Sperm Count of Freeze-Dried Balls?

Whats the sperm count of freeze-dried balls??

I don't know and I don't want to find out!!

The greenhouse was there over that bare patch just this side of the AC units. And no, the barn is not cockeyed, just me.

So while a big chunk of the country is participating in a deep-freeze procreation experiment I'm down here moving the greenhouse because February is planting time. If we don't get our cool-season crops and tomatoes in by mid February the coming summer heat will choke them off.

While I'm going by the open doors of the barn I decide it's a good time to air up the tires, which have been neglected for a good year now since that is a normal 7' wide trailer but the 10' wide greenhouse overhangs quite a bit, making the tires hard to get at.

We've had the greenhouse up against the northeast side of the barn since south of the parking pad proved to be too harsh, sun exposure wise. But last year's crops, the ones that didn't fail outright, were pretty anemic because there just wasn't enough sun.

Made it down the steep slope off the side of the driveway then back up the hill to the southwest side of the barn without any major catastrophes! Now I just have to make sure it doesn't roll back down the hill and into the pond. . .

This year we're going to try out an exposed spot on the southwest side of the barn that gets late afternoon shade from a couple cedar trees. If that's still too much we'll drape some shade-cloth, which is probably what we should have done in the first place.

OK, leveled up, blocked in place, and tested. Yep, I've already climbed inside and jumped my considerable mass around without the thing taking off down the hill. But then again, I'd have to pay good money at Disney World for a ride like that!

Now where did I put those radish seeds? I just bought the dang things a week ago! Maybe my memory would improve, or at least not deteriorate quite so rapidly, if I tried some of that freeze-dried therapy.

Arrogance Bites Me on the Butt

The other day I used up my last 2032 battery on the digital level I use for tool setups, especially on the table saw. I knew it was my last one so I added 2032's to my shopping list for the next trip to town.



Of course if I had bothered to properly check the battery bin before I made that trip instead of being so dang sure of myself I would have known I already had twice as many spare 2032's than I can use up in a year. . .

That's 5 bucks I just wasted.

How The Metamorphosis of Iron Leads to Life

I was cutting yet another trail on the property when I ran into this snarl of steel cable, right where my trail was going.

This time I was cutting my serpentine way through a neglected sliver of our property between the county road and the electric-coop right of way. I was at the top of a hill looking through the fence and down into the cut the county road sits in.

As it's far too large to be used in fence-building, the only other thing up there besides the road, I suspect this 3/4 inch cable had some sort of association to the road-builders that cut a notch through the top of this hill. The road has been there for 150 years and, according to the 78 year old neighbor on the ranch to the south, he remembers the road being "improved" with cuts and fills some 60 to 65 years ago.

Maybe the cable was wound around the spools of a steam-shovel ripping a slash through the hill and there was a back-lash which snarled it all up, or perhaps it was used in an attempt to drag some stuck piece of equipment out of a mud-hole and this is the leftovers when it snapped under the pressure. Whatever it was used for back then, right about the time I was just learning to walk, something must have gone wrong for the crew to abandon it here in the woods; right in the path of my new trail.

I made a brief attempt to pull it up but over the years the ground and tree-roots have swallowed much of it and I lost the wrestling match.

OK, so in actuality, it kicked my ass. . .

I could have re-routed my trail around it, but the woods are thick up here and I was already one heartbeat away from an ambulance ride due to trying to drag it out of the ground, so instead, while the cable continues to slowly morph back into the earth it came from, I decided to designate it as part of my daily regime, using it as a balance and agility-improving obstacle as I dance my way through the foot-snatching loops while I'm doing my laps around the property. (Yeah, I know, a pretty pathetic excuse. But hey, you do whatcha gota do.) 

Iron Ore docks in Duluth Minnesota 1915. They are not much different today and are used to transfer Iron Ore (Now days taconite) from rail to lake freighter.

OK, I know that I titled this post with the word metamorphosis, which is a biological process and the iron this steel cable was made with is an element, but I'm actually not using the word incorrectly, at least not entirely.

In its day the Henry Ford II, a self unloader, was considered one of the prettiest of the lake freighters

I grew up in the land of iron mines and the lake freighters hauling ore to smelters, but even so, like many, at least those that stopped and thought about it, I just assumed the iron being ripped out of the ground had something to do with the earth's iron core and volcanic activity. It wasn't until later, and no thanks to our school system of the day, that I discovered that that is wrong. And that the truth is actually quite fascinating.

The iron ore we mine is from sedimentary rocks not the igneous rock of cooling magma. Yep, that's right, Iron ore comes from rock formed by stuff settling out of water.

Some 1.8 billion years ago (Yep, that's illon with a B!) the earth's oceans were chocked full of dissolved iron and it wasn't going anywhere because there was virtually no dissolved oxygen in those waters.. Then along came photosynthesizing algae, eventually followed by its more complex cousins, all creating oxygen which didn't even have time to unpack its bags before combining with the iron (Yep, there's the biological connection) forming hematite or magnetite, the two main iron ore types, which settled to the sea floor.

In the image above the grey bands are hematite, high-grade ore, and the red are jasper, a low-grade ore that today is processed to extract taconite which is then turned into iron. The hypothesis is that the banding might have something to do with seasonal effects on the oxygen producing organisms.

But the thing to remember is that it wasn't until the vast amounts of dissolved iron had all been settled out and stopped hogging the oxygen, that there was enough O2 left over for the rest of us, for any carbon-based, non-photosynthesis life. There is no limestone older than iron ore deposits because there were no corals, forams, and mollusks around to form limestone because of free iron. And it wasn't until much later that there was enough oxygen making it into the atmosphere to support non-aquatic life.

In other words, all of the earth's higher forms of biological activity had to wait on elemental iron to get out of the way before they could get their start.

As I sat up there on the top of the hill looking at the flakes of steel cable embedded into my palms from ineffectually tugging on it and thinking about how old those elemental particles were compared to my own, less-than-a-speck-in-the-eye, biologic lifespan, my mind was blown. 

This Is How We Ended 2018

This is how we ended 2018 here on the property. (Central Texas)

What a glorious way to usher out one year and get set for the next!

Hey Santa! Where Do I Send The Bill?

Worst place ever!!

A bit of a leak in a steel barn with a concrete floor is nothing to get too excited about, unless that leak happens to be right over your workbench. You know, the place where you carefully cut, trim, fit, and assemble complex masterpieces of woodworking art, (Yep, maybe a bit of exaggeration there.) where you apply museum-quality finishes that take days to complete, and where you painstakingly place 1000 different puzzle pieces made of paper and ink into cohesive wholes.

When that's where the leak is it becomes a big friggin deal!

Because of the sprayed foam insulation where the water comes out in the inside, just off the end of that light fixture in this case, doesn't always correspond to where it went in on the outside.

OK, I'm not saying I have definitive proof. No CCTV, no eye witnesses, no forensics,  no smoking gun, not even little reindeer footprints, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty dang strong.

I mean who else would be stomping around on our roof creating leaks on Christmas Eve?? And I don't care if it was the fat man in the velour suit or the pointy little hooves of his ride, a leak is a leak.

There are a trabazillion bolts in our barn. That might sound like an exaggeration
but ask me how I know what the actual count is. Go ahead, ask!

In the 15 years since the barn was assembled, bolt by bolt and section by section, we've had one other leak. It was in a non-threatening location, doing nothing more than creating a temporary damp spot on the concrete floor during rains, but a leak is a leak so I tracked down the source and put a stop to it.

Because of that previous experience I had a pretty good idea what I needed to tackle this second leak.

With my bucket full of potential tools at the ready and my trusty ladder firmly in place (I know, it looks scary as hell leaning over like that, but it's propped securely against the AC platform and is more stable than if I blocked up the right-hand legs to level it out.) I headed up to correct the situation.

Our barn is made up of a number of 30' X 14' arches, 25 of them to be exact, and before I went wheels (feet) up and climbed on top, I stood under the leak and counted valleys from the front of the building to the inside location of the leak - five. I knew from my previous experience that the source of the leak was either the 5th or 6th peak, the peaks on either side of the 5th valley.

And once I got up there the culprit was obvious. This bolt at the top of the barn right were two of the angle-supports come together. Those supports are used during the assembly process. (The whole 30' X 50' building was delivered to us on a single pallet and just adding water does not turn it into a building.)

They help hold things together during the process of standing the next flimsy, twisty, floppy arch up and getting it bolted to the one already standing. (It takes about 5 arches before the whole mess stops feeling like it is on the verge of coming down. Scary shit!) You could use just three (one on each side and one on top) of the 10' angle sections, moving them along as you go, or you can buy some extras and just leave them on the building as additional bracing. We chose to do the latter.

But the previous leak was also at one of these overlapping joints.




The bolts are about an inch long with a neoprene washer under the head and a square nut on the inside of the barn.

One thing you do NOT want to do with neoprened bolts is over-tighten them, squishing the washer until it can't do its job anymore, but that does create the risk, especially for an amateur, of leaving a bolt loose enough that over time it backs off to the point where the washer isn't doing its job for a whole 'nother reason.

But no big deal, just come back and tighten the bolt down a little bit. Except that with the nut now being inaccessible under the spray-foam insulation, that can be problematic, as was the case with my first leak several years ago. The nut just turned right along with me as I tried to tighten the bolt, so I ended up calking the area instead. (Yes, I could have dug through the foam and gotten to the nut to tighten the bolt properly but that just didn't sound like a lot of fun. Besides, having the guy come out and spray the foam was one of the few things we actually paid good money to have done and tearing it up just doesn't seem right.)

This time the nut stayed put and the bolt tightened just fine, bringing back memories (flashbacks?) of tightening all trabazillion of these bolts 15 years ago as I tried to judge just the right degree of tightness.

OK, so the calk is clear which makes this photo pretty much useless.

And I really hate opening a fresh tube of calk for a tiny job since I know the leftovers aren't going to last long, but I also really don't like climbing around up here a trabazillion feet up in the air, so I went ahead and calked the whole damn thing as well.



And now I'm back to puzzling without fear, but Santa - you owe me for a tube of calk. . .

Celebrating the Cycle

Yesterday I saw someone bemoaning the Winter Solstice as a day of peak SADness (Seasonal Affective Disorder) to be tolerated, but not a day to celebrate.

Well, we're all different and each of us have out own unique way of navigating through this life.

When I came across this particular viewpoint of this particular day, I had just been out with the camera capturing memories of, what for me is a glorious day.

Yep, the rules state never take a photo with the camera pointed at the sun. Well sometimes you just have to break the rules.

Of the four annual solar events, two equinoxes and two solstices, the Winter Solstice is my favorite.

The equinoxes are somewhat interesting from an intellectual standpoint, what with there being an equal amount of light and dark on those days, and the Summer Solstice is useful as a bookmark on the solar calendar,


 

but the Winter Solstice, now for me that's a day to celebrate!

It signals the beginning of the climb out of darkness.

The promise that the days of rest and hibernation will give way to days of renewal and growth.

It reminds that this cycle, so critical to the working of our planet for billions of years,

is still there for us to make the most of.

And when that day, as it did for me here in my little corner of the world, coincides with mild temperatures, dry air, and cloudless skies, well I'm not sure I could ask for anything more. . .

Weird Coincidence or Serendipity?

My Delorme Topo, the mapping system I use on my laptop, has a choice of 7 different coordinate mapping formats. Admittedly, more than half of these are pretty obscure unless you are in the military, work for the USGS, or are just plain contrary, but that still leaves at least three different  coordinate formats that are in common use.

The other day I saw a mention of the Cosmic Campground in the Gila National Forest. I hadn't heard about this place before so did a little research on it so I could stick a pin in my map.

 Rather than chase down the directions I simply copied the coordinates that came up and pasted them into the find field of Topo






Except that I wasn't paying attention and copied the degree-minute-second format and Topo was set to degree format. I don't know what convoluted magic happened in Topo to twist what I copied into the degree format it was set for but,



It sent me off to what is clearly a campground loop. One I hadn't marked before. But wait! This is in the El Morro National Monument. Still in New Mexico but definitely not the Gila National Forest! What is going on?






I eventually figured out what I had done wrong and plugged the proper coordinate format for the Cosmic Campground into the find field.

Ahh, that's better. Back in Gila National Forest, only this time it's not an obvious campground. Good thing I went looking for it then.

But how great was that! Two new pins in my map for the price of one.