be slighted work-wise, Karla used her favorite chainsaw to clear up a whole bunch of brushy messy wood from a gorgeous oak tree down the hill from the garage. So it was work, work, work today. We went home tired and satisfied. Tomorrow it’s supposed to rain. Yay.

Cell phone pix: Tom

Such a deal!

I can’t believe those women just walked past such an opportunity to save.

Cell phone pix: Tom Hurley

Make a hole…

Tim directs as Luke eases the Bobcat onto our temporary platform

…times ten. Well, nine. When we started the project, we discovered that the little Bobcat hole digger can’t be used on too steep a slope without tipping forward. So we built a temporary platform out of a bunch of lumber and drove the Bobcat onto it. Worked like a charm.

A very nice hole, one foot in diameter by three feet deep was the result

One of the places where we have to put a leg of the solar panel support structure has a huge rock in it. There’s no way the auger could cut through it, so we are going to propose to the county building department that we put some little holes in the rock, stick bolts in them, then anchor a support for the solar panels to the rock.

We'll tell the inspector that this rock goes all the way to China

It took only a little over an hour to put in nine holes. Try that with a shovel!

As an aside, we discovered that the square tubing we have to use as part of the structure is over-long by almost double. It seems odd that the supplier, which supposedly cut everything according to their own engineering drawings, would be so far off. Waste of money, methinks.

Cell phone pix: Tom Hurley

Starting the solar project

Today we decided for sure where the solar panels will go. We also decided which “south” to use, what I like to call “local south.” It isn’t magnetic south which is 14° off true in these parts, and not even true south itself. Why? Because off to the east is a rather tall mountain that keeps the sun off our place till 8 or later in the morning, depending on season. To the west is a tall tree and the garage, neither of which we want to cut down. So we’re aiming the panels south-ish, slightly to the west, toward the middle of the southern exposure.

We will be digging ten holes a foot in diameter by roughly three feet deep. Each hole will hold a piece of pipe supporting a structure on which the panels will be secured. We have reserved a hole-digging machine for Monday, and in the meantime will be pouring water into little trenches surrounding the wooden stakes that mark the spots, hoping it softens the soil a bit.

In the background is the mountain that keeps the sun off of us for several hours in the morning.

Rocks are known to be in the area. When the trenches for water and power lines were dug, some rocks that you wouldn’t want to fall on your foot came out of the ground, one as big as a baby elephant, others the size of koalas and anteaters. And of course squirrel-size, dog-size, and horse-turd-size stones were abundant. I hope that’s all we find in the ten holes! we’re digging. Wish us luck.

Cell phone photo: Karla Hurley

Starting to look like a house…

Yesterday Kevin and his crew slapped “mud” on the house and it started to look really solid, not like a bunch of tar paper, expanded metal and chicken wire. Eight guys can move a lot of material and in this, their first day, they covered a lot of territory. But we got only one day’s work from them since they had to head off to San Francisco to finish another job. They’ll return next Tuesday and may wrap up the first of three coats by week’s end. Then we’ll wait several weeks to let it cure before adding more.

Karla is pleased to see so much stucco get slapped onto the house

At the west end of the house their scaffolding is four levels high. I asked him if they get nervous when they’re that far off the ground. “We did a job right smack up against a freeway in Hollywood that was eight levels,” he told me. “So this is no big deal.”

A clean bill of health (aside from being crazy)

On Monday March 18 I experienced a weird event. At noon Karla and I had just finished eating a tuna sandwich when I got hit with what the doctors call a mini seizure. It was brief—a five-to-ten-second feeling of fainting accompanied by a strong bad taste in my mouth like bitter/sour/vile. The bad taste lasted exactly as long as the fainting period, then I was fine. It was over.
I brushed the incident off. “Let’s go down to the new house and do something,” I said. We did. Then at four o’clock the same thing happened again, only less severe. We decided that I had a problem that should be looked at and drove back to the old house to change into cleaner clothes. Then we headed down the road to Oakhurst, the closest medical facility. On the way I had another episode, lighter than the two previous ones. After arriving at the Oakhurst hospital they examined me then called the ambulance to take me to Fresno. I was checked in at the Community Regional Medical Center, which is the huge hospital that has an affiliation with The University of California San Francisco as a training facility.

I spent at least the first 30 hours in the emergency ward (in a private room, believe it or not!). During that time I ate exactly one small glass of apple juice and half a white-bread turkey sandwich, but mostly didn’t feel hungry. I was wheeled to various rooms for tests: first a CT scan, then electroencephalographic stuff, blood tests, sonograms, you name it. Several doctors interviewed me, having me recount what I had experienced. In the meantime nurses took blood pressure and other tests almost hourly. Nobody could agree with finality what I had experienced, so more tests were ordered. The best one was the MRI. Wow! Star Wars! 2001: A Space Odyssey! What a cool machine, this hulking massive thing with a General Electric logo the size of a cow embossed over its huge maw, the entrance to hell that must intimidate at least 90% of the people who confront it for the first time. Even when idle it roars like a blast furnace in a steel mill. Wow, I’m going into that thing near-naked and will be pummeled with forces unimaginable fifty years ago! I am fitted to the tight coffin-like tray that will keep me immobile while massive beams of raw force course through my body to expose my innermost being. The noise is near-deafening. The operator was happy that I had brought my own foam earplugs which were much better than the ones provided by the hospital. I always have them in my pocket in case I have to use a chain saw or our road grader, both of which are very noisy. The shrill screeches, roars, battering booms and perky bongo-drum tappings were a weird cacophony that at first was confusing. Then I realized that when you’re looking down from the top of the head you use a different frequency and repetition rate than you would need when looking from the side or the front since you’re looking through a different mass. I tried to guess which angle they were probing from as the sounds varied. It was fun.

After the 30- to 40-minute scan, I was so jazzed I persuaded the operator to take me to her inner sanctum and show me what the scans had revealed.  She pointed to the thumbnail images on the console then called them up one by one to show the various views she had recorded. “Here you can see that your brain has gotten a little smaller because of age. That’s normal.” Overall there was nothing abnormal that she could see, but she pointed out the white fringe on the outside of the brain. “Those are dead cells; it’s normal.” I saw that the center of the brain was black. I was told that was fluid. Water on the brain? Then I had to leave because there was another patient to be scanned.

I kept up my sense of humor during this entire episode. Making jokes, getting people around me to laugh at my silly comments. Highlights involved the urine bottle. Having only deposited about two inches in the bottle, I handed it to Karla and said, “Here. Take it to the sink and fill it with warm water. I want them to think I can pee like a horse.” She refused, being a rational human being. Another urine bottle joke: Pointing to the urine bottle I told the on-duty nurse that the apple juice tasted awful.

Every time the nurses took my temperature, they would slip a plastic cover onto the thermometer probe, then discard the cover afterwards. I told one nurse that I could save the hospital millions of dollars if they simply cut off the closed tip of the used probe cover, hand the cover to the patient and say, “Here. This is your drinking straw. Don’t lose it.”

During this entire episode I was interviewed by several physicians. The lasting impression I got was that every one of them marveled at my condition, especially since I wasn’t taking any medication and hadn’t had a primary care physician for over a decade. My cholesterol level was perfect. My blood pressure was perfect. My everything else was perfect. At the end of my stay, when the nurse entered my last blood pressure stats into the computer I heard her say under her breath, “Unbelievable—perfect.”

My most vivid impression of the entire experience is about the quality of the staff at the hospital. The people were warm, concerned about my condition, and resolutely dedicated to a very high standard of care. When I asked one of them how she felt about what she was doing, she responded that she was very happy to be working at this facility; it was the best thing she could ask for. What a valuable asset to have here in Central California!

All in all it was a beautiful experience. My health was perfect according to everyone who tested or interviewed me. I was thinking about what could have made the whole episode even better and came up with the following made-up scenario:

    After three days I am being discharged from the hospital. Karla drives up the sweeping driveway of the beautifully landscaped entrance plaza. I'm sitting in the wheelchair chatting with the pretty young woman volunteer who brought me down from the ninth floor. The car approaches, and the volunteer starts to push the chair toward it when suddenly there is a commotion behind us.

    A woman bursts through the hospital's front door and runs toward us.

    “Mr. Hurley! Mr. Hurley! We think this is yours! You forgot it!” She hands me a folded piece of red fabric. I open it and see that it’s a cape with a big red and yellow capital “S” logo in the center.

A couple of Ben pix

It’s been awhile since I’ve shown grandson Benjamin. He’s still growing and getting smarter by the day. Here he is reading about the physics of water—how it can be in vapor phase, liquid, or solid. He is especially interested in how water crystals, always hexagonal, can be unique. No two are alike.

Here Ben examines water crystals. He spent more than an hour increasing his knowledge of the subject. He found out that you can use this stuff called snow to make a ball.

You can throw the ball and a dog with no name (background) will chase after it. But the dog won't bring it back to you—that's something the dog will have to learn. Ben is a willing teacher, so that will happen before too long. The ball may have to be made of something other than snow since that's not always available. Ben is now studying the physical attributes of rubber to see if it can be made into a viable ball.

Photos: Hilary Hurley Painter

We got snow!

Rain gauges don't measure snow very well

 For only the second time since we’ve lived here (30 plus years) we got a whole lot of snow all at once. We measured six inches (150 mm) this morning before the sun came up and it started melting away.

Three of the dogs accompanied us. The fourth, who is yet to be named, stayed back—he's only four months old.

Karla and I took a hike down the road a little over a mile to the new house; it wasn’t drivable due to so many fallen trees. Some parts of the road had become like inch-deep mud pudding where the sun melted the snow.

Grampa and nephew? Only they know for sure.

On the way she spotted a set of bear tracks, “…a momma and a baby,” she remarked. I questioned her observation—“How do you know it isn’t a grampa and a nephew?”

The view south from the new house's bedroom window.

For the next few days we will be cleaning up after the storm. Several trees around the old house shed a whole lot of limbs. I learned that if you want to avoid having to clean up after a snow storm, don’t introduce non-native trees that aren’t immune to the local weather. There wasn’t any damage to the trees at our new house site.

’Snow fun when you want to say it’s snowing

It is uncommon for us to get snow here at only 1,600 feet elevation in Central California, but it’s happening right now. I would like to blog about it and post the blog as it happens, but when I try to connect to the blogosphere via satellite, I can’t do it. Turns out the snow builds up on the dish part of our antenna, thereby changing its shape at microwave frequencies and sending our signal to Mars or Jupiter instead of the relay satellite in orbit around Earth. Dang.

The upside is that my hordes of readers on Mars and Jupiter get my post instead. Due to the distance between Earth and Mars and Jupiter, by the time their comments arrive at my satellite dish, the snow has melted and I can’t receive them. But I know they’re there, and thank all of them anyway.

Will follow up with pictures later today.