Ted’s essays

Halloween

The magical day where at the stroke of midnight chocolate is 50% off.

GOES 17 – understanding the satellite’s viewpoint

This view of the Earth is so informative that I keep it programmed in Firefox as my Home Page. Unless I’m rushing off somewhere specific, I get this image of our area from a cosmic perch every time I fire up my Internet browser. In my video below I go over some of the finer points of what can be learned by looking down at our segment of Earth from The Heavens. Obviously we can see moisture and major storm activity, but thoughtful study reveals so much more. For decades they denied this activity. Recently the geoengineers discontinued their denials and began bragging about it. What they admit to or brag about has little impact on those who choose to […]

dam + ladder

Beagle Brain, aka: Scooter, our Beagle/Lab cross, the BLAB, inherited the beagle willingness to follow her nose wherever it leads, whenever she can. Our containment fence was not up to the task. She would challenge it. I would fix it. Rinse and Repeat. FINALLY I shut her exit down while the rented backhoe was available with a dam and its backwater flooding where the fence crossed the creek. Yay! Success! BUT The tiny dam I rebuild every spring to enable my irrigation to draw from what little bit the upstream irrigators leave in Bunkhouse Creek posed no barrier to the little trout living in the year-round stream. My Scooter dam and culvert, however, did make a barrier… One I was […]

building pad adjustments

My equipment operator skills returned quickly, but my foundation layout talent never existed, and did not magically appear. Said another way, my first shot was off a bit. I had to rework it before the concrete partners did their job. Part of my weakness is not having the cool tools that the real guys use, like a laser-transit and two-man tape measure. Watching them work had me forgiving myself for incompetence where I was outside my skillset and toolset. Thanks in part to a great community, the recovery was quick and not overly expensive. The track hoe I rented was just as cool as I remembered from past experiences. The first phase needed the loader bucket of the back hoe, […]

busy

I have been rushing a bit setting up for winter which solidly arrived last weekend. I was almost ready. I threw a wrench into the works by starting construction of a quonset hut storage building I decided to ‘need’ before this winter. My tractor operator skills came back quickly on the rented backhoe, as did my ability to visualize re-sculpted earth in useful ways and get grades right from the seat of a tractor. I filled in as a presenter to the local garden club playing show and tell with my carnivorous plants. I finalized the lot line adjustment project enabling us to sell two adjacent parcels just over and under 3 acres each. In my younger days, ten […]