Macro Photo Time!

I borrowed some extension rings for macro photography from my camera geek coworker, hoping to get some good pictures for the field guide. Well we lucked out, we didn't see anything new, but our first find was a ringneck snake who was stuck in the pool (and cold and slow) He was a great study for a lot of pictures. On Sunday we found two more ringnecks one may have been the pool swimmer. I added pictures in their own ringneck gallery.

We also got a few pictures of a Western Fence Lizard.

Using the extension rings was a pain, there is such a small distance from the lens that is in focus, I really need to learn more about using them.

I got wood

I've spent the last two days hauling wood up the hill from by our well up to the wood pile. I'm pretty sure we have enough wood for the rest of the winter and maybe beyond. This is for the only source of heat in the house, the same fireplace insert Tricia had in her house growing up. Since the ground was all overgrown and I was using a wheel barrow I laid down the old pool solar panels. These provided a very smooth ride for the wheel barrow but were very, very slippery. I'm guessing I moved about 10 cubic meters of wood, my hamstrings are tighter than a fat lady's g-string.

Field Guide Update

I spent some time updating the infrastructure behind the field guide. Now it's even easier for us to add animals to the field guide. This new system also allows me to publish an rss feed so you can see new additions easily. If you use google reader you can add it here.

Rain update: 18.99"

A Blustery Day

On Sunday we had 6.62" of rain in 24 hours, the previous day we had 1.32" bringing our season total to 12.53". I expect it to be even higher tomorrow and it looks like rain for the rest of the week! Right now there's lightning and cars crashing outside. Nothing appears to be leaking, so that's good news. How do we know all this? We have a WMR968 weather station.

In other news, Tony finished painting and staining the windows inside the house and I'd probably give him a C- grade on the job he did. The color of the big bay window isn't close enough to the woood around it to make me happy. The guest bedroom looks great though and the windows he painted look o.k. too.

Pimping it MTV cribs style

Here's our new TV on a shelf I built (with my biscuit joiner). It was a super cheap Costco deal (27" LCD for under $600), it looks a little cheap, but the picture from DVD's is awesome (to us plebs).

Black Widow Spider

Well we'd thought we'd seen them before but then we found out about boreal cobweb spiders which look like them and we weren't sure we saw the hourglass last time, but there is no doubt this one is a black widow. It was hanging around the end of the hose pipe, Tricia found it and wrangled it, then I took 60 or so blurry pictures of it, this is the best of the bunch.

We also found out something has been eating the bark at the bottom of our orange and lemon trees, time to get rid of that sucker as quickly as possible. Our lemon's are legendary...

New hot water heater!

So for the last 6 months it's been kind of difficult to have two showers during the same 4 hour period, the second person just never gets a really good shower. Today I investigated... My original plan was to drain the tank, flush it a few times to see how much sediment came out (our well had some trouble a year or so ago and there could have been extra grit in there). Since that didn't leak oodles of grit, I decided to pull out the elements to see how much calcium buildup had happened on them (one trip to hardware store to get a 1 1/2" socket wrench to remove elements and check availability and price or replacement (3800 Watt), $14 and they only had one). So I could get the buggers out no matter how hard I tried. Another trip to a bigger hardware store to see if they had better sockets that would fit the huge mac socket wrench I found on the road a few years ago. I'd checked online and they do make them, but nowhere near here sells them. However the big box hardware store had replacement elements for $7 each so I got two and another tool to try on the elements. I also noticed a new electric water heater was under $200. Headed home, still couldn't get the elements out... Waited for authorization to return home to see what was going to be the plan, we ended up getting anew water heater. It was somewhat easy to install although I still need to work out the routing for the emergency pressure relief valve thing. We had piping hot water in under 30 minutes and I even took a full long shower within an hour of first turning it on. It's a 4500 Watt/element heater and we're very happy with it. It'll probably end up being the best $200 we've spent in a long time.