Pike Trail Gaiters Save My Legs

 One thing that inexorably goes along with increased candle-count on the birthday cake is thinning skin and slower healing.

What's that got to do with anything?

Well much of the trail-system that I hike on a near-daily basis around the property is fairly well defined and largely obstruction-free from ground to around knee-level,

but the more open areas are choked with grasses and other, less benign, i.e. more pokey such as thorn-laden wild blackberry, flora that are often wet with dew in the chill of the mornings when I, and my aging-legs, tend to be out there,

and a lot of the trail-system is in the woods and the likely hood of getting tangled in more substantial, skin-tearing-able, objects at around ankle-level is high.

And while it's true that when I'm out doing any real hiking I wear long pants, here on the property my daily uniform of a hard-wearing kilt leaves my legs bare from the knee down.

So a while back I thought maybe I would try trading in perpetually scabbed legs for some protective gaiters. And perhaps save a little on Neosporin while I was at it.

(Apologies for subjecting y'all to the sight of my naked knee. I hope it wasn't too traumatic.)

To that end I selected this set of gaiters from Pike Trail and have been using them for about 8 months now.

Which in my case equates to some significant mileage, and, to my thinking anyway, also equates to the basis for a meaningful review.  - - Unlike those attention-seeking numb-nuts that write useless reviews such as "haven't tried it yet but the packaging was slightly crinkled so I give it a one-star deduction" ! 

As advertised, they, or at least the fabric the gaiters are made out of, is waterproof so they perform as hoped when wading through cold, wet vegetation, and the tough fabric does a much better job of fending off sharp, pokey things than my skin.

Of course, since I'm wearing them in all seasons, including summer heat, that water-proof bit means my leg-sweat collects on the inside just as fast as the dew on the outside, so they do get a little funky. But somehow warm leg-sweat, at least my own warm leg-sweat, is less objectionable than cold dew.

And since I'm not passionately opposed to trading a little funk for undamaged legs, and the gaiters do a good job of keeping them - my formerly scabby gams - pristine and beautiful - - - OK, beautiful might have pushed beyond the bounds of credibility, but you know what I mean - - I am calling this experiment a success.

Putting the gaiters on is easy.

They are ambidextrous so after hooking the adjustable foot-strap (Since I always wear the same boots I only needed to make this adjustment the first time I used the gaiters.) of the one nearest at hand under my arch. (with my boot already on of course) I then pull the gaiter into place around the back of my leg and with a quick, two-handed flip, press the full-length strips of Velcro - oops, sorry - hook and loop, closed up the front, and done.

People wearing normal hiking boots have the option of slipping the hook at the bottom of the gaiters over a boot-lace to assist the foot-strap in assuring the gaiter stays in place.

Since the barn-boots I wear around the property (old hiking boots that are too worn out for real trails) have no laces so I can slip them on and off easily, I don't have an immediate use for this little hook. Then again, I have also encountered no issues with the gaiters staying right where they belong even without it.

Speaking of staying where they belong: There's this elastic draw-string & retention clip thingy at the top of the gaiter so I can cinch them snug above the shapely swell of my calf. - - Yeah, when I find my shapely swell I'll letcha know!

I suppose if I were post-holing through a couple of feet of snow that might come in handy to keep them up where they belong, but having been there, done that, - you know, back when I was young, a northerner,  and didn't know better - I have no intentions of getting myself into that sort of situation again and find that, for me and my circumstances, the stiffness of the fabric is all that's needed to keep the gaiters standing tall and not bunched-up down around my boot-tops.

My biggest concern, robustness-wise, was the foot-straps that are down there getting ground between my boot and the trail with every step.

I'm not sure what those straps are made of but I estimate that I have put somewhere around 300 miles over sandy, rocky ground on them and see no signs of wear yet. No cuts or nicks, and if you brush the dirt off, not even any discernible scuffs.

The one area showing wear, other than the collected grunge which I don't bother washing off since it will just be right back again, is the metal snaps at the top and bottom of the Velcro strip. The snaps are there as one more assurance that the gaiters will stay closed and secure. These snaps are not the cheaper plastic variety but are made out of very tough metal. So tough it is often quite a struggle to get them to snap and even more difficult to get them to unsnap, although that might be in part because of a collection of grit gathered during my travels.

But of more concern is the fact that my apparently toxic leg-sweat seems to be eating away at the upper snaps rather quickly. To the point where the metal is being eaten away and has become prone to bending.

But while this looks bad, actually it's no big deal since the Velcro seems to be enough to keep the gaiters closed and in place anyway rendering the snaps an unnecessary closure-redundancy, so I eventually stopped struggling with them altogether. (If I was truly smart I would have stopped using them much sooner, but - well, what can I say?!)

With the understanding that I haven't yet, and don't intend ever, to use them in the deep snow they were originally designed for, and a one-star deduct for the corroding snaps, I would give these gaiters a 4 star rating - If this was Amazon and not a blog.

And it's nice to have my gorgeous legs back to their chick-magnet glory. And it's nice to look down and see legs that have recovered from their "Holy crap what happened to you!" state of scabbyness.

The Paul Bunyan Pucker-Factor They Don't Talk About!

 

You see that tree there in the middle?

The one that looks like it's falling down?

Well it is, but in very slow motion. Somewhere along the lines of 2 or 3 degrees per year for - well, to be honest I haven't been keeping track.

In fact I was doing a damn good job of ignoring this slow-motion disaster, right up until The Wife found a tiny little replacement-tree wan-a-be she took a shine to there at the yellow arrow and she made sure I realized that it was in danger of being squished.

I scrounged a few rounds of log left over from taking other trees down and built a little fort around it,  but even through my loyal veil of self-denial I could see that wasn't going to cut it, (Oh look! a pun!) and that death-tree was going to have to come down before it inadvertently squashed something important - or maybe even me.

On top of that, once I got to looking I found that there were three other trees, two at the red arrow and one more off to the right, that also looked suspiciously like thugs waiting with raised bats in the shadows of an alley ready to do damage at the first opportunity.

 In fact, the closer I looked the worse the situation got!

This is the up-hill side of that leaning tree and obviously things here are no longer on solid footings!

This is the tree off to the right of the first photo.

It looks like it could be just pushed over. (I tried and couldn't, but the wind can push a lot harder than me when given the opportunity.)

And here are the other two thug-trees.

Clearly not the most upstanding and stable citizens of this little community.

Anybody remember that late 70's movie The Warriors where a small group had to work their way across New York City by negotiating the territories of a whole bunch of different hostile gangs in order to get back to their home-ground?

All the sudden I kinda felt like that when out there in that little patch. (Ahhh for the good old days when ignorance is bliss!)

To remedy this situation I tried to locate the Blue Ox and her companion - but couldn't find them anywhere. Instead I had to hoist up my big-boy panties all by myself and deal with some serious pucker-factor as the implications of the job. - you know, thousands of pounds of ready to fall wood lurking over my tender head - started to affect the ability of my heart to beat properly.

In order to save The Wife's newly adopted seedling I really needed to make that big tree come down about 20 degrees to the west of where it clearly wanted to go.

So I got the snatch-strap out of The Van, wrapped it around the tree as high as I could safely get it,   (although safely is a relative term about now!) and anchored the other end off to the base of one of the other trees I was going to take down anyway (No worries about damaging a good tree that way)

with a come-along. Then set to work putting some snatch in the springy snatch-strap by cranking on the come-along configured with the turning block to the 8000 lb mode.

Note that that's the max capacity and the safe working capacity in this mode is 4000 lbs. I could tell by the degree of pucker in my nether-regions as I heaved my body-weight against the lever that I was exceeding that safe capacity one click at a time! But that was one hell of a lot of tree I was trying to coax into playing nice as it fell.

Now all that was left to do was tip-toe under that menacing behemoth and start cutting, very aware that the chain-saw chaps, leather gloves, and face-shielded hardhat were largely symbolic in the face of the many thousands of pounds of merciless wood looming overhead.

This face-cut I made might look a little shallow but it wasn't for guiding the fall of the tree, we all knew where the damn thing was going, I put it there to minimize rolling of the trunk as it fell.

But I've always had an iffy relationship with small engines, and about the time I got the face-cut to where I wanted it, my big chainsaw decided it had enough of me and picked up its toys and went home.

No amount of fresh fuel, adjustments, or pampering, not even the lure of free candy or the threat of the recycling bin, was enough to entice it to come out and play again.

So I was left with my small saw. 14 inches of guide-bar verses 28 inches of killer trunk!

It was a long and scary battle, and it wasn't pretty, but suddenly, in a flurry of sawdust being thrown off by an angry, snarling 2-stroke, the roots on the up-hill side of the tree started to lift and snap under my feet, sending me running halfway to the county line, (I'm proud to say there was no screaming but there might have been a series of "oh shit! oh shit"s - or words to that effect - as I ran) and she finally came down, resting nicely on that face-cut as she went thank you very much!

And if you look close there at the red arrow

blown up here in this image, you can see that the snatch-strap just barely managed to make her miss doing any damage to The Wife's pet seedling, though it was a near thing.

Like I said, it wasn't pretty

and yeah, I could have used a bigger saw!!

But I made do with what I had and with some careful cutting with the too-small saw from both sides and the help of my peavey I eventually managed to break her down into three tractor-loads of bigger stuff, one on the tractor, one there just below the car and another already carted off out into the woods to create habitats for critters, as well as a big pile of bits small enough to be run through the chipper.

This is what that pile of small stuff looked like after being fed through the chipper hanging off the back of the tractor. There's no scale of reference in this photo but the pile is about four feet high.

Once I had that tree all cleaned up and the ground clear of tripping hazards and safe to work on again I had to do it all over three more times!

Take a tree down, clean it up, and move on to the next.

But when that was finally done, and we're talking several days, days in which I could have skipped my usual morning workout without penalty but stupidly didn't, I was finally able to go back and trim the stumps off near ground-level to make mowing this area with the brush-hog much easier than when I had to dodge those four trees. (I always fall trees at about waist level, which keeps my on my feet so I can run away faster, then go back later to trim the stumps down.)

Now all I have to do is remember to dodge the little seedling there under the yellow arrow when I'm tractoring around.

But the job wasn't quite done yet!

Some think cedars are soft wood, but they aren't. Especially down around the base of the larger ones where the wood is remarkably dense, so dense it can be polished like steel. On top of that cedar is actually kind of gritty because it tends to incorporate the sandy loam it prefers to grow in. Both these traits take a toll on saw-blades.

For this reason I have three chains for each of my two saws that I can swap out as a chain gets dull, (starts creating more dust than chips) rather than having to stop in the middle of a project and sharpen. But since I was limited to the small saw for this job its chains took a lot of abuse and I'm that guy that insists a job isn't finished until all the equipment and tools are cleaned, tuned, and put away ready for next time.

Fortunately I don't have to hand-file every tooth on every chain. Instead I have this sharpener. It isn't automatic, I have to hand-position each tooth before hitting it with the grinding wheel, but it sure speeds up the process!

So, three chains, 51 teeth, sharpened and now I'm done.

Except that I really should do something about getting that 455, the big saw, running again.

Oh, and there's those three trees on the other side of the main barn that need to be taken down at some point, hopefully without hitting the well-house - - - but frankly, right now procrastination seems like a better idea.

I am SO obsolete !!!

 

It was 1972 when I embarked on my career in electronics and computers.

My initial training, courtesy of the US military in exchange for 4 years of my youth, was in vacuum tube technology.

You remember that don't you?

TV's and radios that literally had to 'warm up' before they functioned, tube-tester stations in the hardware store, and the tubes themselves that had enough voltage on them to reach out and strike like lightening when you carelessly got a body-part too close to the top electrode. (Yep, did that more than once! And to this day I do not wear highly conductive rings or watches)

From there my work quickly transitioned through solid-state transistors,

bug-like integrated circuits,

and by the late 70's, firmly into the world of micro processors

and main-frame computers such as this DEC VAX 780.

I got to where I became a global resource for keeping the VAX with its thousands of parts and individual circuits running and I could also go into them at the machine-language level and quickly tweak the operating system parameters to fine-tune it for maximum performance on different kinds of compute operations.

From there I jumped into the rarefied world of supercomputers.

First the liquid Freon cooled CRAY with it's strange shape designed to shorten the length of the internal connections to make them faster because - well you know - because of practical energy input considerations electrons racing down those connecting wires have a finite speed-limit

We even built a private computer room with a wall of viewing windows and special lighting just for it.

But the romance didn't last and we were soon building a second dedicated computer room for the cubistic Thinking Machine. (More shortened interconnects to speed things up)

But in the bleeding-edge, high-tech world I lived in these lightning fast but hugely expensive and persnickety custom computers (To replace a failed component in the CRAY we had to shut it down completely and drain the environment-killing Freon into the black tanks at the bottom before opening it up) soon became Dodo's

as the age of massively-paralleled computing took over.

We began taking hundreds, then thousands, of individual computers, each one representing 10's of thousands of those original vacuum tubes in less than the space of a single one of those little glass suckers, built with relatively inexpensive mass-produced processors and linking them together with complex networks and equally complex operating systems and applications to work together as one gigantic computer.

At one point our company owned one of the world's top 5 largest supercomputers and briefly boasted the world's largest on-line data storage capacity. (Can't compute without quickly accessible data to crunch and an equally quick place to put the results!)

As I approached retirement (2012)  we were running the industry's most cost-efficient data centers and dunking our computers into tanks of chilled mineral oil to cool them so we could run them even faster.

We were so bleeding-edge we owned stock in Bandaid!

About a month ago, while trolling through my usual collection of news feeds, I came across an article published by MIT on practical work (as opposed to theoretical work) being done at an atomic level with qubits. A pairing of atoms that can exist in two different states simultaneously.

Egghead gobbledygook right?

Well check out this excerpt from the article. (My own highlights)

A qubit represents a basic unit of quantum computing. Where a classical bit in today’s computers carries out a series of logical operations starting from one of either two states, 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in a superposition of both states. While in this delicate in-between state, a qubit should be able to simultaneously communicate with many other qubits and process multiple streams of information at a time, to quickly solve problems that would take classical computers years to process.

Now work with the practical use of quibits has been going on since at least 2019 but in the few weeks following that MIT article I came across another one showing how traditional silicone and quibits have been combined onto a single unimaginably powerful hybrid chip using existing chip-manufacturing technology. And if that wasn't enough, a few days ago Caltech published a summary article of a paper titled Nuclear spin-wave quantum register for a solid state qubit (scientists are not noted for catchy, or even particularly descriptive, titles!) demonstrating the ability to reliably manipulate and store data at a quantum level within the synchronized spin of a handful of atoms and using that to build quantum networks to connect quantum computers. (Oh man! My head hurts!)

I used to be actively headhunted in the fast-moving, cut-throat field of advanced computer technology. I used to be a featured presenter at conferences. I used to sit on panels at symposiums. I used to be a master of computers!

But today I'm back here helplessly, ineffectualy,  choking on the dust of progress. Not even a footnote in history.

These days I'm so obsolete that when I break I have to go to Ebay to find discontinued spare parts!

Frozen Contemplation

 

It's not like it never happens around here.

In fact the metadata on the photo above shows I took it at 11:11:02 Monday morning Feb 15 2021. Almost exactly one year ago. (It's Feb 4 2022 as I'm writing this.)

But it, this kind of weather, doesn't happen often. (Our average lows and highs for early February around here are 46 and 64 respectively.)

In the past 15 years here on The Property we've had 2 or 3 significant and maybe 3 or 4 wishful-thinking snow events and about the same numbers for icing events.

Well now we have another to add to the list. Though this one is difficult to classify.

It's certainly not as extreme as last year's, but it has been a mix. Rain turning to freezing rain to sleet and even a bit of actual snow, all layered up in a treacherous, crusty skin on anything exposed.

This time around we've been below freezing for 18 consecutive hours and it will be tomorrow, about 36 hours, before we will, briefly, make it up to 35 around noon under cloudy sky's before the freeze settles in again. And, according to the forecast, we have another 5 or 6 below-freezing nights coming on the heels of that.

But I'm not trying to highlight the extremes of our weather here. I'm not trying to bitch - or brag - about the local conditions in this post.

I'm all too aware that many - many, many - places are dealing with far worse than this little bit of hardship. If you can even call it hardship.

No. This post is about confronting unsettling reminders and finding peace with them.

But first:

One of the sweet blueberry's embedded in this thick, bitter batter is the fact that I can - legit - drag out my trusty wool gloves.

The ones that do a surprisingly good job of keeping my hands warm - ish - (Let's be realistic here!) but leave me with the dexterity to do my chores, and even type on a keyboard, as I'm doing right now in the 45 degree barn, practice on my new kalimba in the chilled tin-can of The Van as the blustery wind rocks her, and troll through the 1440 daily news digest on my phone while sitting out in the open on Dad's bench. (I'm pretty sure I'm getting worse and worse about not wanting to be inside any more than I have to.)

Being wool, they keep my hands warm - ish - even when wet. And when I don't need my fingertips I can turtle them by quickly shaking the gloves down an inch for even more protection,

or even pull those delicate fingers completely out of their individual tubes and curl them into my palms for extra heat conservation.

But I digress - I know. I know - once again. (Digression seems to be my natural state.) 

So back to the point:

I wasn't alone as I hiked the property today, despite the conditions.

The deer were also

out and about.

Non- browsers, in this case skunk, possum, or armadillo had, at least until I disturbed them like an off-key Mariachi trolling the tables in a restaurant, been feeding,

and den-dwellers had been - well - dwelling.

(Unlike me, apparently the inhabitant(s) of this particular den don't get all antsy if kept under a roof too long and feel compelled to get out and wander even in less than ideal conditions!)

But as I approached the T-intersection of trails at the back of the property, all too aware that I was bundled up in a base-layer, over-shirt, jacket, neck-koozy, scull-cap, brimmed hat (Despite the sunlight in some of these photos, it was still blustery and sleeting/snowing some of the time) wool gloves, and wool socks over silk

my mind was unwillingly drug back to when I was growing up in the north when conditions like this would have been nothing more than a nice spring day and I wouldn't have given them a second thought, let alone a coat and gloves, until forced to change my pants when I came in because I'd soaked them through with my exuberant play to the point of being icy around my lower legs.

Not that memories of those days are bad or anything, but they do inadvertently serve to point out the realities of the present. Because of those memories I couldn't hide from the fact that today I'm shivering, I'm flinching at the bite of cold on my cheeks, my neck is crunched down between my shoulders, my fingers curled into my palms, fingernails biting as I cringe at the thought of having to deal with this for the next several days.

Because, unlike my youth, today the cold hurts!

What's wrong with me?!

What happened between that oblivious childhood and this aching now?

OK. Anyone over the age of 50 knows exactly what happened.

Time happened.

That inexorable sweep of the hour-hand that looks like it's going around in innocent, lazy circles but is, in fact, spiraling fast down the passage of time.

Lately there's been a lot of these sorts of unavoidable time-passage reminders.

Cuts linger for weeks instead of days. Injuries can no longer be walked off but must be coddled and nursed. Skin that I've never really paid attention to before now needs to be moisturized daily lest it flake off like frosted bits of - well - me! And the litany goes on. Each one adding, like the beat of Poe's Tell Tale Heart, additional volume to the inevitable.

But just as I was letting this litany of woe shove me down that passage of time even faster than that spiraling hour-hand, I came across this nursery-log.

In its time this oak was a towering matriarch of our little patch of woods here. Rising tall and strong. Converting sunlight to energy and absorbing carbon as it grew ever taller and more robust in the natural seasonal cycling of these things. And in turn providing shelter and food and oxygen, and procreation, to the whole community around it.

But eventually the telomeres protecting the ends of her DNA strands got more and more ragged, just like the aglets on the ends of old shoelaces, and that phase of her journey couldn't be sustained any longer. But this is still within her time and as she produced fewer and fewer leaves in her declining years she was allowing more sunlight to get down to the next generation of oaks that had been sheltering under her protection so that a select few could begin their own journey to towering and strong.

And even when this matriarch fell she converted herself into a nursery for the thousands of fungi and insects and billions of microbes that are just as crucial, as she still is, to the continuation of the natural cycle.

I'm reminded that her falling, just like my waning tolerance for cold, is something to be noted, but not to the point of eclipsing her continuing value and purpose.

Once in a while I need a simple little nudge like this to steer me back on track.The track where I accept and adjust to that which is inevitable but never lose the wonder and joy of participating in this journey. 

So as the breeze carries the distinctly wild, slightly pungent smell of a couple of my neighbors across the pond I breath in deep and give myself permission to marvel at the beauty of the morning instead of bemoaning the sharp bite of its chill in my lungs.

As one of the characters in the Telanovela I'm currently watching (Only for the practice!) often says, while sweeping his hand up across his face and flicking his fingers as if he is waving away an annoying mosquito "Fuera el dolor. Vaya a vivir." - "Out with the pain, hurt, regret, grief, sorrow. (dolor is a widely encompassing word) Go live." 

(This particular Telanovela is older than the song Fuera el Dolor by Adan, Xavi, y los Imanes so I don't think the soap-writers stole that from them. And no. I have no idea what the hell the chicken is doing there in the video!)