And the business continues

If you're going to garden, springtime is a lot of work. If you're planning to garden long term, it's even more work. And, if you're going to garden long term, and you're starting off with a place that hasn't been taken care of in years, all that work increases exponentially. Thankfully, this winter I bought a tractor, and that has come in very handy, and this week I sprung for a 4 stroke mini tiller. With that I can do a lot of work, but I can get it into much smaller spaces that I can with a full size tiller. Right now I'm concentrating on weed removal/control, and that small tiller is getting in a lot of digging time. Yeah, it's a lot of sweat equity now, but it'll pay big dividends later. The ultimate goal is to create and awesome gardening/landscaping space, but make it as low maintenance as possible. That will take time, but small steps daily equate to long stride in the end.

 

It's been another busy week

I have been working in the dispatch center 3 days a week this month, and then I come home and try and catch up on the project time I missed while I was gone. That's rough on an old fat guy like me, but since the project elves aren't going to show up anytime soon, I suppose I just have to keep plugging along. I don't know, but this all seemed a lot easier 30 years ago. 

My number 1 project yesterday was to replace a fruit tree that was dying. I've said before this place had not been taken care up properly for a good number of years, and there was a small fruit tree, of unknown type, that just wasn't coming around, so we decided to replace it. Mrs. Goodwrench said she wanted a nectarine tree there, so I located what might have been the last one left locally, and picked it up yesterday morning. I brought it home, and me and a shovel had a date with the old and new trees, and now Mrs. Goodwrench has her nectarine tree. Of course I had to put some protection around it to keep the two Bambis from next door from eating it, so after it was in the ground I grabbed the remaining fencing scrap and wrapped the tree. It'll work for now, and maybe someday we'll be picking nectarines from it.

We have one peach tree out there. Last year it was half a step away from ceasing to exist, but we tried to make it happy this spring, and it worked. If you zoom in a bit you can see that it's got a bunch of fruit on it. Hopefully they all mature and we can have a few to munch on later. 

And, in the dog world, the new puppy is getting along great with the old dog, and they have already become good buddies. I'm sure hoping old dog can help me train new dog.

 A new family member

This morning, after my wife's doctor appointment, we headed east a bit to pick up our newest family member. We've been talking about getting current dog's replacement for awhile, but when Silas suffered his spinal injury in December, it kind of put that more at the forefront. Si has been the best dog ever, but with his injury he's never have the full use of his back right leg again. As a hunting dog that will slow him down tremendously, and I will never be able to send him out into a river to retrieve a bird because of his limited swimming capabilities. Since I have no plans on quitting duck hunting, it necessitates a change, and that means a new pup. I'd love to get one fully trained, but that is cost prohibitive, so here we go. Our lab Si, is named after Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty. We have decided to name the new pup Jep. In the real world, Jep is Uncle Si's nephew, so now our Si can really be Uncle Si. Here's to puppy days!

 A long Week

Not much activity here from me this week due to the fact I was down south working fires in dispatch for 4 days. 14 hours a day having fun without the sun. The three new dispatchers did a good job, and being this early in the year the fires weren't going to go big, so these were actually good training fires for them. I like making the extra money, but dang, at age 67 this is getting tougher and tougher every year. After coming home for a short break last night, I'll be headed back down later today as I'm working again S/M/T for the rest of May. I will say it was nice to be greeted by blooming flowers this morning, and that made me smile. 

Pickin'

Yesterday we had our monthly bluegrass jam here at the house. 80 degrees, sunny and calm, but plenty of shade provided by out big cedar trees out front. Between players, and listeners, we had 40 people here, and everybody seemed to have a great time. We had a good number of new folks come, and they all had a great time. Folks are really loving this time of music. Might only be 2-3 hours, but there's no politics, no division, no hassles...only music. It's hard to beat that. 

 The Hand of God

I have a 2016 Dodge RAM 2500, with a 6.7L Cummins engine. It's been a great rig, but like anything mechanical there's always something here or there that needs attention. One item on that engine is the air heater grid. It's a plate under the air intake that heats the incoming air during cold weather starts. On that grid is a bracket with a nut and bolt. The bolt is standard steel, while the nut is stainless steel. One potentially huge issue with this grid is that it may overheat, causing the bolt to melt, and the nut to fall off. That's bad enough, but when it drops it can easily roll into the #6 cylinder and destroy the piston and/or the entire cylinder. It's an issue the Dodge knows of, and will do nothing about. New engines can run $20k. I recently got a code saying there was an issue with the grid heater, and our mechanic said to park it immediately and he'd get the replacement kit coming from Banks Power. They were changing it yesterday, when I got a call to come down. I went down and he showed me the grid, and where the bolt had melted. 

He said he didn't think it had gone into the cylinder, but it was in there
somewhere, and they had to find it before they could put everything back together. Finding it could get as bad as pulling the head, which requires taking the entire cab off the chassis, and that means a LOT more money. While I was there they hunted up a small camera on a wire. We all went over to the truck, and he carefully slid the camera into the engine and started looking. He was moving the camera, and watching the small screen, when two of them said, "There it is!" They found the nut, and there was still a piece of the bolt in it. Being stainless steel, the nut is not magnetized, but the bolt was. At this point, while leaving the camera in place, they fished a small magnet into the engine, very carefully moved it over, and connected with the bolt/nut: "Got it!" Then, he very carefully snaked it back out of the engine. All four of the mechanics in the shop immediately told me to go buy a lottery ticket, because what I saw never happens. That bolt/nut had dropped down, and was sitting right at the edge of the cylinder. He said one bumpy road, or one hard acceleration on the freeway could have put it into the cylinder, and now we'd be talking many thousands of dollars of work. 

There is no doubt in my mind that the reason it hadn't dropped into the cylinder was nothing short of the hand of God. And now, thanks to divine intervention, and the work of an excellent mechanic, I'll get my truck back today, fixed and running great, and I'll never have to worry about that particular problem again. 

Odds and Ends 

I don't have any one thing in particular today, more of a scattered approach, I suppose. First, I changed the comments again to allow any posting, no moderation, so we'll see how that goes. Comments are appreciated: that way I at least know there's somebody out there. 

First thing up is last night's dinner. I told my wife I'd cook, which I do periodically, and I chose to make eggplant parmesan. It seems I can never remember exactly how I make it between sessions, so there's always a slight variation, but it's always quite edible. Last night I had three eggplants, and I only cut up two of them. It was enough for the 9x12 pan, but in retrospect, I should have used the other one as well. Hindsight is always a great thing, right? The fact that both my wife and I had a second helping leads me to believe it worked out just fine, but I do think a bit more eggplant would have been better. I can always alter that in the future. 

Item #2 on today's menu is also food related, however, this is a recommendation
for avoidance. I like SPAM. Not the kind you get in email, the kind you get in a can at the store. I have always liked it, and have never had a flavor I didn't like, until now. The other day I was at the store and saw Korean BBQ spam, and I thought, why not? I got a can, and brought it home, and a couple days ago I decided to try it in a sandwich. I made my sandwich, then decided to try a small sample of the meat only. My first thought was, really? I ate my sandwich, and I decided that I wasn't going to ever make another one. My wife, who also likes the various flavors of SPAM, tried it, and her opinion was, chuck it. And that, friends, was the end of that can of SPAM. That particular variation will not be coming home with us in the future. 

Item #3 is also food related...kinda. Friday my wife and I walked around the downtown area a bit, looking at small shops, and we came to the new candy store. Inside I found a curious item, and decided immediately it was something I just had to try. I mean hey, I lived through the Korean BBQ SPAM, so how much worse could it be? So, I grabbed a small container of pickle cotton candy, and it came home with us. After dinner I broke it out for a sampling. It was definitely cotton candy, and it was definite pickle tasting. Now, this isn't something I'd probably make a habit of keeping on my shelf, but it wasn't bad, and me being me, I may go back and get some just to gross other people out when they come over. I'm going to have to give pickle cotton candy two thumbs up, if nothing more than for the entertainment potential it contains. 

My closing item, #4 by my calculations, is animal related. We have two cats, a mom and her daughter. They look almost identical, but they are vastly different in personality. We started letting the mom out a month or so ago, and once outside she's an entirely different cat. Outside she's lovey dovey, while inside she's a straight stuck up snob. But, there's something outside related where she absolutely shines, and that's her hunting ability. In our front pasture we've had a big problem with voles. It seemed like every day a new mound would pop up. BUT, the instant we let Sophia out, the mounds disappeared. Hmmm.  A quick correlation said our cat was taking care of the issue. This was  confirmed after I was working outside, and watched her in action. As I was working, I looked into our front pasture, and she was crouched in the grass, staring at the ground. She inched forward, then made a big pounce, and came up with a vole! Good kitty! A couple days after that, I walked the dog out in the front and saw a fresh mound. Sophia, who likes to walk with us, was there, and I told her she was starting to slack a bit. The next day there was a vole body laying at the bottom of the steps, and no new mounds in the pasture. At this point, that cat can be as weird as she likes inside the house, because outside she's a rock star. 

 Just a note today: I set the comments to anybody can do one, with having to be approved first. I saw I had it set to "Google accounts only", but thought maybe somebody would want to comment, but didn't have a Google account, so I changed it. I'm not entirely certain how it now works, so I'll have to wait for someone to comment on something first so I can see. Please bear with me while I learn something new. 

A Musical Time

My wife and I have played music together for 30 years. During that period folks have shared videos they've taken, but it seems the audio quality was always lacking. That's not the fault of the person doing the "filming", it's simply that basic hand held devices most often produce sound quality that is less than stellar. I have always appreciated the folks who have been kind enough to pass their videos along to us, but we've wanted something a bit more top shelf. When we went into the studio last fall, and recorded a few of our old time tunes, we knew that was the opportunity to combine good audio, with good video, and come away with a very useable product.

We have a friend here semi-locally who does great video work, so we got her involved with the project from the start. She's actually the one who set up the recording session, and she was there during the recording, filming as we went. I'll say here, the recording session was intense. Under normal circumstances you'd lay down tracks one at a time. That way you could start/stop each individual track, and do as many takes as needed to get that particular piece of the puzzle correct. We wanted more of a "live" sound, so we had multiple mics set up, and we did as many takes of the entire song as was necessary to get it right. If we made a mistake somewhere in the song, we had to stop, reset, and start all over again. That's hard enough, but add to that someone with a video camera moving all around you while you're playing, and it becomes a real challenge.  

We got through the recording session just fine, and ended up getting keeper versions of four songs in under three hours, which is actually pretty good. With the recording studio video done then, we still needed live video at a historical site, and last Sunday afternoon we made that happen at an outdoor museum in a town about an hour and a half south of us. 

Yes, this was all a lot of work, and yes, it cost real dollars to make it happen, but we ended up with a video that not only can we use to show prospective employers, but one that we can have available for our kids/grandkids long after we're gone. So, I'll go ahead and post that video here for you, and we hope you enjoy it. 

The Old Cane Press

Still working 

I'm leaving here for the month of May, so I've been trying had to get this place garden ready for my wife before I go, and that means doing some things to keep the deer from eating the stuff we plant. That being the case, I've been continuing to install fencing. Now, we don't have a lot of deer here. In fact, the only two I've seen are the yearlings that live on the wooded lot next door to us, but they still have mouths, so up goes the deterrents. Yesterday I started building the enclosure around the second set of garden boxes. No individual doors on these, unlike the other two raised beds, just a tall fence around them. In the morning I headed to town and got two 4x4 posts, two 80lb bags of redi-mix concrete, and a half dozen t-posts, then I came home and stuck all of that in the ground. Today I'll start stringing the wire. I have a partial roll of fencing left over from the last project, but I'm not certain it'll reach all the way around the new enclosure. I'll start with that, and if it's not enough, I'll get another roll of the fencing and just splice the two together. Yep, more work, but waste not, want not. 

While I was getting fencing stuff, I also picked up two apricot trees, and when I got home I stuck those in the ground. With the addition of those two, it gives us about 14 fruit trees, and that's a pretty good start. We have plans for a lot more fruit trees, and berry bushes, but that will all take time. My wife has informed me, in no uncertain terms, that one of the things I'll be working for this summer will be a big freeze drier. Between that, and all the canning she's planning to do, we should end up with a good supply of various forms of fruit.

The day before yesterday, I put the second coat of stain on the new planter boxes, filled them with some of the bulk potting mix I had delivered, stuck a flower plant in each one, and set them out in a couple locations. I really want to start adding color to this place, and these boxes are step one. As I clean out the useless bushed under the cedar trees around the front yard. I'll add in there flowering shrubs, such as azaleas, and we'll end up with lots of nice color all around that area. I thing it'll make a huge difference. 

 The Command Center 

For many years I was a full time fireman. There, I drove engines, worked on truck companies, ran inmate hand crews, And worked in the dispatch center. The dispatch center I worked in for 6 years had two agencies in it: CalFire, and the Forest Service. In 2009 I retired from full time on the CalFire side, got up, walked across the room, and sat down on the Forest Service side to work "on call". Counting this year, in which I have already worked a bit, I will have been on the federal side for 18 years. All told, at the end of this fire season I will have been in the command center for 24 years. I worked in there yesterday, and at one point I walked through the entire building, and I thought, "From the time I first came to work for CalFire, through today, I have walked these halls for nearly 40 years."  

During that time I have seen a great many changes. For one, the layout of the center has totally changed. When I first went there all the stations were in a "U" shaped counter space, and we (state and federal) faced each other. This made it very easy to talk back and forth during incidents, and that was nice. Now it's laid out so we all face the walls, and it's nowhere near as good for interactions. In the early days we had 4 computer screens...1 phone screen, 2 CAD (computer aided dispatch) screens, and 1 radio screen...now we have 8 screens. We've gone through 2 completely different CAD systems, and three different resource tracking systems. A few years ago the center added EMD (Emergency Medical Dispatch), which is a structured system of prehospital instructions we go through with medical dispatches that sometimes mean the difference between life and death outcomes. Now the CAD system "talks" to the resource tracking system, we have computerized aircraft tracking, and things have become much more complex. It's been quite the evolution to observe.  

Before I first went in, and for several years after, our side (CalFire had a total of three Captains to do the work, only one of which stayed at night. Now there are 5 Captains, and 4 Com-Ops, fully qualified dispatchers, but under the Captains for supervision. The Forest Service side has always maintained 7 dispatchers, plus 3 supervisors. At night there is always 1 CalFire Com-Op on duty, and 1 Captain on duty but sleeping. That person gets awakened in the event of fires of complicated incidents. That makes a great deal of difference in the amount of sleep the Captain can expect to get. Before the Com-Ops came to be, I can remember working a 4 day shift (24 hrs/day) and I got a total of 7 hours of sleep. That was a rough week. 

I think for now I'll end this post as an "introduction" to dispatch, and in the next post I'll go into more detail, and maybe even some "war stories". 

 More garden stuff

I had three projects in mind to finish yesterday: hang the wire fencing around the old berry patch, build/hang a gate for the new berry patch enclosure, and build/hang a gate for the old berry patch enclosure. However, the afternoon thunderstorms had other ideas, and they only allowed me to finish two of the three. My goal today will be to build the gate for the old berry enclosure, and if the weather isn't bad, hang that one. I may also be able to devise latches for the 2 new gates. I also still need to put the clips on the fencing for the new enclosure, but since that's 100% out in the open, the rain would need to give me a break, and I don't know if that's on it's "to do" list. 

I'm very thankful for the rain we're getting right now. It's been pretty dry, and with all the new planting this moisture comes at a great time. I'm not really a lazy person, but if God wants to help me water, I'm all for it. We're playing music next week at an assisted living center, so we need to pick an hour worth of songs today and start going over them. From that gig we'll make almost enough money to pay for a dinner out, but the dollars won't be the important part of that day: we just want those folks to have a time of decent music, so there we are. Someday I might be sitting in their chair, and I'd hope somebody would do the same for me. 

 

After all the work is done, I may end the same as I did yesterday.