To enlarge this picture, click on it. It’s a supercell thunderstorm in Montana. Unbelievable weirdness, almost like it’s on another, even imaginary, planet. Once again, it comes from good old Astronomy Picture of the Day, one of my go-to-first sites that I check daily.
To some people, this kind of stuff is very attractive.
To me, it’s nice in a photograph, but it stinks in real life. When it gets frosty and icy, I steel myself to grab a camera and dash outside and take several snapshots as fast as possible. Then I dash back indoors and fiddle with the exposure and composition and try to reduce the shaking-hands blurriness.
On this morning’s APOD, we get to watch a near-three-minute time-lapse video of auroras over Tromsø, Norway. I’ve never seen an aurora, living at a too-low latitude all my life, though Karla once saw one while at the high ranch one summer. So I’ve never seen the speed of movement. You folks who have seen auroras: How fast do they shift and shimmer?
The weather prediction was correct. It was snowing at the house by 7:00 this morning, and had been snowing up the hill a bit during the night. None of the snow stuck around by the house, though. Good. Up the hill is close enough.
Total moisture from the two-day storm is 1.82 inches, 46 millimeters. It was a gentle rainfall and most of it seems to have soaked in rather than running down the creeks. Storms like these keep the grass growing and the horses fat.
It’s starting to look wintry around here. Look at that awful Sunday forecast. Yuck. Today we split a whole truckful of pine so we’ll be warm, but still—yuck.
In our kitchen we have this awful thing we call “The Knife Drawer.” It holds all kinds of utensils. Oftentimes when I try to find one of the items, there is such a confusing mess I have to dig around to find it. A couple of days ago, I was looking for the melon baller and had a hard time finding it. I suggested to Karla that we should buy one that has a bright red handle so it would be easy to find. She agreed. Then I suggested that if it worked for the melon baller, we should buy all new utensils with bright red handles.
She thinks I’m an idiot.
…Ben is getting!” is the subject line in an email from Hilary. It’s so simple to get pictures like this—you simply hold the subject in front of the computer screen, watch for a reaction to seeing himself which is usually a smile, then email the image. All of life should be so simple.
I ran across a very well done article with accompanying photos about San Francisco’s cable car system, the only one remaining in the world. Twenty-four photos and a fascinating movie taken from the front of a cable car heading down Market Street toward the Ferry Building not too long before the 1906 earthquake.
Don’t click on the movie featured in the article though; go here instead for a much better version presented by the SFFilmMuseum. At the 7:35 point in the film, check out the wheels on the old heavy wagon to the right of the frame. I wonder if they fell off by the time the movie ended!
San Francisco is a very pedestrian-packed city today. The difference is that back then there were apparently no crosswalks and definitely no traffic signals. Horse-drawn wagons and buggies, cars, streetcars, and mobs of people are simply going every which way in this film. Even in 1906, there were tourists—one of the long streetcars crossing in front of the cable car is labeled SIGHT SEEING CAR. Very worthwhile.
Here is a more modern version of the same trip from 2005. In a hundred years, it will be as fascinating as the 1906 version.
As a side note, restoring a film made in 1906 is not simply a matter of removing dust and scratches. If you’ll look closely, the image seems to shimmer as if you’re looking at it through moving water. That is because film a hundred years ago was made of nitrate, a very flammable material related to the main ingredient of dynamite. It was very sensitive to its environment, and would shrink and stretch and respond to changes in temperature and humidity. The emulsion that held the light-sensitive silver nitrate onto the film was made of gelatin, the same stuff you eat in Jell-O: rendered bones and hooves (What? Your mom didn’t tell you that?). Many years ago at the high ranch I had a long discussion with Frank Thomas, Walt Disney’s head of animation, who was a guest along with his family. He explained how difficult it was to re-film old animation from the late 1930s. The “cells” were drawn and painted on a similar material: cellulose acetate. He said that after a few decades the cells would shrink and stretch and do all kinds of things; they wouldn’t fit on the registration pins anymore. I suggested that he talk to their suppliers and switch to polyester, the very stable film base we had just started using in the commercial printing business, which I had just departed to work at the resort ranch (and marry Karla). “You’d have to bang heads,” he replied, implying that the people at Disney were locked into doing things “the old way.”
Plumb, level, square. Note the plumb bob right exactly on top of the hold-down bolt on the pillar-to-be that will hold up the roof overhang support posts.
Loren, middle, says “Here’s how the pros do it Tom” as his helper, Eddie, looks on.
Eddie says “Get your last look at the sky from there,” before the metal roof sheets go on.
Detail work took a lot of time on this project. Here is some of it.
The view from up the hill showing the lower part of the roof sheathed in metal. Karla and I will pour more concrete tomorrow, finishing off the support pillars for the remainder of the roof. Loren and Eddie will return in December for more rafters, cross supports, and the last 20 or so feet (6 meters) of metal roofing.
The past few days have not been blogworthy, visually speaking. Mostly details, tweaking and tiny stuff. Today more dramatic progress was made as the eastward roof overhang was pushed out on temporary supports. Tomorrow we’ll pour the concrete piers for permanent supports. Earlier this morning I finished welding the reinforcing steel and hold-down bolts together (after Karla and I spent about an hour fixing the wire-feed welder!) for said supports.
Another view of the eastward roof and the reason to have an eastward roof: the ranch’s luggage/garbage boat pictured to the left. Yesterday Karla and I picked the boat up from the manufacturer where it had been for several weeks getting its keel reinforced (for the last twenty years it had been driven up onto too many granite shores at the lake and was nearly worn through) and its deck replaced with a gorgeous new deck. We plan to park the fast passenger ferry (at the left in the top picture) between the two trailers, and the luggage boat under the extended roof. Finally—we are treating them both with the respect they deserve during their winter storage! The big ferry boat has its own building at the lake where it’s kept during the winter. Lucky boat.
A pallet-load of concrete is placed in our “barn” for use tomorrow (if it doesn’t rain, that is). That was the first load to come off a truck driven up from Loew’s in Fresno with some of the essential parts for our new barn compound.
Next, a thick stack of steel roofing is offloaded. The fork lift truck is so amazingly maneuverable—all the wheels are powered, the back wheel is the main steering wheel, but the front wheels can be turned 90° so it can crawl sideways like a crab.
It seems unbelievable that a truck this long (28', 8.5 meters wheelbase) can get to our place, what with the tight curves and narrow gates on the road.
The delivery driver, Dennis, turns out to be an old acquaintance, the husband of the owner of The Horse Connection in Smallville.
We followed the truck out, noting that the nastiest curve/gate/bad deep gutter place on the road makes even the pro drivers have to back up and re-try getting through. This is a place that begs for a combination of culvert, ditch-fill and gate widening in order to get through. We’ll have to get ahold of the creator of the fence in that place, an absentee owner who only occasionally flies his plane up from southern California to shoot guns and play safari hunter. Dennis made it through with only one backup maneuver.
Today we put up the first half of the rafters for the roof that will cover the new trailer bodies and extend up the hill for a boat shelter. The trailers are far enough apart that we can park the 22-foot aluminum ferry boat between. Up the hill we will extend the roof to shelter the smaller “luggage boat” to protect it from sun and rain. The all-steel 29-foot boat stays up at the lake (thankfully!) since it would now be impossible to get it out from there, what with the Forest Service road having deteriorated so badly since the boat was first taken up over forty years ago. Even back then it was difficult, requiring anchoring parts of the trailer to large boulders along the road with winches in order to get it around tight corners.
We dug four holes for piers to support the overhanging roof for the luggage boat.
One of the holes was dug through almost pure red clay. The others were dug through mostly rock with red clay as binder to make it difficult.
Karla and I handled rearranging lots of the rocks that were unearthed during the making of the “flat place” (ha!). Without the addition of nine yards (12,700 pounds) of gravel, we would have ended up with an unworkable gooey red clay place for the trailer bodies. The gravel was of local origin, known as Sierra White from the Raymond Granite quarry about 15 miles from here. It is so much better than the crushed river rock that has been the standard for gravel around here for decades. Besides it’s the same rock used for the steps to the US Mint in San Francisco, most of SF’s old-town curbstones, the ancient city of Atlantis and 30% of the Moon. Kinda makes you feel good to walk on such hallowed rock.
For decades these two wheels from a mining cart have been lying around outside the house. Kinda neat, but more than they appear to be. To see them only as rusty cast iron relics from a distant past would be to short-change their true calling. If you strike them with a hard object they produce two different tones: Ding dong, a perfect third in the key of A flat, two octaves above middle C. Think of the first two notes of the spiritual, “Swing low, sweet Chariot” and you’ll know what I’m saying.
Also, think the two notes of nearly every doorbell chime in America.
Click on the photo for detail
Wet hair on Geronimo, The World’s Greatest Horse
Drawing by Vincent van Gogh after his painting, The Starry Night
As Hilary grew up and started impressing people with her remarkable drawings and sculptures, I was relegated to being called “Hilary’s dad.” Now Benjamin is charming the people of Furnace Creek in Death Valley and turning his mom into, not Hilary, but “Ben’s mom.”
Hilary sent this picture of Luke and Benjamin with the caption, “We found a scary little bear in the desert!” Happy dad, fascinated kid, and Great Pumpkin! Who could ask for more?
It’s odd how the mind works, especially when it’s slowly rotting. Karla and I spent part of the day finishing the splitting of a big heap of pine tree rounds down near our new house site. In a couple of hours we were done, and decided to mosey over to the site where our new house is to be built. We parked between the dining room and entry and enjoyed the panoramic sweep of the surrounding mountains and valley below. A never-ending breeze rose from the place we call Solar Hill. I turned on the satellite radio to some gentle jazz. I changed the channel to a bit of Tchaikovsky then mentioned that we could even listen to some old time radio. The Shadow was playing, an episode from May, 1940. As we listened to the fanciful story, we kept seeing a water boatman, an insect you would normally find jerkily darting about in a pond. It was flying onto the hood and beating against the windshield! Occasionally it would fly through the side window, land in my lap, and I would toss it outside again. It was single-mindedly insistent at trying to land on the hood when I suddenly realized what it was doing—the car is blue and shiny, like a pond. Same for the windshield, reflecting a clear blue sky. The boatman was trying to dive in to take a swim!
