Musings of a slowly rotting mind…

The darned thing broke

2012-01-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today while Karla was helping neighbor Bill tighten some of the thousands of bolts in his new metal shop building, I was cutting away at the ground with our road grader, putting in approaches to our house site. I ran into some really large rocks that needed to be dug up and moved away, then I tried to remove a ceanothus bush that was in the way of where we wanted our garage. Since it had been awhile since I had driven the grader, I forgot that I shouldn’t approach things with the left-hand side of the mold board (the big earth-moving blade that is in the middle of the grader) extended all the way forward. As I nudged the bush, I heard that sickening sound of a hydraulic ram rod bending. It turns out that the manufacturer used too small a ram for that particular part of the grader, and about five or six times since we have used it, it has bent to a 25° or 30° angle. It’s easy enough to bend it back by using lots of boards and jacks and the grader’s other hydraulic actions, but it was a stopper for today’s work.

Bummer.

Anyway I dug up and moved a bunch of big rocks.

Badwater Ben

2012-01-22T19:30:00.000-08:00

Here’s a Benjamin update! It was a very windy day at Badwater, and he had a ton of fun running around on the salt.

Photos: Luke and Hilary Painter

More bad legislation

2012-01-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

Watch this speech called Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea), a TED presentation by New York University adjunct professor of the interactive telecommunications program, Clay Shirky. The crux of the abomination called SOPA occurs about 9:30 in and is concluded at about 11 minutes in, when he says you’re guilty till proven innocent.

Much like the gift from our president two weeks ago when he signed (admittedly with reservations about parts of it) the act called NDAA where any person, citizen or not, if suspected of being a terrorist, can be locked up (by the US military!) and won’t get to consult a lawyer or go before a judge. Just shut up and stay in prison till you rot. You’re guilty. The president says so. Period.

Now, let’s define terrorist—could it be anyone who opposes the will of the president or the legislature or the courts and is therefore a threat to the United States? Anyone who broadcasts their opposition on the Internet via a blog or a Facebook post or a Twitter tweet? Hm-m-m.

Let them know…

2012-01-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

I use both Google and Wikipedia almost daily. Today they’re black in protest of the US legislators’ wish to mollify their campaign contributors in the movie and music industries by passing legislation that supposedly will end piracy of movies and music. The legislation will supposedly keep people from getting to the suspected sites by redirecting them to another address. This is dangerous because over time, the government can use their powers of redirection to keep people off any sites they deem unsavory. Censorship of expression, in other words.

Governments always start with the vilification of those people or ideas who are in disfavor with the majority of people. Get everyone’s agreement that the targets are bad, then ask for the power to silence them. That’s the first step. Anyone remember how the government made avoiding income taxes a criminal offense by getting everyone to agree that Al Capone, the Mafia boss, should go to jail for it? Now anyone can be tossed in jail.

Go here and sign the petition to stop SOPA and PIPA. Remind your “representatives” in the House that we outnumber them by 700,000 to 1.

Hooray(n)!

2012-01-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

Lookee here at this beautiful forecast. We are so parched here the air is crunchy. Over the weekend Yosemite National Park was advertising on the radio for people to come up and leave the tire chains at home—all the roads are free of snow for the first time since 1933. Skate on the lakes and ponds. Heck, even go out on the ice and have a picnic since it was warm and sunny and you won’t get your picnic blanket all dirty.

This morning I heard on a San Francisco radio station that people should prepare for pounding rain. Pounding! I hope it doesn’t all come in at once then run off before soaking in. Nice and gentle. Take your time, clouds. Just come in and park here for awhile. Free parking, we promise.

New! Lose seven pounds in only two days!

2012-01-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have discovered a quick weight-loss method that gives guaranteed results. Let’s say you’ve expanded to the last notch on your belt and don’t have a leather punch. Just catch “the bug that’s going around,” spend a couple of days in bed, make sure you’re close to a toilet and have a plentiful supply of TP, and be prepared to dash to said toilet every one or two hours (leave the lid up). Sweating and a dull headache are optional. Make sure you have a nice clean wastebasket to use for depositing the weight you’re losing orally while simultaneously losing more on the toilet (this was handy at least a couple of times).

I started this program Wednesday night. It ended Friday night. Would I recommend such a rigorous regimen? Only if you don’t have a leather punch or a longer belt.

Buckled in, ready to launch

2012-01-11T11:45:00.000-08:00

Ben is strapped into his car seat, ready for the first stage takeoff. He’ll be going to Huntington Lake today, then over the mountains via Tioga Pass (still free of snow, amazingly!) and down to Furnace Creek and Papa. He and Hilary have spent the past several days here at the foothill ranch while Papa and his brother did some nasty plumbing repair. Luke and Hilary didn’t want to expose Ben to the possibility of airborne mold that was the result of a dripping garbage disposal that went undetected for awhile. The floor under it was damaged and had to be replaced.

So Ben and Hilary will return to a nice clean house.

Sub-Scientific American

2012-01-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

I have subscribed to Scientific American Magazine since the 1950s. I stopped my sub when an editor turned the magazine into his personal political rant. Finally he got replaced by a woman who seems to think the magazine’s mission is to write about science rather than left-wing social issues. Now the magazine has a blog that comes to my email box (since I’m once again a subscriber), and the blog is written by some amazingly incompetent people.

In the most recent issue, the first article in the blog is about charging stations for electric cars. The author talks about the stations using “220 volt” connections as opposed to 120-volt connections. The correct voltage is 240, since electrical distribution in the US is whole or half. (End-use American power comes in three flavors, 480, 240 and 120 volts.) The article describes a string of charging stations which will extend from British Columbia in the north to Baja California in the south. The author says it will extend to “Baja, California” as if Baja were a city. Quibbling minor error, but still ignorant.

The next article describes a new crop of televisions. It describes them as having 1.4 meter screens. In America, that means 55-inch screens (it’s Scientific American, remember, not Scientific European). The writer must think Scientific American readers are all metric-savvy in everyday usage. Not in my house. Go to any Best Buy or Costco and ask to see a 1.4 meter television and you’ll get a blank stare.

The next article has the headline, “Floating Wind Turbines Set to Conquer Deep Ocean.” The deep ocean needs wind turbines to “conquer” it? Bad headline.

Next, a review of the upcoming flood of laptop computers called ultrabooks. The author describes the term as being a vague, amorphous description of the computers which can be interpreted at anyone’s whim. In fact, the term Ultrabook™ is trademarked by Intel Corporation, and is very strictly defined as being computers that are 3.1 pounds or lighter, 0.71 inches thick maximum, and have at least 5 hours of battery life.

The rest of the email has articles that are beneath-high-school-journalism-class quality. The writers are lazy, the proofreaders are asleep, and the publisher simply doesn’t seem to care what is being published. Shame!

Did it work?

2012-01-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

I think it worked, anyway. The jars are still warm, but the residue of marmalade in the big kettle is jelling nicely. But wow, the work! I spent at least four hours making this stuff to fill two one-quart jars. By the time I was finished, my right hand had developed finger cramps; the ring finger, then the index finger just became rigid and refused to bend. The reason, I think, is that I used that hand to grasp the tiny cooked orange rinds while the left hand dug out the pulp and tough membranes that remained after the skins were boiled.

At first I used spoons to remove the pulp, but they didn’t work too well since they didn’t have a sharp enough edge to dig in as needed. So I used my thumbnails, alternating from hand to hand. That worked very well. I now have the cleanest thumbnails in this whole valley. If I make another batch of marmalade, I am going to try and figure out how to use my toenails—they need cleaning too.

Marmalade time?

2012-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

This poor little orange tree is working its branches off holding so much fruit! Last winter it got stunted by some very cold nights that killed off its younger shoots, along with all of the oranges. In spite of not getting a lot of watering during the summer, it managed to replace all the lost fruit, to the point that the branches may start breaking.

Making marmalade will be tedious for sure, since none of the oranges is even the size of a tennis ball, and some are hardly bigger than an olive. Slicing, seeding, juicing, and chopping the skins will take a lot of work. Cooking to the exact temperature needed, for the exact time needed will make a decent marmalade without the addition of pectin for thickening. But miss the time or miss the temperature and you end up with soup. Orange soup. Not even orange syrup—thin soup. Should I invest the time and energy? For soup?

I’ll think about it. Either way, I need to at least pick all of them so they don’t further damage the tree. Tedious.

Proud Grampa Moments

2012-01-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

The current visit by our grandson, Ben, has brought some really interesting things to my attention. First of all, his complexion is positively radiant, which means his loving parents give him the very best nutrition: fresh homemade foods with almost nothing packaged or prepared in a factory. And his enthusiasm for these nutritious foods is a testament to his body’s appreciation for them. I mean, how many kids do you know who love broccoli? Even without mayo! Yesterday I had puréed some apples in the blender because we knew he loved applesauce. Just apples, whole, skins and seeds included (only the stems were excluded). No sugar added. He ate it out of his bowl with a spoon, and smiled after every luscious bite.

His energy is boundless, at least compared to Grampa’s energy. He can outrun and out-hike me without breaking a sweat. He’s better uphill; I’m better downhill.

He loves to contribute to household chores. Karla had emptied the wagon of firewood so Ben could ride in it. When she went to the woodshed to refill it for tonight’s fire, Ben went along and helped by picking up heavy pieces of firewood and stacking them in the wagon. “Here, Ben, put this in the wagon. It’s heavy. And here are five more. Put them in too.” Then she asked him to help by pushing the wagon as Karla pulled it back to the house, which he did willingly.

Later in the day he decided the kitchen floor could stand mopping. So he upended the dog’s/cat’s near-full water dish, resulting in Grampa’s bringing in the mop to clean things up. Smart kid!

When Hilary was a little teeny child I doted on her. I was anticipating what we ended up calling the “Big Rock” moment. It occurred when we were at Florence Lake. As we stepped out the cabin door, Hilary pointed to the enormous boulder to the west and said, “BIG rock!” It was her first two-word utterance, an adjective followed by a noun. Today Ben approached the front door and said, “Door, open.” That was really significant, being a noun-verb word pair, since he was asking me to open the door. I was blown away (as only a doting grampa can be). Later in the day I handed him the remote control for a large globe light hanging high in the living room. I reminded him to press the number three button, since that controls the light. He did. Then he said, “Light, turn on.” Wow.

Proud Grampa moments in abundance today. More tomorrow? I can’t wait!

BO-ring!

2012-01-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

For several weeks, the weather forecast has looked pretty much the same—daytime temperatures more like what we’d expect to see in springtime. It hasn’t rained for almost two months. No rain in the near future, either. In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, they reported some hope for rain—in late January!

Steinway Saving Time

2012-01-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

Ben and Hilary are with us for a few days. After helping us feed twenty or so horses and playing “splash” in the the horses’ water (which explains why he’s shirtless—his shirt’s drying in the house), he was itching to pound the keys, so Karla took him to her little studio (our former chicken house) where she has her Technics electronic piano. It can sound like a pipe organ, a string ensemble, a xylophone, and any number of other instruments. It can also, shall we say, withstand a firm touch. Its piano mode is based on a Steinway grand, and sounds really nice, but doesn’t fool us.

Ben loves it, especially since Grandma’s real Steinway grand doesn’t have a chicken on its music stand.

Ethiopian orphans

2012-01-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

Our very good friend Audrey has gone to Ethiopia to help expectant mothers deliver healthy babies. Right now she is working at an orphanage in Hawassa. Today she sent some pictures of the children she’s working with. It’s hard to believe that parents could give up such beautiful kids.

Modern art

2012-01-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is gorgeous. This is a photo that belongs in a nice frame to hang on the wall in an elegant home. To anyone living on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, the view of the rings around the giant planet is something never seen except edge-on. The shadows of the rings on the planet provide a clue as to their shape, but that’s all.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

A fish tale

2012-01-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

If you’re too cold to eat, you’re in trouble. It’s a very different story if you’re a fish, though. I have found that when the temperature of the water in the fish barrel is below 42°F (6°C), the fish simply aren’t interested. After a little research, I found that goldfish can go for weeks, even months, without eating at all. Not only that, they can be frozen solid, then thawed out after several years. But that tends to kill them.

Lion Creek

2012-01-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, we went to our bank so I could change the PIN on my debit card, which had been re-issued because some bad person had hacked it.

(As an aside, it’s so nice to walk into the bank and Shawn, the customer service guy, says “Hi Tom. Hi Karla.” Makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Nice bank.)

On the way back home, we drove up the hill from our house site to where we plan to put our water tank. We also wanted to see how much water was coming out of the main spring that feeds the creek that runs alongside the site. Oddly, even though this season has brought almost no rain and has actually tied a 138-year-old record for lack of rain in December, Lion Creek is running. Not a gusher, but flowing nonetheless. While the rest of the mountains for miles around are starting to look more like a desert, Lion Creek canyon is lush. Horse tracks all over the place attest to the canyon being an important source of their sustenance. I had only my cell phone with me, so the pictures aren’t the greatest.

We have been users of alternative energy for decades. The high ranch has been off the grid for its entire existence, depending on water to provide it with 60,000 watts of electricity when the creek is high. Here in the foothills we have depended for 20 years on solar power, giving us a much lower 2,400 watts. During the winter when the days are shorter and the sky could be dark with clouds, it would be nice to supplement with some hydro power.

Lion Creek could supply us with that at our new house site where we plan to install 6,000 watts of solar panels down the hill below the house, and another 2,000 watts by the well. Even if the creek gave us only 500 to 1,000 watts, that runs lots of LED light bulbs when the sky is dark. After our years of experience on solar power here at the foothill ranch, we know how to stretch energy budgets. It’s just the opposite of how you do it on the grid: Run the big power-hungry appliances during the daytime.

Did Bucky Fuller peel mandarins?

2012-01-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

R. Buckminster Fuller was a genius at rejecting the ordinary then creating the extraordinary. His Dymaxion map let us see, for the first time, the world’s landmasses with the least possible distortion of sizes of the continents and islands in relation to each other. By making triangles which could be moved around and butted up to other triangles, the relative distances between points on the globe were more accurately presented than using other mapmaking techniques.

When I peeled a mandarin orange this morning, I was flattening a globe. It struck me that Bucky may have gotten his idea from the same activity. “Food” for thought, methinks.

Dymaxion map from Wikipedia

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

If I were French and my last name was Inou-yére (pronounced ee-noo-year), would I have had the nerve to name a son born on the first of January Hap?

Play with your food

2012-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

I love it when our good friend Patt sends us a Priority Mail box jammed full of mandarin oranges from her orchard. The little seedless gems are so sweet! When I make our annual batch of cranberry sauce with fresh cranberries, I toss a few whole mandarins in the kweeze (Cuisinart), skins and all. It’s so good!

But it’s even better when we simply eat them, ’cause that’s when we get to do some creative peeling, like in the photo here.

Just a thought…

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

If my last name were Moss, would I have the nerve to name a daughter born on December 25 Mary Chris?

Probably not.

Mary Chris Moss to all my readers anyway.

Chainsaw carton gets extended life

2011-12-19T17:30:00.000-08:00

The carton containing our new chainsaw was perfect for cutting into the shape of a rear door’s now-missing window. I cut it with my trusty Swiss Army knife and tucked about four inches of it down into the window channel and the rest of it into the guides along the sides and top. It will help keep us warm when we go to town tomorrow morning when the temperature will be 32°F (0°C) and we’ll be zipping along at the speed limit.

Last night Karla came back from seeing a play (she loved it!) in the old gold rush town of Sonora, and after dropping off the neighbor who had invited her, approached one of our gates where there was a clot of our horses waiting, anxious to get through. The roadway at that particular gate is narrow, and Karla slowly eased by the horses, one of which must have swung her head the wrong way and smashed the glass. The horse wasn’t hurt.

We made an appointment at the glass-fixing place for 9:00 AM tomorrow. The car will also be going in for routine maintenance at the Toyota-fixing place just a couple of doors away, so we’re doing that two-birds-with-one-stone thing. Good for us. Oh yeah, just a few doors down the road is the horse-fixing feed store where we’ll stock up on horse feed. Add another bird to that stone!

But don’t feed any goodies to that head-swinging, glass-breaking horse. Not till she comes up with a couple of hundred bucks to atone for her crime.

Update: Today we took the car in. I mentioned to the glass-fixer that we were lucky to have only a side window broken, rather than the windshield. “If it had been the windshield, I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t have a big enough piece of cardboard.” I’m not sure he got the joke.

Biting the bullet

2011-12-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

Bullets taste awful. I suggest that if you’re going to bite one, you contact it with only your teeth, not letting either tongue or lips touch it. Lead is harder than I thought. I bit down pretty good, but only left a little polished mark. Probably the same mark would have occurred on the brass part had I bitten it there.

Saturday morning we got a faxed quotation from a contractor we had interviewed, a bid on the foundation of the new house we want to put up a mile down the road from the old house. It came in several thousand dollars under the estimate we had gotten from the house plan designer, so we said “Yes.” We’ll give him a small payment to seal the deal. Karla and I committed to going ahead by ceremoniously biting the bullet shown above.

We’ll take our plans over to the County Planning Commission to start the permit process, which shouldn’t take too long since practically nobody is building houses around here these days (except our neighbor down the road who’s putting up a little 7,000-plus-square-foot bungalow). I’ll use our road grader to cut away all the grass growing on our house site so the workers can see their marks in the dirt to lay out the foundation and carport slab.

I have to pick a spot from which I’ll take pictures of the progress. But for now, a shot (pun intended) of the bullet with barely perceptible bite marks will have to do.

We miss the Bentley

2011-12-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

We had the chance to get some much-needed rain, but unfortunately the Bentley was in the shop getting the fly-potty stain removed from the leather-wrapped steering wheel. (Whoever let that fly in the car had better be on guard—I am ANGRY!)

Our usual “put the Bentley outside with the top down” method of getting it to rain wasn’t available and as a result the storm passed over us with nary a drop. The forecast for the next week is dry. The horses are eating acorns instead of grass. We might have to break the lock on the barn and start tossing out very expensive hay.

Can we borrow some of our readers’ Bentleys? Please?

Osprey spotted

2011-12-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

This should interest our closest neighbors, who are avid birders.

Today we saw an Osprey. Actually we heard it first, a deep throbbing sound from the north. Karla and I were hiking up to what we call Dragon Hill when the whole valley seemed to be infused with a very loud wubba wubba sound, more felt than heard. There was a component of the sound that reminded me of turbojet engines. I had heard the same thing yesterday but never discovered the source. It was obviously an aircraft, so I scanned the sky and finally saw it—an airplane with two enormous propellers. The Osprey takes off as a twin-rotor helicopter, with wings. Once airborne, the two huge engines/rotors swivel forward on the wings and it becomes a regular airplane and goes twice as fast as a fast helicopter.

It’s an aircraft that uses a great idea, vertical takeoff with fast horizontal flight, and took nearly two decades to perfect. It has commercial potential. The last time I went from our foothill ranch to our high Sierra ranch by helicopter, it took a whole 40 minutes. In an Osprey, it would take only 15. That would make a daily commute much more practical.

I’ll have to present the idea to the board of directors.

Photo: US Navy, via Wikipedia

The real origins of bedrock mortars

2011-12-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the holes in the rocks around here were a little too symmetrically perfect to have been made by people in ancient times using ancient methods. Recently I got reinforcement of my suspicion from NASA, of all places.

Local bedrock mortars, supposedly made by people

Where I live there are many outcrops of granite with holes in them. Local lore maintains that the holes were made by early inhabitants, and were used for grinding foodstuffs such as acorns into meal. That may be true in part, the meal-grinding part, but as for the making of the holes by people—well, that’s probably wrong.

Asteroid Vesta with abundant bedrock mortars, ready for oak trees and human inhabitants.

Here’s my theory. As the earth began cooling after its birth, granite was still hot enough that when hit by meteorites it could be dented instead of shattered. As NASA’s picture of the asteroid Vesta shows, meteorites make bowl-shaped dents in rock. Many of the dents look just like the holes in the granite around here.

Time passes, rock cools and hardens, humans arrive on the scene. On discovering these meteor-made holes, people decide to settle down where they don’t have to buy expensive imported mortars in order to grind acorns. The evidence proves my theory—where there were many bedrock mortars, there were large populations of both people and oak trees, all thanks to ancient meteor strikes.

I should’ve been a college professor.

Image Credits: Top picture Tom Hurley. Bottom picture: NASA, JPL-Caltech, UCLA, MPS, DLR, IDA

An interesting exception

2011-12-02T20:15:00.000-08:00

When making an abbreviation from the initial letters of something, it is customary to not include the initials of the minor words, like of, the, and and so on. For example NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The “and” is left out. NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, leaving out for, the and of.

POTUS stands for President of the United States. If that abbreviation were to follow the rules of leaving out the minor words, it would be PUS.

And that might not be too flattering.

Leading versus chasing

2011-11-29T20:30:00.000-08:00

Today Karla and I went to town and stocked up on horse feed to last for a week or more. As we were loading our booty into the barn, a cow moseyed by and looked in. For several days, we have had eight or nine cows on the place due to a nearly-impossible-to-repair fence. There is a path that could be decades old that leads to part of the fence where the cows simply push through. Remember, these critters are covered in cowhide, and mere barbed wire is kind of like cobwebs to them.

They seem to be craving salt. We always keep a block of salt out for the horses, but our neighbor may be remiss in providing salt for his cows. We’ll have to put some on his place. Anyway, I thought it would be nice to lure the cows off our place and back to their own territory.

A few days ago we failed at chasing them down to the gate—they scattered. So remembering our late neighbor’s method of grabbing a handful of sweet hay and saying, “Come on, cows. Come on, cows,” and walking to where you want them to be, we lured them down to the gate, then onto the land where they’re supposed to be. All except for a young’n who took off along the fence on the wrong side away from his/her mom. Oh well, the young’n is covered with the same cowhide, and will probably survive his/her squeeze through the barbed wire to rejoin the family.

It’s been a long time since I was so close to bovines, and I was interested to see that they pick up their food by wrapping their tongues around it, almost like a giraffe, which can have a two-foot-long tongue to grab leaves from overhead tree branches. The hay I had in my hand was in a loose bunch, so it was easy for the cow I was leading to grab a mouthful by wrapping her really long tongue around part of it and pulling it in. They also do very strong breathing through the nose, sniffing and exhaling loudly. They’re sniffing the bait to see if it’s worthwhile. And the nose itself seems to be covered with sweat. Cows’ noses and mouths are very wet! I can see why they need so much water.

Horses use their prehensile upper lip, much like an elephant’s trunk, to gather their food. They have both upper and lower incisors, while cows have lowers only and a soft upper gum. Cows are very interesting creatures, and I could develop a hankering for them. If only they would drop their pies where I don’t walk!

Our dog Sioux loves the scent of a fresh cow pie, and often rubs her right shoulder in one to enhance her personal scent. She gets several baths a week from us in exchange, usually a cold shot from the garden hose. Is she really telling us that she loves cold showers?

Life has so many questions. I’d really like to know some more answers. Maybe I should have a long talk with a cow.

Sea for Sioux—NOT!

2011-11-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

For the first time in her life, doggie Sioux got to see the sea. We walked onto the beach at San Simeon with dog in tow. Karla was anticipating her reaction on first tasting salt water. Unfortunately, Sioux was having none of that nonsense.

The tide was high and the waves were coming in with some force. Karla took off her shoes, rolled up her pant legs, and went for a run with the dog. Sioux stayed on the high (shore) side both out and back, and didn’t appreciate it a bit when the water rushed over her paws. Karla loved the run up and down the beach.

There were other dogs on the beach, and their people were throwing sticks into the surf. The dogs bounded through the waves to retrieve them. Sioux isn’t a retriever, so that option was out.

Sioux laid on her big soft cushion in the back of the car as we left, and finally got a taste of the ocean as she licked her paws clean. She didn’t beg to return, and seemed to be happier as the car got farther from the ocean.

Wine tasting

2011-11-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

We stayed two nights over the Thanksgiving holiday in Paso Robles. In our hotel room there was a book that featured some of the wineries in the area. It had a guide for newbies on how to act at a wine tasting. The server pours a little wine into the glass, you hold it by the stem, then lift it to the light to judge its color (bright is best), swirl it in the glass, and notice its “legs” (the stringy lines it leaves on the glass). You sniff it and try to identify what you smell and compare those smells to familiar flavors and then take a sip, rolling it over your tongue while noting all the tastes. Finally you spit it out into the little bucket on the counter and wait for the taste in your mouth to subside (the longer it takes, the better) while noting those lingering tastes.

Flavors like cinnamon, citrus, rose petals, vanilla, oak, cloves, and apples were listed. But not rotten grapes. Did we miss something? Is there such a thing as being Tongue Deaf? Apparently, since the wines we tasted at two very different wineries mostly tasted that way to us. As for the sniffs before tasting, I completely missed the secret odors.

I wonder if the tasting room servers are simply filling all the bottles with the same cheap stuff and chuckling to themselves while watching the rubes go into ecstasy as the tastings get up into the $125 per bottle range.

It’s pretty obvious to me that I haven’t developed the essential discernment to make a distinction between shiraz, chardonnay, merlot, or cabernet sauvignon. Yet I can surely spot the ersatz flavor of Ripple or Mogen David and other swill that merely poses as wine. There’s a California wine maker whose rock-bottom-priced Charles Shaw (“Two-Buck Chuck”) gained a tremendous following as he pooh-poohed the whole tasting culture and its pie-in-the-sky hoity-toitiness, enraging the high-end vintners. Perhaps he too suffers from tongue deafness.

When we got home, I tried the sniff test on some red wine that had been opened a week ago and was left out on the kitchen counter. I was pleased to discover that I could discern the following: distant skunk, damp dishrag, and a subtle hint of wet dog. So maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Thanksgiving day

2011-11-23T18:30:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning we get up early and head southwest to Paso Robles for a Thanksgiving gathering of the Smith clan (Karla’s people) at her cousin Rowenna’s place. The following day we will return to witness the wedding of Ro to our friend Frank Hoke. We have known Frank for decades since he worked for the Edison Company at Florence Lake as the dam tender.

Frank once saved our lives. We were returning from the far end of the lake in our ferry, the Sierra Queen, which at the time was powered by a couple of iffy outboard engines; one had already pooped out. The lake was full, and water was spilling over the dam at a furious rate. Dangerous! As we approached the store end of the lake in the evening, the second engine quit. I punched the horn on the boat, sending out an SOS call in Morse code; three short toots, three longs, three shorts. I repeated the call. There was a party going on outside at the Edison Company camp beside the lake, and hearing the horn, people cheered and waved. But Frank got the message—SOS; Save Our Souls! He ran to the company boat, came out to us, and pulled us clear of the spillway.

The next morning we ordered two new engines and I drove, breaking every speed limit, to the distributor in Sacramento to pick them up before they closed in early afternoon. The following morning we were wondering how to haul a couple of 265-pound engines down to the ferry, when who should show up but a weight-lifting club from Fresno. They wanted a ride across the lake. “It’s free if you haul these engines down to the ferry,” I said.

Serendipity strikes again.

Have a great marriage, Frank and Rowenna! And may you never have an SOS situation.

Silence

2011-11-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

We took a walk this morning down to our first gate, stopping to feed that ol’ Pelton horse, the late Geronimo’s buddy. Peltie misses Ger and still hangs around by the corral.

We stopped at the gate and slowly realized that it was eerily quiet; there was no sound coming out of the sky. We normally hear airplanes high overhead all day long—not loud, but aways there to some extent. An acorn woodpecker piped up with its “ch-racka-racka” call and took a few pecks at a tree somewhere off in the distance. Otherwise, dead silence.

We walked up to the water tank to see how much was left after doing a lot of cleaning and several loads of laundry yesterday. Heading back home from the tank, we walked over to the big rock outcrop near the western edge of the property. From that vantage we can see most of the valley below, and spotted the house being built by the Gerbers down near the river. (It’s hard to miss a 7,000-square-foot house!) Line of sight, the distance is over two miles, and in the stillness we could clearly hear the sound of hammering.

“That’s a sixteen-penny nail,” I remarked to Karla. “I can tell; first a tap to set the nail, then three hits to finish. Probably a vinyl coated sinker.”

Adjacent to the rock outcrop is about an acre of ancient graves on Graveyard Slope, so dubbed by a woman who used to work at the ranch and is an archaeologist with a specialty in pre-lithic Peruvian culture. Rock mounds mark each burial, nine or ten of them scattered over the wide open space. One of the graves is a little harder to spot since there is a three-foot-diameter oak tree growing out of the rocks, which are pushed away to make a ring instead of a mound.

The carpenters put down their hammers. Again we were engulfed in silence. Awesome thick rich deep silence.

Taking the high road

2011-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

Our friend Audrey, whose horse Vanessa is staying with us, wanted to come up to see her one more time before she ventured off to Ethiopia for a half-year.

Found them!

As would happen, Nessie wasn’t hanging around on the lowlands, so Audrey, her friend who recently retired as a computer science professor at CSUF, Karla, and Sioux had to hike a mile or so north and go up a couple of thousand feet to find her. The view from there includes California’s coast range mountains and a stunning view of our surroundings, so it was a worthwhile trip.

Karla and Sioux, coast range in distance.

Photos: Audrey Spach

Priorities

2011-11-10T19:15:00.001-08:00

“I know, I know. The President is waiting for his horse, but I promised Ben a ride so tell him to cool it.”

I love my dad.

Photos: Hilary Hurley Painter

Animal trainer

2011-11-10T19:15:00.000-08:00

Ben is getting an early start to his career as an animal trainer. Here he is showing how, with a subtle movement of the leash, he instructs Bella to look to her left. Most people, on watching Ben’s near-imperceptible moves, can’t believe that he has her complete attention and cooperation. Imagine—if he’s this good at one-and-a-half years old—what he’ll be able to do when he’s two!

Photo: Hilary Hurley Painter

What a downgrade!

2011-11-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

When grandson Ben is at the Furnace Creek Ranch Stable during the wintertime, he can go for a ride in a great big wagon pulled by two great big mules. But when he comes to our foothill ranch in Central California, the only wagon is a little Radio Flyer.

And it’s pulled by a creaky old grampa. Oh well. Life can be tough, so he may as well get used to it while he’s still young.

Photos: Hilary Hurley Painter

It worked!

2011-11-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I was awakened by the pitter-patter of raindrops. Quick as a bunny, I dashed to the door and ran out to put the Bentley back in the garage, but it wasn’t there! I guess Karla put it away before coming to bed.

We got almost a quarter of an inch, and more in the afternoon to nearly a third of an inch. We’ll just leave the Bentley where it is for now.

At home in the grain barrel

2011-11-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

One of Ben’s favorite places is in a grain barrel. Not only does the grain move around so you can get a really comfortable seat, it’s good to eat! Here Grandma Karla is watching as Ben samples what we have here at the foothill ranch. Yum!

Goodbye, dear friend

2011-11-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

Tonight the vet will be showing up after dark to finally end the pain of our old friend, Geronimo. Ger-Ger is over 30 years old, older than Hilary and one whom we consider to be one of her best teachers. Hilary rode him first with saddle and tack, then with just a bridle or halter, and finally with nothing but her skill—her hand grasping his mane. She claimed that Geronimo could go from zero to 60 in just a couple of seconds, beating even the fastest Porsche. In her bedroom as she grew up, you would find thoroughbred horse models and an equal number of Porsche models.

As so often happens with old horses, he has arthritis. It is really difficult for him to get up after he has been lying on the ground to rest. His walking is labored. His balance is compromised by the pain he has been feeling in spite of our medicating him twice a day. He had an injured foot that we spent a couple of weeks medicating. It is healed now, but he still has trouble walking.

I just now got a phone call from our three-miles-away neighbors saying that a truck just went through our furthest gate—probably Doctor Seamans.

The kindest thing we can do now is to have him put an end to Geronimo’s cruel pain. Ger-Ger will be going to a much better place, where you don’t need a body to keep going on your adventure through the eternity of living.

How to make it rain

2011-10-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but when you need rain you’ll try anything. It’s been awhile since it rained and the grasses and forbs shot up and it looked lush. Now they’re looking pretty tired and the outlook is bleak. But the old trick should work, I told Karla—let’s put the top down and leave the Bentley out of the garage.

Boo!

2011-10-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

Ghostly spooks are watching you from out there in the constellation Cepheus. Happy Halloween!

Our brush with fame

2011-10-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

For a few weeks we have been listening to the radio station in Fresno that has a feature called Valley Legends and Legacies, short stories that are played a couple of times a day during their news hours. The stories are repeated several times over a period of more than a week. For a couple of weeks we heard about Frank Thomas, Walt Disney’s lead animator and native of Fresno. In one of the stories it was mentioned that he along with his wife and children spent two weeks every summer at the Diamond D Ranch, later to become the Muir Trail Ranch. He studied the movements of wild animals, later using his observations in his animations, including Bambi. (Karla and I visited him once at his home in Flintridge after he retired from Disney. In his studio, we were especially drawn to the marvelously lifelike wooden puppet, Pinocchio, that he used to model his drawings for the movie.)

We received a phone call from the Legends author, Catherine Rehart, who has been writing about the history of Central California for several decades. Cathy wanted to chronicle the history of the Sierra in the Huntington Lake area and its surroundings, and was planning to include the Muir Trail Ranch and its history. We referred her to Ed Selleck, the biographer who had interviewed Karla’s mother, Adeline. He would have a more comprehensive viewpoint since he was documenting the history of a larger area of the Sierra for the Central Sierra Historical Society.

Cathy’s stories are compiled and published as books, but first they’re produced and presented by Fresno’s KMJ Radio. A few weeks ago we started hearing her stories about Andy Ferguson, Karla’s great-grandfather, and his role in planting the Golden trout throughout the Sierra. Next came Andy’s son, Edgar Smith, Fresno County’s engineer who was responsible for planning and building the Tollhouse Grade, a road that at the time was considered impossible to build. Then the stories moved to Edgar’s son, Karl Smith, who graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and whose trombone skills gained him a close friendship with jazz musician Al Hirt.

In the summer of 1947, Karl’s wife Adeline drove him and his friend Sam Peckinpah, later to become a famous movie director (The Wild Bunch), to the east side of the Sierra so they could start a hike over the crest. During their hike they came across the remnants of a plane crash, and Sam cut his hand rather badly on the wreckage. They had to find a way out of the mountains in a hurry, and after checking their map decided to drop out at Florence Lake. The trail led them through the Diamond D ranch. Karl got acquainted with the ranch’s owner, Jack Ducey, who gave him a tour of the ranch.

Karl fell in love with and wanted to buy the ranch to balance his “other life” as a musician and librarian with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, but the ranch wasn’t for sale. So he and Adeline bought the nearby Florence Lake Resort from its owner, Dick Morrison, who had diabetes and was going blind. Sam Peckinpah and his wife, Marie, helped them run the lake operation in their first year of ownership.

Meanwhile, Jack Ducey sold the ranch to Nate and Pansy Combs who five years later sold it to Karl and Adeline. When Karl died, followed thirty years later by Adeline’s passing, Karla and I ended up running the ranch.

Cathy spread the family’s history over several episodes. Nothing grand and historic has happened under Karla’s and my ownership; we are simply mentioned in the conclusion to the story.

You might ask what it feels like to be part of an interesting story, even if our role is only seen as being the period at the end of the last sentence. Fifteen seconds of fame? Maybe in thirty or forty years we’ll be recognized as titans of industry, at least that which involves service to backpackers on the John Muir Trail.

Kaboom

2011-10-28T19:15:00.000-07:00

Those who have followed this blog know that I live amongst horses. This story doesn’t involve horses, but cows.

When I was about 18 years old, I had been working at a television station in Fresno for roughly a year. During one summer the station’s owner, a well-known cattle and cotton baron in the San Joaquin Valley, sent his grandson to the station to get some work experience. The kid was about my age, and we connected immediately. Since we were both unpredictable (even though I was dedicated to being responsible), we decided that the TV station’s elaborate chemistry set was way underutilized. I have no idea why a TV station had such a thing as a chemistry set, but that’s irrelevant. We read up on rockets, and decided to make one. We wrapped several layers of newspaper around a broomstick and secured it with masking tape. That made a sturdy and lightweight rocket body. We slipped the tube off and attached an aluminum foil nose cone.

The chemistry set provided all the necessary ingredients to make, essentially, gunpowder. We packed the paper tube with our mix, went out behind the studio to its manure pile (remember, the owner of the place had plenty of manure for gardening around the station), then carved a groove in the pile, placed a broken fluorescent light tube in the groove, put our rocket in the tube, and made a fuse out of a long string of crumpled newspaper.

It was early afternoon when we set a match to the fuse and were thrilled to see our rocket shoot out across the empty fields surrounding the TV station. It must have gone a thousand feet! Cool!

We made more rockets that afternoon and adjusted our manure-pile-fluorescent-tube groove to get more elevation. More successful launches only fed our desire to achieve more-spectacular results. As evening approached, we weren’t sure we would be able to see where our rockets were going, so I had the idea that we needed a tracer, something that would illuminate our rocket in flight when it was dark. Aha! Add some powdered magnesium to the mix. Magnesium burns hot and very bright. So our last rocket of the day had its usual gunpowder mix plus magnesium.

It was probably 7 or 8 o’clock when we launched it. Actually, it didn’t launch—it exploded! Turns out that magnesium powder burns really quick, and instead of the steady burn of our gunpowder mix, we had made a bomb. A really loud bomb. The manure pile, our faithful launch pad, was blown to oblivion and within an hour the sheriff was at the TV station, asking if we knew anything about the huge explosion that had the neighborhood in turmoil.

Denial was rampant. The on-duty director of programming pleaded ignorance of even hearing the explosion. The owner’s grandson had driven off in his expensive car, and I was only a low-level kid, obviously innocent.

A few days later the manure pile was replenished by the owner’s ranch hands.

More magic from an Apple alumnus

2011-10-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

Tony Fadell, the engineer who designed the iPod while at Apple, has come up with a terrific innovation, a smart thermostat. His thermostat is different from others because it learns as you use it. It could save a tremendous amount of energy if several million of them go into houses and replace the old dumb thermostats we’ve been using for most of a century. “Smart” thermostats have been around for decades, but people don’t bother to get the Ph.Ds necessary to program them. I am sure other companies, like Honeywell, will try to come up with a competing product, but can they make them simple and gorgeous? Not likely. Mr. Fadell has Apple in his DNA.

Read a good article with a video here, and a more comprehensive one without a video here. Order now and be the first on your block to have one!

Idiocy is cheap

2011-10-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

Maybe that’s why there’s so much of it. The City of San Francisco passed a law requiring cellular phone retailers to post warnings about health risks from radiation. That’s about as relevant as warning about the risk of light reflected off the screen at a movie theater. Lumens from a movie screen could be potentially more harmful to human health than the radiation from a cell phone or a bluetooth dongle hanging on someone’s ear.

Radiation causes damage to living cells by ionization. When electrons are torn from the molecules making up DNA, it causes replacement cells to be altered from what they should be. Two things are required to make radiation harmful: Frequency and intensity. The frequencies at which cell phones or bluetooth devices operate are orders of magnitude lower than that required to cause ionization. Intensity, or power, of cell phones or bluetooth devices is millions of times too low to cause even localized heating of flesh. A bluetooth device hanging on your ear, which operates at the same frequency as your microwave oven, is putting out the power equivalent of a gnat compared to a whale.

The Board of Supervisors in San Francisco should be ashamed of their unanimous vote to require the posting of power levels of cellular phones. The city is surrounded by bright people who actually understand radiation—Silicon Valley to the south, UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Stanford University. People at those places know that it is far more dangerous to lie with your skin exposed to sunlight on the warm sand of a beach than it is to use a cell phone. Ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and X-rays cause ionization; cellular radio waves don’t. Being at high altitude exposes you to even more radiation from the cosmos. Hiking in the High Sierra exposes a person to radiation from the atomic decay present in granite. (An aside: Are granite countertops contributing to cancer deaths? There’s a whole new regulation pursuit for the Board of Nannies!)

San Francisco’s government is straitjacketed by its perceived mandate to control and manage its citizens’ lives at all cost, with total disregard of scientific evidence. In the supervisors’ minds the citizens must be protected from evil corporations that are so eager to kill all of their customers in their ardent pursuit of profit. The city’s principal source of income, like that of Athens, Greece, is tourism: Keep it attractive and amusing—a playground. The Board of Supervisors should be recruited from Disneyland, not from home-grown despots.

Idiocy is hard to fight. Especially when it has the imprimatur of official decree.

A couple of interesting links: http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/MedicalTreatments/radiation-exposure-and-cancer
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/20/18685395.php

What did they expect?

2011-10-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

An odd thing happened yesterday when Apple Inc. reported its earnings for the quarter. When the numbers came in lower than “Wall Street expectations,” the stock fell in after-hours trading. In fact, Apple exceeded its own prediction of earnings, but fell short of outsiders’ expectations. Since the company has exceeded outsiders’ expectations for the past 20 or so quarters, but came in below them (for good reason, by the way) this one time, the stock was punished by “the Street.”

What a bunch of bogus nonsense. The actual earnings and profits were the highest ever. The reason for not being as high as “expectations” was that Apple was preparing to introduce a new phone in the following quarter. Potential buyers of a new phone stopped buying the older model and that reduced sales for the reported quarter. This is to be expected—if you know a brand new magical gadget is just around the corner, and you don’t need a new phone right now, you wait to buy the new one which, by the way, set an all-time sales record—Four million units in the first three days worldwide.

But most distressing were the headlines of the articles, all of them implying that Apple was on the skids and everybody had better get out NOW. We are staying in for the long haul. We’re not going to abandon the company we watched pull out of almost certain bankruptcy to grow and become the most valuable company on earth. Our personal stock in Apple has increased in value by about 300%, and our daughter’s cache of shares has gone up over 5,000%.

Not bad for a fading star of a company.

Jury duty

2011-10-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Early tomorrow morning Karla heads off to Madera, the county seat, for an appointment with the criminal justice system. Perhaps she’ll end up sitting in the jury box at a trial to decide the fate of a robber, a rapist, a murderer.

The best way to get on a jury is to deny any knowledge of the case, sound like you understand the English language, have no preconceived notions regarding criminal justice, and look like you’re intelligent.

We’ll see if she’s selected to be one of the twelve, out of hundreds of thousands of county residents, who will have the fate of a human soul in her hands.

My experience with being a jury member leaves a sour taste. When my team presented the verdict of guilty of first degree murder, we all wanted to go home and hide under the covers for a week to diminish the guilt we felt for coming to that verdict. None of us felt good about it, and each of us probably blamed our decision on the perceived inviolability of the orders from the judge: If so-and-so is proved, then so-and-so must be the verdict. On reflection, we as a body should have rejected the judge’s instructions and nullified his orders. Problem is, the court system is rigged. Juries are told that the judge is the boss, and his or her instructions are to be followed. You would have to be on a jury at least once previously in order to game the system.

So why have a jury if that’s the case? One thing that is never told to the jury before they go in for deliberation is the instruction to “Vote your conscience.” Probably no judge in the last fifty years has used that phrase, which was routinely spoken a hundred years ago. Had we voted our conscience, the kid we sent to prison would be doing a sentence of a couple of years for bad behavior instead of twenty-five years to life for a really minor part in a crime committed by a dozen youngsters. I’m sure the prosecutor was interested only in enhancing his image of toughness, hoping to advance in the ranks of nasty bastards so he could get a higher-ranking position in the political game he was into.

Shame on me. I won't commit that crime again.

Update: After being held for hours, the prospective jurors were released around 3:00 in the afternoon. Thanks but no thanks.

Trust

2011-10-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

It’s been more than a whole 24-hour day since I relied on what has to be some powerful Honest-To-God trust. Karla and I had hiked up to check the level in our water tank and to gather a few of the empty Crystalyx drums to return them for the deposit. On the way I spotted a really big puffball, a ground-growing fungus that grows all over the ranch. It was the size of a medium orange, and heavy. I wondered if it was something we could eat, and Karla said “Audrey said yes.” Audrey is our organic/holistic/young friend who studies local Indian lore and has spent time in Alaska counting migrating whales and is heading to Ethiopia in order to teach prenatal care to women. She’s a nutritionist and yoga instructor and is beautiful besides. We trust Audrey.

I took the puffball home. I planned to make it part of a really exciting gourmet breakfast—fresh wild mushroom and eggs. Karla demurred, deciding to have Grape-Nuts cereal instead.

Slicing into the puffball was delightful, its texture firm and smooth like a young banana. The first slice I consumed raw. The rest was cut into rounds and sautéed in butter. Then I fried a couple of free-range vegetarian-diet-hens’ eggs and flipped them in the pan without a spatula, a skill which I am always willing to demonstrate to anyone within eye-shot.

I laid out the tender golden puffball slices, overlapping them in a C-shaped curve along the plate’s edge, then slipped the skillfully-flipped eggs into the C’s negative space. As I sat down at the dining table next to Karla and her Grape-Nuts with milk and Greek yogurt and locally-produced honey, I felt like gloating. What a prize! What a brave guy! I was actually going to consume a wild mushroom after only hearing an anecdotal “sure, you can eat them” from Audrey through Karla. What if Karla had mis-heard? What if Audrey had actually said the Indians had used them to kill people, not fill them? After all, the local natives had done some pretty potent things with wormwood leaves and crushed buckeye nuts and mistletoe berries.

As it turned out, this meal wouldn’t top my list of requests for a last meal that I’d submit to the executioner, but it was good. I had a lot of attention on my liver as I swallowed each bite. Once during the meal I felt a gas bubble stab my abdomen but dismissed it as mere coincidence. After all, how often does that happen even during a perfectly safe federally-approved meal? Often, I assured myself. The twinge of pain I felt in my big toe was something I had experienced before, the result of stubbing it on a rock during our hike. Nothing to do with this meal. I assured myself that the slightly giddy feeling I was becoming acutely aware of had to be caused by my recently-consumed cup of strong black coffee. The entire dining experience consisted of me assuring myself that everything was just fine, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing that was going to keep me from really enjoying and relishing this wonderful natural organic meal. Nothing!

Hours later I was mildly pleased that I felt no bad after-effects. But it could take time, I thought; not every poison is fast-acting. Sometimes the effects can take hours, even days to manifest. Decades in the case of radium salts or mercuric oxide or fibrous asbestos or bad booze. Millennia in the case of bad karma.

But that was yesterday. This is today. And I’m still here, proving that putative puffball poison is at least very slow-acting. I even went out this morning and plucked a few more of them. This time they’ll be used in tonight’s salad.

Karla says she’s also going to try something new for dinner—Grape-Nuts.

Just add water…

2011-10-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

Grass!

…and a little time, like a week. The greenery is popping out all over the place. The grass is three or four inches (75 to 100 mm) high in many places, but the real treat for horses is what we call filaree, a forb that they love. They discovered the filaree when it was barely out of its seed form (mm-m-m! filaree sprouts!) and have continued munching it wherever they can find it, which is almost everywhere.

Filaree!

As a testament to filaree’s appeal, we put out six drums of Crystalyx, a hardened molasses-and-protein-and-other-stuff mix, in various places around the ranch. Each drum weighs about 250 pounds (113 kg) and the horses found them quickly. Being hierarchical (kind of like chickens) the meanest horses get to eat first, then the second-third-and-fourth meanest horses, and finally the wimps get in a lick or two before the meanest ones get hungry again. Usually the Crystalyx is gone after a couple of weeks, but we found three drums with some of it still uneaten, and no horses around! All we need now is more rain in order to keep the green stuff growing.

Or we’ll have to spend the other green stuff on more Crystalyx. Or feed hay. Or move onto a more rewarding way to make a living, like raising worms or chinchillas.

A rousing night’s deluge

2011-10-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

The center tube, measuring one inch, is full and has spilled over
to the outer tube.

Starting around midnight, the skies opened up and by 8 o’clock in the morning had dumped nearly an inch and a half of rain on us. A record-setting storm for sure, giving us what normally falls in the entire month of October in just eight hours. Later in the morning, another five hundredths fell giving us a total of 1.52 inches (39 millimeters). The grass will definitely start very soon and be ready to eat in maybe a month.

Can we take our hay back? We contracted for 120 bales and loaded 60 of them in the barn last night. Oh well, there are always bad-weather years to come. And hay keeps well without refrigeration.

A bonus was the thorough washing our solar panels got from the heavy downpour. Since they’re up where it takes two ladders to get to them, and I don’t do ladders without another person steadying them, they didn’t get washed all summer. I checked the power when the sun poked through the clouds and was happy to see 2,475 watts coming from them into the thirsty batteries.

So we now have early upcoming grass and tons of solar electricity. Who could ask for more?

Update: Storm total—1.93" (49 mm)

Please! Rain!

2011-10-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

What a disappointment. Checking the Internet for weather forecasts, looking longingly at radar pictures of storms, hoping that the dark green—or even better, the yellow and red (even, if I dare, purple)—portions showing rain intensity fall over your location. So far, nada. Disappointing. The forecasts were so much more encouraging. What happened? Why aren’t they coming true? Who do you believe? Is the tooth fairy a myth? Is there no justice? Will mediocrity overcome deep thought? Is nature capricious? Should the government never be in charge of anything important? Was I lied to?

There is one consolation. Hilary is bringing up a load of 60 bales of hay tonight. We have to get it out of the trailer and into the barn before it’s ruined by rain. It would be nice of it doesn’t rain during that time. Let’s hope. Please! No rain! I take back all my pleadings!

Please! Don’t rain!

Rain! Yay!

2011-10-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

I stepped out of the house yesterday evening and saw to the east some nice cumulous clouds, with brilliant white tops lit by the sun shining through low clouds to the west. The lower parts of the clouds were in graduated shades of lovely pearly gray. You know the kind of moment, when the skies get together and say to themselves, “Let’s give ‘em a light show!”

Of course, we humans who need to record this kind of stuff for broadcast to friends need to grab their cameras and capture the moment. In my case I was too late. By the time I had ripped into the camera case, yanked off the lens cap, flipped on the power switch so forcefully I was surprised I hadn’t broken it, and arrived at the scene with the smell of burning rubber from my sandals assaulting my nostrils as I dashed out of the house so fast I could look back and still see my fading streaked image lingering in the air, the sunlit scene got dull and dark. I must move faster!

So instead I took a picture of the clouds to the west.

The latest weather forecast says that by Wednesday we should have RAIN. Not a 30% chance, or even a 70% chance—just RAIN! That’s exciting. While many people consider rain as something either nice to look at or maybe a commuting nuisance, we who are closely connected to the soil and the elements consider this an important moment. We have literally tons of horseflesh on our near-square-mile ranch and early rain means free horse feed. If the horses find green underfoot, we find green in our bank account. People in our neighborhood stocking up on hay are lamenting the high price, almost double what it was a year ago. To hedge our bets, we are filling some of our new barn space with a few tons of grass-alfalfa-mix bales that we found at a decent price locally. If we don’t need them this winter, they have a long shelf life and we will have them for next winter. It’s always a crap shoot. People whose lives closely depend on weather are the real gamblers.

From out of the blue…

2011-09-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

At just around noon the phone rang and it was Hilary’s clear-as-a-bell voice on the other end. “Where are you,” I asked. “On top of Turret Peak” she answered. If you’re not familiar with where that is, it’s way off in the middle of the John Muir Wilderness of the Sierra National Forest. If she were flying an unpressurized airplane, she could only stay at that elevation/altitude for a half hour before needing supplemental oxygen. The only time I was on Turret Peak, there was no such thing as a cell phone, so this was an odd experience for me.

She listed the points of interest she could see from there which included the entire Muir Trail Ranch of course, the stone hut on Muir Pass, Paiute Pass (where our horses will be in just a few days), and myriad other things that I’m sure existed when I was at that same spot decades ago, but were unknown to me. The air was clear so the view was incredible.

I asked if she had taken her “real” camera. No, this was a pleasure trip, not a photographic assignment. She and two of the other women had decided to take a day off and do some horseback riding. Just one of the perks you get when you work at the ranch, like having your own goose down pillow and all the cool spring water you can drink and hot spring baths you can soak in.

Jewelry in the making

2011-09-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Gold and white enamel are combined into a fine filigree for this brooch. But don’t wear it or it may freeze to your skin. This picture shows dry ice beds at the south pole on Mars. Carbon dioxide freezes into ponds that later sublimate (turn directly into gas) and disappear for the rest of the year. So far nobody knows what gives the pit walls their gold color.

Boy, you just never know what you’re gonna find out there in the big ol’ universe, do ya?

Image Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Two cheetahs and a gopher

2011-09-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday Luke and Randy dropped by the lower ranch with one goal in mind—to finish putting a roof over our double barn. Several months ago we had a couple of 28-foot-long truck trailers, without their wheels, installed next to each other. There was a space between them that, once roofed over, would provide a nice place to park our aluminum ferry boat, which we bring down every year from the lake. (The bigger all-steel ferry boat has its own storage building at the lake.) Off to the east we extended the roof to protect the aluminum “luggage boat,” which also gets hauled down yearly.

The project had remained in a partially-roofed state for several months. The cheetahs arrived and in less than one-and-a-half days finished the job. I, the gofer, was near finished myself, not accustomed to that kind of work speed. They both agreed that they could have completed the job in just one day if it hadn’t been so hot and humid—near 100°F. They had to take breaks in the shade and dip their heads in the cold spring-water-fed horse trough for cooling.

When the two of them left, the place felt empty and a little dead. Randy will be heading back to his home in England after a whole summer at the high ranch, while Luke returns to finish some projects, supervise the removal of some hazard trees, and take the horses over Paiute Pass to the Bishop side for trailering down to Furnace Creek Stables in Death Valley for the winter.

Caught in the act

2011-09-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

I was wondering if my skill at Solitaire was waning when I noticed something odd. This deck has two Jacks of Clubs! No wonder I couldn’t win no matter what! I couldn’t drag the offending double away off the board, so it seems the only thing to do is restart the computer and hope the glitch is only temporary.

It reminds me of how people think computers and electronics in general are so infallible. Several years ago I was shopping for a thermometer at a pharmacy and saw that there weren’t any plain old mercury thermometers, only the digital ones. I asked the pharmacist if he had any regular analog types and he said Oh no, they’re illegal anymore. “And besides,” he added, “the new ones are all digital!” as if that were a marvelous improvement. I worked in electronics for way too long to be fooled by that belief.

I think I’ll just go to bed.

I’m back

2011-09-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been away from the blog for awhile, and am glad to see that some of my readers kept the fish and the gopher fed. Thanks!

Re-reading Atlas Shrugged kind of takes all your time and energy, but I’m recovered now. That book changed my life at a young age. I was sixteen when I first read it. I recommend that you wait till at least 25 or so so you have some more maturity and don’t end up hating the idiotic world. Of course, the world is still a mess anyway…

It’s a start…

2011-09-10T18:00:00.000-07:00

Raindrops smatter the windshield

Today at about a quarter past five in the afternoon there was a terrific lightning flash really close, followed by a clap of thunder that made me jump, right after jumping because the lightning caused snaps on the ground as I walked along. I didn’t quite see what snapped, but I sure heard it. One lightning bolt, two jumps; that’s pretty good. So far it hadn’t rained even a drop. The National Weather Service is publishing Red Flag Warnings for lightning-caused wildfires here in the foothills.

Dang! That’s all we need! It has been very windy off and on, enough wind to have actually blown two socks off the clothesline! Then, finally, a smattering of rain. But nowhere near enough to suppress any wind-blown wildfire, that’s for sure.

Off in the distance to the south I can see dark bands of rain pouring out of the clouds, but it hasn’t gotten up here yet. I lived through the most destructive wildfire in history in this area in 1961, and I don’t want a repeat of that awful experience. The fire was clocked at between 45 and 60 miles per hour. There was no escape, 200 houses were lost and two people died. This area has grown up so much that now 2,000 houses would be lost if that fire came through.

Think rain. Lots of rain.

Rain? Rain? Please! Please!

2011-09-09T16:30:00.001-07:00

I stepped outside a few minutes ago and smelled rain. Then I felt a drop on my forehead. The weather prediction is for low percentage chances of thunderstorms for the next two or three days, so if we can get the wet stuff before we get hit with the hot sparky stuff I’m a happy camper. If we get an inch or so of rain, that’s the best of all since it will start the winter feed growing for the hungry horses we have here.

Now if the horses and mules will stop their silly ballet moves and get to the down and dirty rain dances, I’ll be very happy.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

2011-09-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

As promised, getting the Kindle edition took only a few minutes. I dove in and was captured by Orwell’s powerful prose. It had been decades since I read the book, and fortunately for me, I had forgotten about 110% of it, so it was an all-new experience. It ends, sadly, with the protagonist’s total mental and spiritual defeat, but for quite awhile your hopes were up that he could make it and triumph against the dystopian state of the world. The upshot is that it was hopeless to fight the system because the system was so thoroughly established and meticulously maintained. Nobody is to be trusted, though again there are glimmers of hope. It’s a wrenching experience, but one you shouldn’t miss.

Occasionally I was shocked when the story mimicked what is happening today! Reminding me of my last blog post—Scary.

I wish Amazon could produce a flawless Kindle edition of anything. This one had page numbers popping up occasionally in the body of the work. Annoying, but the price is right. And you can’t beat the speed of delivery. I was thinking about which books people buy in the physical paper versions versus the ones they buy as ebooks. I came up with two reasons for the ebook: Nobody will see it on your coffee table and think you’re a radical or a creep, or belong in jail; the other is that you’re cheap.

Or three: You’re green. Or all of the above. What do I know! Ask Big Brother!

Scary…

2011-08-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

I got the picture shown here in an email, and sent it off to a few people on my mailing list. The signs at first make me laugh, then they make me fearful of living among people who need signs like these. One of my correspondents mentioned hearing someone say that he has a couple of kids in school and they’re not being taught longhand writing; that form of writing is like hieroglyphics to them. I recalled that the original United States Constitution is written in longhand.

Yesterday I heard government agency representatives talking about how the victims of hurricane Irene could count on assistance from the federal family. Not federal government—federal family. Remember when people on the leftward end of the political spectrum called themselves liberals? Now the preferred term is progressives. When I was in high school, the term progressive was used by those who didn’t like being called socialists.

I don’t believe any of this is happening by accident. I just bought the Kindle edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Gotta brush up on Newspeak.

Another astonishing…

2011-08-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

…astonishing what? How can I describe the most thrilling moment in Solitaire? This game went so smoothly and well that when I finished it I wondered—did I actually do that in one time through the deck? Fortunately I can back up the game completely with the Undo key and replay it, card by thrilling card, feeling my heart pound, the tingle running up both legs, the shortness of breath, the sweat gushing from my brow, the dry mouth, and finally the exhausting elation of playing all the way to another once-through-the-deck fabulous win!

Excuse me, I have to go lie down.

Wrench stretcher

2011-08-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

When the most prevalent sound around here is twin-engine airplanes with bright red tails flying over the house, you know it’s that time again. Now we have a wildfire burning to the northeast, shutting down Highway 140, the middle way into Yosemite National Park. The park is being powered by its emergency generators since the utility lines are down. The fire was caused when a motorhome’s propane tank caught fire. The motorhome was completely lost in the conflagration, and the residual effect was that several thousand acres of rugged country are now burning.

When I discovered a few weeks ago that the valve controlling our fire hydrant was split, I bought a replacement. Installing it was something else again. The old one was on so tight I couldn’t budge it with my puny eighteen-inch pipe wrenches. I had a 24" and even a 36" wrench but they were nowhere to be found. Probably went to the high ranch where the pipes are bigger. So I put together the rig shown above. The green nylon strap load binder can exert 1,500 pounds of force. It worked. I got the new valve on. Now if only those noisy airplanes would stop flying over all day long, things could be pleasant around here once again.

I just love this illusion

2011-08-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

I had first seen this illustration many years ago, and ran across it again today used in a Scientific American article about making a better light bulb. Without diving into the article, I tried to remember what the picture demonstrated, and came up with this: Two squares are labeled A and B. Which is darker? Well obviously A is darker than B. Duh.

Wrongo! They’re the same brightness! To prove it, put the fingers of both hands together at the tips, index to index, middle to middle, and ring to ring. Leave little diamond shaped holes between the fingers and superimpose them onto the A and B squares, masking the surrounding squares. Surprise! A and B are identically bright.

The whole idea of the illusion is to demonstrate context. You can try another experiment yourself that involves taste, not vision. A lot of people don’t like the taste of broccoli, for example. That’s because they are probably eating broccoli alongside things they do like such as mashed potatoes and gravy and fried chicken. But try this: Take a swig of a mixture of paint thinner, mashed ants and cat pee. Swish it around for a few seconds then spit it out. Then take a bite of broccoli. Wow! It’s love at first bite!

Google math

2011-08-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

I was checking into using Google for Business to handle our ranch’s email. We already use their Gmail, but the Business mail offers more and only costs $50 per year.

I was checking out the features and had to view their introductory video twice because I thought something didn’t quite add up. As background, do any of you remember Google’s billboards recruiting people to work for them? The boards showed arcane symbolism that only a geek could appreciate. Like the sum of primes of factors of mathematical constants, or zeroes and ones that spell out something that no normal human ever heard of. The billboards were very successful in recruiting some very smart people to do Google’s magic. The problem was (and still is), very few normal people work at Google, the kind of people who can communicate effectively with the unwashed masses that make up Google’s audience. And some of their communicators don’t speak very clearly nor can they do simple math.

To illustrate my point, click on the link and view the short video titled Gmail Overview. The “announcer” mumbles his way through the script. At about the 1:10 mark listen to him say “that’s more than fifty times the industry average.” Google gives you 25 gigs of storage while others give you only one gig. Twenty-five times one equals fifty?

Google, you make me giggle.

Odd wasp

2011-08-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Some ground-nesting birds use an interesting behavior to lead intruders away from their nests. The grouse, for example, will make a fuss and lead a possible enemy far away before returning to the nest and its babies. But have you ever heard of an insect that does the same thing?

Several times, when coming back from my morning chore of feeding a couple of horses, I have seen a brilliant iridescent blue wasp staying just ahead of me on the trail, fluttering its wings, darting back and forth across the trail, always leading me up the hill until I’m safely away from whatever it is the wasp is trying to hide. Of course I don’t have a camera with me when this happens.

Today is different. I hung my nifty little Flip Ultra HD video camera on the doorknob so I wouldn’t forget it when leaving to feed the horses. After giving them their feed, I quickly headed back up the trail, hoping to see the blue wasp. And wouldn’t you know—for the first time there was no wasp! I guess the baby grouse it was raising grew up and flew away.

Windy day

2011-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

In the summertime, I always hang my laundry on a clothesline instead of putting it in the dryer. It saves gas and makes for less wear and tear on the fabric. The days are hot enough to get the job done quickly, and shaking the items as I take them off the line gets rid of the stiffness that normally sets in if there’s no wind to fluff things a bit.

Imagine my surprise when I went to take clothes off the line and discovered an entire sock blown clear to the ground! This year has been a big one for wind damage across the country. We here in California don’t usually get big blasts strong enough to lift a whole cotton sock clear off the line, and when it happens, it’s blogworthy.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Warning! Your PayPal account has been limited!

2011-08-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

It amazes me how people for whom English isn’t their first language (or if it is, that’s even scarier!) think they can pull in victims with the like of the wording in the screen shot shown above. I hovered the cursor over the link, and it shows that it’s a place called “surf in israel.”

My PayPal account doesn’t even do shekels.

They’re ba-a-ack

2011-08-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t seen raccoon tracks in a long time, but when I headed uphill to start the olive tree soakers, there they were. The picture above shows them along with several other tracks: Car, Me, Cat, and Rabbit. A record of our passing is made daily in the sand, and if we stop to study it, we are reminded that we’re not alone. The tracks are spread out over time mainly because we can’t all occupy the same space at the same time. If the car makes a track, I will be in the car. When I make a track, the car is elsewhere. When the raccoons make their tracks, I, the car, the cat, and the rabbits are absent. You get the idea.

People of an analytical bent could create a chart showing the presence/absence/time relationship of the various actors in this scenario. One thing that could be anomalous is that some of the bunnies around here are fearless regarding human presence; we could make tracks together. One of the rabbits has actually befriended the cat (or at least isn’t afraid of it)! That’s probably a temporary situation; I better keep the cat well-fed so he doesn’t get any ideas.

When I feed one of our old horses, sometimes I almost have to boot a couple of rabbits away in order to pour the feed into her trough. Currently only one squirrel is fearless enough to sniff at my sandals. It reminds me of the times a decade or so ago when we had a low-to-the ground horse trough that would nearly fill up with squirrels (fourteen at a time!) waiting for the raining down of grain and pellets. I would have to stand in the trough and shove the squirrels to one end to give the poor old horse access to his feed. Our bunk (an off-the-ground trough and hay-holding combo feeder) gets visited by the ravens, who only rarely use it as a toilet, much to Geronimo’s approval.

I really enjoy the company of our wild animals. As for man-made animals, I reserve judgment. Well, no, I don’t reserve judgment. People have created house cats, for instance. Ours is a cross between [deleted] and [deleted]. Horses are…I better hold my tongue since there are dozens of them around here most of the year, along with people who really like them. Dogs are cool as long as they retrieve a thrown ball and don’t get it too wet and slimy.

It always amuses me—

2011-08-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

when I see this printed statement:

This page intentionally left blank

I took off running!

2011-08-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I went over to the corral to let Geronimo out. He had been working for over four hours to eat his two-bucket ration of senior horse feed, something that’s so full of nutrition it makes him look like a real horse. He has all his incisors so he can bite things off, but the few molars he still has don’t match up. Chewing is not possible, so swallowing lots of pellets and ground-up grains works to keep him healthy. He still acts like he’s chewing, though, probably just a habit.

A few days ago I had sprayed him with fly repellent which is effective for several days. There is a species of smallish black flies that land in hordes, covering parts of the horse and making it look black. His normal brown coat is nice and shiny, but the flies can change that quickly. It’s funny—when he shiver-shakes, as only a horse can do, the flies take off and he’s a brown horse for a few seconds. Today I noticed that some new flies, very large yellow ones, were bothering him. I was familiar with the really nasty black “regular” horse flies which are about an inch (2.5 cm) long, but these big yellow ones were new to me. We have had smaller yellow flies before, and they pack a painful bite. I went to the barn and grabbed the big bottle of repellent and started to spray his back and belly. Flies flew off in clouds. The yellow ones were especially bothered by the spray and were very angry that I had made their meal ticket off limits to them. So what did they do? They came after me! I, with a bald pate, a thin t-shirt, and shorts and sandals made a very tempting target. I tossed the repellent into the barn, slammed the door, and took off running back to the house.

Felt good. I hadn’t run in months.

Survivors

2011-08-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

For some odd reason, the grapes around here are hanging in there without being munched by all the wild critters. No wasps, no birds, no vine snakes are eating them as fast as they ripen. Maybe Karla will get to eat some of them; they’re one of her favorite fruits. All she has to do is get down to the lower ranch once in awhile….

So many subjects…

2011-07-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

I have a ton of ideas for blogs, but I always like to accompany them with pictures. It seems that whenever I go to take a picture, the light is crummy, or the tadpoles run and hide, or the huge colorful spider dashes off to the hidden corners of his/her web, or some other thing. Like when the horses were engaged in their version of Swan Lake, the ballet, over by the corral, I didn’t even have a camera with me. Imagine! Huge horses and even huger mules twirling on their tippy-toes! Stunning. And when the squirrels and the rattlesnake were sitting on a flat rock playing poker, once again—no camera. (The snake appeared to be winning by a huge margin, by the way. Unless those “chips” in front of him were actually squirrel turds.)

Dang! It’s really getting to me. I makes me want to start making things up and not even using pictures.

Summer snow

2011-07-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

Early this morning I went to check the irrigation to the olive trees up the hill. When I came back toward the house, I noticed the hood (bonnet) of the car was covered with a thin layer of what looked like snow. Mid-July doesn’t often give us that phenomenon. Sure enough it was tiny blossoms that had fallen from the privet trees near the car.

The trees were alive with bees and wasps taking advantage of the millions of blossoms coming into full nectar-bearing, and they were knocking them off by the handful. A steady shower of pale blossoms landed beneath the trees, making a wintry scene till the wind blew them away to make drifts against any upright surface. Nature’s abundance is astounding. Who knows—maybe one of the mature seeds from one of the seven trees may become a tree some day, but most likely that won’t come to pass. But that’s okay; Nature made a lot of fat bees instead.

Abundance strikes again

2011-07-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes abundance can cause a lot of work. For the first time ever, our apricot tree started to crank out fruit like it was going out of style. Many dozens of apricots fell to the ground daily for weeks. I couldn’t just scoop them up, eat a few, and toss the rest away, so I dried some (turned out ugly) and finally decided I had better make jam.

Birds and insects found many of the fruits before I did, and did minor to catastrophic damage to them. A few apricots received only a tiny bruise from hitting the ground. Overall, most of the fruit was usable after only minor trimming. It is always surprising to see that a large pile of fruit in the food processor shrinks so much when the whirring blade does its duty.

The first batch I made was tiny. But it was gaggingly sweet because of its nearly-one-to-one ratio of sugar to fruit. For the second and subsequent batches I picked some lemons (huge!) off our tree and added a generous amount of lemon zest and juice to cut the sweetness. I thought I might be in trouble altering the basic recipe with lots of acid from the lemons, but it worked out just fine. It seems jam-making isn’t as touchy as candy-making.

I sent the first batch of jam to the crew at the high ranch. They loved it. If they’re nice to me, maybe they’ll luck out and get some of the second batch.

Hey! Get outta my plum!

2011-07-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

For several years I have been feeding local birds. While I’m sure they appreciated my generosity, they were risking their lives because we always seem to have at least one cat living with us. The hummingbirds were a tasty snack when the cat would lie in wait under a quince bush. The little birds seemed unaware that the blob of fur beneath the bush had claws and sharp teeth. Other birds would gather under their seed feeder to pick up the seeds that had fallen to the ground. The furball with claws kept nice and fat feeding on them.

So I stopped feeding the birds. As a benefit, the cat now gets only veterinarian-approved official government-inspected cheaper-by-the-ton Costco dry cat food. He’s getting fat and lazy and lethargic. Another benefit is to our fruit crop. Without an artificially-boosted gang of birds around, the plum tree is actually producing enough for us humans to harvest. So far the raccoons haven’t been by to break the branches, probably because of the growing abundance of feral/wild pigs eating what the raccoons used to eat, crowding them out. And we all know that pigs can’t climb trees worth a hoot. I don’t think they can even stand on their hind legs to reach up.

Only one local natural creature remains a threat to our plum crop—yellow jacket wasps. They seem to be growing in number because there was a bumper crop of apricots this year, and the plum tree is trying to catch up. I don’t know what to do about the yellow jackets. They usually only eat half a plum before moving on, so I get to eat lots of half plums. I just hope I don’t bite into one that still contains a wasp, though.

We both have dangerous jobs

2011-07-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Our favorite helicopter company, Ambrosini Helicopters, Inc. in Fresno is run by a man who faces danger every day. A few days ago he flew one of our guests in from Fresno, and he came back to the ranch a few days later to pick her up and take her to Mammoth, on the other side of the Sierra. For several days we had been getting afternoon thunderstorms up there, so he asked me to get ahold of the ranch and make sure she was ready by 9:00 in the morning. That way he could beat the storms. “I hate flying in hail,” he told me. I emailed the ranch and got a response: She was ready.

Contrast what he faces daily with what I face daily. Last week I slipped on some dry grass as I walked down a steep slope to the creek on the way to feed horses. I fell flat on my back. My head missed a rock by mere inches (mere centimeters). The following day a horse, anxious to get to the feed I was putting in his trough, pushed me into the steel teeth of a hay bale cart. I still have a very swollen shin. While I was stirring a pot of 220°F (105°C) apricot jam, the boiling got especially vigorous and I got splashed by hot jam. I can still find the red spot on my arm in the right lighting conditions. I am dreading the day, when opening a bill from one of our suppliers, that I get a paper cut.

Another astonishing achievement

2011-07-07T17:30:00.000-07:00

Life has few moments as exciting as going through the deck one time and getting a win in solitaire. It’s happened to me maybe six times in my life. But every time it’s something to swell up with pride about, kind of like getting a triple Ph.D or becoming pope. While those are pretty decent achievements, they don’t quite have the—what can I say—visceral thrill of turning one card after another and placing them with such skill and certainty and knowing a win is coming. As it starts to look like it’s going to happen, I slow down a little just to prolong the excitement. Then, finally, the “Bravo! You did it” pops up and I am elated for a couple of hours at least. Nothing like it.

Why I bought Apple stock way back when

2011-07-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

Here’s one more reason I love Apple. This company has its finger on the pulse of the future. It’s astonishing the number of industries and enterprises that are adopting the iPad as a fundamental part of their operations. Airlines expect to save millions of dollars annually in fuel costs alone by adopting the lightweight iPad instead of the 40-to 50-pound flight bag with its paper charts and manuals required to be on the flight decks of airliners. I don’t know why the iPad won out over the myriad of tablet computers available now, but I think it is because of Apple’s reputation of “innovation that simply works.”

Don’t be surprised if your San Francisco to Tokyo flight crashes and the cause is that the pilot was playing Angry Birds instead of monitoring the killer storm that brought the plane down. We’re all human after all. I mean even in the paper chart days, he could have been doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

A friend of ours who is a retired Delta Airlines pilot said that after he gets the airplane off the ground and aimed at its target, he just punches the autopilot button till the airplane is ready to land. In the interim, his chief responsibility is to keep the toilets working.

Photo: New York Times

Depressing, isn’t it?

2011-07-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

As things get more expensive, things don’t seem to cost more. I noticed this when I was in Costco a few weeks ago. I was used to paying just under $40 for Chevron Delo 400 motor oil, the product we use in diesel engines. I grabbed a box of gallon bottles and put it in the cart. It was only later I realized that instead of four one-gallon bottles in the box, there were three. Another instance was yesterday when I asked Hilary to pick up a 5-pound bag of sugar so I could cook up some apricot jam. She brought home a 4-pound bag, which superficially looked like the old 5-pound bag. She noticed the deficiency and bought an additional 2-pound box to make it up. [Thanks Hil! I used every speck of it!]

Check out a box of breakfast cereal on the supermarket shelf. Same width, same height. But front-to-back it’s thinner, and the price hasn’t changed.

Is it a nasty conspiracy? No, it’s marketing. If prices go up, people start changing their buying habits and instead of buying a brand name product, they’ll pick a generic.

Behind all this is the unacknowledged fact that here in the United States we are in a depression. No politician dares to mention the D word, but every historic indicator points to the conclusion that it’s true. And we can only get out of this mess by cutting spending on the part of governments. Stop the stupid wars, too. It will hurt short-term, but if we keep kicking the can down the road, we only prolong the pain. This is a rich, powerful country with resources, both natural and human, that match or exceed any country on earth. We can save ourselves from a lingering demise if we confront the problem directly and stop calling it a recession with recovery on the horizon.

The first step is to declare the truth: We are in a depression. Period. Even though things seem to cost the same as they did before.

Second batch of equines heads to ranch

2011-07-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Hilary headed out this morning with six horses stuffed into the big trailer. As the trailer passed by me, I could hear wheezing and grunting as the tightly-packed horses struggled for breath. Hilary told me that when they get up to highway speed, the horses will cool and shrink and be able to breathe normally.

Joke.

She’ll return tonight with Emily and repeat this activity until the ranch has enough horseflesh to meet the needs of the guests for the summer. We don’t have any French chefs scheduled to cook this season, so I don’t know why they need so many horses. Maybe they’re just up there to fatten up on the rich meadow grass, for use later.

Joke.

I’d better quit before I get blasted.

Pendulum waves

2011-07-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations. (Thanks for the link, Bill.) Fascinating to see what we mostly see on an electronic display such as an oscilloscope. In one minute these pendula (pendulums to those not comfortable with Latin) go through some very interesting wave motions. One of the professors suggested that “the demonstration could be used to simulate quantum revival.” The writer concluded, and I quote: “So here you have quantum revival versus classical periodicity!”

No wonder I almost wet myself!

The article mentions that halfway through the 60-second cycle, half the pendulums are at one amplitude maximum while the other half are at the opposite amplitude maximum. That occurs at the 57-second mark in the video.

Someone should build swing sets like this for playgrounds to teach kids that cooperation can actually be fun, to the outside viewer at least.

It rained!

2011-06-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

I filled in a long gash of a gully in this part of the road

Record-breaking rainfall fell yesterday. It’s almost July, and we got 1.4 inches (35mm) of precipitation in under 24 hours, which is very rare. Several weeks ago I had promised neighbor Bill that I would bring the road grader down and work on getting some bumps out of his driveway. He’s an accomplished tractor operator, but some things can only be done with the really broad blade on a grader.

In a couple of hours I was finished with his driveway, then got in some licks on a piece of the road that was neglected because it was always too hard and dry to work with whenever I was in the area. This morning it was just perfectly moist, so I filled in a very long gully that ran along about a third of the way in from the road’s edge.

Some of these rocks turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought. Several hundred pounds anyway. Glad I had the grader to push them out of the way.

Then, on the way back home, I thought I’d pluck a rock out of the driveway-to-be at our new house site. Of course, there wasn’t just one rock; I found a whole nest of them. So I dug them all up then had their empty nest to fill. The dirt was just perfectly moist, so the rocks got tossed off to the side and the nest was filled with soil. To top it off, I also plucked the stump and roots of a long-dead manzanita tree that was right under where Babe will be in the new house.

Regarding the house, we got a quote from the builder, and it turned out to be much more costly than we had anticipated, and that’s even without a whole bunch of needed stuff. We thought it would be cheaper since we already own the land. But the power company wants $40 per foot to run lines in, which comes to $70K, so forget the power company. Besides the power in our area is at the end of their lines and isn’t the best. Then there’s the septic system, the water lines, well pump (we already have a good well), and multi-thousand-gallon water tank. Solar electricity with storage batteries and propane-powered backup generator will come to a pretty penny. Ground-source heating and cooling adds who knows what. We have no idea what it will cost to put up our clay tile on the roof (we already have over 8,000 handmade barrel tiles). And on and on.

We’ll think about it. So far at least we got rid of some nasty rocks and a manzanita stump.

Come on up—the weather’s fine!

2011-06-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

Ben is enjoying his summer home in the high Sierra. Sure beats Furnace Creek in Death Valley at this time of year!

I am not kidding…

2011-06-25T18:15:00.001-07:00

Headline at Web site The Register:

Woman dies of heart attack at own funeral

Shock of resurrection proves fatal

It can only happen in Russia. Read the article here.

I am not kidding…

2011-06-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

Headline at Web site The Register:

Woman dies of heart attack at own funeral

Shock of resurrection proves fatal

It can only happen in Russia.

Read the article here.

And why this blog appears twice? I dunno, and it won't delete, either.

Scary email

2011-06-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Darn! I guess I lose all my Halifax Bank money because as the email says, failure can “result to account suspension.” Darn!

So THAT’s what all the croaking was about!

2011-06-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

It seems that we heard croaking frogs all winter. Today I spotted some new life in the middle barrel of our fish fountain. Last year maybe two tadpoles came to life, but that’s all, and they disappeared soon after I first spotted them. This year there is more food for them since I don’t clean that part of the fountain anymore. There’s plenty of algae and who knows what else in there, along with (presumably) lots of invertebrate life. Somehow little pollywogs manage to grow into frogs in really grungy natural places, so maybe that’s what they need.

We’ve all heard Kermit the Frog complaining that “it’s not easy being green.” I figure it’s very green to not scrape and scoop up grungy crud from a slimy wooden barrel. So wrong, Kermie. Being green is the easiest.

Plum lonesome…

2011-06-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

I visited the Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker works in Berkeley a few years back. They had free tours of the factory and gave quite a comprehensive demonstration of how chocolate was processed. One of the oddities they showed was how the cacao bean pod grew—many of them simply stuck out of the trunk of the tree, looking like a small purplish-yellow football that was glued pointy-end to the tree. This lonesome plum reminded me of the cacao pod.

Unlike its siblings higher up, this little thing was only a few inches off the ground. It has been green for a very long time, much longer than the higher plums. Does it need more sunlight? Should it be closer to the fresh nutrients being made by the leaves? Is it anti-social? Do plums have souls? So many questions.

I can’t wait to eat it and put an end to the rumination.

We love you, Babe

2011-06-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

There’s probably a term that describes a person who fiddles away on a keyboard without formal training or inherent skill. I don’t know the term, but I’m in that category. Late this afternoon I went out to the studio to see how the temperature was inside since Babe, our Steinway grand, should be kept cool or at least not hot. The studio is hooked up to our older solar power system, one we put in twenty years ago. It’s good for maybe 1,000 watts nowadays, and should provide enough power to keep a small window air conditioner going in Babe’s room.

The outside temperature today got to just over 100°F (38°C) but inside the studio it was a nice 78°F (25°C). I sat on the comfy leather-upholstered piano bench and turned back the first foot of Babe’s velvet cover, enough to open the keyboard for playing. I hit a few chords that I remembered from my early piano lessons and was rewarded by the rich sound that Babe gave back. This is a truly remarkable instrument—it’s like there is a vibrant soul inside that wants to please. I played around, pressing one key at a time and delighting in the sound that was produced. No matter what key I pressed, there was a beautiful response. Wow. This thing is pure magic—even beyond magic; it’s like immersing yourself in what makes life worthwhile. We took on a considerable obligation to acquire this magical instrument. It may be the smartest investment we ever made.

More fish stuff…

2011-06-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

After losing a batch of goldfish to marauding raccoons awhile back, I was so shocked and stunned that I swore off fish forever.

Forever is so darned long to swear off of anything, so I agreed when Hilary suggested getting more of the delightful critters to liven up the waters. We had a piece of expanded metal left over from another project and I bent a piece of electrical conduit into a circle, welded everything together and painted it kind of Navy Ship Gray to remind me of my nautical years spent on the Enterprise.

The sun-battered funnel has a dual purpose: It reduces the splash that eventually would soak through the paint and rust the metal, and it cuts the noise of splashing water, allowing the fish to get some shut-eye so they’re not all grouchy in the morning which can really spoil your day when you’re seeking peace and serenity.

Companion goldfish

2011-06-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Since I am on the subject of fish (previous post) I should address some of the questions that I’m sure are on the minds of my readers. Many of you know that I have a fountain/fish bowl made of three half-barrels. In the bottom half-barrel there are ten fine goldfish that Hilary bought from the local feed store about a year ago. Imagine—the feed store stocks and sells hundreds of tiny barely weaned goldfish every week. People buy them to use as food for other creatures! A secondary use is to keep livestock water troughs free of mosquito larvae. But Hilary’s intent was to provide a clutch of soothing companions to enrich our lives.

Over time I’ve learned to recognize the needs and desires of these adorable golden creatures. I discovered little behavioral clues, and would like to share my knowledge with my readers so you might consider acquiring these quiet companions that don’t scratch or bite or stink.

To start with, how do you know if your fish are unhappy? Simple—look for tears. Is the water they’re living in too hot? Watch for sweating. How do you know they’re hungry? When they see you approaching, they start salivating.

It takes a little practice to detect these subtle cues, but the rewards are gratifying. If having goldfish as loving companions doesn’t work out for you, remember—they cost only a dime apiece in quantity, they grow rapidly, and they can become a colorful ingredient in a yummy stir-fry.

About the gopher and the fishes

2011-06-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

For a very long time I have featured the cute little gopher (hamster?) at the top right-hand side of my blog page. A. Bowman is the developer (click on the aBowman on the top right of the animation to see his Web site) and has done a really good job of creating a very entertaining feature that bloggers can use for no charge.

One problem I have with the gopher’s water bottle is that when he drinks, no bubbles appear and rise to the top. Every water bottle I have ever seen has bubbles rising when drunk from (and I’ve seen a gazillion of them, having fed tons of chinchillas in my adolescent years). Maybe it isn’t water in that bottle. Maybe it’s helium. Inhaling a lungful of helium gives you a very high-pitched squeaky voice. Maybe that’s why we can’t hear gophers talk.

As an aside, you can buy helium for inflating party balloons. Do you know how to tell when a canister of helium is empty? It gets heavier.

Think about it.

Down the page a bit is the little blue pool with a bunch of fish swimming around. Click and you deposit some fish food, and they go for it. What I like to do is click ten times rapidly in one spot to get the fish to converge on it. My hope is that with such frenzied activity one or more of the fish will inadvertently get bitten and start to bleed. That will really pump up the frenzied behavior and we’ll get some real entertainment. But somehow they avoid biting each other, so we just see the dull pseudo-frenzy of semi-ravenous fish. Mr. Bowman has disappointed me.

I’ll have to write to him with my complaints. I hope he’s not a pacifist vegan but a red-blooded comedian.

Best before…

2011-06-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the date code on this bag of tortilla strips. To me anyway, R 08 10 11 C 3 6 05:24 doesn’t exactly communicate a “Best Before” date very well. What’s the R for? And the last four digits must mean you should eat them before 5:30 in the morning? Who eats tortilla strips at 5:30 in the morning? Only those who want to eat them before the final fleeting moment of freshness expires?

Good grief.

The big seasonal shift

2011-06-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

Today Karla and Hilary headed for the hills. Ben decided to go along too, as did dogs Sioux and Sallie. Oh, and so did Florence, if you count cats. Luke had already flown in to the ranch by helicopter a couple of weeks ago.

I phoned this evening and they all had arrived safe and sound at Florence Lake. Luke was there to greet them, and to delight Karla by having cleaned out the cabin of the winter’s rat shenanigans. The way the cabin at the lake is built makes it near impossible to keep those rodents out. But I am certain Luke will come up with a way to do it, even if it involves encasing the entire structure in reinforced concrete. Not too attractive, but hey.…

Every year we go through this whole routine. It’s been done for over 60 years and involves taking the stuff you need with you to the lake like clothes, food, and toiletries, and stuff like records of boat rental agreements, and extra blankets to replace the ones the rats decided to live in. Speaking of rats, I’m sure we have more of them than anyplace on earth. At least when you look at the destruction they can wreak. You never see one, but you can count on finding their toilets everywhere. Big cats can help control them, but we’re not so sure kitty Florence is up to the task. Sallie, the little black dog, can probably outperform Florence at the task.

Meanwhile, back at the (lower) ranch, my duties increase. Answering phone calls and responding to emails fills my day. I get up early, before the onset of oppressive heat, and get all the irrigation of plants and trees done. Old horses need feed supplements. When noontime comes and we have enough solar power, I turn on the well pump so I have enough water to keep everything alive and maintain a tankful of water to help fight the inevitable wildfire that so far hasn’t happened. It’s coming. We haven’t had a big fire since 1961. We are very overdue since the normal cycle is a wildfire every eight years to keep things in check. Nature’s way of lots of small frequent fires keeps our wild lands healthy. But humans have messed with nature’s plan to detrimental results.

In my next post, I’ll speak of policies that make fires more destructive than they need be.

Update: Not next post, another post. What I wrote for my next post was really too angry to put up.

Babe gets snuggy

2011-06-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

In spite of ghastly lighting conditions, I went ahead and took pictures of Babe’s new blanky. We have waited almost a month for it to arrive, custom-made by an outfit in Arizona that makes nice protective covers for pianos. It’s maroon crushed velvet, underlain with a Naugahyde-like waterproof layer, with a non-marring soft felt that will touch Babe’s delicate ebony skin. Who could ask for more? Her gold-embroidered name and Steinway’s lyre logo make it extra special. Are we to be accused of pampering?

Guilty as charged.

Pencils need a major re-design

2011-06-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

I ran across the stub of a pencil today. It was just about an inch long and for all practical purposes, useless. We have an electric pencil sharpener that we’ve used for about 30 years. Poke a pencil in and it’s made good to go. But when a pencil gets too short, you can only grip it with fingertips. What you end up with is only usable with fingertips.

I have a proposal: Eliminate the top one inch of all pencils. The manufacturer could save a ton of “lead” and a whole forest of trees if this simple action is adopted. Here is a picture of my proposed no-waste pencil.

Sun blows itself up yesterday…again

2011-06-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

It’s a wonder the sun still exists. Here is a five-second movie of an explosion that seems to be blowing an enormous chunk of the sun away. Most of the matter falls back, but still.…

How long can this irrational behavior go on? Read more at SpaceWeather.com.

Some people regard us as odd

2011-06-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

Saturday we took another look at the wood-paneled wall in the piano store. The store owner told us he paid $35,000 to have it installed. The question now is: Does the owner of the building want to tear out the wall and sell it to us? We are waiting for a response.

Meanwhile, we purchased one of the store’s chandeliers and put in a bid on another chandelier that someone else had already bid on. If they don’t buy the second chandelier, we get it. Being very strange people, we told the store owner (not the building owner) that the first chandelier will go in the piano room in our house, and the second chandelier will go in the new two-room outhouse that was built last year at the high ranch. The wall separating the rooms doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling, and the ceiling itself was built extra high to accommodate a chandelier which can be admired from either room.

Waiting, waiting.…

I thought I made a mistake once…

2011-06-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

…but I was wrong.