Going home (bleah)

We got out on time, but traffic suxxxxxxed. We lost an hour overall. I was hoping to get out before the mad weekend rush, but no such luck.

I poked Mason awake on the home stretch, and suggested he get his shoes on so he could run inside when we got home. He was still dressed for Florida, and it was 41°F at home.

Charlie was still up when we got here, and laughed when I hugged him. Then I put him to bed.

The Orange Crate averaged about 30MPG on the way down, and a shade under 29MPG on the way home. Downhill and uphill.

And one final pic of the boys on the beach:

It beat being at the manor.

Boogie in the surf

We took the boogie board to the beach today. Mason actually did pretty good.

A guy about my age had a surfboard, and offered to let Mason try it. That was fun to watch.

He told me later, “I just hang out and try to get people hooked on surfing.” Nice work if you can get it, dude. :-D

After lunch (well, before lunch actually), Mason was worn out and just wanted to hang around. That was OK with me.

Supper was ribs and shrimp, and it was really good stuff. Solar brought coleslaw from KFC (which seems to be considered pretty good here), and Mom baked beans with bacon.

After supper, Mom and Mason went for a walk, and left Solar with me. He got a new-to-him truck to replace his van (it’s rusting away), and gave me the run-down on what he was doing to clean it up. Maybe we should see if we can sell The Boy’s old Acura, the way used car prices are now. Solar said the stealership offered to buy back his Civic for more than he paid for it.

Mom was talking about how much she streams stuff these days. I told her about the wife binging The Good Place, and we watched the first four eps. I kind of wish she had talked me into watching it with her when she started.

Raining tomorrow. We had better luck than I’d expected with weather, and it will be clear for the Friday drive home. So tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to hang with Solar while Mom takes Mason to a movie or other indoor entertainment.

Wife texted late in the afternoon... big storm at home knocked out power. I told her where to find my portable charger, and what it looks like. 

Parks

The morning started out, um... interesting. Wife sent me a pic of her iMac screen, showing a blinking question mark over a folder. Figuring she just needed a repair, I looked up the “what to do” stuff and sent it to her.

So far, this week, we haven’t managed to go to the pool. But Mom’s cat, the one Mason has tortured since he was 2, decided to be nice. Mom thinks she’s trying to clean up her act enough to get to Cat Heaven.

I’m trying to enjoy this.

Mason and I hiked over to the nature park this morning, while Mom was trying to get her library card straightened out (or renewed). We talked with a woman who had a red-tailed hawk and was giving him some air. I told her about the ones that live near the manor. We walked out onto the pier, and Mason openly wondered how safe it was. I pointed out new boards, showing him that they are maintaining it. He saw some interesting marine life, anyway.

Since last time we were here, they’ve “paved” the walkways with rubber shavings, bound together somehow. I forgot to ask them whether they fused the shavings together with heat or used some kind of compound. In any case, it puts a spring in your step.

After lunch, we went to Largo Park so Mason could goof off on the playground. There weren’t many kids there, let alone any his age, so he got bored pretty quickly. Mom thought the locals were on spring break this week, but we passed a middle school that was full of cars and bicycles, and they were setting up crossing guards, so I guess it’s not this week, anyway.

We went to the end of Walsingham for ice cream. Kind of nice, after all the walking we’d been doing. Mason wanted to browse the shops, so I agreed we could do that and walk home, and Mom could just motor on back. We went south until we ran out of shops (where the road runs alongside the water), then north a ways.

Then I grilled some burgers on the grill out back. I had to scrub the spatula with the wire brush, trying to get some of the rust off. Mom said the burgers were perfect, so that was a win. I thought they were pretty good, too.

On the way back from the park, Daughter Dearest texted me about the wife’s computer. They still hadn’t gotten it to cooperate. DD ended up calling me; she thinks the hard drive might be fried, and mine was dying, so she might be right. I replaced mine, so I should be able to do hers.

Of course, her computer had to pick this week to take a dump.

A day (of several) at the beach

Mason and I went to the beach this morning. We brought The Boy’s old skimmer board, and Mason actually did better on it than his dad did. 

Mason didn’t bring a chair, but he did have a shovel… and that worked out fine.

Custom fit!

After lunch, we went to Publix for stuff. I needed cherry juice, and there were other things we needed. Mom heated some rotisserie chicken for supper, and did little Yukon Gold potatoes with some good seasoning. A fruit salad rounded things out. 

Solar came, and we all hung out for a while. After Solar left, Mom got out the dominoes and we played Mexican Train. I won the first round, and Mason won the second after getting deep in the hole to begin with. What a comeback!

We’re in Florida—no foolin’!

Well, Mason and I are. Wife can’t leave the farm unattended at the moment, and Charlie has some therapy appointments he couldn’t miss. Mason had a snit when I opted for the Orange Crate instead of the Miata, but he was bringing his dad’s old skimmer board and a boogie board, and they wouldn’t have fit. I brought the drone, in case there was a day with not much wind.

I was hoping to leave around 10, and we did manage to get out around 10:30. I've observed before, the fewer people you have in the car, the less late getting out you'll be.

I was hoping that leaving on Sunday would shield us from the traffic jams... nope. It was mostly slow from the beginning of the express lanes, almost to the rest stop just before taking the Macon bypass. Then there was another stretch of heavy traffic from Valdosta down to the state line. One or two more in Florida (im)proper.

But we’re at Mom’s, and Solar has a break!

Mad cow, and Paddling about

More rain is headed our way tomorrow afternoon, but the weekend gave us a pair of not-quite-spring days: a fair measure of sun, and highs of 55°F to 60°F (12*C to 15°C, give or take). Between the farm and Omicron, we didn’t get out much, but sometimes you can find a little fun in the farm work.

Saturday, as any day in winter goes, the wife takes hay to the cows. Depending on the day and time, she takes either me or Mason with her to cut the strings (big round bales). But first, we (and DD’s boys) piled into M.O. the B.B. and went to a farm supply to get fencing. We went west, toward Ellijay, instead of east toward the retail district, because the local suppliers only had 100' rolls of mesh fencing and she wanted 350' rolls. As Mick Jagger sang, you can’t always get what you want, and they had 330' rolls. It mattered only in that her crew had spaced posts for the slightly longer rolls; she still needed three.

They dropped the rolls into the truck’s voluminous backside, using a Bobcat with a forklift attachment. I threw a ratchet strap over the triangular stack, and that was a wise move—the top roll flopped around a bit until it settled down tightly between the other two. There was also a couple rolls of barbed wire, and a bag of chicken feed (one of the renters has a small brood of layers). As usual, M.O. the B.B. went “pfft” at the load (pulling a one-ton trailer doesn’t affect the fuel mileage on that beast, it will give me 21MPG empty or loaded—seeing as the minivan gets 19MPG, that’s kind of impressive).

Oh hay! Let’s roll. (My photo)

The fun part was taking hay to the cattle. As the wife was doing her pastoral duty, Blockhead the heifer wandered over toward the hay barn. The gate was open, after all. (Wife has a t-shirt, compliments of DD, that has a sketch of a calf and the caption “Live like someone left the gate open.”)

Blockhead saw me, and froze. “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked her. She saw the open gate, and decided to press the issue by rounding the corner.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said I, and pulled the gate shut.

This is where it gets funny. Blockhead got pissed off, and bucked her way back toward the tractor. As Mik and his aunt observed, cattle are born knowing all profanity, and Blockhead used quite a bit of it through her body language.

That evening, wife made it clear that there were Things That Had To Be Done on Sunday afternoon. She repeated it before church… and Mason, somehow, was surprised to hear about it after church. This has been a long-standing trait on the wife’s side of the family, acting shocked that reality doesn’t conform to their whims, and Mason has it down pat.

Stuff to be done included:

• Raking debris out of a chokepoint in a drainage ditch
• Taking feed to the renter’s chickens (I don’t know how we got roped into doing that)
• Running a couple more rolls of hay out to the cattle
• Clearing the debris filter over the pond’s overflow pipe (a wire crate—my idea, and a rare idea of mine that the in-laws actually acted on)

Wife was like, “How are we going to get those fence rolls out?”

I suggested, “Use the hay spike on the tractor. Slide it into the hole in the middle and pull it out.”

For once, she realized I had come up with a Good Idea.

So I pulled the rolls out to the tailgate, and she carefully slid the spike in far enough to hoist the fence roll. It turned out that if I used gloves instead of bare hands, I could pull the rolls out to where she didn’t have to worry about catching the tailgate with the bottom spike. That only happened once, and the dents were already there on the tailgate. M.O. the B.B. is a work truck, not a TPC. A few scratches and dents are to be expected. In this case, I don’t think there was any damage.

Mason wasn’t needed for the hay part, although Charlie came along. He likes to bring a construction-equipment toy and play in the dirt/hay while his parents handle the details. Given the coming rain, she dropped much of one roll between the gate and haybarn, so we might have some non-mucky footing through the coming week.

After that, it was Mason’s turn, He was ranting that we gave Charlie the R/C truck he wanted, although he had guided me through the Zon’s pages to the one we got for him. (We missed the two-year anniversary of Charlie’s adoption, but made up for it.) But he came along anyway. He sat in the truck while I cleared the drainage ditch (a small tipped-over tree is catching debris at this particular juncture), but helped a lot with the chickens. The johnny boat “somehow” got bashed in at one corner of the stern, and tore it open. Mason opined that we could hammer it out and patch it with Flex Seal, and that might actually work, but it didn’t solve the immediate issue. So we clattered back home; I grabbed the inflatable kayak, but the pumps were scattered around. Wife finally found the 12V one, and I found the 120V one plus the hose in the camping box (and I don’t know why they ended up there). The hand pump is behind a pile of yard tools in the big garage, as I learned after the fact. Wife made one of her usual comments about putting stuff away, and she was right for a change. I’m not sure why it happened, though.

Anyway. We clattered back down to the pond, and I inflated the kayak while Mason did a little fishing. He got a nibble or two, but no fish. But he was good and ready to hop in when I told him to help me carry the kayak down to the water. We put it next to the dock, took off our shoes, climbed in (one at a time), and I found being slightly off-center was an invitation to ship water. But we paddled out to the overflow pipe, and I cleared off the debris while Mason kept the kayak away from the drain handle.

But we weren’t done yet! We paddled over toward the pump house, where the overflow feeds the pond. Remember, the air is cool, and the water is cold. Mason got the worst of the dripping off the paddles. But we did get a good (if algae-encrusted) five-gallon bucket out of the pond, floating there since Kobold had let it fall in.

We got back to the dock, clambered out, and Mason decided he wanted to solo around the pond. He had been helpful, so why not? He got in, we maneuvered back around the dock, and of course I got pics (and video).

Wife didn’t approve of me letting him solo in the pond, but that kayak has five air chambers—any one of which would keep him afloat long enough to get the fifteen feet (five meters) to shore. Not to mention the seats, attached only with two clips and velcro, and that would have made seven levels of redundancy (two seats). It certainly won’t hurt to bring a couple of floatation devices for future trips, though. And a couple of towels.

After deflating the kayak, we clattered on home. I put the wet stuff in the big garage to dry out, then we got supper. Charlie was already 90% asleep, and he seriously overreacted to dropping some books on his foot as he tried to kickstart his bedtime routine.

You know it’s mid-February…

…when the daffodils start blooming. This clump is just across the driveway from the front yard.

A good reminder that winter doesn’t last forever. Better days are coming, and more rain for Sector 706 in the short term. At least we’ve had a week and a half to dry out after the last deluge.

I got Mason to get up all the stuff he’s strewn around the back yard, and got all of the outdoor toys in the garage or under the gazebo. The boys are off for “winter break” until Tuesday; I never did think to take a day or two off work, but that won’t stop them from coming upstairs (still, it’s not as distracting as co-workers yapping on phones all around me in the office).

It has been warm enough to get the grill out. Sizzle has one of those pellet-feed smokers with the phone app, and it has eliminated the “not quite done” issues in his BBQ game. Me, I just go with the dual-chamber (gas on the left, charcoal on the right) grills. I did a couple of sirloins from the pasture last week, and it was some of the best steak I’ve had in ages. I didn’t sear it, but Sizzle handed me an 11" cast iron griddle he had left out on the deck to rust up. I took a wire cone brush on a drill to it, to get most of the rust, then followed it up with soaking in Coke overnight. That left the ultra-fine rust residue, and I got that off with a Brillo pad. A couple rounds in the oven with a thin coat of Crisco, and it looks a lot better than it did when I brought it home.

So I can toss it on the gas side of the grill to get it good and hot, and put pretty sear marks on the next meat I grill, or maybe cook bacon and/or sausage on it. I’ll probably take it with next time we go camping, too.

Are you seeing signs of spring? Or getting neglected stuff ready to use again? Comments are open!

Sunset over FAR Manor

 …and when I say over, I mean over.

I launched the drone, high (23m, according to the flight log) above the trees to get an unobstructed view of the mountains to the west. You can see the tree platform in the back yard at the bottom center. The light-colored horizontal strip left of center is one of the chicken houses equipment storage sheds.

We’ve been getting pretty sunsets all week, but this was the first evening I had the presence of mind to get an aerial shot. There was a little wind, enough to make it tricky bringing the drone back down, and for the second time I’ve had trouble getting a good GPS lock pre-launch. (The workaround is to turn off the GPS switch on the side of the controller, get the drone up about 20 feet/6m until it finds some satellites, and turn it back on.)

There has been plenty going on, but I’ve often had a hard time motivating myself to share it. I’ll try to do better.

If the Kludge works, use it

Kludge. Jury-rig (or the variant, jerry-rig). Lash-up. Sunshine Engineering (named for Mr. Sunshine, who bodged lots of things together that I had to straighten out later). Whatever you call it, including the racist ones nobody should have used in the first place, it’s (so the dictionary says) “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose.” Sometimes, the kludge is a necessity; a critical piece of equipment failed, deadlines are looming, and there’s no way to run to a nearby store to find what you need.

So… last week, someone called the wife. Her video business, that hasn't had any significant income in two or three years, still has a listing the in the Yellow Pages. “Can you put VHS video onto DVDs?” As she has done that before, she took the gig. Last time, we hooked a VCR into her commercial-grade DV deck and rolled tape. This time… not so much. The deck wouldn’t stay powered up, and wouldn’t open the tray (she was just passing through, but wanted the tape in there to be out so it wouldn’t interfere). She opined the deck got fried by one of the close lightning strikes we’ve had from time to time, and I couldn’t dismiss the possibility. Meanwhile, I was trying to find our cache of RCA-to-BNC adapters. We found plenty of the BNC-in/RCA-out types, but we needed the opposite. Mal-Wart dot commie carries them, but “not sold in stores.” The Mighty Zon could get us some by Thursday… it was Tuesday, and the wife was in DO SOMETHING NOW mode because she wanted to wrap this up by Friday. But with the DV deck apparently fried, there wasn’t any urgency to get the connectors anyway.

Seems to work fine for old VHS tapes

But! As the wife snarled something about taking her client’s tapes back to her, I remembered finding something else when looking for the adapters: my old Canon ZX-80 camcorder. When I say old, I mean I took footage of The Boy’s high school football games, so at least 15 years. Probably more like 17. The imager crapped out on it a long time ago, but I kept it around because I could at least play tapes into a Firewire connection, view on a tiny screen, or a bigger screen if I plugged in the included DV cable. In other words, it could do everything but take video itself. Being a tech writer, I kept the manual with the camcorder. There were lots of functions I never explored, and just in case…

Well, just in case arrived Tuesday night. I went down the table of contents, and found the vindication of my packrat ways on page 84: Converting Analog Signals to Digital Signals (Analog/Digital Converter). In this mode, you:

• connect a VCR to the camcorder’s DV cable
• connect a Firewire cable to the Mac
• start capture on the Mac, play the tape, and relax

Sure, it’s a kludge, but time was tight. We have better camcorders, but I didn’t have time to find the manuals to figure out how to use them as video digitizers. Here, we hit Snag #2 (or is it #3? I lost count quickly): Final Cut Pro wasn’t capturing the video, or even seeing it. Looking at the documentation, I guessed FCP was too snooty to deal with an early-century consumer camcorder. So I tried iMovie, and iMovie told me:

(link to original)

So I guess iMovie is friendlier to the older, not so well-heeled, camcorders of the world. Since FCP has no problem importing iMovie assets, we were on the way.

Or so I thought. Snag (int(rand()*4))+3 came in this afternoon. Wife was again ranting about giving up and taking the tapes back to the client, because she couldn’t burn a DVD. I seem to remember us using Compressor to create MPEG-2 video, then using Toast to burn that, but we couldn’t remember the incantations and she wasn’t inclined to take the extra step. So I started troubleshooting. The DVD Burner app icon started bouncing, so I clicked it. “Couldn’t burn (click here for more information).” Clicking the helpful link told me what the initial “insert dual-layer disc” message should have told me in the first place: the video was too long to fit.

Solution: cut the video to 80 minutes so it fits on a DVD. Splitting video and moving it around is one of FCP’s strong suits, so the wife got to work on it.

As I type (10:30pm Friday evening), she has all the video on the system, and two or three DVDs burned. She’s behind schedule, but has a clear path to completion.

If the kludge works, use it… at least until you get a more elegant solution in hand. We’ll look into replacing the DV deck—looks like we might find something that works for around $400—and if she’s going to start back on her video work, it will pay for itself soon enough. Then, maybe, we can look at modernizing the intake end of things (i.e., the commercial-grade camcorders that are at least as old as that ZX-80). As I understand it, a lot of the newest models skip the tape drive and go directly to a SD card with some enormous amount of capacity. If that’s true, importing would mean sticking the SD card into the back of the iMac and copying the file. At that point, who needs a DV deck?

Computer-Aided Weeding

A couple weeks ago, I finally decided to start pulling in all the notes I’d saved up from Evernote and Google Keep into Logseq. I started with Evernote, just because.

First, I had to update the Evernote app on my iMac, so I could actually access my stuff. That should tell you how long it’s been since I actively used it.

After exporting, I used a utility called Yarle to convert the notes in each notebook to Markdown.

Now the hard part: deciding what I wanted to keep, and what to toss. The even harder part: cleaning up the sloppy mess that were most of those individual pages. There were over 400. Cleaning them up in Logseq was do-able, but slow. Lots of repeated stuff. This wasn’t a job for an outliner, it was a job for a high-powered text editor like Vim or Atom.

Unlike Vim, Atom sports a sidebar that displays all the files in the directory, and its regular expression parser recognizes newlines. So I could find blank strings using the expression ^- *\n (which means, “look for a line starting with a dash, followed by zero or more spaces, then a new line”) and get rid of them.

But the even bigger time-saver: realizing a lot of those entries were long outdated (some dated back to 2013) and deleting them. By the time I was done with that pass, I had 109 “keepers” left. From there, it was a matter of applying search and replace to fix common issues.

So with 3/4 of the pages deleted, and much of the boilerplate stuff from the remaining pages deleted as well (I just need the content, the source, and some info about the author). That means my assets folder has 4852 items in it, and most of them were no longer being linked to.

Now… am I going to make 4852 passes through my pages, by hand, to see if a pic can be deleted?

The shell (aka Terminal) is my machine gun for blasting a job like this.

# assume we're in the assets directory

mkdir -p ../assets_removed

for i in *; do

  grep -q "$i" ../pages/* || mv "$i" ../assets_removed

done

Let’s pick this apart, for those who need it.

The first line is just a comment. An important one, all the same. You need to be in your Logseq database’s assets directory for this to work correctly. BAD THINGS will happen otherwise! One of the nice things about using MacOS: if I eff something up, I can pull it out of the Time Machine backup and try again.

Next, we make a directory called assets_removed at the same level as the assets directory. Just in case we make a mistake, you know. The -p option is there to make the script shrug and move on if the directory already exists (if we’ve been here before, for example).

The third and fifth lines begin and end a loop, going through each of those >4800 graphic files.

Inside the loop, we search for the file name in the pages. The -q option is exactly what you want for a script like this; it returns success if grep finds the string and failure otherwise. The || (two vertical bars) means “execute the next part if it fails” (in this case, fails to find the file name)… and the next part moves the unused file to the assets_removed directory.

And I ended up with 255 files (out of nearly 5000) that were actually being used. The other ones are out of the way, and can be safely deleted once I verify that none of them are needed.

[UPDATE: After stepping through the pages again, I found 18 “false negatives” that had to be dragged back into the assets folder. That’s why you move them out of the way, instead of just nuking them.]

It took about a minute to grind through the assets directory, and a couple of minutes to set up the script, but that beats the heck out of hours (or days) doing it by hand! I’m fond of saying, I’m lazy enough to get the computer to do my work for me. It doesn’t always pay off this big, but it does pay off.

Off to get the Google Keep notes…

Some updates to recent happenings

Backyard play area: I got another pair of eyebolts and hung the old bucket swing beside the nest swing. Charlie has long outgrown its previous iteration, but it’s perfect for AJ. She was a little apprehensive at first, as it’s fairly high off the ground; but once she realized there was a gate of sorts, she was all for it.

Up high is where the fun is!

Balloon: The planning commission met Tuesday to hear about the proposed tower. A lawyer for Verizon came, along with a rep from the company they’re outsourcing the tower ownership to. (I’m not sure quite what the deal is with that, if it’s a way to shield Verizon from any liability issues with the tower, or what.) Anyway, the neighbor to whom I sent the photo invited me to ride with them to the hearing.

So they had a nice little presentation, justifying why the tower was needed. They wanted both a Special Use permit (to put the tower on a piece of agricultural property), and a variance. Towers have to be spaced 3 miles (4.8km) apart here, and the location is 220 feet (67m) short of 3 miles. The tower is spec’ed at 190 feet (58m) high, plus 5 feet (1.6m) for a lightning rod, just short of the height that requires flashing lights.

After they finished, they invited members of the public up to speak for or against the tower. There were only a handful of citizens, and we were all nearby residents. Personally, it's “not my dog, not my fight.” The trees along the road would hide it for me, even if it did have a blinkenlight up top. But being a good neighbor, sometimes, means supporting your neighbors when they feel strongly about an issue (to a point… if they think #Dolt45 is the second coming of Christ, I’m not supporting that).

Anyway, the commish for our district is also the chairman, and said he thus wouldn’t be voting (although he seemed to lean toward supporting it). The others were less convinced, and thus both the Special Use and variance were voted down 3-0 (with the chairman abstaining). Shocker!

As we stood around outside, chatting about the next move, our commish came by and said, “You’ll need to be here December 16 for the county board meeting.” The board can, as I gather, overturn the planning commission's decisions… which means it’s more of a recommendation than a decision. I guess that means we (the neighborhood) need to come up with our own counter-presentation. I don’t have any qualms about public speaking; I’ve done a dozen or more sermons at church, so I’ll take point on this one.

One salient point, that one of the neighbors brought up: after they get the 190-foot tower up, what will stop them from coming back later and insisting they need a bigger tower at that spot? Then we get Das Blinkenlights, and maybe it is my dog in the fight. They should have chosen our pasture to put that stupid thing up in… it wouldn’t have even bothered the cows.

The thing is, Verizon could short-circuit all the opposition with a little honey. The local phone company laid a bunch of fiber along the road, going straight to the proposed tower site, and it’s mostly dark. If they offered to light up that fiber and give everyone a far better Internet connection (for free) than our flaky DSL, they might end up with one or two holdouts. Stay tuned, there will be more next month. I'm sure Goliath isn’t done with us yet.

Backyard entertainment, Phase 1 (part 3, finishing touches)

 I’m fond of saying, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.” Or as one of the villains in White Pickups put it, “Go big, or go home?” In other words, I’ve already sunk a fair amount of time and money into this project. No sense in leaving it 90% done. Besides, I needed at least one thing for Charlie. Mason got his treehouse and extreme swing, after all.

So I ordered the bits that I figured would finish it up: a nest swing and a climbing net. The swing was, after all the other stuff I did for the platform, nearly trivial: put it together, screw a couple of eyebolts into the bottom of one support, and hang the swing. I got another 8 feet (2.4m) of decking, and had just enough to piece together the last of the open joist area. And I had exactly enough screws to finish (after finding two in the bottom of my tool bag).

Anyway, Charlie likes the swing.

One more thing to go: the ladder. I wanted something more permanent, so I started reading the instructions for the climbing net. Uh-oh… it wants a 4x4. Upon further reading, and using some of my tech writer skills to interpret what was really going on here, I realized the intent was to sling the 4x4 under decking that stuck out past the support beam, and the 6" eyebolts at the top of the net went all the way through both. The end of the decking only sticks out about 1/2". Scrounging around, I found a 4x6 that was long enough for the job. Some Timber-Lok screws secured it to the beam (and stuck out far enough that we felt it necessary to hacksaw the pointy ends). But I didn’t have a drill that would go through the wide side of a 4x6. Back to the Despot to get a 12" bit (I would have settled for 8" but they didn’t have any).

Mason: “That’s long!… and it went all the way through!” Well yeah, that was the whole point. It worked best to go in about an inch, pull out to shuck the shavings, and repeat until it went through.

Now the instructions said to run the eyebolts up from underneath, secure them at the top, then use provided plastic covers. Mason suggested doing it backwards—and since the eyebolts barely clear the top of the decking, it worked pretty well to reverse it.

How to secure it at the bottom? A few augur stakes would be just the thing, but I don’t have any laying around. But I did have a plastic maul handle laying around. It released the business end a long time ago, and has been sitting in a corner ever since. I hacksaw’ed it in half, used a 1/2" spade bit to put a hole in one end of each half, then pounded them into the ground. The bottom of the climbing net had convenient loose ends to tie to a stake, and I threaded them through the holes and tied it all down.

It works pretty well. It even holds me up, although the ladder is a bit more convenient for me. Oh well.

(The girls are the daughters of a guy who helps the wife with farm stuff. The older one, on the net, is Mason’s age and also in advanced classes. And yes, the two of them do some scuffle-flirting as 12 year olds do.)

So that’s Phase 1 complete! Mason has grandiose ideas for upgrades, including walls (although he thinks railings would be bad), a roof, and maybe even a second floor? He’s likely to get a canopy for a roof, and a zipline going off the other side, for Phase 2. I might put up a couple more eyebolts, to hang the bucket swing for AJ. She likes the nest swing, but wants someone riding with her.

Mason also likes the nest swing, by the way. He found that the Wi-Fi reaches to it, and has laid in it with his iPad to play Minecraft. But being November, it’s taking a turn for the colder. The kids are putting the shorts away for the duration.

Backyard entertainment, Phase 1 (part 2, deck and rope swing)

With the framework complete, I tossed four planks onto the joists. Given the length of the boards, I decided to start in the center and work my way out. This worked very much like the support beams: put a deck screw on one end (using a hip square to space them), scoot across to the other end, space and screw down, then work back and put down more screws along the way.

Well, it wasn’t quite done. I calculated 11 boards should be just enough to cover it, and I could have sworn I’d ordered 11, but they gave me 10. Checking the order later confirmed that I’d asked for 10. I’m not sure how that happened, but it was just one corner that was see-through. Mason was ready to move in! Even with my chunky bod on the thing, there’s no sag or sway, so I was happy with my over-engineering.

With the deck complete enough, it was time to accessorize. Mason had already picked out a nearby branch for a rope swing (you can see the spool on the ground in the third pic), and he chose well. I tied a lug nut to the end of a fishing line, and cast. It went over on the first try!… and kept going… and going… and ended up over a second tree. We ended up breaking the line, trying to get it free, and subsequent casts gave us none of the luck of the first one. I tried casting from the other side, and ended up sailing it all the way across the back yard and into yet another tree.

Mason, who is a perfectionist with a short fuse, was getting increasingly frustrated at this point. I said, “Using a bow and arrow is another way to do this. Too bad we don’t have one.” Mason immediately brightened, ran into the house… and came out with a bow and arrow. We had bought it for him for Christmas a few years ago, and I don’t remember him using it much. But we tied the line to the arrow, and (after a few attempts), he got it over the limb. Not exactly where we wanted it, but it turned out to be a better spot anyway.

Next snag! We tied the rope to the fishing line, and found it wasn’t quite strong enough to get the rope up and over the limb. Mason was re-entering his funk, when I suggested we use the smaller rope I keep around for camping trips or shaking drones out of trees. It wasn’t quite long enough to go all the way up and over, but it was long enough that the fishing line held until we could grab the small rope and pull the big rope down. I tied a slipknot (showing Mason how it’s done), and hauled on the rope until the knot was at the limb. I hung on it to test it—if it held me, it will certainly hold Mason—and all was well.

It was not long at all before Mason was launching off the platform on it…

At this point, Mason was good to go. But Charlie needed something, because he can’t be allowed up top, and I wasn’t going to have the stepladder as a permanent access method. The next part will wrap up Phase 1.

Backyard entertainment, Phase 1 (part 1, framework)

This has been going on for a while, but I wanted to make sure it got done before posting, so I didn’t end up with a start without a finish.

Mason and I talked last year about setting up a treehouse. I had plans for an octagonal one, with the tree in the center, but I had neither the skill nor the equipment for tackling something like that. But as fall started, we were poking around the backyard (that got expanded about a year ago), and Mason looked at a trio of trees… arranged in a near-perfect equilateral triangle, about 12 feet (about 3.6m) on a side. “We could put it up here!” he said.

I remembered a smaller platform I set up for The Boy, when he was about 9. It was arranged similarly, in a triangle of trees. Definitely something within my skill and equipment sets, as both had improved in the past 20+ years. So that night, I sat down and started mathing it out—how many 12' 2x10 boards for the supports and joists, how many 5/4x6 decking planks—and made my grocery list.

The order was ready the next day, so we jumped in M.O. the B.B. to “pickup” the load. A few hundred pounds of lumber doesn’t even start to settle the suspension, but the support lumber did stick out somewhat past the lowered tailgate. I tied a safety flag to the end, and clattered home.

I got the first two boards up without much effort: put one 6" Timber-Lok screw through it and into the tree, lift up the other end, level it, then screw it in. You can see I put three screws in each end; if I’m reading the box correctly, that should support about 700 lbs (317kg). There’s two supports for each corner, so (assuming weight is evenly distributed) the platform should be good for about 4200 lbs (950kg) minus the weight of the platform itself. Over-engineered? Maybe. Mason and his friends are 8-10 feet off the ground. It needs to be safe.

The third, highest off the ground due to the slope of the yard, took some more effort. I finally tied a rope around it and used one of the other supports as a pulley. That actually worked better than expected, and I soon had it bolted in place.

Mason had to try it out, of course, unfinished as it was.

Now it was time to measure and cut the joists. I spaced them on roughly 2-foot (0.6m) centers, set the circular saw to cut the ends at the right angle, and used joist hangers (plus a Timber-Lok screw) to make sure it stayed in place. I got up all but the last (heaviest) one on Saturday, and Sunday brought rain. (Yes, this was something done over several weeks.)

With a lot of heave-ho’ing, some unsafe work practices (Charlie missed getting bonked with a falling 2x10 by inches), and many magic words, I finally got the last joist into the hangers and used a hammer to pound it down level with the support beams.

Yay, time to put down the decking! That comes in the next post.

Rope-a-dope

A Saturday afternoon mini-adventure started with a text from Daughter Dearest: Can you take big butt truck to help get sizzles truck unstuck

This was quickly followed up by a phone call, asking me to pick up Sizzle’s boys and take them along (in the slim hope that they could push Sizzle out). Charlie had been jonesing for a ride in M.O. the B.B anyway, so I loaded him up, got the boys, and headed on down. Sizzle was at the campsite, presumably for some deer hunting, and I don’t know what possessed him to get off the high ground… but when I saw the situation, I figured pushing would not be enough.

Of course, I was right. :-P

Another project, that shall soon see the light of blog, entailed my having a spool of 1/2" rope handy. We clattered back up to FAR Manor, got the spool, and returned (turning around at the dam to get oriented for pulling stuff). Meanwhile, Sizzle had attached a heavy-duty ratchet strap to the front of his truck… a Nissan, for which The Boy and Daughter Dearest had taken a road trip up to Nashville to get a replacement motor for… but I digress.

He tied the rope to the ratchet strap, while I wove it through the hitch on M.O. the B.B.'s end. We put our trucks in gear, and mine did its usual “Pfft, I’m towing something?” routine as I crept forward. I stopped, because it was clear that Sizzle was going to get pulled into a tree before he got clear of it. We rearranged stuff to bypass the tree, and started anew. This time, we got Sizzle up on the two-track. “M.O.” stands for Massive Overkill, and that’s what it is… except when nothing else will do.

At Sizzle’s request, his guys piled into his truck, and I clattered on home.

I was too busy doing the tow to get pictures, so I’ll leave you with a shot of the pond, ringed with weeds in glorious flower (I took it while turning around). Wife is planning to nail them, so they might not be around next year.

Now that is some fall color, huh? May your fall be filled with color and miss the part with the stuck trucks.

The balloon goes up

Everybody around FAR Manor got a letter, week before last: Verizon wants to put a 190' (58m) tower on a hill across the highway, but (and it’s not a bad idea) they want to make sure the tower will actually do the job before they sink a bunch of $$$ into building it. Therefore, they planned to do a balloon test on November 1. This basically entails (I think) lofting a balloon carrying a microcell, and seeing if it will link to the nearest existing tower.

Some of the neighbors, especially the ones who know the wife, came by to talk about it. Not that it matters… Verizon already had good coverage out here, but they do seem to think that Lily Tomlin as Ernestine is their guiding light. They don’t care, they don’t have to care; if they want to put up a tower than up it goes.

None of us really knew what the balloon test was going to look like, so I was thinking I might launch a drone if it was calm enough. My oldest drone, a Sharper Image DX-4, had just received a new controller. Since it has a Wi-Fi connection that can transmit video and stills to a connected phone, I hoped it would let me get a good real-time view. Well, the app hasn't been updated in years, and froze showing the sidewalk.

Monday arrived, and I found it calm outside. I thought maybe I could launch the Holystone, which meant I'd be flying blind, but would get something. But there was enough wind to push the drone around, and make me continually be guiding it, to make it worth trying.

OK, time to pull out the Big Gun (aka the Canon). I put the long zoom lens on, and walked down to the road. About 50 feet before the intersection to the dirt road, there’s a break in the trees… and I saw the balloon.

Rather anti-climatic, if you ask me. When I first saw it, it was actually below the tree line. But it rose up, and bobbed up and down for a good while. I took pics, but nothing really stood out. One neighbor said the pic is "ammo,” but we’re talking Verizon here. It’s maybe a .22 against a tank. The only way I can see their affecting things is to use the tower as target practice. With as many guns as there are around here…and some of the people are likely to have swallowed that 5G/vaccine chip/boogabooga nonsense, it could be a volatile situation.

I don’t call it the free-range insane asylum for nothing!

Trick or treat!

The wore-out Grim Reaper might not worry you, but Charlie could cute you to death in his Power Rangers outfit.

Candy… or else!

Yes, that's a real scythe. The blade is very rusty, and about 1/3 of the snath (handle) is missing. The sign hanging off the blade reads, Wore OUT (I hate pandemics!). Yeah, as Death said in his New Year’s message, he’s had enough. I’ll hit the edge with my Dremel, and we can use it to hack weeds under fence lines.

But, as I so often do, I digress. A local charity sponsors trunk-or-treat at the biggest county park, and I took Charlie. We went to about four booths, then there was a line longer than Charlie was willing to deal with. He grabbed my hand and started walking at random.

Finally, I suggested, “Do you want to go to the playground?” He often considers such questions thoroughly before answering, but not this time. “Yeah!”

We were early adopters. There were two or three kids in the playground area when we arrived, but there were well over a dozen by the time we left. Charlie did really well climbing around on the jungle gym, and even tackled the scariest climbs to the high slide (he only slipped once, and I backstopped him). He stumbled on some steps in the mid-section, and bonked his head on the railing. That required a few minutes getting cuddled on a bench, then he went back to it for a few minutes before retreating to the bench… then telling me he needed a potty run.

Wife suggested I get us Taco Bell, since I was 2/3 of the way there, so that’s where we went next. Charlie came home with a small portion of candy… but Mason brought a gigantic bag, hitting a subdivision with a friend of his, so there’s more than enough to go around.

Oh… and if you want to know about the next Accidental Sorcerers book, I’ve finished the draft. I’m looking for beta readers, now.

Pitter-patter, part 3 (home again, home again)

The dynamic completely changed, once Charlie was in the mix. Mason went full-on micromanager, completely losing his shorts over the most trivial things.

As for Charlie, his happy place is the pool. Put floaties on him, toss him in the pool, and he’s good. The outdoor pool at the clubhouse is usually pretty cold (with 2018-2020 being exceptions), but Charlie doesn’t care about a little cold. (A lot cold is enough to get him out, but this wasn’t a lot cold.) Mason insisted on the indoor pool, but the outdoor one was tolerable even for me. So Charlie and I played around, while Mason sat in a chair and sulked because he wasn't getting his way.

After maybe an hour (I’m not keeping track of time on vacation, what’s the point?), Charlie decided he would be okay going to the indoor pool. Mason, finally getting what he wanted, joined in.

At this point, I should point out that there’s a third pool, next to the waterslide and close to the diner and country store. It was closed for much of the week, since some moron had gone tubing, didn’t shower, and introduced algae. For some reason, this pool is often warmer than the outdoor pool at the clubhouse, but it had a definite green tinge. I’m not sure why that would be a problem, since the lake is also a good place to swim (and is often warmer than the outdoor pools, and I have no idea why). Maybe the algae had some irritant qualities.

But I digress. By Friday, they had dumped enough chlorine into the pool to kill the algae, and re-opened it. Charlie was so happy to be in the pool, he wanted to hug everyone in the area… literally. He spun around with a huge grin, arms wide open, making his happy noise. Several folks thought it charming, anyway. It was noticeably warmer than the clubhouse outdoor pool, and it also has a “real” deep end (8 feet). People invited Charlie, then Mason, into their games, and I just hung out and kept an eye on the rugrats. Mason complained about the amount of chlorine in the pool, but he was wearing a diving mask so I’m not sure what his actual issue was (besides just complaining).

Mason brought a couple of R/C vehicles along for the final leg of our outing. Charlie enjoyed watching them whizz up and down the lane. Someone came up in a golf cart, and suggested a “race.” The R/C truck won (those electric motors can go from zero to top speed pretty quick).

By Saturday morning, I’d had all I could take of Mason’s attitude, his constant ordering everyone around (especially Charlie) and refusing to help. He’s been throwing up all this anti-spanking “evidence” at us, trying to dodge the consequences of his actions, so I simply told him he could have no electronics (no iPad, no Xbox, no Switch, no nothing) until his attitude got better. That probably hurt more than any spanking, anyway.

I’d loaded all the non-essentials into M.O. the B.B. Friday evening, so (with Mason’s ultra-reluctant help) we broke camp Saturday morning and headed on back to the manor. The outdoor rug stank with mildew, and needs a good cleaning, and the Starflyer needs some attention as well. I’m trying to decide whether to get the A/C fixed, or just replace it with an exhaust fan and stuff a window A/C unit in a convenient spot. Whichever way I go, I’d like to have it completely functional before I sell it and go with something else. Then again, campers are going for a premium right now… anyone want a lightweight camper with a few minor issues?

We got home, to find the wife there. They had drove up to their retreat, then the sister-in-law hosed up her foot when they went to get groceries. And when I say “hosed,” it was several times worse than either of mine. They ended up coming back. BUMMER. The wife needed a break more than I did, and I had somewhat of a break even with Mason making things as miserable as possible.

Back to work, and everything else. The boys will be in school soon, although I don’t know how long Delta will let that happen.

Pitter-patter, part 2

Rain on a popup is a special kind of noise. What hits the bunkends is a nice pitter-patter sound, actually quite soothing. What hits the roof in the middle is anything but soothing: it’s somewhere between a pop and a snap noise. And that’s what we contended with for much of the night.

The Starflyer’s A/C isn’t working, despite my replacing the starter capacitor, so we had to make do with fans. I claimed the fan/light combo, since Mason swiped it last time. He groaned, but didn’t press the issue. Fortunately, it never got out of the low 80s (F) for highs each day… I guess the rain helped with that.

Staying dry on a wet night

With the awning and the EZup, and no wind pushing the rain around, there were dry spots to take a chair and a beer outside while Mason was zorched out (or doing late-night iPad sessions while pretending to be asleep). The EZup framework also provided a convenient place to hang swim suits and towels, to get them a little dry, anyway.

So this was our routine, the first few nights. Charlie has his therapy sessions on Monday and Tuesday, and the wife was going to have some fun with her sister on a long weekend starting Thursday, so we went home Wednesday afternoon.

The foot improved with (not enough) rest. By Thursday morning, I could walk on it almost normally for an hour or two before it started giving me grief again. Extra-strength Tylenol helped to extend the time I could use it, and propping it on a pillow at night made it less cranky in the mornings. We took a brief bike ride on Wednesday, and it was okay. Our campsite is at the bottom of the hill, so we could coast back “home.”

Thursday, Charlie had a neurological evaluation scheduled at ENEC in Decatur, so I drove us down there. In the vein of combining trips, wife had her bags packed and in the back of the van, and all we had to do was figure out where to get lunch and meet the sister-in-law. We settled on a place called Grub (Burger Bar), that served up what the wife described as “the best burger I’ve had in a long time.”

So they tossed the wife’s bags into her sister’s vehicle, Charlie told them “bye-bye,” and away they went. We also went… back to the manor, to get Charlie’s stuff and get Mason while we were at it. M.O. the B.B. chugged on back to the campsite, and we did manage to get about 40 minutes at the pool before it closed for the evening.

Pitter-patter, part 1

Pretty similar to last time

The wife’s sister decided the two of them needed a long weekend out. Wife floated it by me, and I thought it would be a good idea for her to have a little fun time, far away from FAR Manor and the adjacent farm. Plus, maybe I could take the boys out camping or something, right?

So I called the resort to see if I could swap our week in September for something in July. Nope! All the condos were slammed. EVERYONE is (or was) trying to get out and enjoy some vacation time in that brief period before the Delta variant decided to try culling the idiots who have made such a mess of things over the last… oh, who am I kidding, my entire lifetime.

But I digress, as usual. The woman who runs the condos gave me the number for the campground (different part of the resort) and they had openings. “You can have slot 38.” As we have a new pastor at church, and I’m nominally head of SPRC (what passes for HR in a Methodist church), I decided to go in Sunday afternoon and leave Saturday morning.

On Saturday, I decided to buzz up to the resort to see what #38 looked like, because M.O. the B.B. isn’t exactly the easiest thing to maneuver around in tight quarters. I took the boys with me, so we could hit the pool as well (the pool is Charlie’s happy place). Turns out it’s the same space I had last time we came up!

Sunday afternoon involved lots of packing up. Wife bought a Thermacell gadget (it does a pretty good job at repelling skeeters and the like) at Tractor Supply a while back, but they didn’t have any extra fuel cartridges at the time. I ordered a pack from the Mighty Zon, who told me they would be in on Friday… then Saturday… then Sunday. (Can someone explain why I’m paying Prime fees when 2-day delivery is 4 days so often?) Fortunately, the shipment arrived before we were ready to go.

Lots of rain in the forecast, but we had a good dry slot as I rolled M.O. the B.B. into the road around 4:30pm. It stayed dry long enough to get the essentials set up, too. This time, I brought the EZup to put over the picnic table (instead of dragging it under the awning). With Mason’s reluctant help, we got it hoisted. I’m trying to get screens for the EZup, but their website isn’t cooperating and they weren’t really needed for this trip.

I’ve had a little more practice backing a trailer over the last two-ish years, but not enough. I did realize I needed to position the backend of the Starflyer at the edge of the driveway, this time. It only took two tries, rather than five or six, to get it into position this time.

Mason and I both brought our bikes, but I’d managed to hose my right foot… just as the left was feeling better. Mason was trying to wheelie his mountain bike back on Thursday, and I thought maybe a visual would help him. I stuck my sandal’ed feet into the toe straps, put the bike in granny gear, and gave the pedal a good push. The ol’ Raleigh lofted all the way up, and spit my right foot out of the strap. The pedal put some impressive gouges in my lower leg, and I’m still trying to figure out what I hit my heel on. The upshot is, I’m once again gimping around—two days after getting over whatever was wrong with my left foot.

Fortunately, for now, it’s just Mason and me. Charlie has therapy Monday and Tuesday. We’ll run home Wednesday night and bring both boys up on Thursday. Of course, I forgot several things, and we ended up making a Mal*Wart run (because I had no other choice) to get them.