We went by agrisupply and I got a few 6 gal gas cans for the generator, and a funnel. I don't think that's what the funnel is for:

We went by the scary Mexican supermarket looking for those good uncooked tortillas like we used to get at Costco (they don't carry them here) and had no luck, then we went by the farmers market and I picked up some beef fat and sausage seasoning so I could make some boar breakfast sausage. We made up a small batch and they turned out edible so I went into production mode and cranked out 5 pounds of patties. Should last me for a bit and if not I've got more ground fat and more boar meat and more spices. I hate processing meat, even the fancy new grinder I got binds up a lot and you still have to make several passes on the meats to get them the way you want them.

I also went to the driving range today, following up on playing at Prestonwood on Thursday with Red Hat. They liked my tech talk, and want me to come back at some point. That's good.

We have a carport, finally. I need to clean up the gravel mess but otherwise it's good to go.

Parents are on their way back home, should be interesting to see if they think they want to move here.

Woman had me make some edits to her web site and I had to figure out how the style sheets were being used to set the background size and how it was being over-ridden. This would all probably be a lot easier if I had whatever software was used to create the site instead of just editing the html directly but the mods are all pretty minor really.

The woman saw one of her carp in the pond. Good to know at least one of the 3 survived.

Forgot to post a picture from the golf outing last week. Nothing exciting, just a short game with the Allscripts guys. Tomorrow I'm playing at some fancy private club with Red Hat. They're not my account but they want me to talk to them about namespace so between some lessons and lunch and a round of golf I'm supposed to talk to them. Business on the golf course.

The woman was at Bristol this weekend and ended up hanging with the winning team for both series. That's pretty lucky!

Some official photos (where she's just hanging out in the background):

Now that's a chipper! Rented the big beast from Home Depot and between mom, dad and I dragging sticks and chipping we got the pile in the front and back done in about 5.5 hours. It used about 5 gallons of gas in that amount of time and generally hacked up anything under 4" in diameter. It's rated at 6" but that's probably fresh soft wood, not the dried sugar gum and whatever else these trees are. I've got a huge pile of stuff still that needs to be chainsawed into small blocks so we can burn it. You can't chip a 12" log....

In the front we got a nasty surprise, a copperhead was lurking in the pile I was attempting to move. They're pretty damn tough, even after I blasted him in half the front half was still moving around and managed to crawl about 6' away from the back half. Scary! The neighbours heard the gunfire and thought the chipper exploded. Um, no.

We went down to Lillington for me to check out a hunting farm (birds and deer) and on the way back we stopped at this funky taco stand advertising itself as Oaxacan food. I've only had it twice before but damn, this stuff was pretty good. Didn't do a mole dish but the tacos were good and the flat bread whatever the woman got was tasty as well. Too bad it's so far away but I know where I'll be having lunch anytime I go hunt down there.

All my researching into boats and dad goes out and buys one. He supposedly didn't pay much and fixed it up himself and now he plans to resell it next spring after he and mom zip around the lakes on it a bit since it will be "free" after he resells it for a profit. Guess it pays to have friends who are marine mechanics and can do stuff for you.

I was working from home yesterday morning and after I finished my calls but before I went in we went for a quick walk. There were even more random mushrooms growing along the trail so I took more pictures and moved them to a page off the main page. Crazy shrooms. The deer do enjoy eating them though, or at least most of them. They eat parts of the tops of them and leave the rest of them scattered around the driveway.

Now I'm toying around with the layout of the home page and again it needs to be scripted. Too much manual stuff going on.

Mods to the current meter, even if it's not going to work on the well the way I thought it would. So what I've done is instead of having the green blinky LED telling me that it's running (burning up a valuable digital control line) I've got a little bar graphic on the LCD that fills up 1 pixel line at a time until it reaches the top then resets. If you don't see this bar moving, then you know the unit is dead. I'll probably make it more interesting, like a ball that bounces up and down or something but you get the idea.

It's amazing how powerful some music can be at invoking emotions. I've been listening to more classical music in the car since I'm bored with the limited play lists they seem to have on the 80s and 90s stations on XM (I think I have more selection on my phone) and it's interesting how many emotions are tied to classical pieces in my head. Is that because the music itself is more in tune with the human mind (which is why things have remained enjoyable for hundreds of years) or has modern media just tied those sounds into strong visual images which themselves are designed to invoke emotion? I'm leaning toward the second idea, since when I hear "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes I immediately think of Spock's funeral... so yea, media.

Filled in the dents in the sheet rock by the new panel and will paint it next weekend once the spackel is nice and dry. Also printed the spreadsheet version of the panel layout and tossed the paper copy I had cobbled up over time.

Saturday was the Krav review which is also a pre-test to see if you're ready to actually test for the next level. Over the course of 3 hours (some outside in the rain) it was determined that after 6 months of training I am not ready to test for level 2. Sad, but understandable as even I could tell I fell apart on a bunch of stuff when put under stress. Sigh. Maybe in 3 more months now that I know the level to which they're expecting you to perform I can push the training harder. The worst part is that everything is sore, arms, legs, joints, throat (lots of choking attacks), ears, nose, hands, etc. My lip got split open in the first 15 minutes so I had to taste blood for hours. Ugh.

For some unknown reason the woman picked up some scallops on sale and left them for me to cook on Friday night as a snack for myself. She didn't think I would do it really (because I'm lazy and there are granola bars and pig stick to snack on) but I got motivated and made them. Not bad, but where's the accompaniment?

Sunday is when I really lost my freakin' mind. The day started out lazy with breakfast and coffee on the patio watching the critters, and then I changed the oil in the bike. That too WAY too long because it took me 2 hours to get the oil filter off. I had it changed at the shop in CA before I left and they put the filter on so tight that it actually warped the base plate of the filter. They probably cranked it down that hard because there was no gasket on the filter... WTF? It was a factory filter and I know they have a gasket but this one didn't. So... they had a defective one and just cranked it down hard enough the steel plate dug into the aluminium pan to make a seal? Who knows but luckily it was a factory filter so I could cut the damn thing off because the K&N filters I use are extra armored and would require some serious dremel action to get apart and who knows how the base is on there. The K&N filters have a nut on the front of them as well so you can use a standard socket to get them off rather than a proprietary filter wrench that no one outside a dealership has. I used to be able to fake one up by taking a standard filter wrench and wrapping the filter with duct tape to make it fit snug enough to come off but that wouldn't work this time with it on so strong. I had to use a breaker bar on the drain plug too. Way too tight!

Moral of the story, never let a shop change your oil. They must only let the total noobs do that since it's an easy job and of course they have no idea what they're doing.

With all of Sunday morning wasted at that point due to the oil change issue, I apparently lost my mind and decided to try to make bread. Not just any bread, but bread that used only water as the wet ingredient and that I could pre-package the components to and add to our emergency supplies. I had to go to the store to get "butter buds" to replace the actual butter (or oil) called for in the recipe along with some fresh baking powder but then I was ready to try.

It mixes up easy, and without any active yeast you don't have to let it rise for very long. While it's rising, you can build you campfire and select your baking stick. Yea, you cook this bread over an open fire on a stick. With 2.5" of rain in the last 24 hours everything was nice and wet so I used wood from the covered woodpile rather than stuff on the ground. It's good practice though trying to build a fire using minimal materials.

Continuing the theme, I broke out the "tactical tomahawk" I picked up on sale a while back and rather than throwing it (which is why I got it) I decided to use it as an actual tool for, ya know, chopping stuff. Mostly because the axe, hand axe and splitter were in the barn and I was in the front, so, lazy.

Works well enough to generate kindling if the wood is dry, but trying to split off wet oak, hickory, cherry or sugar gum wood? Forget it. That's hard enough with an actual axe.

I knew I wouldn't get a 1-match fire started with the materials I had so I tried to think of some home made fire starters I could build and store. The easiest thing I came up with was to take one of the full sized presto fire logs and cut it down into small pieces and then vac pack those along with paper. I made a little prototype and it worked to get the fire going so I'll probably make more of those. The other idea I had was to saturate small pieces of dowel with the tiki torch fluid and vac pack those but I don't know how well the wood will soak up the oil and how leak prone that would be. I do want to try it though because I think it would start easier with flint and steel with the oil being so easy to start vs. paper.

With the small fire started I cut a green branch and shaved the bark off (pocket knife, not trying to use the tomahawk that much) and tempered it on the fire per the instructions. Once that was hot enough, I wrapped the dough around the stick and rotated it while holding it over the fire. It sorta worked. I was supposed to bake it for 10 min but the damn fire went out because I build it too small. Ironic since it's sitting next to a 3' tall burn pile that's waiting for a chance to burn.

Rather than give up on it and just chuck the dough, I dumped it back in the bowl and took it inside and tried to bake it in a pan. That actually worked and I got an edible little loaf shaped biscuit thing that I cut up and we ate. So, fail on the stick method but success on making an edible bread out of all dry ingredients with long shelf life and water.

Transfer switch is in and we're ready to move on to the next phase of the project, figuring out where to install the generator. The install took a long, long time, the dude was there from 9am to 5pm. He did a good job minimising the drywall damage so we don't have to patch/paint much which took extra time but we also spent a while debugging what turned out to be a bad connection in the panel. Pretty disappointed by the amount of trouble I've had with stuff from Amazon this time around, a flaky generator and a bad panel. Savings get eaten up quickly when you have to fiddle around with second rate products.

On the plus side, running the well pump and way too many lights, the fridge/freezer and other assorted junk puts us right at 4000 watts used. That's 1/2 load on the generator which is supposed to be the sweet spot as far as output per gallon so we're right on target. In an actual emergency though we wouldn't be continually using that much so we'll "waste" fuel but it also means we don't have to worry about what we use when we need to.

The woman is doing the networking thing and one of her new contacts convinced her to do a talk for his group. You know she's getting modern when stuff shows up on eventbright on the phone.

Ready for it's first trial run on the actual well pump tomorrow!

Well monitor project is still coming along. I can't for the life of me get any of the buzzer circuits I've found make any noise with the hardware I have which is a little annoying, but I do have the LCD working and figured out how to simulate printf() to the display since the Arduino language doesn't actually have a fully functional printf/sprintf library when it comes to floating point numbers.

My next set of mods will be to put an "I'm alive" light on there (reusing the previous "pump is running" LED which I've changed to just be the back light coming on the display) so I can tell the system is still running through it's main loop.

In preparation for the electrician we tracked down all the circuits in the house verifying which ones we want wired in, and then I prepped the generator. I wired in the solar trickle charger, filled the oil, threw some gas in there and.... it wouldn't run. It would turn over but not fire up. I saw fuel in the filter so I figured it was getting gas so I tried some starting fluid thinking maybe it was just hard starting because it was new. Nothing. I pulled the spark plug and cranked it and it had spark. I tested the low oil pressure cut-off switch, it was fine and bypassing didn't help. Huh. I then tested the compression and it was fine so it wasn't a stuck valve (something in the debug process in the manual to check). The plug was slightly out of gap spec so I gaped it and tried again. Nothing still. Hmm.... I disconnected the fuel line and let a bunch of gas pee out everywhere so it was flowing gas, and I tapped the fuel line going into the carb. Then it reluctantly fired up. So... air bubble in the fuel line? Couldn't be vapour lock because it wasn't hot out and the engine hadn't been previously running. Dunno. I stopped and started it a bunch of times after that and it was fine each time. Maybe some crud in the carb holding the float closed? We'll see if it starts again tonight and can assume this first run hiccup is behind us.

This random branch fell Friday night and broke a piece off the neighbour's fence. I repaired the fence and chopped the branch into firewood so there is no evidence it was ever here. Pay no attention to the sawdust on the ground.

Lotta mushrooms growing in the area. Here are some random pictures we took while on our walk. Some are in our yard, others are on the road or down by the marshy area.

Pictures moved to a link off the main page, there are enough now to warrant putting somewhere else.

Whenever I start a new month I just "head" the same month from the year before and feed that into the file for this year so I don't have to retype the headers. It's always interesting to see that 10 line review of where I was at this time last year. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's just embarrassing. I shutter to think what happens in 40 years when I want to go back and read through all this nonsense. :)

Yesterday I got the current meter circuit actually working. Now when it senses a load it turns on a green LED and when it senses the load for 10 seconds or more it turns on a red LED. It will reset both when the current drops. I'm going to hook up a buzzer next to complement the red LED, and maybe when I get the LCD hooked up tonight I can make the back light flash when we're in an alarm state as well. I need to figure out how to silence the alarm (the noisy parts, not the lights). A button would work but it kinda pedestrian, so I was thinking of using one of the extra motion sensors I have so that when someone enters the area where the alarm is it will auto-silence. The woman may like that.