End of the World. Beginning of a new one. The Life of Amberwolf.

[amberwolf]

Thanks--that helps. I guess I will have to just be patient; maybe something happened with the grass root system to expand way more since it wasn't getting any water from the yard anymore for all of last year till the rebuild was done and water was hooked back up? Anyway, i guess it'l jsut take time. It's alreayd bette rthan it was a month ago; it just didn't work as fast as it used to when I've used it before, so I made a probably unwarranted assumption.

Evetything in the yard itself is certainly springing up nicely, now that the oppressive heat isn't baking all the water out of everything. :lol: I'ts not even reached 95F this week, and a couple of days it barely passed 90F. most nightsa re at least 65F low, and sometimes lower. I picked the perfect week to do this vacation, I'll tell ya--I've gotten a LOT of stuff done. (the problem is that it's probably only one percent of the stuff that NEEDS to get done, eventually...but at least the bike is now mostly rebuilt, and is safer and sturdier and should last a good long while now).

Tiny and Yogi both LOVE the weather--except in the midday thru early afternoon, it's cool enough for them to wander around outside, and in the morning they often are out playing or investigating, etc., till 9 or even 10am, and they go out again an hour or even two before sunset. Tiny discovered she loves to lay out in the dirt areas between trees after dinnertime (usually 9 or 10pm), and sometimes Yogi joins her (but he's usually patrolling around the yard or sticking with me wherever I happen to be).

OH, and most pictures I post from now on will probably be better than what I've posted before, and I may get useful videos and stuff, too (of dogs, bike stuff, etc).


After much searching the last several months, I got a "new" camera, from a friend in France (it's a Canon Powershot G7, and is functionally pretty similar to the lost-in-the-fire DSLR originally from GMUseless), except it's not an SLR-type, and is less than half the size of the other, bigger screen, probably higher MP, etc.--it does everything I need it to, so far, most especially a really good macro function, a physical zoom, and MOST ESPECIALLY it actually takes the picture almost when you click the button, instead of several seconds to half a minute (or more) later, which was the worst problem I had with the celphone cameras.

I think if I set it to all non-auto settings, it'd probably take the pic when I tell it to exactly, cuz I think it takes it time to determine what settings it needs to use each time.




Anyway, so once I get htem all uploaded, there will be a lot of new pics off that camera, which started use on late afternoon, October 1st. The very first shot I took with it is Tiny's butt, though I was trying to catch her about to head into the doggie door, I just wasn't fast enough on the button (the camera could've done it though, I think).





Ther'es a lot of others to be posted once they're uploaded (wifi here is abominally slow right now, can't even TRY to do the vids yet). One set is of the current solar water heater placement/configuration. As it is now getting into the low to mid 60s F by dawn, and even by midnight is already down to 70F, I've taken to covering the tank with 3 layers of puffy blankets once the sun isn't directly on it anymore (about 30-40 minutes before sunset, I think, or if it's near then and it gets breezy. This (until I build the box, which might happen tomorrow if I finish the new trailer), helps tremendously to hold in the heat--I can take a still-warm shower with it even at 3am. Not really hot anymore, maybe just a bit above body temperature, but good enough compared to what it'd be otherwise. :lol: :brrrrrr:


I still haven't connected it up as a thermosyphon and really need to do that soon.


Oh, and for the very last pic in this post: I had left the de-statored wheel leaning on the bike, and Yogi pushed his head thru to investigate what was on the otherside, and got his head stuck in the rotor, so you're seeing me holding the wheel up so he didn't hurt himself, and telling him to sit. I had the camera in hand already, to take pics of the progress on the bike, so I took a pic just before I worked his head out of the magnet ring. :lol:

 

[amberwolf]

Dogs are pretty bored with me this last week or so, cuz most of my time has been spent in the backyard with teh bike, and tthey don't like the noises from the powertools, so they have been staying mostly inside. Yogi has come out to see me every so often, and to bark at evertyhing that moves, but Tiny only came out to pee and hten went right back in.


Well, they also would come out to remind me it was breakfast or dinner time. :lol:






The lantana on Bonnie's grave had been doing really well, actually making shade from the morning sun for the "back porch" even from dawn, but Yogi fixed it.


He has been just plopping down on top of it,and it's broken off all but one of the main branches. Tthat'd be gone too if it werent' growing over rocks half his size. So if I wanna get it to grow back and stay there I'll have to block that off from him till it gets so big he can't really do that to it anymore.


He hasn't destroyed any lantana under the tree east of there, so I guess that's not as fun a place to lay down in. If it keeps going it ought to make a nice bundle under the tree to cover the ground there and hide the ugly cut-up trunk. Once it grows big enough I'll start trimming and shaping it, cuz it seems to be sprouting up all aorund the tree, though teh northeast side is biggest.





Aloevera in the box by the southeast gate is doing really well, even though it gets little sun and less water....



This lantana is all about ready to start shaping and trimming; I've already started tying some of it "up" so it is more vertical to shade the east wall of that back room some.




I still havent found out what plant this is, that's hanging over the side of the box:


but it is ripening one of it's pods:


Looks a little like a tiny tomato or pepper, but probably isn't, given it's size (see finger for scale).


I've gotten yet more doggie videos but still no bandwidth to upload with teh wifi I ahve access to. I think I need to makea trip to BIll's to use his internet to do that.
.

 

[dogman dan]

Nice collar pic.

 

[amberwolf]

Yeah, I was pretty surprised about that one...and glad I had the camera at hand cuz wihtout it being right there ready to snap a pic, I wouldn't have gotten the shot before getting it off of him. :lol:

(if I'd had to use the celphone camera, it'd've taken so long to turn it on, open the camera app, wait for it to get ready, press the shutter button, wait for it to take the pic eventually, that he'd've started panicking by then, I suspect)

 

[amberwolf]

'Tis the season for tree trimming and whatnot, so I did a fair bit of it, and got most of the bigger lantana (except the stuff on the graves, to be done later) tied up so it's not just sprawled out all ove rthe ground. Gotta wait and see which branches got damaged enough to need removal and hten I'll trim the lantana to more "geometric" shape like a hedge, since I've got it all growing to make shade and to screen the house/yard from street view, eventually.

Pics at the end of the post, including some doggies.



I didn't have the camera with me for the cutest pics, though (and didn't even think of getting up to go get it; I didnt' want her to foloow me and stop what she was doing, cuz it was so cute to watch and i didn't wanna miss it):

Tiny decided I needed help trimming and removing branches, so while I was going at it on the northeast tree by the back fence, which had branches down to the ground level still, she crawled under there with me (I was kneeling on the ground) and started trying to chew branches off at the trunk-intersection. :lol:

When she found she couldn't do that very easily, after a couple of minutes of trying, she then just started grabbing branches I'd already cut off, and dragging them away, then coming back for more after gnawing on the cut end a little.

Yogi just patrolled the yard and barked at anything that moved within visual range, like usual. ****


Sometimes Tiny would join him but mostly she stuck with me to "help" (which is pretty unusual...she's usually hanging out inside on the cool floor, but I guess since it's been pretty cool outside and wasn't even 90F out there then, and we were in the shade of the tree, she was all for the togetherness? Yogi usually sticks near me inside and somewhere nearby when I'm outside, so maybe she's finally gotten jealous?)

Mostly the two of them are now getting along as if they were siblings that grew up together.

Although walking them both at the same time is not possible yet (tried that, I physically can't do it yet, cuz Yogi isn't yet trained well enough, and Tiny is much worse at pulling ahead when he's with us than when she's by herself).



The solar water heater stuff is still in the middle of the yard till I get the box built for it. Right now there's a breeze so I stuffed the blankets I usually cover it with after sun stops shining on it under it wher eits' shaded anyway, to keep the breeze from cooling it as much, cuz I'm gonna need that hot water later today when i bathe the dogs.


IMG_0368, I think it is, shows a hose with water coming out at the base of a lantana. That's the output of the clothes washer drain, and is almost the only water that the entire line of lantana on hte east wall of the house gets, other than any roof runoff/rain. it's apparently quite enough even just once a week for one or two loads, to let all that stuff grow really quick/big.

I move the hose each wash load so it's in a different area of the lantana line's roots, sometimes right on the line, sometimes east or west of it, ath the north end, south end, middle, etc. I need to move the "berm" around the area outward now, a couple of feet or so east, and about up to the house wall west, to better contain and spread the water (started out with just a handspand-wide channel for the water when I planted the stuff there).

The last couple pics are of the mystery plant (peppers? tomatoes? ?? ) in the planter on the chair under the big mulberry. Some of the teeny ones smaller than teh end of my pinky are ripening. THere's also one that's much closer to the ground on the "vine" that's almost as big as a finger joint, that's still green and appears to still be growing.


Havent' figured a good place ot plant pumpkins yet, cuz I'd have to fence it in against Yogi.




I've also now got a good start on getting the northeast edge of the backyard (north of the east gate) survivable for new plants, in a strip continuing hte existing line of stuff from the southeast edge of the backyard (only skipping the gate area, in case I need to use it for something). Been using a soaker hose periodically on that line to get and keep it damper there, so stuff will grow donw in the soil an dget it ready for digging and planting the lantana screen there (out of the planters of it I've kept going in the summer, when it wouldn't have survived transplanting to that place).


An idea that might not be practical, to get coverage for the gate itself, is to build planter boxes with a support wheel under them onto the inside of the gate. They'd need to be reasonably deep/wide boxes, and end up kinda heavy, to hold lantana large enough to screen the gates. And i'd need to manually water (and fertilize) it regularly, as it won't have the deep-soil resources the regular in-ground stuff does.

Other than that, I'd need to build gate covers that look nice and will stay that way on their own. I'm not sure I have materials for that, since they can't be stuff like tarps or whatever; anything affixed to the fence/gates must be a "solid" thing made of "consistent" materials. Not even allowed to put slats in the chainlinks (even though they sell kits to do that at HD and Lowes and the like :? ).


Got another vacation coming up first week of November, to work on sorting out all the sheds this time, since the ibke ought to be good for a while (well, I'll have to spend a day or so doing it's rewiring first, but after that....)


**** (I finally gave up on the anti-bark ultrasonic thingy. It stopped making any difference to him, though it does deter Tiny about half the time if she's close enough to it. Mostly though it just gets knocked over on it's tripod, as they race along the fence to get closer to whatever they're barking at.

Doesnt matter if it's on battery power or on a 9V DC power supply, and it does output sound (I tested with a microphone and a computer, and while it isn't designed to pickup that high a frequency, it gets enough of it to show me it's working) I'm gonna have to get a battery and a canister refill for the citronella spray bark collar and see if that does anything, cuz neither of them listens to me anymore pretty much at all, when i try to call them in during a barking session--I physically have to leash them and take them inside, which is much worse than when this started.

I don't care if they bark and actually prefer that they do, and most neighbors don't care or also prefer it (cuz it alerts them to activity outside) but eventually someone new to the neighborhood or something is gonna complain to the city and I don't need trouble like that--it's part of why I want to screen the streetside fences visually).

 

[amberwolf]

My electric bill should cut about in half, might even be less than that now that summer's heat is gone, and it's only getting up to 90-95F at worst, and down to 60F or so most nights. That means the inside temperature stays aorund 75F or less on it's own, with just opening up the house (doors/wndows) for ventilation once it's cooler out htere than inside.


As I don't expect to need it for half a year now, I took the window A/C unit out of the bedroom window a couple nights ago so now both windows are free to use for ventilation that way.


With the A/C unit used to keep the bedroom around 80F in the daytime, it'd be between 17-20KWh a day, and now it's down to a peak of 9KWh (on days I've used the deepfryer or toaster oven) and a low of 6KWh (on days I didn't need to cook at all cuz I had leftovers), and an average day of around 7KWh.

That brings costs down from summer's peak of $68/month, to $61 the previous month, to $55 for the just past month, to what will probably be $30 or so for the upcoming month, at a guess.


Water, on the ohter hand....I don't have the data with me (not available online like the power is), but that's been over $100 every month, almost, and the worst months were over $150. Most of taht has just been to get the trees and lantana recovered to where they had been before being unwatered for nearly a year during the rebuild (city wouldn't reconnect the water till it was done, I guess). Now that much of it is recovered, and I will have anohter half year to grow more things to cover ground under trees and stuff to keep water in when I put it there, it should cost a lot less next year. At worst, it would cost the same, because of all the new lantana and stuff I've been trying to grow as screening and shading.



Speaking of that, I got the first three of the planter-saved lantana, already about a foot and a half high and branched out some, transplanted form the planters to the east fence area, done this morning. Hopefully all of them will make it, but won't know for a little while.

I have three more planters of them to move over, and after that will be transplanting some others growing under the southeast mulberry tree.

I also have some other "eucalyptus" tree sproutlings, still quite tiny, to move into the places where others dind't make it thru the summer. There's also one larger one near the house that recovered after being cut down to the ground after the rebuild, which I need to dig up and move to the spot near the sheds where the one over there didn't make it.

 

[amberwolf]

Been completely offline the last few days, as the laptop decided it didnt' have any networking of any kind anymore. :?

It had been acting strange (and very frustratingly) for a couple of weeks, where the wifi adapters would disconnect randomly, sometimes not even showing they were installed. One's internal, and one's USB. Reinstalling drivers and software made no differenc,e and eventually wouldn't even reinstall, giving errors about "windows cannot load installer for XXXX" where XXXX is whatever type name the hardware was for. Did the same thing trying to plug in USB memory sticks to do backups, too.

At some point, Network Connections became totally blank, and didn't funciton like it was supposed to. I suspected registry problems, but a few backups of the registry I had from earlier this year didn't chang eanything at all. That's when i suspected a virus/malware, but numerous checks found no problems.


I had three complete systme backups on separate harddisks (complete images that could just be swapped out physically on the laptop), and NONE of them would work, either, which was very strange--same problems, whcih couldn't be hardwrae, because it was in the networking section of windows itself, and the hardwrae detection/ installer stuff.

Of course, before I tried to boot from them I hooked htem up via USB adapter to check which ones they were, so if it was a virus or malware and was "smart" enough to infect any attached drive, it could've gotten to all the backups.

So on the primary, after backing up all the data and stuff, I first just tried a repair reinstall of XP, which at least booted normally, but still had no functioning networking. I then installed SP3 from offline files, and then the sytem wouldn't even boot--locked in restart cycle before desktop, even in safemode.

At that point I dug out another old (partly broken) laptop another friend had given me, which I had freshly installed XP, tested and updated via wifi, on a few months before the housefire, and it had sat around unused since then. THIS one wouldn't even SEE any wifi stuff in the area, which I knew was wrong cuz my phone's wifi does. Tried my USB wifi and it saw wifi stuff but of course coudn't connect cuz I have none of their passwords.

I took it out to active free wifi areas and it could see them (with USB but not internal) but dind't even try to connect to any of them, which was wierd.


So this morning I took one of my old backup drives and wiped it on this X31 (the original problem unit from the top of the post), then reinstaleld XP /etc from scratch.

FINALLY, now I have functioning wifi, and here I am....


I still have several weeks of re-adding my data and settings and programs to it, to make it "usable" for me, but at least I have access to do it.


I'll need to take everything up to Bill's and use his hard connection to see if I can scan all the drives with a few online malware/etc checkers, too, just in case the stuff I have locally is simply too old. Then once I know it's "safe" I can move my data from the old drive back onto this one.

Then I can also rewipe/setup the "backup" laptop, and make sure that one works again, in case this happens again sometime.


GAH. I probably wasted nearly a hundred hours the last couple weeks on this mess, most of it the last several days. I didnt' even get as much sleep as I normaly do, and wasted my entire day off on Thursday from dawn till past midnight trying unsuccessfully to find and fix the problems.


Did I ever mention that I HATE COMPUTERS!?

 

[amberwolf]

Wel, wiht the computer problems fixed (for now, I guess), I finally got some of the doggie vids uploaded (and some other stuff I've been trying to get recorded and uploaded for ages), so here is the first very short tugowar one, when they decided to "help" me trim the trees and (un)pile the debris....

[youtube]kTuN2oCdSgk[/youtube]

More will be here in an hour or two, I'd guess, depneding on how slow the wifi here gets:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8zdTTheCL1BFH5IZtYEscQ




I did have one more computer problem: The Logitech Marble FX trackball's leftclick button (thumb) switch finally wore out. :lol: It would sometimes actually engage, but mostly it would click with no connection (verified with continuity meter). So I transplanted the switch button off the red button I never use over to it, and it's fixed for hopefully a few years more. I kinda wish I had saved the mostly-melted leftovers of teh one lost in the fire for it's internal parts, cuz those might've still been good, maybe at least some of the stuff. Oh, well, way too late to worry about now.



BTW, on the other laptop (HP ZE-something) I used temporarily till I fixed this one, I verified it, too, will run off the 16V EIG NMC lighting pack (plugged in in place of it's AC adapter), even though it's AC adapter is 18.something volts, it keeps running fine at least down to 15.8V (as far as I got in testing) with or without it's internal battery connected.

Presently teh EIG pack is 4s, but I guess if I had to I could go to 5s (~20V) to run the HP laptop, if it ends up not able to run as long as I need on the 4s. (but I'd have to leave a tap for my lighting at 4s, and I'd have to regcharge in two stages: 4s for the lighting part and 1s for the added cell). Before I bother with that, I shoudl do a test using my big lab PSU adjusted down to the LVC of the 4s pack and see if the HP will still run on that voltage, just in case.




EDIT: some more vids:

[youtube]a1jdK4bzDOE[/youtube]

[youtube]5DrmU9vO4NE[/youtube]
[youtube]XMkGNEtl5TQ[/youtube]
[youtube]6AijZPprYsQ[/youtube]

 

[amberwolf]

Got more vidz uploaded.

I shoudl've gotten a vid of this mornings playtime though, cuz both of them skidded and crashed in the mud many times, after last night's small rainstorm. :lol: Mostly they just got up and kept going, but after a few of those Tiny finally had enough and just avoided Yogi's attempts to keep going, so he started making a pile of all the toys and branches and sticks, to see if he could make her jealous enough to go get one...which she didn't--she just laid down on a big one so he couldn't get it, then when he gaveup she began stripping it (I did get some pics of that, and a couple absolutely classic stills of a tugowar cuz I forgot to set it to video first).



The tugowar's first shot shows Tiny JUST as she lost her grip on the branch, and Yogi pulled it away and ran.


The second shot shows Yogi JUST as he was slipping in mud, and letting go of the branch in surprise--instead of correcting and going back for it, he tried the trick of running to the fence and barking to get Tiny to drop the stick and go bark, too (which didn't work this time).



There's also more vids:
Yogi and Tiny play getcha:
[youtube]ZF13ePH9NYc[/youtube]

More of teh tugowar, different branch, much longer:
[youtube]kbSy-mdjtbE[/youtube]


Yogi and Tiny play:
[youtube]e4_gVE9xCms[/youtube]


Tiny NEEDS dinner:
[youtube]ERNS3UenKZA[/youtube]

Yogi uses doggiewindow, Tiny uses backdoor
[youtube]YdoGfvK6E4I[/youtube]

And some random pics:

Yogi got confused as to what he was chewing on, and ate the end off one of my more decrepit soaker hoses while he was eating a stick:
View attachment 15


Yogi an dTiny after playtime, each with their own stick:



Playtime again:
View attachment 10




Boring stuff:


I got mroe stuff moved from planters to ground, mostly lantana to the east fence:



Oranges are actually almost as big as golf balls now, which is about twice as big as they have gotten in years. :lol:



.Some of the lantana under the southeast mulberry is getting taller than Tiny now:




The barking actually did get worse (especially Tiny) when I put the ultrasonic bark control away, so I put it back out again, and now they're back to where it was before, manageable. Yogi still barks at antyhing that moves, though I can at least usually call him and have him come (since there's always a treat for him if he does come).



Oh, and because I always have a treat for Yogi when I call out "Yogi", Tiny has come to think the word "Yogi" means "food", even though *she* doesn't get a treat for coming when I call Yogi. :lol: She still smells them and knows I have them hwne I give Yogi one, so wheneve rI call him, she comes running, too.



Not long ago, once it got a lot cooler in the daytime, I moved all my planters (on chairs so Yogi doesn't dig in them) to the middle of the yard where they will get sun all day long, to grow more. I also have to water them a little more, but that's ok; I just wanna make sure things get big enough to survive transplantation, first.




Then there's the mystery plant, whose flowers look like this:

and whose "fruit" looks like a little tomato or something; pics in previous posts (biggest one smaller than a finger joint, still).


I planted a bunch of seeds collected form various "parking lot" plants and trees and shrubs in thsi planter som eweeks back, but no sign of any germination yet:





While cleaning stuff up after a windy day, I found a hole in the fence near the back (northwest) corner of teh backyard, near where they'd kicked in the wooden fence at the alley inset of the neighbors yard to get into mine during the post-fire rebuild year. I never noticed it before, though it's almost big enough for Yogi or Tiny to stick a head thru.



it's been ther elong enough for hte cut tips (wire cutters?) of the metal to rust the same as the rest of the fence in that area has, though. I looked at the pics I took back in March of that area, when they were putting in the new utility pole right at that spot (the new pole is just east of the hole, and the old pole is just west of it). But I can't see the chainlinks well enough in the images to tell if the hole was there then or not--it sort of looks like it..just not sure. I *hope* it was already there, cuz I don't like the idea that someone was still trying to get into the yard after I'd moved back in, and was living there with Tiny guarding it already.

Either way, it's obviously been long enough to rust evenly, so it's unlikely to be anytime recent, and they were obviously disturbed by something in process of doing it, and never came back to finish it.

For now I tied it shut with old brake/shifter cables taht are too messed up to re-use on bikes, and will more permanently fix it as soon as I find my other chainlink and repair wire, somewhere in the sheds.



Oh, and I did more solar water heater stuff, but I've made a new thread for that one here:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=64197

..

 

[amberwolf]

Got another tugowar video (upload not working to YT right now), this time wiht a rope toy that has sat unused on one of the rocks around the grave, till today Yogi sniffed it out and started carrying around, tossing his head up to show Tiny that "I've got something you don't got!". :lol:

Tiny of course had to respond, and the tugowar game was going for a couple of minutes already before I went after the camera and got out there, so I guess there was more than 5 minutes of it before it wore them out enough to stop for a bit. (they started up again not long after, till Yogi saw something to run off and bark at and left Tiny sitting there with the rope).

Yogi has also discovered how to peel tennis balls to get to the yummy chewy center:





I got more done on the solar water heater, or rather, more parts prepared to do something with:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=64197&p=962148#p962148

 

[amberwolf]

Greetings from sleepy Tiny and nappy Yogi; didnt' get as boisterous as they usually do when I get home cuz of that I guess. They both looked like they wanted to go back to sleep, and they did, not long after I got home.


[youtube]Sy_dt-kjPVM[/youtube]

 

[beast775]

That stator pic is cool as heck.dogs look happy and the yard looks great.

 

[amberwolf]

More happy dogs, rope tugowar this time (video I got before but couldn't upload till now):
[youtube]1e_2hKK8QIk[/youtube]

 

[amberwolf]

Dogz was bored with me working on the trailer and stuff:

 

[dogman dan]

Yogi is so sweet, just like my Barry he plays but lets her win.

Barry does it different, he gets the ball or stick, then makes her chase. But then in the end, he flops belly up and lets her love bite him all over.

In both pairs of dogs, it's clear the female is the dominant one.

 

[amberwolf]

Tiny doesn't usually pester him or bite at him or anything, except when he steps on her (whcih still happens from time to time when they're playing, like in one of the vids above, or when we're all sleeping and he gets up to find a new spot in the middle of the night or hears something he has to go check out).


But she does seem ot be in charge most of the time, and Yogi shows off to her whenever she's out htere patrolling; he tosses his head around to wiggle whatever he's chewing on at the moment, or if he doens't have anything he'll go find something and run back over to her to get her approval, before running off with it to get her to chase him. :lol:

But he can be quite the stinker sometimes, just teasing her with it until she gets bored and go gets her own or goes inside to have a nap instead. :/



He usually looks really disappointed when he realizes she's not chasing him anymore.


I...sometimes feel sad when I remember that she's probably getting closer to 9 years old, and he's maybe 3...and I think about how he's gonna feel when she's not around anymore. (I know how *I* will feel, and I understand these things...he won't, not really).


But they're both still here, now, and are great fun and help me (and each other) a lot.

 

[amberwolf]

Vacation this week; mostly to clean out and organize all the crap in the sheds left (almost completely disorganized right now) after the fire. Apparently it is also cleanup week for some neighbors; my north neighbor across the alley gave me this bucket of propane/MAPP torches (some still have a little fuel).




I haven't got very far on the sheds; jus tgot some of the stuff out of the barn-style one under the biggest mulberry, closest to the house. That's all gotta come out first, so I can start putting lighting, shelving and worktables in there, and then can put other stuff in there, too.

I also wanna put a floor in there, but I don't have any real stuff for doing that. So probably I will take apart some furniture that is still in one shed, that was already pretty damaged first by the firefighter's water putting out the fire, and then by sitting in weather for most of the year after that. It should net me enough wood to be able to secure together ot make a floor.

I don't have a frame for a floor in that shed...but I do still ahve the third shed kit, unbuilt. So maybe I will put that kit's floor frame together inside this shed, even though it' snot he same shape/size, and hten fasten everyting to that. it'll be on top of hte existing masonite sheets I'd stuck down there when we mvoed sheds around right after the fire to store things in. (those sheets are pretty well shot already, not being meant to sit on the ground). That would be better than putting the "new" floor directly on the ground, most likely.

Dogs were very bored with the whole thing, and mostly slept inside during the windy/cloudy first 3/5 of the day:
View attachment 6




When it got sunny, they came out to do some playtime, but the vids of that won't upload where I am now, so they'll be up here later. :/


When playtime was over, and they were worn out (me too), I dug out a roll of cloth I'd originally intended several years back for awnings over the windows, and a shade to hang from the portch. Since it seems I don't really need that very much, given the much better insulation the house has after the rebuild, I decided to try out something to get Yogi to stop barking at everything he sees on the east street side of the yard.


If he can't see it, maybe he won't bark at it, right?




Well so far it seems to be working ok. He hears stuff and barks once or twice, then since he doesn't see it he trails off and hunts around looking for hte noise source. If he doesn't see it, he gives up. Dunno about Tiny yet, since usually she does what he does for barking (as I had almost gotten her to stop doing it before I got Yogi, and now that's all untrained by him).

 

[amberwolf]

Am posting from home now...my north neighbor across the alley got wifi so is sharing.

The signal is very weak, but doesnt' drop out much. I cant actually connect using just hte laptops built in wifi antenna, so I jury rigged a connector to the internal card so I can plug in a long cable to an external antenna that's about 1/3 of the way fr=-om my room to the alley. I also added the "windsurfer" directional gain reflector, though it's very crudely made and isn't really quite parabolic, I think, due to my construction method. :lol: But between the two things, it gets me about half a bar of signal, vs "no signal" warnings.




View attachment 16
View attachment 17




Once I have some time and get all the networking stuff back in one place, I'll rig up a wifi router setup as just an ethernet/wifi bridge as close to the back fence as I can get it, and just run an ethernet cable from that to the house. It'll probably go in the tree that's right at the fence, to shade it from sun, and I'll either seal it up in a bag for waterproofing, or make abox for it if I get fancy. I'll also use some form of the windsurfer antenna to directionalize it, which ought to help a lot, in addition to using the old Symbol AP's highgain antennas.

I'd use the Symbol AP itself, but I cannot get it to talk to anything via serial port, with any cable, and tat's the only way to configure it. Right now it's all locked up, and cna't be accessed via internet and it doesnt work as a wifi router or repeater. :/ So I'll be using one of hte other ones (maybe the Netgear from Bigmoose, though I'll have to open it up to bring out it's antenna wires, as it has no plugs, IIRC) instead.

But for now, I've got the very basic connection, which is all I actually have to have.

This should make it a LOT easier to post updates, and do moderation stuff, etc. Also means I will probalby waste more time on the internet than I should, but at least it means I won't have to go anywhere to do it, and thus it saves me the travel time, as well as the frustrations of going somewhere only to find their wifi not working right or at all, and having to go somewhere else (or being stuck without wifi that day, having already bought food ro whatever to stay there to do my posting, since most places won't let you just use their wifi, but rather you have to buy something, and some have time limits, though almost none seem to enforce them).

The dogs didnt' have a lot to say about it yet, other than BORING:






Back to the real subject of the post:

I've got almost everything out of the barn shed that will be the "shop", and have dug out most of the shelving pieces I've had scattered in the other three, and am now just working on exactly what to use with what to make shelves that will fit in there and be sturdy, and hold the stuff I need in a way I can use it.

This shelving is just parts of the framework for a snap-together type, but needs plywood or particleboard or similar for the actual shelves. I don't have neough of that to make them, but if I welded some stiffenrs across the bottom of each shelf, I could use masonite that I do have. Oh, and they're also almost two feet too tall to fit in teh sheds at all, so they have to be cut first.


Then these are the old retail-type shelves, which I have no basedecks ro uprights for, so I have to weld them to pipes or similar to make them into shelving. I might use the uprigths from the other shelving above, for that.



But I don't really have to, as I do have a lot of EMT and square tubing I could use for it:


That'd leave the other shelving for how it was intended to be used (though I stil lahve to modify it to use it, since I don't have all the bits).

Ther'es also this shelving, but it also is at least two feet too tall, and would have to be cut to fit in teh sheds.



While I was banging around stuff a lot making noise, Tiny decided to hide in one of the sheds, and when I dragged some metal near teh doorway, she hopped up onto the powerchair in there, as the only place to "hide" that wasn't on teh floor, I guess. I snapped the pic quick cuz as soon as she got up there she wanted down

(I've been carrying this camera wherever I go in the house or yard, to try to get the shots I can't get with the celphone cameras cuz they're too slwo/etc...but there are some thigns i can't do with it in my hands or around my neck, so i still miss some shots. In this case I happened to have it sitting on the shelf just inside the door there, and I got it turned on and pointed just before she got down)

I've already had a basic layout in mind for what goes where, but some of it may change based on what shelving bits I have, plus I didn't know the dimensions of the stainless steel tabletop I had in the back of another shed; tha'ts gonna be the main worktable.

I've gotta put together frame to hold it up, and coudln't do that till I knew it's size, cuz that determines what I will make it from.

I also dug out the mats I'll be using as floor covers, since I don't realy ahve enough wood to "waste" as flooring even if I put together the frame kit to hold it off the ground, out of the other shed kit. I decided I'll need that wood for other things, instead.


I found that I have a LOT of old wheels:

though most of them are either damaged or not a size or type I can presently use. Still, they are a source of spokes and nipples I may be able to use on other projects, and if I can think of something to do with all the broken/ junk rims that'd be nice, too.


I've found new homes for about a large pickup truck load of stuff. some of it was actually garbage, just shoved into boxes and the sheds by helpers after the fire. Some was stuff I simply am never gonna use, or projects I'll never get back to, etc.

I still have probably at least two or three times that much stuff that still needs to go, once I sort thru all the stacks of boxes of stuff--most of the boxes have collapsed on each toehr, though, since they were not on shelves but just stacked up haphazardly wherever they'd fit, either by helpers or by me and Mark when we hurriedly tried to get eveyrthing out of the yard and into the sheds last year, to preserve what we could from theives and weather. So some stuff that *was* good before is not now; broken glassware/etc, for some of it, and paper/books/etc for others.


I probably wont' get most of the sorting done this week, but I *will* get the sheds unpacked, shelves built, and then repacked in a wya I can actually get to stuff easily, and be able to work in there as needed, instead of having to do all my work on the ground or temporary tables/etc setup in the yard.



EDIT: Oh, also while digging around, I found the box of spare (probably prototype!) parts for the old BITS 483 computer system (which is around as old as I am),
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?18132-Bits-483
includng these two core memory cards. (I'd thought the whole box was long gone...didn't find the schematics for it yet, though)


One fo them had it's cover already fallen off (the nylon screws disintegrated from age, I think), so I took the opportunity for pics, and Tiny took the opportunity for sniffs:


At first glance it almost looks liek a solar panel



but it's realy only a 64bit x 64bit x 18bit array. That's only 73728 BITS, and that's not even ten thousand BYTES of data (9.216kB).

Teh text of this post, NOT including pictures, probably takes more space than that!


But the amazing part is the craftsmanship that has to be done to make this stuff. There are wires threaded thru little ferrite cores to make these things, and if you've never seen core memory, well, here's your chance:


Doesn't look like much, till you zoom in a little. Here's the best-focused little part of that, whcih is an area around the size of my fingernail (if that):

 

[amberwolf]

As a comparison experiment, I tried my bare ASUS USB wifi adapter in place of the long antenna with the Windsurfer reflector. Since it doesn't have an external antenna port, I just used a USB cable long enough to let it reach the laptop (at the bedside) and perched it in the windowsill, which means it has to go thru waving treelimbs and stuff. It's about the same height off ground, so it just clears the chainlink fence with LOS to the neighbor's house.


With no amplification, it's already better than the built-in wifi card, as it gets a flickering single bar about a third of the time, though it keeps losing the connection particularly during gusty breezes that move the tree limbs around a lot.


Then I moved the windsurfer reflector over to it:

and now it picks up a steady two bars, plus sometimes a flickering third. No problems with dropped connections yet.

That's quite an improvement, and essentially means that I don't have to do anything complicated, don't have to even run a cable outside the window. I dunno if it's a good enough connection to stream video or anything like that, but it certainly works fine for posting here and uploading pics.


It also (slowly) lets me upload YT vids of the dogs/etc, so here's the two from the other day. One of them is cut off for some reason in the original file so it's only like a half a second, but the other seems fine.

[youtube]znL3V3EApps[/youtube]

[youtube]UVU3KLPihL0[/youtube]

 

[amberwolf]

I didn't get very far on the sheds today. Already tired from the last few days, I pretty much had to stop before midday, even with more frequent breaks than I would normally do. I"ve been mostly dozing and puttering around with the wifi, and chekcing some stuff on the solar water heater.

I'm also trying not to strain my bakc worse than it is already, cuz the shed door lintels are so low (I guess around eye level) I have to bend over quite a bit to carry things thru, and it's been taking a big toll on the small of my back, even for little things.

Because of the way I had stuff scattered around before, I couldn't use a dolly to do it, either, though I fixed that yesterday evening as it began to get dark, before taking Yogi on hsi road trip last night.


I'm also being eaten up by a cloud of mosquitos, whcih went away fro a while but have come back with a vengeance today, even with the breeze. They;'re also inside the house, and even citronella repellent isn't keeping them off of me. Am wearing a longsleeve thicker shirt right now, cuz the thin cooler ones (it's about 83F out there right now, was 86F half an hour ago), and have it tucked into my pants and my pants tucked into my socks, to keep them from getting inside the clothes and eating me up. Even so, they land on my hands and I have to smash them because they won't just fly off.

So a fan doesn't do any good, as they apparently are strong enough to fly thru the turbulence and land on me somewhere, then crawl to where they can bite me, I guess.

I wish I knew where in the neighborhood they are breeding, so I could do something about it or get the person owning the place to do something (just dump out teh water they msut be breeding in would do it). But I have no idea of their source, and I havent' seen anything they coudl breed in either.

My head and hands are covered in bites, though, and my neck is geting there despite pulilng the collar up and closed. If it were colder I'd put gloves and hat on, but it's too hot--I tried for a while but felt sick from overheating.


Definitely sick and tired of the mosquitos, completely and totally. :/

 

[Eclectic]

Love the old memory boards. They are a lot denser than the ferrite core memory cards I have. IIRC (I haven’t seen them in 35- 40 years – gotta be around here someplace), they were probably only 64 bits on an 8x8 inch card. I remember one of my programming teachers saying “You know, if they ever figure out this memory thing, computers might really take off”.

 

[amberwolf]

I doubt I still have it, since I haven't found anythign else that was with it, but I used to have a little palm-sized core-memory board with a black anodized "faceplate" about 3/4" wide and maybe 4" tall, with nylon ejector levers, and a card-edtge conne3ctor on the other end. AFAIK it was from some multi-cabinet type computer, that had rows and rows of the things, from somethign my dad worked with in the 1960s.

But it only has a small grid of relatively huge cores, which were each something like several millimeters in diameter! I guess it might've been an 8x8, but I don't think it was an even number. I wish I could remember (really I wish I just had the thing to hand to check). No idea what system it was from; I once tried to find anything resembling it on any web archives, and no luck.

It *might* have been by Control Data, or Xerox, since those were two places my dad worked before Sperry/Honeywell/Bull. But it doesn't look like anything I can find of those.

I guess it could've been Air Force stuff, as that's what he did before then,but I don't imagine he'd've been let go home with stuff like that.

I never saw the actual memory itself from teh Sperry test equipment we used at Honeywell CFSG, but the boards were pretty huge--bigger than the ones above.


Anyway, so, yeah, the pics above show a much denser core memory than I'd recalled.

 

[Eclectic]

Yeah... at 1$ per byte for memory... that means my smart phone would be worth how many billions of dollars

 

[amberwolf]

Haha...we'll send some back in time and make a fortune!

..which reminds me, around when I found those boards, I also ran across a USB memory stick that had been in my "fix" box of such things, which had gotten full of water in a shed, and corroded (it already had it's connector snapped off, which is why someone had tossed it). I don't know what capacity it had been, but I tossed it out, too, and didn't think a thing about it (except that it was a shame I coudln't do anything with it, or rather I simply wouldn't have time to do it, given it's very minor usefulness to me if I did spend the hours cleaning it up and fixing it).

Is it ironic that I'll toss out that more or less modern tech that I probably could've fixed and used, but hold onto this ancient unusable (by me) tech?



In other news, I've tried a number of things for the mosquitos, most pretty unsuccessfully.

So far the only remotely effective one is squishing them whenever I catch one close enough, and wearing thicker full-coverage clothing that's all tucked into each other (minus gloves or facemask/hat). It's not really quite cold enough for that yet, except late at night (when they've all gone away; they're only really active from about 4pm thru 6-7pm, and sometimes in the morning from predawn thru 7-8am).

A box fan blowing on high right on me will keep them away, too, but unless it's pretty close to me and basically blowing in my face I still sometimes end up with them on my neck, face, or forehead biting me. The fan itself is really noisy that way, and my eyes dry out in minutes, and I end up with hurting eyes and a headache, enough so I'd rather live with the mosquitos.

Cieling fan on high isn't quite so bad but it still dries out my eyes, and does little to deter them. Supposedly theyc an't tolerate wind speeds over 2MPH, but I guess the fan isn't generating that much wind (feels like it, but I don't have an easy way to measure it at hand). The oscillating fans appear to have all been taken or destroyed unfixably by mishandling in the post-fire cleanup, or I would try one of those. (I pondered making one using some high-volume/speed "computer" fans, but don't yet have all the bits for that found out of the sheds).






Supposedly they don't like / aren't attracted to LED lighting, and/or to bluish-white CFLs that imitate bright daytime. Apparently the ones around here don't know that. Doesn't matter how brightly I light up the room, either, or which LED lights I use (I don't use the incandescent that's in the cieling fan, just the LED stuff. And turning off the computer display, which uses a CCFL, doesnt' help either. )


Aloe Vera is supposed to repel them; I have some of it around here (nowhere near as much as I used to), and it helps with lots of things. It has even helped before--but not with these vicious ones we've got now. The only thing it helps with at all is right after I apply it (squishing/peeling the gel out of fresh leaves, and smearing on my exposed skin) then they stick to it when they land so it's way easier to squish them. :/

Supposedly eating garlic helps, but I've done that before for other reasons and while it does seem to do something about fleas and ticks (which were a problem at the house I lived before this one, last millenium), mosquitos still bite, though they may not stay as long.



A little dish soap in a saucer or bowl or plate seems to work by lessening the amount of them that come after me, but I can't walk away from it: the dogs keep wanting to slurp it up, and Yogi is unabashed about standing up to get things on high shelves/etc.



Still...argh.--smack. being bitten. And that's it for teh Itchy and Scratchy show for now.

 

[amberwolf]

Been pretty windy today (though nice and sunny, just under 70F till an hour ago when it went up a couple degrees), and Tiny's been sticking right with me cuz the wind is howling thru something outside (probalby the southeast big mulberry over the shed, but I don't know for sure), and it's making branches move a lot, and Tiny generally doesn't like any of that stuff. Yogi doesn't mind most of it, but he's been sticking around a lot, until midday when he went out to sun himself for a while.

Not long after midday, I heard a whipping sound like a giant thousand-foot flag in the wind. Yogi'd been outside but ran into the bedroom with wild-horsey-eyes and joined Tiny hiding in the corner of the bed where the walls meet.

I went out to see what had scared them, and saw the cloth fence strip had broken all the zip ties (cloth didn't tear!) from the top fence rail, from the north end to just past the east gate, and it was wrapped around the base of teh tree there.

I imagine if Yogi was over there when it tore loose, it probably would've been pretty scary having that coming at him!

I was out there around an hour or more repairing the thing (many more ties, and a different pattern to prevent it from being a billowing sail). Most of the time was just standing there holding part of it until the gusts stopped long enough for me to get that part retied.

(ideally I'd sew a reinforcement strip along the edgs and make "buttonholes" wherever I need to tie it down, but that's more than I'm capable of at present...so zipties thru little holes it is--it won't survive a really good wind, but it seems to be doing ok now, in today's ~15mph winds with 20+ gusts).


It's only there to help keep the dogs from seeing things they would bark at, cuz generally if they dont' see it they don't bark at it. It doesn't cover teh alley side, just the street side, so they'll still bark at anyone where they shouldn't be (in the alley itself).



I also have taken some pics the last several days I didn't get posted, but with the wifi issues (low bandwidth and intermittent connections) due to the wind moving branches around between me and the source, I'm not able to post them yet.