The pool is warm enough

The weather's been lovely for 2 days, the water has been circulating around the solar panels for a week and today the pool is officially warm enough to swim in. It was great!

Not much else been happening around the house. I've been working on clearing out the brush down on the terrace behind the pool, it's slow going when you can only chip wood with the wood chipper when my daughter is awake. There's also a huge old rotten log that's about 3 ft in diameter I'm slowly working my way through to get out of the way. I'm trying to get the whole area ready for her to explore around and perhaps make some swings in the big trees and perhaps a tree house and also my big goals for a huge deck at BOTH ends of the pool, but that mostly depends on if we're going to remodel the house or not.

Soon it's going to be time to install a new pool filter which is going to be a big adventure.

I guess it doesn't look like we'll get much more measurable rain so I'll document how much rain we got so far this year: 32 inches. not bad, but nothing compared to the 60 inches we got a few years ago.

Chip it, Chip it good!

Three or four years ago we borrowed the wood chipper of a coworker of my wife. It was awesome, it was one of those teeny gas powered ones but I managed to get a lot of brush cleared and
didn't have to try and cram the sticks into a yard waste bin. Since then I've wanted one of my own, but I've been paralyzed with reviewer dread. All the reviews of wood chippers I was interested in (around $700) said they sucked. Then I found the bear cat ones, that reviewed very well and were quite a bit more expensive. Well I got one and finally got to use it this weekend; It rocked! It was very powerful, chipped logs larger than I felt comfortable feeding into it and also seemed relatively quiet, although that might be the peltor ear guards I got. Anyway, now I'm looking all around for other things to chip. I'm trying to clear a path down to the terrace so I can get the chipper down there and really start chipping up a storm.

Crazy Storm

We just recovered from a super crazy storm! We got over 10 inches of rain including 7" in just one day. The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down in rushing rising rivulets! and the wind huffed and puffed but did not blow our house down. The wind did blow down a big tree in our neighbors yard, mercifully it only crushed their cyclone fence and blocked the driveway a bit. They cleared it out so we could pass and then cleared it properly 2 days later. I did go down to help them clear it, but I fired up my chainsaw and realized my chain was blunt, so went back to the house to put a new chain on, finally found it and installed it and by the time I got back it was raining and they were almost done (whee!).

We lost power early on in the storm and didn't get it back for around 60 hours. It worked out pretty good now we have our generator but since it's so small we can't use the generator for our electric stove or our electric hot water. Boiling water on the wood stove is kinda easy and we took a trip into wifey's office to take a shower which worked out well. Baby was running around the office completely starkers, good job it was the weekend! We had the status number on speed dial and called often, it's maddening to have the time to restoration keep being pushed back and last we heard they said they'd have more info Wednesday, so I didn't even flip the switch to have the power come back on during the night, then I call at 2AM on Monday morning to see if thy have a new estimate and the robot asks me what kind of outage I have. Oh joy! I run out to flip the big switch and sure enough, we have power! It's such a great feeling to have made it through another outage and we're getting so good at it now it's starting to feel less like a big deal. One of our faraway neighbors still had their generator running well into the next day, I wonder if they too really had power, but just didn't know it yet?

I found myself pondering the problem that the electric company has to solve when scheduling the crews to fix the outages, I imagine it's a pretty interesting problem and wonder how automated it is? You need to get the most people online as quickly as possible but need to factor in access to the places to fix, how easy they are to fix and also merge in incoming outage information too, fascinating!

In other news, the initial pool work was done and turned out cheaper than expected and looks awesome, I'm very, very happy with it! I pulled out all the old conduit and it looks much tidier now. I'm going to wait until winter is over before replacing the filter. I might even do that myself now the hard work is done. I don't think we'll even end up getting a pool sweep installed, but it's always an option.

Pool Work

It's been a long time since I blogged here, sorry. Not much has been going on with the house since the spawn arrived since she's been keeping us rather busy. Mostly it's been reactionary stuff when things break and I can't even remember anything breaking seriously enough to warrant much attention (we've been lucky!). About a month ago, the pool pump just kept stopping and tripping the circuit breaker, after a quick afternoon of diagnosis I worked out it was a short in the conduit that leads down from our main panel down to the pool pump (about 50 ft). It could have been worse, I might not have been able to find the problem, but at least I did, but sadly it's a long piece of wire underground. I quickly botched something together using the very thick old wire that used to power our well pump (replaced with the new pump (in 2003 I think)) and promised myself I would talk to the pool guy about it and also talk to an electrician about getting it fixed. Then I got busy at work and the pool guy called and asked why I was trying to kill him and I finally got to calling an electrician to come fix it.

You see I have grand plans for that end of the pool. When we moved in there were two really old rusty intermatic boxes with old mechanical timers in there, the one for the pump worked, the other one for the pool light never did work. When the timer finally gave up the ghost I found a really slick digital one on line for only twice the price of the mechanical one. I got it, I love it. The best thing is that it keeps time for 8 hours during a power outage which is kinda critical where we live. It bothered me it was installed in this crappy old rusty box, but I just couldn't find a new box on line and it was more work than I wanted to replace it anyway. At some point my plan is to have a nice big deck at that end of the pool too, just like at the other end, but it will be more private and have a bench that covers up the pool pump and filter.

Anyway so when talking to one electrician he came up with the genius idea of moving the timers to the side of the house and only running conduit down to the pool pump and everything will be simpler and only 15 ft of conduit to bury. Lovely! I got back to thinking of those crappy old boxes and moving them to the side of the house and searched in earnest and found a beautiful double timer box for not much more than a single box and it came with two timers, which I could keep as spares in case my digital one ever broke, or I wanted to time more high voltage motors to come on. Why am I blogging about this? because it worries me the kind of pride and joy this new timer box brings me and how excited I am to see it finally installed on the side of the house and to tidy up some of the pool wiring. I'll post before and after pictures once it's done.

After the electrical is done, I need to replace the pool filter too. The Pool guy is heavily pushing a DE filter which he says will be awesome and I've found it cheaper online, I'm seriously considering trying to install it myself and cleaning up more stuff around there while I'm at it (like taking out the old busted pool sweep motor).

Critter Sightings

It's been a while since I posted anything or updated the field guide. So here's some recent pictures of critters.

We have this critter proof bird feeder which is only supposed to feed the ickle birdies. However the squirrels just rock it and rock it and then eat what falls out, similarly for the acorn woodpeckers, so any little birdie that's trying to eat at it will have quite the roller coaster ride. It's fun to watch the circus though.

I think this birdie got too fat at the bird feeder and now he won't fit through the bars! He had an amazing bright yellow bit on his head which of course I didn't capture in the photo. I took the picture through our windows and it was hard for the camera to focus, I should learn how to manually focus I guess.

Quite a nice humming bird picture. They continue to thrive at our house and visit often.

I think this is the biggest king snake we've seen at the house. He must have been at least 2 feet long. This was just in front of the garage and then he slithered over to our front step and snuck into a pipe that leads to our downspout, I bet it was very comfy in there for him. We haven't seen him since, but we did spy a teeny little king snake around the same area so perhaps this big snake was a girl snake and about to give birth? The little snake slithered into a impossibly small crevice under the front step and vanished, makes you wonder what else is living under there. Oh well, King Snakes can eat rattle snakes and aren't venomous so we're kinda happy to have them around.

An adorable deer family have been visiting a lot, eating the ivy off the trees and generally trying o eat everything they can. I managed to catch a picture of these guys on the driveway which I'm pretty pleased with.

and elsewhere...

This is a California Giant Salamander, he was really big and a little grumpy when my wife tried to move him off the trail (we were mountain biking). He made a great hissing growly noise and we left him alone, It was early in the morning (6:30AM) so he hadn't warmed up yet I don't think.

An adorable We also saw a raft (or paddling) of ducks. Check out the last one, he's so fresh he hasn't even turned from yellow yet. Awww, how precious.

More pictures in the ever expanding field guide gallery.

Red Tailed Hawk

Here's a hawk that was on a branch just outside our living room window.

I need to get better at taking pictures like this. We've seen a great horned owl in the morning one time too and I only managed to get half decent pictures of that as well.

Bring on the chill

Check out all the wood we had, ready for a nice cold winter. Well it was pretty mild, rained less than half of what it normally does. We were able to ride our bikes pretty much the whole winter long and only burned half this wood. We're pretty set up for next year (2007) now! Thanks so much to Ag for stacking it all while we were busy working on the front garden/driveway. Sorry this post is so late, it was all drafted up here and never posted.