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.

 Working outside

The last couple days I've been hitting it hard outside working in the "berry department". We're putting in a lot of various berries, and also trying to work on structures to keep the deer out of them. Being old and fat isn't really in my best interest when it comes to working long hours. Whereas in the past 10-12 hour days were no issue, now I'm about all done in after 7-8. At 67 years old I just can't do as much as I did when I was 37. I understand the dynamics of that, but it still irritates me. 

Yesterday I bought 7 small cedar planter boxes off Facebook Marketplace, and I
started out this morning by putting the first coat of stain/sealer on them. I'll put one more coat of that on them, and then I'll apply a couple coats of clear waterproofing finish. These boxes are 15 inches by 15 inches, so not large, but they'll just be used for flowers to add some color around here, and that size should work great. Some folks wouldn't bother with the stain and finish, but I feel if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Since the guy was just getting rid of them, I only paid $10/ea, but I still want them to last as long as possible. So, if I put some effort into the front end of the project, it should pay off for a long time at the back end of the project. 

After I did the boxes, I concreted in a couple of pressure treated posts to extend the fencing of one of the berry areas. Weather permitting, tomorrow I'll string the welding wife fencing around them, and at that point it'll be time to build a gate. When our son-in-laws were here this weekend I got them to help me string so 6ft tall welded wire fencing around posts I had already installed, and that will enclose berry area #2. I have the materials to build that gate, so maybe an hour's worth of work will finish that off. 

Additionally, I planted 22 various berry bushes today: huckleberry, lingdon berry,
blueberry, and raspberry. Oh yeah, in my spare time I relocated 2 thornless blackberries, 6 strawberries, and 3 lemon balms.  The nice thing is we have great soil, so the digging isn't difficult. Lots and lots of work, but eventually it'll pay off with lots of yummy things to eat. 

 More pickin'

Yesterday was our monthly jam here at the house. Sunny, blue skies, upper 70's, lots of pickers, and lots of grinners. We even had our 15 year old granddaughter join in, which made it even better. We're hosting this jam the first Saturday of each month, and having had three of them so far, I'd say it becoming a popular option for folks. The first jam was inside due to weather, and we had 17 people. Both the next two gathering have been outside, and we've had 40 people at each of those. We're hoping to keep this thing growing until our whole place is packed with folks playing, and folks listening. Having a musical sanctuary for us backwoods type folks has been a dream of ours for a long time, and now that we've got the perfect setup for it, we're moving ahead at full speed. We'll keep holding these events the first Saturday of each month, and they are open to anybody, so if you're in the Grants Pass, Oregon area then, please do stop by and join us.