RV Travels With Huggy

Trying out my new camera

2011-12-31T15:31:00.000-08:00

I really love my Nikon D200 camera and the quality of photos that I get from it. I have half a dozen different lenses, a special flash unit that works with it and some other features that make it a wonderful system. BUT, it is large and heavy to carry around so I find it tends to sit at home on a shelf unless I know that I will specifically want it to take photos, so then take it along. Sometimes I'll even take an extra lens or the flash unit, too.

So, I saw an ad on TV for a new Nikon camera, the Nikon 1, that looked good, offers some of the features of the D200 (interchangeable lenses, view finder, etc) plus a lot of things that the D200 will not do. I looked into it and found that Nikon had sale prices on the lenses that go with it that would be in effect until the end of the year. I hadn't yet bought myself a Christmas present, so went ahead and ordered the basic camera that comes with a 10 to 30mm zoom lens ($50 off on the sale) and a 30 to 110mm lens ($100 off!) from Amazon.com. They came last Thursday- the UPS guy came with it about 11:00am. I put the battery on to charge and Pat & I went out to lunch, with the quick start direction sheet.

When we got home, the battery was fully charged so I put the unit together, found an empty SD memory card, took a picture of Pat & one of our cats, Peewee

and I headed off to my local Starbucks to read the owners book, drink a mocha and learn about my new toy.

I decided to start out with it just letting it handle its own settings so took a couple of photos of one of our barista's while sitting at my table drinking my mocha and reading

This photo is totally unchanged from when it came out of the camera except to reduce its pixel count to upload to Flickr and I think the camera did a very good job on setting the best white balance, exposure and focus.

By the time I headed home at almost 17:00 it was getting dark and the homes in our park had begun turning on their outside Christmas lights. I thought that would be a good test of the automatic settings, plus it was raining so there should be some pretty good reflections on the wet pavement. Here are a couple of those shots, again with very little correcting of the image after it came from the camera.

Yesterday we went to lunch with a good friend over to La Conner, Washington. La Conner is a quaint little village on a waterway that separates Fidalgo Island from the mainland and the restaurant we went to is right on that water way. I left Pat & Barbara to place my order with theirs and went outside onto the dock to take some photos. It was a crisp, windy but sunny winter day and although it was shortly after noon, the sun in the winter this far north is waaaaay to the south in the sky so even at noon we don't have that terrible directly overhead lighting that you tend to worry about while taking photos around noon. I am just including one photo that looks across the waterway toward the Indian Reservation but I think it shows what the little camera is capable of in delivering landscape photos.

My lovely bride and I have a habit of going out to breakfast together on Saturday mornings and I have been carrying this little toy along so of course used it to take a picture of Patti B as she sat across the table from me.

There has been no image changing here, other than a very slight darkening of the image so it is almost as it came from the camera. There is a fireplace to her left providing some lighting and the lighting in this part of the restaurant is what I'd call cozy comfortable (not real bright) but the camera seems to have handled it very well.

I like the Nikon 1. There are two models, the V1 with a viewfinder and a 3" monitor screen. When you put your eye to the viewfinder, the monitor turns off. The other model (L1) just has the monitor screen. In my experience, those monitors are harder to use especially in bright light, so I spent a little more money and got the one with the viewfinder. So far I've only played with the standard lens which goes from a slight wide angle view at 10mm to a slight telephoto view at 30mm. The aspect ratio to compare to a lens length on a standard 35mm camera is 2.7, so the "normal" image size would be with this at about 18.5mm. Shorter than that would be considered a wide angle view, longer a telephoto view. At the higher 30mm setting (81mm on a 35mm camera) it is about the perfect length for people portraits. Oh, and the camera will take HD level video with sound and even has a connector for an external microphone for the audio. Some day I will get brave and give that a try but for now, I am having a lot of fun learning how to use it to take still photos.

I hope everyone who reads this had a good Christmas and will follow with a Happy New Year. Pat & I don't like to go very far from home on New Year's Eve but will be going to a party here in our park with the Singles Group. We went to events with them before we were married and they keep telling us to please continue coming as they consider us to be alumni.

Travel Signs

2011-11-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

I've done quite a bit of traveling by roads in my life but have never seen a sign that was quite so wrong as this one:

Don't people pay attention to the signs they are putting up? You'd think those putting it up would have noticed that it was just plain wrong.

Our North Cascades Highway has now been closed at least over this next weekend due to expected snow. The forecast up there calls for at least 22 inches of snow overnight tonight and more over the next few days. The State Department of Transportation will check it on Monday for avalanche danger and assess then if it will stay closed for the winter. Last year it wasn't closed until Dec 1 and then it was a good month late on opening in the late spring/early summer.

That is a beautiful route for us to take going to Eastern Washington. It starts right in our backyard in Burlington and drops us out at the town of Winthrop in the Methow Valley. We usually actually usually come back that way, taking Stevens Pass (the US 2 Highway)when going East. The two together, along with the connecting roads, make up what is called the Cascade Loop Trip and it is a wonderful outing for a weekend (or longer) trip. The two main passes on the North Cascade Highway (Washington State Route 20) are each about a mile high- there is only one regular pass highway in the state that is higher in elevation and there is so much snowfall every winter plus a very high avalanche danger so they don't even try to keep it open. I believe I heard this past spring while they were trying to clear the roadway to make it passable that there was still something like 70 feet of snowpack up there. That is a lot of snow to have piled up.

Here is a scene taken along the Wenatchee River about eight miles west of the town of Leavenworth at The Alps, a store that all my vehicles seem to find it impossible to drive by without stopping. They have some of the best candies you can find anywhere and also a good stock of toads and other collectibles that others in my family like to look at (and buy). This is just an example of some of the fantastic scenery along the Cascade Loop Trip. You could easily spend a week making this trip and visiting all the things to see along the way. Don't forget to take your camera along.

Halloween? Already?

2011-10-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

I guess I have to wonder where time is going as it sure seems to be slipping away very quickly. Halloween is here already and it hardly seems like we are past summer. Of course a part of that is because summer was short and late this year and the weather guru's are saying that we will likely have another La Nina weather pattern much like the one we had last year. I suppose that compared to what happened weather wise in much of the rest of the country we here in the northwest cannot complain very loudly. But I am definitely more of a summer type person than a winter one, so I will complain a little. Oh well, the way time is flying it really can't be too long until summer comes again but I hope the next one will come in a more timely manner.

Pat and I are doing pretty well although we both do have a few of those things going on that seem to affect older people. It is a surprise to me how much more of our money goes out for various medical things than it did in the past. I really think the Powers That Be ought to change the things they include when they calculate the annual increase in cost of living for Seniors, as I am sure that medical costs are a lot higher percentage of our annual expenses than they are for those in whatever base they do use.

My basic retirement plan from Metro Transit is paid through the State of Washington Department of Retirement Services (DRS). When I retired at the end of 2003 I was told that I would start getting an annual cost of living increase, starting in the year when I reached age 66. For me, that was 2009. I got an increase that year and again in 2010, but this year the State Legislature decided to partially balance their short fall in budgeting on the backs of retired folks and they ended those COLA increases. All during the years I worked I paid 6% of my total income into that plan and my employer matched my contribution. The state was supposed to also match but there were many years when they either shorted their contributions or failed to make any contributions. Now they say they don't have enough money to pay all the things they want to pay and still give me a COLA increase any more. I think it is the State's fault but I am going to have to pay for it. Oh, and it doesn't affect the other retirement plans the State has, only mine and the original teacher's plan. Now they are talking about asking me to vote for some tax increases. Guess how I'll vote on any tax increases in the future? If they think I can live the rest of my life with no more income than I have now, then I think the State can, too!

Sorry about all this complaining on a Holiday, but it is starting to weigh on me.

Sunshine!

2011-09-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Pat and I at the Enzian Inn in Leavenworth, WA last April. This was four years and a day after our wedding in 2007. Leavenworth is still a favorite place to visit for us.

We have had a real odd year weather-wise. For quite awhile it looked like summer was not going to come this year, but yet we have had one of the driest (lack of rain) summers ever. The temps rarely got above 70 until almost August and only hit 80 two or three times. Then in September, about the time school started, we had about ten days in a row of close to 80 every day. There was rain last Sunday & Monday, the first since early July, but it has been sunny and nice since then. BUT, you can tell that fall is knocking on the door.

I was out early this morning and the temp was only in the high 30s. The sky was clear so the sun came out with sunrise and the temp soon went up and will probably go up close to 70 today, which is just about perfect. The leaves are changing color and starting to fall from the trees. We've re-started the pilot lite on our gas fireplace, taken down the patio table umbrella and the outside sunshades over the windows. And now those weather gurus are talking about another La Nina year that could be even stronger than the one last year. Ugh! I do miss Snowbirding!

I'm getting OLD(er)

2011-09-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

Last month I attended a reunion celebrating the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation. I was amazed at how many old people there were there! I guess there were about 520 of us who graduated that day in the old Spokane Coliseum back in June, 1961 and that was just those of us from Lewis & Clark High School. At least two other Spokane high schools graduated the same day in that same building. I think there were about 140 of my classmates there and over 200 with spouses. It really doesn't seem possible that it has been that long.

Pat and I have never stayed in a 5 Star hotel so we ponied up the bucks to stay in the event hotel, Spokane's recently remodeled Davenport Hotel although our room was on the 14th floor of the newer Davenport Tower. It is a very nice place although I am not sure I'd pay the full overnight rate. We got a group discounted rate of some sort so it was only $140 a night, plus $20 to park the car and of course all the taxes that are added on. Everything there was high quality. But we didn't have coffee in our room. You had to go to the Starbucks coffee bar in the lobby area for coffee. We only stayed two nights but it was fun.

On our way home we stopped in the Lake Chelan area to spend a couple of nights visiting friends and tasting wine. The town of Chelan used to be famous for apples and other tree fruit and I guess it still is, but it is now also gaining popularity as a producer of grapes and some of the best wine in the state. Our friends live just across a vineyard from one of those wineries with another dozen or so within just a few miles. And many of them also have some fine eating included. It was a good time, but we found another desert wine that we fell in love with, so bought a case of small 375ml bottles that are $26 a bottle. The good news is that we got a discount for buying a full case!

We both enjoy the Western themed town of Winthrop that is on the East side of the North Cascades Highway, so on our way home from Chelan we came through there and ate lunch at our favorite place in Winthrop, the Duck Brand Hotel and Cantina. It was good as usual and the trip across the N. Cascades Hwy was beautiful and almost uneventful. I had forgotten that in addition to this being the summer season (it finally came!) it is also Road Construction season and that delayed us a couple of times. I guess they can't do much road work in the winter when they have over 70 feet of snow at a mile high elevation. In fact, the pass closes all winter and this year didn't reopen until June. But with this road when we come back into civilization on the West side we are almost in our backyard in the town of Burlington. We did stop at a car wash to treat the car to a bug removal session. Speaking of the car, our Prius averaged right at 50 miles per gallon for the trip, using about 15 gallons of gas to go about 750 miles.

We are also experiencing a much more negative side of growing older and that is losing friends and relatives to death. A cousin of mine died in June, an uncle just last week and a very good friend of ours who lived in the same park we do died on Aug 28th. He was 13 months younger than me! I think the message that we have to remember is to live every day as best you can and enjoy them and your friends as you never know when either they or you will no longer be around to do that.

Kindles and such

2011-08-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

Well, our two Kindles did arrive on Wednesday July 27th and we got them up and going right away. We ordered them from Amazon.com and when you do that, they arrive already setup linked to your Amazon account, registered and with the email address all setup. We got the dual connect versions that can connect by WiFi or a cell phone connection, so as soon as we turned them on they downloaded the books we had already bought from Amazon.

I really like it. The screen is good and clear with a newer version of e-ink screen called E-Ink Pearl. It seems to be better than the screen on my Sony E-Readers but the newest one of mine is now a couple of years old. And it is very light in weight! Very thin but easy to hold. We at first thought they had shorted us on the USB cord that was supposed to be in the package to connect to the computer, but the power cord to plug into the wall is actually a USB cord with an adapter on the big (computer) end- when you pull it off, what you have left is a USB cord although the device end is a smaller size plug than some of the mini-USB cords that I have for other devices.

It will also charge from a powered USB port on your computer and you can move compatible files from the computer to the Kindle by dragging and dropping them into the proper folder on the Kindle- Books, Music or Video. I had downloaded my earlier books from Fictionwise in .MOBI format that the Kindle will read, so I moved them and they are there and readable. I have also moved a few .MP3 music files but haven't yet tried listening to them. They tend to be a lot larger than books so will reduce how many books you can have on your device if you have many of them. I don't know anything about the video files, what is compatible, etc. The screen is monochrome- no color- so photos, video, etc. wouldn't look as good as it would on a computer or tablet with a back-lit LCD screen, but it is easier on the eyes which would be important for long reading sessions.

After we ordered the M-Edge book covers I was notified that my blue one had shipped but it would be 1 to 3 months before Pat's purple one came. I did a chat linkup with Amazon.com to ask about the missing one and connected to a very helpful person. We cancelled the order for the purple one, Pat picked out a mocha colored one that was in stock, so I ordered it and the helpful person said they would have it shipped by 2-day service at no charge to us as they had been ordered with free shipping offered for orders over $25.00. Pat's came last Saturday, mine on Tuesday and they are great ($35 each.) There is an easy to use light available that goes with the book cover for $20 but they are currently out of stock.

We are enjoying them. I started right away reading "The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest" by Stieg Larsson, the third and final book in that series and have finished it. It was just as good as the first two that I read in paperback editions. I wish there were to be more but the author died of a heart attack shortly after sending the original manuscripts to the publisher in 2004. If you want a good read, go get this series and if you want to get an e-book reader, I think you will like the Kindle.

eBook Readers

2011-07-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

I just last week ordered my first Amazon Kindle ebook reader. I've had Sony Readers for a few years and bought my first of them about the time the first Kindle (the one I have coming is the Kindle 3, new this spring) came out. I decided on the Sony then mainly because my brother had one he had been using for a year or so and could give me guidance on using it. The Sony is a good system but I think the Kindle is becoming the 800 pound gorilla in the ebook arena so I finally decided to join their ranks. I ordered it a week ago tomorrow (Wed July 20) and hoped they would ship out of Seattle as I'd get it right away, but instead it was shipped Fri from Kentucky. It arrived in Kent, WA yesterday via FedEx but they transfer it to US Mail which was done this morning. It think (hope) it will arrive tomorrow.

I've already bought some books from Amazon for it's format that are on the Amazon.com site and I will be able to download them right away when it arrives. I decided to pay the piper and buy the third in the series of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" which I had been holding out for the paperback version due out this fall. It was $12.99 from Amazon in Kindle format vs something like $28 as a regular hardback book. I've read the first two in this series and really look forward to this final installment. I'd love to read more as it is a fascinating series but the author, a Swedish gentleman, died from a heart attack shortly after he sent the manuscripts for the first three stories to a publisher, I think in 2004, so there won't be any more in the series.

Many of the books that I had bought for the Sony were from a source called Fictionwise.com which is now owned by Barnes & Noble. I had bought those books in their Multi Format category, which means they can be downloaded in different formats to fit different ereaders. For the Sony, I used .epub but .mobi is also available and that is a format the Kindle can read, so I've downloaded those in .mobi format and they are sitting on my computer hard drive, ready to move to the Kindle after it arrives.

Amazon also has Kindle reading software that can be downloaded for computers, laptops, tablets and even smart phones, so these books can be taken with you almost wherever you go. Amazon says the Kindle will hold about 3500 books in its memory and you can move them on and off the device as you read them, so it really is virtually unlimited. You can also create collections so that you have, say, all your mysteries in one collection, making them easier to sort and find.

Needless to say, I am hyped up waiting for this new toy to arrive and looking forward to playing with it. I just hope the date Amazon told me for shipping the book cover I've ordered isn't right. They said between Aug 31 and Oct 31. That is a long time to wait, although I sure can use the device in the meantime but will just have to be extra careful with it. Pat liked the idea so well that she also ordered a Kindle the day after I did and hers seems to be arriving at the same time. Her book cover will be purple, mine blue, whenever they come.

Huggy is home and fine

2011-07-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

Huggy came home from the Vet's yesterday and is doing fine. She is a little overweight but I don't know how to put her on a diet, what with the two other cats who live here with her not being on diets. She is up to 16 pounds, from 15 1/2 two years ago. I also have to give her a dose of liquid antibiotic twice a day for six days. She got the first of it this morning and it isn't too bad to do, although not fun. Her doc says her teeth are in good shape. Nice to have my little buddy back in the house with us, but I am not sure how happy Peewee and Molly (our other two cats) are about having her back!

About Huggy

2011-07-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

I took Huggy to her Vet a couple of weeks ago for shots and a routine exam. They again told me that she needs to have plaque removed from her teeth so I setup an appointment for today to have that done. They have to knock her out in order to do this so she wasn't allowed to have any food after 8pm last night. She is also going to have her claws trimmed while she is in a more docile mood.

I dropped her off there about 08:30 as they requested and she will probably stay overnight as they don't want her going home until she is fully over the anesthesia. She was ticked off with me this morning and probably will be really ticked off when I finally get to pick her up to come home. I think this will be the first time since she moved in with Annie & I in June, 1998 at the age of about 8 weeks that she has been away overnight. I know that she is "just" a cat but it seemed much like it would to drop off one of my kids when I left her there. I hope she will be okay.

Another car show

2011-06-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend is the annual Berry Dairy Days festival in Burlington, WA, another small town near us. They also have a car show as a part of it and we went over there for a Father's Day lunch and to see the cars. Many were also at the show in Sedro Woolley two weeks ago but I do have some photos of three of them from today. We've had nice weather until Friday night but today is better than yesterday so quite a few cars did come out to play. This weekend is also the annual Dirt Cup at our local Skagit Speedway which draws participants from all over the western part of the US.

Here are photos of those three cars:

This is a 1950 Crosley, with the owners in the background. I think these cars were sold back then through Popular Mechanics magazine as a kit car that the owner assembled himself. They are a very simple, basic car but I expect are worth many more times what they cost in 1950 today. This is a nicely done car.

Here is the engine compartment for the Crosley. There is a simple hood that is sitting on the rear part of the car so the engine is visible. Notice how nice and clean it is.

This is a 1939 Chevy Coupe. My last post had a 1938 Chevy Coupe and that car was also here, but they were not sitting side-by-side. This car is owned by friends of Pat.

I like hot rods. This is a nice 1927 Ford Model T Coupe hot rod that is fairly simply done. So many of them have all kinds of exotic things added to the engine, lots of chrome- basically they involve spending a lot of money. This one looks to me to be one the owner is paying for as he goes. It is also something that I'd not be afraid to take out and drive. Some of them you've spend so much money on that they probably just live in their garage.

Here is the interior of this car and as you can see, it is very basic at this point. I am sure that more upholstery will be added but I hope he stays with the idea that cleaner and simpler is best.

This is a three-quarter rear view of the Model T Coupe. Clean and simple.

These two festivals, this weekend and the one two weeks ago, are the closest ones to the town I live in other than those that happen right here. These both have pretty good car shows that I enjoy going to but the weather for the last one was certainly better. Of course the forecast calls for nice weather for the next few days, starting tomorrow. Murphy's Law works.

Spring has funally Sprung!

2011-06-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

This weekend spring has finally come to the Pacific northwest. We have overcast with showers this morning but had three straight days of 70+ degree weather over the weekend and on Monday. The long range forecast, even with some clouds and showers, is showing lows that are as high or higher than the high temps we were getting just a week or two ago. Hopefully that La Nina condition in the southern Pacific Ocean that has been causing this has ended.

Last Sunday we went to the nearby town of Sedro Woolley for their Blast From the Past annual festival and its annual car show. I don't know how many cars were there but somewhere over 200 due to the great weather. Of course I do have some photos to share:

This car was one of the first we saw as we walked up to the area where they were parked along a 3 block area of town with all the parking lots and side streets included. This is a bright color and sure was a stand-out in that sunshine.

I don't know if this is a home built travel trailer or not but it is nicely done and looks good behind an early 1950s pickup.

I don't remember seeing this car before. It is from Eastern Washington but very interesting in that it shows a newer side to hot rodding. The engine is a four cylinder unit that is also unknown to me. One valve cover says "Olds Powered," the other says "225 Hp." Does anyone know what this engine is?

Here is a view of that side of the engine. The other side has two dual-barrel Weber carburetors.

I couldn't resist taking this photo! This guy is so big and the little tow car he is pulling is so small. The couple did have a toddler who is more likely the one who rides in this little car, but it makes a different juxtaposition photo.

In addition to a nice color this Ford Mustang has interesting eye lashes. I wonder if they leave them on while driving on the highway?

There were quite a few trucks including this rather unique Chevy one. I don't remember ever seeing a model like this. Pat is checking it out.

Whenever I see a 1937 - 39 Chevy I am interested in it as my first car was a 1938 Chevy two-door sedan. I rebuilt a Oldsmobile V8 engine over the winter of my senior year in high school and installed that engine into my Chevy over the following summer and early fall. It was a fun car and I think is still on the road in the Spokane, WA area although I don't know how much it gets driven as the best mileage I ever got was 12mpg. That wasn't too bad when gas cost 32 cents a gallon but with today's $4 it would be expensive to drive. And it needed Ethel (high octane) gas. Mine was a metallic blue color but the last time I saw it the color had been changed to a yellow that is about like that of the first car in this post. In the photo my favorite lady is walking up to check it out, too.

That was a fun day for us and another couple from our community that went to the show along with us. Of course we ate fair burgers for lunch at a booth there. And for at least the second year in a row, the weather cooperated. There is another local car show in two weeks in Burlington. I hope the weather will be as nice for that one- in fact I hope it will continue to be nice for all summer. This sure was a good weekend. I even got the lawn mowed!

Happy Mother's Day!

2011-05-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

I'd like to wish a Happy Mother's Day to all Mother's in Blogland. We have had a good day so far and are about ready for me to take Pat to dinner. We have a reservation for 17:00 at Taco Bell. Well, maybe it is somewhere else but I've been telling her it is T.B. all day. I suppose I could have just said Costco where two can eat for about $3 plus tax. But Mother's Day only comes once a year so I guess it is okay to spend more than that on two meals.

We are still waiting for Spring. Pat bought two tomato plants today and if the weather forecast holds for tomorrow, they will get planted. Everything up here is running late this year and I really wonder how well crops like apples will do, with this late start. I guess they'll be okay if we have a hotter than usual summer but so far that sure isn't looking like what is going to happen. Ugh.

Our Fourth Wedding Anniversary

2011-05-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

The day after our wedding on 28 April 2007 we went to the small Bavarian themed town on the east side of Stevens Pass called Leavenworth. It has always been a favorite place for us to visit ever since. This year to celebrate our Fourth Anniversary we spent two nights in Chelan, WA and two in Leavenworth. These towns are both on the other side of the Cascade Mountains from where we live and a bit too cold (and snowy) for us in the winter and pretty hot in the summer but they usually have wonderful weather in the spring and fall. This year it was warmer and dryer than on our wet side of the mountains but was still cooler than it should be for this time of the year. But we had a good time.

The last morning there we went to breakfast with friends at Enzian Inn and the following photos were taken of us on the fourth floor deck by my friend I've known since Kindergarten, Dave.

Here are Pat and I with some of the town and a few of the hills in the background. Other friends who actually live in the Bavarian area of Germany have told me the look and especially the setting of Leavenworth are very much like in Bavaria.

Here is another. Leavenworth is a rather magical place for us and we always enjoy our visits there. Our favorite places to stay are the Enzian Inn and the Linderhof Inn, both of which are next door to each other. They are right on the main highway, US-2, and at the entrance to the downtown village. For RVers, there is the Icicle River Campground or the KOA Campground, both of which are close in to town. If you get the chance to visit there, be sure to go.

Playing catch-up

2011-04-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

Weather. Yes we have had unusual weather this year and every time I start to gripe about ours I realize that other parts of the country have had much worse. We don't have tornado's (well, occasional small ones have been reported but they don't do any damage) but I am more than ready for Spring to finally arrive. Today looks like it has with sunshine, blue skies and temperatures in the mid-60s in most areas, but clouds are due back overnight with rain (again) tomorrow. We drove out through some of the tulip field areas yesterday (Mt. Vernon's annual Tulip Festival runs all the month of April) and some other farming areas today and there is still a lot of standing water in fields and pastures. Tulips are finally up although in most years they burst out in early April. Some fields have been plowed but it is still too wet for them to do much in the way of planting. Pat has been hardening plants in the garage, some that should have been planted outside a month ago. Oh well, May is just around the corner and maybe Spring will finally arrive with it. The picture above is from one of the commercial tulip growing farms here, where the bulbs are actually the main product.

Gas prices have gotten worse since my post on March 17th about being happy that I bought a Prius. We are seeing regular gas locally at prices over $4 a gallon at some stations but can also find it in the $3.85 range and we do get an extra 10 cents a gallon off at Safeway and Fred Meyer because of our purchases at those stores last month. Where will it stop? Pat's VW New Beetle uses diesel fuel and it is running $4.15 now at those two outlets.

Thursday of next week, the 28th, will be our Fourth Wedding Anniversary and we do have plans. More about that later. This year also marks my 50th anniversary of graduating from Lewis & Clark High School in Spokane, WA. There will be a reunion in Spokane during the summer and we are going. I don't think I have ever stayed in a 5-star hotel but with a pretty good discount for LC-61 class members I think we will stay in the Davenport Hotel which is the headquarters for the reunion. There were about 520 in my class who graduated that June day in 1961. I still am in contact with a few of them and look forward to seeing more later this summer.

I love my Prius!

2011-03-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

What with the daily increasing fuel prices, I sure am glad that I bought my Toyota Prius a year & a half ago! I saw this cartoon today in an email and thought it was very timely:

As usual, my mileage over the winter months is down but I think I am getting more like what this little guy is getting (mine is around 44mpg) than the big one on the other side of the pump island. And spring starts this weekend with its warmer weather so my mileage ought to move back up to its warm weather 50 - 51mpg. I don't like to pay almost $4 a gallon for gas but getting to go 50 miles on that gallon really does help.

Snow. Ugh!

2011-03-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday night, Feb 22nd, it started snowing and when we got up Wednesday morning we had about six inches of the stuff. I right away got the driveway and sidewalk shoveled and it started melting. The park roads got plowed and it was looking very good by evening.

That night it started snowing again and actually dumped about 12" of the stuff in a two hour period! By Thursday morning, we had between 14 and 16" all over the place. Now I know this probably doesn't sound like a lot of snow to some people who live where it snows a lot, and I like having snow around us in the mountains, but not down here where I live. That is more snow than we usually have in at least three or four years, total. This time I have some photographic proof:

This is what our road beside the clubhouse looked like, shortly after I finished shoveling (again) but before the snow plow came by. Our two cars are both small and low to the ground and we couldn't operate them in this much snow as their wheels wouldn't even reach the ground, with the car hung up on the snow!

This is the mountain of snow I built in our yard from shoveling snow from the driveway and sidewalk. Our neighbor in the next house was doing his at the same time and I suggested that we build two snow forts, then have a snowball fight. I guess we are too old for that now.

Anyway, a week and a half after that snow fell, there is still a little of my mountain in the yard. Maybe I'll go out and throw snowballs at cars as they drive by. No, I guess most people wouldn't appreciate that and my hands would get cold.

A question for the day

2011-02-28T16:33:00.001-08:00

We got our Federal Income Taxes completed and submitted on Feb 16th and got a bit of a refund that came last Friday. Washington State has no state income tax so that completes the process for us. BUT, I've been thinking about the process and came up with the following question:

At income tax time, did you ever notice: When you put the two words "THE" and "IRS" together, it spells "THEIRS"?

My, isn't that a fact?

Bad weather - not Spring yet

2011-02-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

I guess we here in the northwest really have little to complain about regarding our winter weather this year when compared to much of the country, but I am going to do a little complaining anyway. Here I had been thinking that our winter was about over and it was time for SPRING to arrive, but this week we got a rude reminder that it isn't over yet. Tuesday evening while we were celebrating Pat's birthday eating dinner at the local Johnny Cerino's, the outdoor temperature dropped and soon after it actually started snowing! This was on February 22nd! By the time we got up the next morning we had about six inches of snow! I got that shoveled from the driveway and sidewalk and our community had our roads plowed and by the afternoon things were looking better. Then that night it again cooled off and the snow started falling, this time dropping twelve inches of the stuff in just two hours. It continued to snow overnight although not quite as hard as when it started, but we ended up with about 16 inches of the stuff Thursday morning! That is more snow overnight than we usually have in two or three years worth of winter, and it was followed with two nights of low to mid teen temperatures and not even above freezing in the daytime, although it was sunny, so not much of it has gone away yet.

Now, 13:00 hours on Saturday, it is again overcast with a snow looking cloud cover. The forecast calls for it to warm up this afternoon and over night as a warmer but wetter front collides with the cold front we have had for a few days. That may bring another three inches of snow according to the forecasters before it warms up to just rain by tomorrow morning which should eventually get rid of this stuff. I have the biggest pile of snow in my yard that I have ever had. My neighbor and I were each shoveling our driveways Thursday morning when I suggested that we build two snow forts and have a snowball fight. Fifty years ago that would have been fun.

Come on Spring, I am more than ready for you to arrive!!!!!

Hi Blog World!

2011-01-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

I am still around although I haven't posted anything for some time. I think this last December is the first month I've not put up something since I started this blog in Dec 2005. I don't have much to add here but will do a little updating.

Christmas came and went. My Navy son enjoyed a month long leave between his assignments and is now getting used to a new job in a new location. He had never been with Navy Air before so decided to try it this time. He likes the job and the people he works with but they hope to keep their house in another town that is too far away for a daily commute so are trying to resolve that issue. He may end up renting a small apartment in the new town for $500 - 600 a month just to have a place to stay during the week, then go home on the weekends. An unforeseen expense as he thought he would be able to get BOQ type housing during the week.

I started back to work. Sort of. I have been on the Citizen's Advisory Council for our local transit agency (SKAT) for a year and a half. It seemed to be a natural fit for a volunteer opportunity for me, what with my background in transit. Last month I was asked if I would be a passenger count surveyor over the year 2011. It is a paid position although just barely. I told them that I would as long as it was not enough of a job to make me fail retirement. I was assured it would be no more than ten hours or so a month, so I said I'd do it. I went on a test ride early this month and since then have done three on my own and it seems to be going pretty well. I will sure learn the local system this way!

Pat and I both bought Internet Tablets last month. We are not Apple people so bought two that run on the Android operating system. It has been interesting learning how they work. Pat asked the other day what they will do that our desktop and netbook PCs won't do and I said nothing. But they are easy to carry and fun to play with. Mine is a 10.1" by View Sonic, hers is a 7" by Archos. She thought the 7" would work better for her as it will fit in her purse. We don't have smart (Android) cell phones but that may end up finding its way to our house before too long. But again the question, Why?

I am ready for summer. We were told in the summer that this was to be a La Nina weather pattern year and it was supposed to be worse than the last one two years ago. That one brought us about two feet of snow around Christmas time and we usually don't have any snow. So far we have had the stuff three times but a lot less than 2' and none of them have lasted as long as it did then. Right now we are having way tooooooooo much rain and that has caused some river flooding as well as hillsides sliding down in places. Our Skagit River went about three feet over flood stage last week which caused minor flooding but it looks like cooler temps in the mountains (less snow melt) and less rain now have them receding. By Wednesday we are supposed to have sunshine and 50 degree temps although with the clear skies that temp will drop a little below freezing overnight. Sounds good to me. And when we look at what is happening weather wise in other parts of the world, we sure can't complain.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Newport Oregon

2010-11-26T17:50:00.000-08:00

Hey, I am finally getting a few more of the photos from our Oregon Coast trip last May edited and ready to post. These are from the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in the town of Newport, Oregon. It was built in 1872 and is one of a series that are along the Pacific Ocean coast on the west coast of the US.

This first photo shows the lighthouse standing on a rise of land. It is a beautiful example of a traditional lighthouse and is now in the US National Park system although it is also a functioning lighthouse that is used for navigating ships at sea.

Here Pat is walking up to the lighthouse, which is 93 feet tall. The light source itself is 162 feet above sea level as the site is on a cliff well above sea level. These combine to make the light visible for about 19 miles to sea. The weather on the day we visited was perfect, sunny but not too warm and with these exciting cloud formations to keep the sky interesting.

As a part of the park system there are good signs displayed around the site. I hope you can read this but if not, click on it and you should be taken to my Flickr site where the photo is hosted and you can see it in a larger size. There is quite a bit of information available on this one sign.

This view is looking to the north from one of the windows as I was climbing the stairs. I don't remember how many steps there are but it is a pretty good climb, at least for an old guy like me. There is a photo later in this set looking down those stairs.

When you do reach the top you can only go as far as the top step. They limit that top step to one person at a time or two if one is a child. This is a working lighthouse and a necessary part of the coastal navigation system and there are things on that top floor that can be damaged. The view here is looking to the southwest.

Here is the source of the light. I am sure that when it was built in 1872 the light source was a flame of some sort but it is now electric. Notice that there are two bulbs but only one is lighting. I guess the extra is for an instantly available backup should the primary one burn out. The light is bright but not hard on the eyes although I doubt that you would want to look into it too long. The lens system that surrounds the light makes it focused and more intense outside the lighthouse. The lighthouse originally had Coast Guard attendants but it was automated in 1966.

The view from the top looking to the north. At the far right side of the photo you can see a car parked in the lot below and it looks pretty small from up here! One thing that I am not sure of is how the glass is kept clean. It had no noticeable salt spray or other things on it, even thought there are seagulls around. Maybe the wind and rain take care of that cleaning.

And here is a view looking to the south. There is a fairly large motorhome parked below in the lot. The road you see is the one visitors approach the lighthouse on. This Oregon Coast is a very beautiful area with a dramatic coastline. Here it is pretty rocky but there are also many very nice sandy beaches.

This is the stairs that wind around the inside of the lighthouse from the base to the top. It is just possible to see the floor at the bottom, way down there. There are good handrails to help but it is a fairly strenuous climb and the steps are narrow so it wouldn't be a good idea to attempt the climb if you are not sure that you can complete the trip up and BACK DOWN. But once you reach the top, it is sure worth the effort.

This is just another of the many things that we saw and did while on our trip. We spent a week down there, four days in the Depoe Bay/Newport area and could easily have spent a lot longer. If you have the chance to go, do so.

Our fireplace is working fine now

2010-10-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd better mention here that Tim from Handy's Heating came back last Monday, checked out our new fireplace and replaced the control module on it. Now it is working fine, but our weather has been warm enough that we haven't needed it since then. The forecast calls for a high temp of only 61 on Monday so maybe that day we will be able to use it. I do know it will get a lot of use over the winter and am glad that we did go ahead and have it installed early enough that it will be ready when needed.

Time really seems to be flying. I can't believe that it is already October. It really is true that the older we get the faster time goes. Annie has been gone over five years and this month will mark four years that Pat & I have known each other. In fact, we will be visiting good friends over in the Lake Chelan area of Central Washington on the 22nd which will be our exact four year anniversary. Roy, if you read this, we will have to plan on something special that day.

We are planning that trip for about the middle of the month. To get there we cross Stevens Pass which reaches an elevation of about 4100 feet, on US 2 and go through one of our favorite towns, Leavenworth. We should get to Leavenworth about the right time to stop for lunch. That time of the year the fall color should be brilliant. I hope the weather will also be great. October is usually a good weather month with fairly warm days and cool nights. It should also be ahead of the snowfall in the mountains. The long range forecast is calling for a return of the La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean which usually means colder temps for us. Winter always brings more precipitation and if it is cold, that can come as snow. Two years ago when we last had a La Nina winter we had close to 24 inches of snow here around Christmas and we usually have none all winter. Spokane in Eastern Washington, where I grew up, had four feet of snow that winter, much of it on the ground at once. They always have snow but not that much! See why we wanted to have the fireplace installed before winter? When we come home we will probably go to Winthrop and come home across the North Cascade Highway (WA State Route 20) if it hasn't yet been closed by snow. It is over a mile high and it has so much snowfall that the State Highway Dept doesn't try to keep it open through the winter. But when we come out on the west side we are right in our own backyard. And by going that way we can stop for lunch at Duck Brand Hotel & Cantina in Winthrop, another of our favorite eating places.

Enough for now. I still have some photos from our Oregon Coast trip back in May to post, especially those of our visit to the light house at Newport. I'll get to that before much longer.

We have a new fireplace!

2010-09-26T12:34:00.001-07:00

We have dreamed about putting a natural gas fired fireplace into our house for some time but just were not sure where to put one in a house as small as ours (1450 sq ft). But we are hearing that the long range weather forecast for our area is calling for another nasty winter, much like the one of two years ago, so we decided to finally go ahead and just do it.

We had visited the booth of a local heating supply place at our County Fair this summer so we started with them. They had a nice unit on a special price that we liked, so we ordered it. The delay was in getting the special sized hearth made, but it finally arrived last Thursday and they came on Friday to do the installation. Of course I have some photos of that process and I hope I can get them in here as Flickr has changed the way the code is copied to put into a blog. I hope I've figured it out. Here goes.....

This first photo shows part of our living room, with the hearth about in the right place. We felt this location would provide some heat into the dining area behind the fireplace and the kitchen is then to the left in the photo from the dining area. We rarely have power outages but they do happen and we wanted to be sure this stove would work, even with the AC power off. It does although not as well as it will with the AC powered blower working.

The two installers, Tim and Jake, have carried the main unit in and are placing it on the hearth. It is by Vermont Castings and has a cast iron firebox so weighs about 200 pounds. Tim is the stove man, Jake is the carpenter.

As you know, we live in a cat house with Huggy, Molly and Peewee. Peewee is the youngest and most inquisitive, although Huggy was watching most of the process from her perch on the sofa. Except when she was asleep which was quite often. Peewee has given the area around the floor a good sniff test and is now checking out the top. Better now than later when it gets hot.

Our manufactured home requires that outside fresh air be supplied to the firebox for combustion. With a gas fired unit there isn't a lot of exhaust so they are able to use a double walled chimney, with the fresh air coming down the outer part. With a fireplace that burns wood or pellets, you have to cut a vent into the crawl space under the house that comes up to the bottom of the fireplace. Gas is a lot easier.

The chimney goes through the roof inside a box that keeps the hot parts from the combustible parts of the house. For that, a fairly large hole has to be cut into the roof and it has to be aligned with the hole in the room ceiling where the box accepts the chimney from the stove. Here Tim and Jake are checking the alignment of the drill before punching the holes out through the roof.

Pat is sitting at the dining table in the background while the fireplace is in its final position, with the chimney installed. The glass front of the firebox has been removed so that Tim could place the "logs" in their proper position. These are some sort of a ceramic that glows when the flame heats them. There are also "embers" added to the mix. The iron front that goes in front of the glass is also here on the floor. You can see some of the gas controls under the firebox. We have a remote control that runs on batteries and the receiver in the fireplace gets its electrical power from some units that generate power from the heat of the pilot lite so no household electrical power is needed to operate it, although it will distribute the heat better if AC power is available to drive the fan system.

Here is the unit operating. When Jake finished hooking it up to gas he could get the pilot lite to ignite but it wouldn't stay on even after quite a long burn-in with the button depressed. Jake isn't a stove man and Tim had gone on to another job so we called in Jesse who got it working. These have a high temperature paint on much of the unit but it does smell a bit at first so they suggested that we let it burn for a couple of hours with the doors & windows of the house open. It was 77 degrees outside so we didn't need the heat but it did get the paint smell cleared.

Here's a closer view. I have been playing with using a couple of different sizes photos from Flickr and am anxious to see how they look in the blog. Hopefully they will be okay.

Anyway, we now have a fireplace so should be all set for winter. However, the pilot lite went out yesterday and it again won't stay lit. We will have to have the stove guys back out tomorrow to get it resolved. I'm glad that we did this before winter set in.

"Eat Here & Get Gas"

2010-08-18T15:55:00.000-07:00

Today we went to lunch with some neighbors at Big Rock Cafe & Grocery, just outside of Mount Vernon. The title of today's post is their slogan, which is posted on signs outside and also prints on their cash register receipt. Of course they sell gasoline through the store. The food is good and at reasonable prices. We will go back.

We have been following the weather problems that seem to be occurring all over the world and most of them make our weather problems actually seem pretty minor. BUT, today our high temp is going to be about 70 and after nearly a week of high 80s to mid-90s, that sure sounds good.

I've decided to try to sell my Honda moped. It has been listed for sale on Craig's List for a few weeks and while I've had some inquiries, no one so far has bought it. Most inquiries have been from the Seattle area or farther south so a buyer would have to come 60 miles or more to see it & then have a pickup to take it home in. It has very low miles and has been stored inside a garage all it's life so is in real good condition and I don't want to just give it away, but maybe I'll try re-listing it at a lower amount and see what happens. Or maybe I should just take it to Chris' car lot and pay him a commission to sell it. That would be the easiest thing for me to do. I have the electric assist bicycle and have been storing it in the sunroom. Pat would rather I keep it in the garage but I need to sell the moped to get the space. I don't use it very much- have owned it a little over five years now and it has less than 800 miles on the odometer.

More later.

It's been a long time.....

2010-07-30T19:41:00.001-07:00

I have been busy and not gotten to the other photos from the Oregon Coast trip. I will try to get to them before too much longer.

One thing that I've been up to is moving my small stock portfolio from a full service broker to one of the discount brokerage places. Since then (at the end of June) I have been having fun making some small trades and a couple of somewhat larger ones that I have wanted to do but was unwilling to pay the high broker fees to sell and buy more.

Another thing that I wanted was to have the dividends paid to me buy more shares of stock rather than paying to me in cash. The place where my former broker was when I started with him did allow that but then he changed companies and the new one allowed that only on mutual funds. The new place allows that at to happen with most securities as I understand. So far only one of them has paid a dividend since I changed (at least that didn't still go to the other place as it was my brokerage on the day they based the dividend on) and that one did buy more shares. It pays monthly, as does a new one I bought in my IRA that will pay its first dividend to me next Tuesday, so I'll find out then if it will also buy more shares. This is kind of play money that I don't need to live on so I'd rather have them buy more shares, which helps the portfolio grow quicker.

Anyway, I have been having fun with it now and am learning more about how to track investments. I also have my Honda moped scooter listed for sale on Craig's List. I have had it almost five years and it still has less than 800 miles so is not even really broken in yet. I have the electric bike which I have been storing in the sun room but Pat would rather I get it out into the garage, so the scooter needs to go. When it does sell I will probably move that money into the stock market. With the much smaller cost of making purchases with the discount broker, I can do that.

Our Old Coots did get together again this summer in Spokane (WA) and Pat agreed to go even though it was in July. She doesn't like hot weather and all three days we were there the daily temps were over 90. It was fun. The Old Coots is a group of us who went to school together in Spokane many years ago. In fact, it is so many years ago that next year we will celebrate our 50th high school graduation reunion. I definitely want to go to that. Since we no longer have the RV, we drove the Prius over and stayed in a motel. The car averaged right at 50 miles per gallon of fuel use so it is running right about where it is supposed to.

I will try to post a little more often and get around to reading those I like to read but I just don't seem as motivated to blog as I used to be. No promises.

Depoe Bay, Oregon area

2010-06-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

We spent four nights at a WorldMark Trendwest condominium in Depoe Bay, Oregon on our Oregon Coast trip last month. This was a gift from one of Pat's daughters and her husband for our third wedding anniversary. Here are a few photos from the Depoe Bay area.

I hope this one will work on your computer screens. It is a very large panoramic photo that I stitched together from about five separate photos that were taken from the deck of our second floor room in one of the ten buildings that make up this condo resort. In the stitching it somehow lost the continuation of the railing- there was no missing section of the actual railing on our deck. This shows a glimpse of our deck and more of our neighbors deck, as well as much of the building beside ours. There are ten of these three story buildings plus a few other buildings for different purposes. There is a nice lawn and a sport court on the water side of our building. The resort has three swimming pools- two outdoors and one inside, that are kept open and at 82 degrees all year There are also hot tubs, exercise rooms, and other activities. I was a bit surprised that in order to get an Internet connection I had to pay $16 for a ten day connection to their system. We were there only four days but the daily rate for four was more than the ten day rate.

This view shows a closer look at the small bay in front of our building. The big rock area on the right side was a real hangout place for seagulls and there are a lot of signs around asking that we not feed them as they are pretty messy. During our first couple of days there the weather over the Pacific Ocean was kind of stormy, although there were also sun breaks. In talking with our kids at home at that time, it sounded like our weather down there was better than it was at home during the same period. This is about 300 miles south of our northern Washington State home. There are some great sandy beaches along this coastline but not here- this one is pretty rocky.

Just on the north side of our condo complex was a place known as Boiler Bay. There is a nice pullout along the road there and that is where I took this photo from. Notice the shade from a cloud in the foreground with bright sunlight beyond that shaded area. That surf is from the swells coming in off the ocean.

This view is still of Boiler Bay, just a bit farther south or to the right of the last photo. At least during the spring when the snow in the mountains is melting, there are a lot of waterfalls where small streams flow into the ocean. There is one at the far right of this photo.

Of course you know that I am going to find a place to go for a mocha wherever I travel and there were more than one to choose from at Depoe Bay. This was taken inside Pirate Coffee which was the closest one to our condo and we liked their product. In talking with the Barista, I learned that Pirate Coffee is a major supplier to the US Military and likely provided the coffee that my son drank when in Afghanistan last year while he was there with the Navy. I haven't checked but do believe that they also have a pretty active mail order business. You can access them on the Web here. They also have quite a few things for sale, as you can see in this photo.

Depoe Bay is listed as the smallest harbor on the Pacific Coast. Here is the entrance to the channel from the open water of the Pacific Ocean. By the time this photo was taken the weather was pretty calm but I think it would be a real challenge to leave or enter this small opening during a storm. We took this photo just after eating dinner at Mazatlan Restaurant on May 5th, Cinco de Mayo, which is right beside this channel. These photos are taken from the lawn outside the restaurant, looking down onto the water.

The bridge is going over the entrance channel to the harbor at Depoe Bay and it carries US-101, the beautiful coastal highway that actually runs from the north end of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, all the way through Oregon and California to the Mexican border at the southern end of California. The channel entrance is behind the camera to the left of this view. You can see some of the downtown buildings that cover the east side of the highway through town in the background beyond the bridge.

Before we left home some friends who also live in our park told us of a good restaurant to try and they said it has a fantastic view of the shoreline. The name of the place is Tidal Raves. It was just south of our condo, not far from Pirate Coffee, and we went there for lunch one day. Jerry was right, the view from there is fantastic-

This photo was taken through the glass of the window beside our table. Luckily, they keep that glass pretty clean and that is no easy chore with all the salt that had been blowing ashore during the storms early in the week. The point seen in the background is the one with a few houses on it at the left side of the water views from our condo.

Depoe Bay is a small town, less than 2000 population, but it does have a "downtown" or commercial area. The main tourist part is along the east side of US-101 for about 4 blocks north of the bridge over the harbor channel. There are other businesses all along that highway for a distance of a couple of miles in both directions from this main area and I guess those would be considered to be in Depoe Bay.

The camera here is looking to the north.

And this one is looking south. The single traffic light in the town shows up. How about that, a town with only one traffic light?

Most of the businesses are restaurants or sell souvenirs and knickknacks. Pat is a collector of toads and things toady and one shop had a pretty good collection of those available. Here Pat is giving close scrutiny to that collection, trying to decide if any of them needed to move their residence to our house. Some did.

From Depoe Bay we did quite a bit of traveling around the coastal area. Using this as a base, we roamed from Lincoln City to the north to Newport to the south, 12 to 15 miles in each direction. I'll post some things about what we found in those areas later, but it will take a few posts. By the way, one of the guys I used to work with at Metro Transit in Seattle moved to Depoe Bay with his wife, also an ex-Metro employee, after they retired and he is serving now in his seventh year as a City Councilman. Pete likes it and it sounds like he is doing a good job. We got together for a great lunch at a place just a bit north of our condo called Jacks and again one afternoon at their house just off that little harbor.

Tillamook, Oregon area

2010-05-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

The highway that follows the Oregon Coast is US-101. It goes north to south from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, through Oregon and all the way along the coast of California. The whole of the trip is beautiful but some of the prettiest is the section through Oregon. May in the Northwest can offer very nice weather or not so nice, but by then it is rarely real bad and that is what we found. We had sunshine most of the way to our first stop, at the Shilo Inn in Tillamook. This view of Manzanita Beach is looking south from a viewpoint along the edge of the highway, looking down on Manzanita.

Our trip to the Oregon Coast to celebrate our third wedding anniversary started with our first overnight stop in the town of Tillamook which is the home of the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Pat & I are both fans of cheese and Tillamook is one of the best brands. They also have a nice self-guided tour of the production area as well as a wonderful selection of samples and of course a company store.

Here is the entrance to the place for visitors. There is adequate parking for cars and RVs so if you are ever in the area, be sure to stop and visit. Our Shilo Inn was just half a mile south of the cheese factory so of course we went to see the place the afternoon we arrived.

This sign summarizes the capacity of this place. From the upper level visitor area you look down through windows into two sides of the factory. The first is the production side where there are eight of these vats. Each vat holds over 53,000 pounds of milk to make a batch of cheese and it says that each vat can make three batches of cheese a day. They say they are the second largest producer of cheese in the US and I guess this shows why. There is a smaller vat where more specialty types of cheese are made that is in this same room.

This view shows one of the vats with others in the background, but this really doesn't give you much of an idea of scale of size. They are large.

On the other side of the visitor's balcony you can see the packaging section of the factory. This is a general view of the forward part of it and shows some of the 40 pound blocks of aged cheese on the path to being cut smaller and then packaged.

This shows the rest of the packaging section. You can also see pretty clearly the glass windows that visitors look through. This view gave me the most problems with reflections of any place here where I took photos. We were there on a Saturday so I think this was a smaller crew working than you would find on a weekday.

A closer view of the big blocks being cut smaller. I think these were to end up being five pound blocks but it is also possible that they cut some five and some two pound blocks at the same time from each of the big blocks.

These guys were sorting the blocks but I am not sure just what they were sorting. I guess they do, though.

This interesting machine in the background with the blue arms was called the Octopus, for obvious reasons. It was also involved in the sorting/packaging process.

A little different view of the Octopus. The cheese blocks shown here are wrapped and ready to move to wherever they go next. The moving belts through out the plant keep the cheese moving.

I am not sure just what size these are but they look too big to me to be the regular 2-pound once that we buy in the store so I think they are the larger five pound size. Those larger ones are probably mostly sold to restaurants. And Costco. I think cheddar is the one they make most of. I read there that mild and medium cheddar age a fairly short time but the time is extended to more like 8 months for sharp cheese. I guess that is the reason sharp is always more expensive to buy.

I learned of cheddar cheese curds at Tillamook Cheese Factory and it is one of my favorite things to snack on. It is available there in their store and I can find the product locally at supermarkets here at home, but the curds I buy from our store are not Tillamook brand.

One of the things I always enjoyed while traveling with my RV was visiting places like this that I found in the places on my route. The Tillamook Cheese Factory is a pretty big operation here in the Northwest and they do like visitors. They make a wonderful ice cream that I tend to stay away from as it seems to add pounds to me. But it is sure good.

Back from Oregon

2010-05-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

We came home last Saturday from our week long trip to the Oregon Coast. I didn't try to do any blog posts from there. While I did have Internet connections, I don't have Photoshop on my netbook computer which is the one we had along with us, so I also didn't upload any photos to my flickr site which is where I host my blog photos from.

I don't have much time right now to work on photos but did do one that Pat used in her newsletter she edits for our homeowners association and while I was working on it I also prepared a version to upload to flickr:

On Wednesday, May 5th, we ate lunch at a very nice restaurant in Depoe Bay, Oregon called Tidal Rave. It is right on the coast with a fantastic view. I took a lot of photos through those windows and also some from outside. I think this is one from outside. There are a lot of others (I took something like 380 photos on the trip) and I'll get to them before too much longer. I promise. In the meantime, here at least is one from that most beautiful area.

Off on a road trip!

2010-04-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

We are about to head off on a road trip to the Oregon Coast, to celebrate our third anniversary last Wednesday. It will be another trip in the Prius and over roads that don't include any high mountain passes so I expect our mileage will be pretty good. The best we have had so far was about 53 miles per gallon on the trip last October from Spokane, WA to Chelan, WA. I don't know if I'll be posting while on the road or not. We will take my new netbook laptop (that I am using now) and will be able to log on but I don't have photo editing software on this machine so will be limited in what I can do with photos until we get back home. My camera takes large files and I always reduce them in size as well as usually tweak each image a little before uploading them to my Flickr site. I use Flickr to host the photos that I put on the blog. I'll see how the photos look unedited and may try one or two, just to see how it does.

The three cats will be at home and cared for by one of Pat's daughters. We are not brave enough to risk taking even one of them on a car trip.

Okay, I've got lots to get finished today so will end this & get it posted.

The new Netbook computer

2010-04-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

I ordered my "new" computer on eBay on a Friday night. The seller shipped it the next day, Saturday, from Kentucky to me in Washington State and it arrived on Monday. I liked it from the start although the info posted on eBay said it had Windows 7 Starter Edition but it didn't- it came with Windows XP. I was planning to install Windows 7 Professional but it having XP made that a bit more complicated as you have to do a full install rather than being able to upgrade. And I had to wait for the external DVD drive that I ordered that Saturday from Amazon.com to arrive, which it did on Tuesday.

I like Toshiba brand portable computers so all of my newer ones have been that brand and these are no exception. Here are a few photos comparing the size of this computer with my regular laptop.

Here are the two of them on the table in our sunroom. The Netbook is on the left, the laptop on the right. You can see that there is quite a difference in their size.

Here they are open and running. The Netbook has a 10" screen and is running Windows 7 while the laptop has a 15" screen and runs Windows Vista. I will move the bigger machine to Win 7 before long as I really do like Win 7. As you can see I haven't yet changed the desktop photo from the standard Windows one on the Netbook. The photo on the laptop is looking downriver on the Wenatchee River about 6 miles west of Leavenworth, WA along US Hwy 2. I don't plan to keep a lot of photos on this new machine as it really isn't intended to do graphics and its internal hard disk is a fairly small 160GB size.

This view is looking down on the two of them. You can see that the keyboard on the Netbook has smaller keys and they are what I've heard called "chicklet" type keys. But, it does seem to be fairly easy to use. My main complaint about both machines is that I really don't like the touch pads for mouse control. The big machine has four USB ports so I just plug in a USB mouse to it. The little one has three USB ports but it also doesn't have a DVD drive, so two of those are used to plug in the exterior DVD drive that I bought. That only leaves one USB port clear. But, it also does have a Bluetooth system and came with a Bluetooth mouse, so I use it without tying up that one extra port. I don't use the DVD drive all the time, usually only when installing programs, so much of the time the two ports it uses are available, too.

A closer view of the Netbook. I do like its bright clear screen which is easy to use although much smaller than the big one I have connected to my desktop machine or even the one on the laptop. The battery in this little guy is a fairly large lithium ion battery that will give up to about nine hours use of the computer on a charge. That would be reduced if I have the DVD drive or an external hard drive hooked up and am using them a lot, but I don't think I will be doing anything with this PC where I will need either of those hooked up all the time.

So far I'd say that I like this machine. It is quite a bit smaller than a regular laptop so will be easier to carry while traveling and it's long battery life per charge should be a help, too. We will be going to the Oregon Coast for a week in May and I'll plan to take it along and give it a bit of a workout on that trip. The built-in WiFi works well and Win 7 makes it a breeze to connect to hotel servers. I may end up not keeping the bigger laptop although this sure won't replace my desktop computer.

iPad fever strikes

2010-04-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, I like small portable computers and that new Apple IPad does look pretty good. I have been toying with the idea of buying a newer, smaller portable laptop, something smaller and easier to carry around than my 15" screen Toshiba laptop. I've been looking at those Netbook machines with their 10" screens and thinking that it would be easier to lug around and now that they have fairly large Lithium based batteries they do have a good long operating time on a charge- over nine hours or so depending on how many other things you also are powering on the battery.

Well, I really am not an Apple computer guy and from what I've seen on TV that IPad is mainly a toy, not something that you can also use for serious computing. With all this tumbling around in my brain and a strong wind & rain storm going on outside on Friday evening, I logged onto eBay. When I brought up Netbooks on their site, there was a coffee brown Toshiba NB205-N325BN computer that had only been used about four months and the guy replaced it with a desktop machine. In the meantime, he had expanded it's memory from 1Gb RAM to 2Gb and added a Logitech V470 Optical Bluetooth Mini Mouse with cases for the mouse and the computer.

He started the bidding by asking $99.99 but after 12 bids it was up to something like $275, not a bad price for a package that would probably cost at least $475 to duplicate. I couldn't resist putting in a bid for about $3 more than what had been bid but it was immediately overbid by someone else who had put in a higher bid that he was willing to pay than what was listed. I should also mention that when I first logged onto this auction, there was only four minutes left before it would be done.

With less than a minute left, I quickly decided that I'd be willing to pay up to $325 for this and taking out the $18.45 shipping charge, I entered a bid of up to $306.55 and punched the button with only a very few seconds left in the auction. Mine won for a price of $286.55 plus the shipping charges. The seller is in Elizabethtown, KY and he promptly shipped it via USPS Priority Mail on Saturday morning and it should arrive here tomorrow, Monday, in my mail delivery!

Here is a link to the Toshiba web site, right to their page for the Netbook computer that I have bought. Mine is the brown one. I'll get some photos after it arrives tomorrow and do another post before too long with my thoughts on the machine. It will take a little time before I'll have it fully operating as these machines don't have a DVD drive built in and the one I have on order from Amazon.com won't be here until probably the end of next week.

It is all Apple Computer's fault.

Another week? Yep

2010-03-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, I see that another week has gone by since my last post. There has been a lot going on in our lives so I'll use that as my excuse for not getting another done sooner. One thing that has happened is that our friend with the car lot has sold my Smart Car. I bought it about a year ago and when I look at what I got for it in this sale versus what I paid for it, including trading in my 2000 Saturn, I figure that it cost me about $10,000 to own it that year and drive it about 1950 miles. That cost figure doesn't include the fuel used but the fuel really wasn't much. If you figure the mileage that way, with my total cost included in the calculation, the Smart Car sure didn't do very well! Oh well, I did learn to not buy something like a car without first flying it by the wife.

Speaking of flying, most of you know that I bought a radio controlled model airplane a year ago last November and flew it. Once. There is nothing wrong with that plane, it is just that the pilot (me) and his flying adviser have failed to get together and do it again since that time. I have recently learned that there is a group near my home that meets a couple of times a month to fly inside a school gym, but they have to use smaller planes and they have to be electric powered. I get regular emails from a couple of hobby places and one recently had a small electric plane with a wing span a little over 18 inches that could fly inside. So I bought one from our local hobby shop.

Here is a photo from the web (I can't claim taking it, but it is a good action photo) of a plane just like mine flying. It is called a Playmate which is a good name for a R/C plane that is almost like a toy in some ways.

The directions with it say to fly it only when there is no wind if outside but they recommend indoor flying as the best bet. Not in an average house but in something like a school gym. Well, I was anxious to try it out so I took it out into the common area of our park where I live on an almost calm day, and flew it. After about six successful flights, the next one ended up with it looking like this:

Yep, I broke it. The breeze took it over the fence that runs around that yard and into another home's back yard area and when I turned it to fly back out, the wing hit the wooden fence. Yeah, I know, I was flying it too low but it was windier up higher. I am happy to report that my one ounce airplane did absolutely no damage to the three foot high fence, but I can't say the same for my airplane. The airplane is what is known as a foamy because it is built from a kind of hard foam that is very light but pretty strong. Until you bang it into a wooden fence.

Here is a closer view of the damage. It is actually a fairly clean break and I've bought special two part glue to try gluing it back together. I think that will work, but if not, I have also ordered another wing. Maybe I should have ordered two.

I think that I may also have done this

to the fuselage just in front of the tail assembly. This happened while I was lifting it out of the box it came in that I use as it's "hanger" as it holds it very well. I had my camera in my right hand and tried to lift the plane out with just my left hand. This may be a natural break in the body where two parts join together but I don't think there is supposed to be that much of a gap between the two parts, so I'll glue it, too. The shape of the break line looks too much like an intentional joint so I am thinking that this break was there but I've made it wider.

I have a lot to learn about these things, but they are still fun to fly. This one flies different from the bigger one and part of that difference is that there are no ailerons on the wings of this plane. To make turns you use the rudder. With the big plane when it is airborne I found I make most turns with just those ailerons and rarely use the rudder. Because of this difference, the control box for the Playmate only needs three radio channels- one for the rudder, one for the elevators and one for the throttle. That controller is fairly inexpensive, in fact the whole kit with the plane ready to fly including that controller is only $80. And it doesn't use fuel that costs $25 a gallon. Four AA batteries go into the controller and it is used to charge the small 130ma hour battery in the plane that runs the motor and the controls. It should be fun and inexpensive to fly for quite awhile. Oh, I guess I need to also add in the cost of the glue. I should have just bought it when I originally bought the plane.

A road trip to Leavenworth, WA

2010-03-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

This past week we returned to one of our favorite area towns, Leavenworth WA. It is about 130 miles away, east of us on US 2 on the east side of Stevens Pass through the Cascade Mountain Range. Leavenworth was a railroad town but went into decline when the railroads decided to no longer make stops there. Some in the town recognized the similarities of their area to the Bavarian area of Germany and proposed that they go through a rebirth to make themselves a Bavarian community here in the Washington State Cascade Mountains. They did that and have been quite successful. It is close enough to the population area around Seattle that many from the Puget Sound region go there, for a day or for a bit longer.

This view is looking west in the downtown area of the village. There are commercial buildings on the left and the town square is on the right. In mid-March the leaves have not yet returned to the deciduous trees so they are bare. There is also not much snow on the foothills around town. The Pacific Ocean had an El Nino year this year and most of the precipitation that usually falls here in the NW instead went south to California. I know they need water but think this year they actually got more than they wanted. I understand that some of it also traveled east, as far as the east coast, so they got some of our mountain's normal snowfall.

If we are not traveling in an RV, we like to stay in one of two hotels in town and they are both in this photo. This trip we stayed in the Linderhof Inn, the nearest one in the photo, but the Enzian Inn is in the background. Both are good places to stay while in Leavenworth. Both are right on US 2 as it goes through town and the entry to the shopping village is just a block away and across the highway. There are well marked pedestrian crosswalks and the traffic seems to be well trained to stop for pedestrians. Both these hotels have swimming polls (outdoors, so they were not yet open on this trip but the hot tubs were) as well as other things and breakfast is included in your room rate. At Enzian it is a full buffet meal.

There are many places to eat in town and most offer German food as well as regular American fare. Gustav's, shown here, is a tavern that is across the street and a block away from the Linderhof Inn. The food is primarily sandwiches but they are very good and there's a good selection of northwest brewed beer and ales. I like their Sleeping Maiden Porter but Pat prefers to stay with her wine. Beyond Gustav's in the photo you can see Visconti's, an Italian food place, that is also very good although more of a dinner place. We also love Cafe Christa in town on the second floor so you have a neat view overlooking the downtown village and the town square across the street. And they have a Bavarian chocolate mouse (did I spell that right?) that is so rich one serving is more than we two can eat together. A great place for a mid-afternoon break for coffee and desert.

Another view here of the foothills around town, showing how little snow there is this year. All the snow would normally be gone by mid summer but this photo was taken while it was still officially winter. These hills should be covered solidly with snow at this time of the year. Instead of it falling here, it went to Maryland and Virginia and that other Washington. Can we have our snow back next year, please?

I like attractive girls and anyone who has read my blog for very long knows that I really like my mochas, so when I spotted this young lady across the street pushing her baby in a stroller AND drinking a mocha, I couldn't resist taking her picture. It would be nicer with leaves on the trees behind her but I kind of like it this way, too. Made me want to go get a mocha. But not a baby. Been there, done that, and am now very happy with Grandkids. I can enjoy them and return them to their parents later in the day. But I think this is still a nice photo.

We only spent two nights in Leavenworth but that gave us half of the day we arrived and all day the second day, plus a little time on the third day. In a tourist trap type town where there are almost too many things to buy, that is long enough for one trip. We may well return later in the year for another visit and in a month and a half we will be going to the Oregon Coast for a week or so. Our travels now do not involve an RV but we are still getting out, seeing and doing things around the area and I will continue to take photos and make blog posts here. I have even started a Travel Photos set on my Flickr photo site (click on any of these photos to be taken there) and may go back in the Flickr archives to add some earlier photos to that set. More later.

Spring has sprung, at least here!

2010-03-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

This El Nino winter has brought us an unseasonably warm winter and with it an early spring. The Skagit River Valley, where I live in Washington State, is still very agricultural and one of the main products of our farms are daffodil and tulip bulbs. Every year in the month of April the local Tulip Festival is held and visitors come from all over to stroll through the fields with these flowers in bloom. However, the flowers are not the main product, it is the bulbs in the ground. The growers try to leave the flowers as long as the can before "topping" them but it looks like this year that will come before the end of the festival at the end of April. If you want to come see them, come early, like at the beginning of April or even in late March.

As of today many of the tulips in our own garden are starting to bloom but I have no photos of them. However, this area has some beautiful flowering trees- some are cherry and some plum and I can't tell the difference. A week ago we had beautiful weather on Saturday March 6th and due to the early spring, the blooms on these trees were already changing into the red leaves of summer. I had wanted to take some photos and with colder temperatures along with strong wind & rain forecast for the next few days I figured I'd better get to doing it while it was still possible. So, I put my macro lens on the camera and took a hike in our park. Here are three photos from that trip.

There are quite a few of these trees that have grown large enough to partially cover the roadway in the northeast part of our park. These are a few of them, looking north from Phillips Loop East (yup, that is the name of the road I live on.) You can also see one of another kind of "tree" that our park has grown a lot of over the last couple of years- a For Sale sign on a post. We are a senior park and some residents sometimes need a higher level of care than totally independent living that we have here, so they move. The real estate market has not been kind to us here either. There are people who would like to move in but most have another house somewhere else that they have to sell before buying one here. So, right now we probably have a good dozen homes (out of a total of 120) that are for sale.

This closer view shows some of the red leaves along with the blooms. These trees are beautiful now with the flowers blooming and also during the rest of the growing season with their red leaves.

I have always loved forsythia plants with their early spring very bright yellow blooms. They always look so bright and cheerful after our usually dull, dreary winters. So we planted one in our yard a couple of years ago and it is doing very well. Our only goal with it is to try to keep it from getting too big. Last Saturday when I was on my photo walk, our own forsythia was too beautiful to ignore, especially with it brilliantly lit by the afternoon sun.

I have other photos of spring plants in our park and will try to include them in posts here and I'll try to do it a little more often that I have been. We are going east of the mountains for a couple of nights in one of our favorite local towns, Leavenworth, next Wednesday and I should also get some photos over there. I think I will also have some good news about my car "collection" when we get back.

More later.

A practical electric car is (almost) here!

2010-02-13T17:36:00.000-08:00

The Nissan Leaf is a 5-passenger fully electric car (called a BEC for Battery Electric Car) and it has been touring parts of the US over the last few months. It is to be built in a factory in Tennessee as will the lithium ion battery that will give it a range of about 100 miles and speeds up to 90mph. The cost has not yet yet been announced but Nissan says it will be in the same range as other regular sedans, suggesting it will be in the low $20,000 after a $7500 government rebate. That puts it in the ballpark with the Toyota Prius we recently bought.

I missed going to see it in Seattle when it was here in December but I've been looking over the Nissan web site here and there is a lot of information available. I have captured a few photos from the web that I'll try to upload here. I usually put my photos for the blog into my Flickr site but don't really want to upload these there as they are not my photos. I'll see if I can get them to go into the blog with what is provided by Blogger. The photos are from Nissan and some from Autoblog, a member of the Weblogs, Inc. Network where you can also see many more photos of the car.

This shows where the power connections are to recharge the battery system. There are two of them, one a high powered system that isn't something you will find all over but will find more of in the future and a second one (shown being hooked up here) that will plug into more standard outlets.

I see they come out backwards from the way I enter them. This is one of the two instrument clusters.

And this is the other instrument cluster, the one behind the steering wheel.

This is an interior view looking forward. As you can see, it is a right hand drive car but of course those built for use in the US will be left hand drive.

I see that I've got a bit to learn about using photos with Blogger's photo handling system. I think I like working from Flickr better, but this does work. Anyway, these will give you an idea of what this car is like. The Nissan site says the first of them should be available in Dec. of this year in limited numbers and locations and within a year or so, the plant in Tennessee should be up to full production and the cars available almost everywhere. It is looking good!

Welcome (almost) to February!

2010-01-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

This being the last day of January it seems appropriate to welcome the month of February. Welcome! In our area we have set a record for the warmest January on record and those records go back into the late 1800s, so this is a pretty long standing thing. Our weather guessers are saying they expect February to be warmer and dryer than January was, but it normally is so I'm not sure if it will be quite a bit better than usual or what. I have noticed more hours of daylight and that I like. It will also do well for our home heating bills, although I guess what is good for us here is not so good for others in different parts of the country. Last year we had a very cold, snowy winter while the East Coast was enjoying balmy weather. This year it seems to have flip-flopped. I don't know what next year will bring but I'll vote for another El Nino year like this one, although it didn't get started until about the end of November.

February is also a month with some important birthdays for our family. It starts out with Pat's younger brother on the 4th, then Pat's on the 22nd and my brother's on the 24th. Pat and T have a fun thing of trying to outdo each other with wacky birthday cards but Pat is a little behind since if she goes too far overboard it will catch up as T's BD is first and he has almost three weeks to find an appropriate card. The 22nd also used to be the birthday of George Washington, our country's first President. Pat told her school mates the reason they got a holiday on the 22nd was to celebrate her birthday. We also used to get Abraham Lincoln's birthday off on the 12th. I guess Congress decided it was too much to allow the People to have two holidays in one month. Or there was a lot of pressure from government employees who wanted three day weekends but thought they couldn't get two of them in a month, so they canceled both birthdays and we now just celebrate an office workers holiday on the 3rd Monday. We haven't canceled or moved Pat's birthday- it will still happen on the 22nd.

I've had a few questions about how Huggy is doing. She is fine although we are still having cat wars between our three cats. Huggy and Peewee, the youngest one, have almost made it a game. Molly is still the queen of the house and she tries to just ignore both of the others although they sometimes do get her involved. There are times when they will all three be in the same room and just quietly ignore each other. That is about the best we seem to be able to have happen.

Okay, I give up!

2010-01-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

The spammers really seem to be out in force, so I've implemented comment approval on all comments left on my blog posts. You will be able to post a comment but it will not show up until I've approved and allowed it. I also do get an email with the post included in the email and that comes out right away after the comment has been left, so I will know right away when there is something to look at. That makes it a bit harder for me but still easy for those who legitimately comment while letting me keep those foreign language things, etc. off the blog. I'll try that in the hope that it will still work without driving people away and be easier for you than having to enter those graphic letters before it will let you comment.

I'll see how this works for awhile.

An El Nino year

2010-01-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

I had heard early last fall that we were expecting to have an El Nino year weather wise this year, although it wasn't expected to start until after Thanksgiving, near the end of November. I guess it has arrived although we have also been wetter than usual and El Nino usually brings us warmer, dryer weather than normal. I guess it depends on where you look. Here in the lowlands of Western Washington State along the northern part of Puget Sound, we have had twice the amount of precipitation that we would normally have in the first part of a year. We have the Olympic Mountain range to the west of us and the snowpack there is above normal. To the east of us is the Cascade Mountain range and the snowpack there is below normal. Here is a photo of the hill to the east of my home that was taken about New Years Day 2008 (Jan 1st) and it shows the snow that was on that hill at that time:

Last year we had a lot of snow and this hill had visible snow on it from early in December until probably late February. This year there have been a couple of mornings when there was a dusting of snow up there but nothing that stuck around very long and right now it is totally bare clear up to the top.

While we have been seeing record cold and snow levels in much of the eastern part of the country, we have been warmer (and strangely, wetter) than normal. There were a couple of days this past week when our high temp hit 60 or over and even the overnight lows were all above 50. I know this affect is from El Nino out on the Pacific Ocean and I guess that is what is causing the excess' of winter back east. Our biggest problems right now with it are coming from saturated ground on slopes that are sliding down in mudslides. Friday the US-2 highway just west of one of our favorite little towns to visit, Leavenworth, WA, was closed when a large boulder came crashing down onto the roadway. I've seen photos of it on the TV news- about 25 feet long, 20 feet wide and 15 feet high. It totally covered both lanes of the roadway and caused a crater that is 3 to 5 feet deep under it. There are cracks in the road surface that extend up to 100 feet away from the rock. This is a main east/west corridor across our state and it is closed for a week or so until it can be repaired.

Other roads around our area have been closed due to mudslides & flooding and some will not open for awhile because they are worried about trying to clear them until the rainfall slows down. As I said earlier, this year's El Nino has been a bit different. Too bad we can't just direct the jet stream to deliver the clouds and rainfall to where it is needed! And just leave the cold weather up north.

The eMoto Velocity 2.0 electric bicycle

2010-01-11T19:32:00.000-08:00

When I started to learn about electric bicycles (ebikes) I of course went looking through Google for those terms. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to learn that China is the main ebike place in the world nor that Europe is pretty heavily into them, too. The bike that I ended up buying is built in England by a company there named Urban Mover who also builds electric scooters and, believe it or not, electric skate boards! Click on this link to go to their web site to see some pretty interesting video clips and, for the brave (or foolish,) to learn where you can buy a 20mph self powered skate board. I won't list any of the bike specs here as they can be seen online if you are interested enough to go looking.

I do have some photos:

This first one is my bike with our Prius in the background. The two are about the same color! This bike comes equipped with things that often cost extra on others, like fenders (important in a wet climate like mine,) a rack on the back to carry items on, a generator powered headlight and taillight and even a bell to ring when you come up behind someone on a trail to warn them that you are there. It also has a built in locking system to secure it to a pole, bike rack, or whatever when you have ridden someplace like Starbucks and will be away from it awhile.

Here is a closer view of the rear wheel area. The battery is in the container locked to the vertical frame post. It is a Panasonic brand 37 volt lithium ion battery and fairly expensive so there is a good reason to lock it to the bike. It can be charged there or unlocked and then carried inside with the rider to hook up to the charger. A full charge from empty takes 3 - 4 hours but 1 hour will bring it up to about 80%. The lock is the unit above to the left side of the wheel and the bike rack is obvious on top of the fender. The electric motor is a brushless 250 watt unit that is built into the hub so it is essentially maintenance free.

A closer view of the battery. This bike weighs only 47 pounds, even with the battery attached. Many ebikes I looked at were more like 60 pounds. The difference doesn't sound like a lot but if the battery runs down and you have to pedal it home that extra weight can seem like a lot. The button to the right side under the handle is the on/off switch and I find that my heel tends to hit it while riding and can turn it off. I really notice the difference in pedaling effort when that happens! The strip to the left of the switch is the indicator lights showing how much juice is in the battery.

This 3/4 rear view better shows the 7-speed derailleur gear system- the pedal it part of the bike. There is a single sprocket on the front with the pedals, so there are 7 speeds available. That front sprocket has a system built into it that senses how hard the rider is pushing on the pedals and tells the computer how much power to feed to the motor. It provides more help while you are riding up a hill than it does on level ground. The locking system shows up better from this side and the rear brake is below it. The hub on the front wheel contains the small generator that powers the lights.

My first ride after bringing it home was just a couple of miles- over to Starbucks and back. On the second day I headed out and rode probably farther than I should have as I was a bit sore when I got back. I rode on some bike/walking trails the city maintains that I was aware of but hadn't much used before and they are nice. There are places on them where you have to cross fairly busy streets but it is nice to be able to go a few miles without having anything other than other bikes and pedestrians to worry about. I live up on the hill above Mt. Vernon and this trail took me almost down to the river, so coming home was mostly uphill. The motor system worked very well. By combining it with the pedal gearing I was able to ride while staying in a seated position up those hills. In the biking condition that I am in right now I would have been off of it and walking pushing it up some of the steeper hills without that electric assist.

Diane asked if you can ride it under electric power only if you get tired. My bike doesn't have a hand throttle although there is a dealer installed option to add one but you must first check local laws. In some places they would call that a moped and it would have be licensed as a moped and not treated as a bicycle. No riding on bike trails, parking on the sidewalk, etc. That version also uses battery power a lot faster. With mine you have to be rotating the pedals in order to get power assist but it doesn't require a lot of pressure before the motor comes on. It is hard to describe.

I like this bike!

My new bike is here!

2010-01-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

I have decided to change my green and white Honda Metropolitan II moped into an electric bicycle. The ebike will get even better mileage and also give me some exercise while riding it. I did a lot of looking on the Internet at ebikes and found there is an amazing range of them out there. Apparently in most of the rest of the world they are pretty commonplace, especially in China where most of them are built. There is also a big price range from the cheapest to the most expensive, although it does look like you are getting more for your money with the higher priced units, at least for the most part.

There are two basic types and not are legal in all locations, at least if you want to retain the classification of it being a bicycle. The types are those that are controlled with a throttle, usually a twist grip on the handle bars, or those controlled by the rider pedaling. Some jurisdictions call the throttle controlled units mopeds and require licensing and treatment as a motorcycle. The pedal controlled units are an electric assist to the rider's pedaling- no pedaling, no electric power applied to the motor.

I had pretty much settled on one of two bikes and they represented both types. I finally decided on the pedal operated type for a couple of reasons. I want to get exercise and feel that I'll get more of that with this type and the range they will go on a charge is farther since there is some human power involved, too. My bike is a eMoto Velocity 2.0 that was made in England by the Urban Mover company and is imported here by eMoto of Kent, Washington. I bought it through Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) in Bellingham, WA. It arrived in their store last Wednesday and they called me yesterday about 13:30 saying that it was ready to pick up. I went right up there.

I wasn't sure that it would fit inside the Prius and it just does. This picture shows it in the Prius, with the back seats folded down.

This is a little closer view of the bike in the car. The thingy on the floor near it is a part of the lock system that is built into the bike.

I'll post more about it in another post as this one is getting about long enough with these two photos. I have more photos of it and can talk about my first (and now my second) rides. It is fun!

Problems with bad comments

2010-01-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

Is anyone else but me having problems with junk type comments being posted on your blogs? I have the system set to require my approval on comments put onto posts that are older than what I have it set for and that is working pretty well but still more active than I think it used to be. Today I told it "No" on a couple of comments on an old post that were all in an Asian language and there was a fairly innocent looking one from Anonymous left on my current one that I really didn't think was from a real reader so I deleted it. I'd rather not have to turn on the thingy where those leaving comments have to type the graphic letters in order to leave a comment as I really think it makes it harder to comment, thus cutting down on the number of them that do get left, but I sure can see why people get pushed into doing that!

I have changed both Pat and my desktop computers to run on Windows 7 and I'll say that I really like the new operating system. It seems to be faster and easier to use than any of the previous editions. On both of our conversions I had to do a complete install of 7 rather than just an upgrade so it was a bit more complicated than an upgrade but like a friend said, it gives the computer a good cleaning out of some of that old stuff that is rarely or never used. Now I have to get our laptops done. So far it looks like most of the programs we use regularly will run under 7 although one of Pat's may not. It is a card making program that dates back to 2002 so being that it is as old as dinosaurs it is probably due to upgrade it, too.

My new bike is due to arrive at REI in Bellingham by tomorrow. Maybe I'll be riding it by this weekend. See how much of an optimist I am?

Happy New Year and a little tease

2009-12-31T18:45:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to you all! I am now starting into my 6th year of posting on this blog although my focus with it sure has changed over those years. I guess right now I really don't have a focus with it but just post every once in a while when I have something to post about.

Other than wishing a Happy New Year to you, I am going to put in a little tease in the way of a photo of something that I just bought, although I won't get it for another week or so. More on this later:

Photo is from the Urban Mover web site, the manufacturer in England.

My Christmas shopping is finished!

2009-12-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

I think that I am finished with my Christmas shopping. I'm not going to talk here about what I bought as I know some of those I buy for do at least occasionally read my blog, but I think it was a fairly easy year for me. Annie used to do most of the picking out of gifts for the grand kids especially and I'll be the first to admit that I have little idea what a 9 year old (or those a bit older) want for gifts. There are some safe things, like video games or Webkinz that sound good but which ones to buy? What do they already have? I am not a fan of buying the kids gift certificates but I almost think they make more sense than striking out blind trying to find things they will like but don't already have. I didn't have to resort to this. More on this later (after Christmas.)

We have already had our Christmas party here in the park where we live. It was last Tuesday night and it was good. The ladies who put it together outdid themselves. Here is a photo showing how the Mirror Room was arraigned:

There were eight tables of eight, with a host or hostess for each table. Pat was the hostess for Table 6 which is the one in the foreground of the photo. The host/hostess did their own table settings and table decorating. Everyone paid $4 each and the park owners contributed $50 toward food, so ham and scalloped potatoes were provided, along with sparkling cider, coffee, etc. Everyone also brought a side dish so there was plenty of food for all. Like most parties in our senior park, it wrapped up fairly early but was fun for all who attended.

Speaking of our park and Christmas, this year many here seem to be really going out to decorate and light their houses. I plan to take some night photos of the area and will try to post some here later. I think the new LED lights have helped a lot- they are inexpensive to buy and operate and are long lasting. We don't have the snow that we had last year but as far as I'm concerned, snow isn't necessary to enjoy the holiday displays. We like to use real Christmas trees and they can't be up inside for too long so ours won't go up until Saturday. I love the smell of those real trees.

Thanksgiving, Black Friday and all

2009-12-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Wow, we are already a week into the month of December! That doesn't seem possible. Although since I am not fond of winter I'll be glad when the weather improves and we start getting more daylight hours. But right now, we are in for some cold times. Tonight in Mt. Vernon it is predicted to get down to 27 degrees and tomorrow's high only 30. Those brutal temperatures are things that we are not used to.

Thanksgiving this year was good for us. We enjoyed two separate dinners, one on the Monday before and the other actually on Thanksgiving Day. The first was at the home of my youngest son and held that day due to the fact that he had to work on the actual holiday. The other was at Pat's youngest daughter's home. Both were good.

The day after Thanksgiving Day has been known for some years now as "Black Friday" because it is supposedly the day in the year when retail business' turn a good profit (a day definitely with the books "in the black") and start the run to Christmas which for some is the busiest season of the year. A couple of times in the past I participated in those early morning (middle of the night?) sale starts but this year I slept in. I drug myself out of bed about the usual time and arrived at Best Buy at the crack of 08:15. Pat did even better, arriving at Fred Meyer about 10:30. But, we both got what we were after at those special prices for the day.

Since then I have bought some more gift things online but didn't participate in the so called Cyber-Monday sales as I didn't see anything that really struck me as needing enough to turn loose my credit card number. I have been able to buy things far enough ahead of Christmas to take advantage of free shipping on most items. That is the big bugaboo for me with online buying. I hate to pay shipping charges and on small things the shipping can be as much or more than the cost of the item you have bought. That is especially a problem with eBay purchases.

I have been kind of holding back on purchases for myself. I keep hearing from She Who Should Be Obeyed that I do that too often, thus making it hard for others to buy gifts for me. So, I am still holding out in my torn, holey gloves, even in these brutally cold temperatures, as some of us walk for exercise three times a week to the hospital for coffee in the cafeteria, then back home. Now only three weeks to go.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US and I'd like to wish you all a happy one. A year ago my older son was serving with the Navy Seals in Afghanistan and it is sure a relief to know that he is home this year. Our holiday has been good. We actually have had two Thanksgiving dinners, today at Pat's daughter's home and last Monday at my younger son's home. M & his family decided to do it on Monday as M has to work today. We enjoyed them both and thank our kids for the opportunity to enjoy the holiday with them.

Yesterday dawned with kind of an overcast, but since we tend to get up early I was looking out the kitchen window to the east shortly before the sun rose and saw that we were going to have a beautiful sunrise. I got my camera and proceeded to take some photos and I'll post a few of them here.

This first one is looking to the east and a bit south. The sun will come up in that area where the bright spot is behind the house across the street from us, but the sky was lit all along the horizon from far north to the south behind Little Mountain. You can just see the beginning of Little Mountain rising at the far right side of this photo.

This view is also to the east but looking almost north. The base of Mt. Baker is just visible at the horizon if you look at it over the back end of our Prius. This photo shows what I meant about the horizon being lit all the way from the far north to the south. The pink clouds are low but there is a full cloud cover above them and we didn't actually see the sun as the view of it was totally blocked by clouds.

In moving around to get different views of the sunrise I happened to look to the west between our house and the one to the south of ours. This is what I saw. Those are also low level clouds with the sunlight just breaking across them. Again, that is not blue sky above but the full cloud cover. This was amazing to me in that there was actually almost more exciting light in the sky to the west than there was to the east!

I went out into our back yard beside the sunroom and this was the view from there. The lighting is changing very rapidly. Our fence is across the bottom of the photo with the fronds and blooms of the pampas grass rising to the right side of the photo. Across the common ground behind the house is our neighbor's home and beyond it, across the street and the other houses that cannot be seen from here, is the background of fir trees. But look at the way those clouds are lit by the sun rising on the opposite side of the sky!

This view is close to the last one- see the pampas grass blooms, but here the camera is looking a bit farther to the north. You can see the arbor that rises above our back gate that goes out to the common yard.

I do not particularly like winter but we occasionally get some pretty phenomenal sunrises during this season and yesterday sure was a good example. I sent these photos to our morning DJ, Joe Flood, on our local Oldies radio station, KBRC, and will hop from here to their web site to see if he posted them there. Joe lives a bit to the east of us up in Eaglemont but he was already at work when this painting in the sky occurred. I still don't understand just how that light to the west happens, but I'll enjoy looking at it whenever it does.

Skagit Valley Gardens Christmas Open House #2

2009-11-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

I'll go ahead and add the second seven photos from a week ago at the Christmas Open House at Skagit Valley Gardens (see the link in the last post.)

This photo shows Pat signing up for a drawing for something but it also has one of the largest toads I've ever seen in the foreground. Pat is a collector of toads and things toady but I'd not be sure where we could find enough space for this one.

These two were working the Cashier counter at the time we were by. I took two photos because we knew one had blinked in this first one but I really like the expressions and feeling of this one better, even with the blink. They look like they were having fun and I think they were.

In addition to the dinner that was available through the Garden Cafe, Skagit Gardens also provided a table with cookies and coffee (I think it was coffee- as it was just after dinner for us I didn't have any.) I was good and only had one cookie and I called that my desert with dinner.

This little still life photo has had the light color corrected. Yellowish angel hair just didn't look right, nor did the yellow casts on the crystal figures. This was on a small shelf and I just liked it. It is simple with only three components but to me it is beautiful.

This scene has been setup for quite awhile and it is one of the most interesting. The bear on the left, hiding behind a fir tree, has a fishing pole and has snagged himself a very large fish which is on the top of the tree to the right. I doubt a person would ever have enough space in a home to setup something like this but it is cute and works well here. Maybe outside in one's yard?

Pat is checking out an interesting Christmas tree with Santa behind her. This photo was hand held as I had put the tripod away after the photo of the bear so it isn't quite as sharp as it ideally should be but I like it because of the subject.

I guess you almost have to include Barbie in Christmas. This is one of the largest Barbie dolls I've ever seen but it does make a very nice display. My younger granddaughter may still be young enough to like these but her favorites are something called Webkinz where she logs onto a web site to register her menagerie of them. It is more involved than just registering them but I don't try to follow it.

This annual event is fun every year and this place sure goes all out to decorate for the Christmas season. The place looks good all of the time and they do a good job with whatever season it might be. Last spring we were there with hundreds of others for an Easter egg hunt all over the 20 or so acre place. Everyone was a winner of something and it was far enough into the spring planting season that there were a lot of plants to choose from. If you live near enough to Mount Vernon, stop in and see this place. It is right alongside the I-5 freeway just a couple of miles south of town. It is fun. And don't forget to eat at the Garden Cafe.

Skagit Gardens Christmas Open House

2009-11-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

Friday November 6th we went to dinner at the Garden Cafe and I've already posted a few photos from there in my last post. Garden Cafe is located inside a large greenhouse that is the retail outlet for Skagit Valley Gardens. Skagit Valley Gardens does a fantastic job of decorating for the Christmas holidays and this open house is a perfect time to come see the displays which look even better after dark. I took many photos and had a hard time trying to limit how many I was going to post here. I think that I will actually split the post into two. I'll do one now and another in a couple of days with the rest of the photos. They let me take my tripod and most of the photos are in available light, so it is generally pretty "warm" toned light as opposed to a colder, more bluish daylight that we are more used to. I decided to not make a color shift on most of the photos but instead just leave them as the camera saw them, with some cropping, exposure and contrast corrections. You will also notice that I am posting them in a little larger format. I checked it on my system and this size is fine with it, although I do have a wide screen monitor. Please let me know it it doesn't work well on yours. Anyway, here we go:

This is a general inside scene with their cashier station and a Welcome sign.

This old truck is one of a few that are around the area. During the warmer weather there are outdoor gardens to explore and in September the local dahlia society, that grows their display garden here on the property, holds their annual viewing and it is spectacular. In addition to this greenhouse there is a large building that is heated and comfortable that contains many gift items.

The shutter speeds on these photos are not real slow but you can still see some motion showing up in many of the people who are moving. I like the juxtaposition of the tree ornaments in this photo, both those in the distance that are in sharp focus and the nearby ones that are fuzzy. There were a lot of people here and it was very hard to get photos without including some of them.

There are many already decorated Christmas trees with various themes. They can be bought already decorated or one can pick decorations off the trees to buy individually. This is a closer view of a part of the Peacock tree.

This tree in the foreground would be perfect for an apartment or other fairly small place. It is tall and skinny. And, the trunk is lighted AND it changes colors! There is a more normal Christmas tree in the background.

This display was hanging from above so I lowered the camera and turned it upward for this photo. You can actually see the glazing that makes up the roof of the greenhouse in the background here.

Musician Marcia Kester provided live entertainment during the evening. We have heard her before and she is good, kind of a country western/pop artist. Notice the tall skinny Christmas tree from the previous photo to her right in this photo. This is a flash photo so the lighting is more like what we are used to seeing.

This gets me about half way through the photos I've got ready to post so in order to keep the post from getting too large I'll close it here. Look for the second half of the photos in a couple of days. In the meantime, go check out the Skagit Valley Gardens web site as listed at the beginning of this post.

Dinner at the Garden Cafe

2009-11-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

One of our favorite area restaurants is the Garden Cafe that is located inside the greenhouse at Skagit Gardens. Skagit Gardens grows many plants of their own and operates this location as a retail outlet for their plants along with those from other growers, and a very large gift shop. They go all out for Christmas, starting to set up the displays back in September. Then they have a one night open house to kick off the holiday season, inviting their patrons.

The Garden Cafe usually serves lunch daily. You are seated inside the greenhouse and get to enjoy all of the exhibits. During this once-a-year open house night, owners Ray and Katie stay open late to serve a by reservation only dinner. Their food is the best around (I LOVE his tomato bisque soup!) and we are usually there for lunch at least once a week. Last night was the Christmas Open House and their dinner which we attended. Of course I took some photos and will start today with a few of the folks from the Garden Cafe.

Owner Ray is at the left with a couple of the others who were there helping with a very busy night.

Here is a sneak peak behind the scenes into the kitchen area. Nearest the camera is Ray with his wife Katie next. They are the owners and Ray does most of the cooking. This photo has an odd mix of lighting. I used the flash but it primarily lighted the foreground (bluish daylight type light) while the background is lighted with the ambient lighting (warm, yellowish colored light) in the greenhouse. It was after dark so no daylight was coming through the glass from outside.

Here is my bride paying for our dinners (wasn't that nice of her!) and chatting with Ray's Mom who was brought in to help.

Todd is Ray's cousin and you couldn't find a better person to greet patrons than Todd. His smile shows how he enjoys meeting people.

I have a lot of photos of various things about the Open House and will post them next although I may split it into two posts as there are about 14 photos that I've prepared and I could easily have included more. This place is beautiful and if you have the chance to come to Skagit Valley Gardens between now and Christmas to see it, do so. And plan to eat lunch at the Garden Cafe. You will not regret it.

Daylight Savings Time is over- again

2009-11-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

So far it doesn't feel bad, what with it getting light earlier in the morning. That means on Mon, Wed & Fri when I go walking with the guys from my park it will be an hour warmer when we start at 08:30. But I know that at the other end of the "day" it will get dark an hour earlier and that is the part I am not fond of. The two things I liked best about Snowbirding was the warmer temperatures and more hours of daylight. In the north during summer our days are longer than they are down south but it is the opposite in the winter. And the winter difference between here and southern Arizona is about an hour, or the difference between having Daylight Savings Time and not having it. Oh well, in two more months the timing will start back the other way toward longer days.

We did go on a road trip last month in the Prius. We left home on Monday Oct. 12th and drove to Spokane, WA on the far Eastern side of the state. It is about 340 miles and most of the trip over was via I-90 with 70mph speed limits. I did set the cruise control for 70 and we averaged about 47 miles per gallon (mpg) going over. That is not bad but not as good as what I've heard these cars can do. I didn't do any extraordinary things like trying to draft behind semi-trucks or anything like that. Just driving at a pretty constant speed.

For our return trip we came west via US-2 which is a 60mph road most of the way, with some slowdowns for small towns. We didn't go quite as far as we stopped in Manson to visit friends but it was long enough to give a pretty good test. This leg didn't have us crossing any mountain passes (there is one on I-90 of about 3000 feet) but we did drop down to the Columbia River and climb back up. Our mileage average for this leg was about 53mpg. It does make a difference when you slow down a bit- 60 as compared to 70.

The last leg, home from Manson, had us on 60mph roads but also crossing two mountain passes, one over 5000 feet and the other just below that at 4800+, then dropping down to sea level. Out mileage for this leg was about 51.5mpg which I figure is very good, especially when considering the elevations we climbed to. To be fair, the area between the two passes is all at high elevation so the climb up to the second pass is probably less than 1500'.

The car was very comfortable and easy to drive. We both like it, other than Pat often getting a static shock when she gets out. I don't know why it doesn't affect me the way it does her. I keep telling her that she is an electrifying woman. I don't think that helps.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet my younger son and my youngest granddaughter and go watch K play in a soccer game with her team. They are in a U-10 league and I think all the girls on her team are age 9. The other team sure has some tall girls for only being 9 but the two teams were actually fairly well matched. Our team lost but the score was 4 - 3 and it really could have gone either way. Of course it was raining- isn't it supposed to when the kids are playing soccer? I took some photos of the game and after a quick look through them, I setup one to post here:

My granddaughter likes to play defender which means that her position is to hang out in front of their own goal to help the goal keeper defend it. But K is quite fast and her coach has been working with her to move the ball forward when she has it and to even go as far as taking a shot at the other teams goal. Here she is moving the ball against a much taller opponent and staying in front of the other girl. K's team are wearing the gray jerseys. I think she might develop into quite a good player if she stays with the game.

Just a short one for tonight

2009-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since my last post and we did make the trip to Eastern Washington with the Toyota Prius and I do have more to post, but just not enough time tonight. So, I thought I'd slip in something that a friend sent me from a book titled, "Disorder in the American Courts." There are quite a few others but this is perhaps the best. If I have any attorneys who read this, my apologies, although I am sure that this would not be you.....

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No..
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

800+ miles on the Prius so far

2009-10-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd report back on how the Prius is doing for us so far. We have over 800 miles on it at this point and our average mileage for that distance is right about 51 miles per gallon. I've filled the gas tank and will soon do it again, but it wasn't real low when I filled it. The tank was full when we got the car and I've read that you do not want to let it run out so, not knowing how accurate the gas gauge is, I filled it at only about 3/8 of a tank indicated. Most of our current mileage has been here around town with a couple of short freeway trips of 20 - 25 miles each direction. But, next week we will be driving to Spokane, about 320 miles away, so that will be a good road trip to see how it does on the highway.

So far the only negative we have found is that every time Pat gets out of it, either from the driver or passenger seat, she seems to build up a static charge and gets a spark that is very noticeable when she pushes the door closed. I keep telling her that it just indicates that she is a very electrifying woman but somehow I don't think she appreciates those little (or maybe not so little, according to her) jolts. We did add a static strap that drags on the ground but it didn't seem to help very much if at all. She has a static spray that she sometimes uses on certain clothes like slips and she sprayed the passenger seat with it. That, combined with the static strap, did seem to help. Now we need to see how long it will last. I'll have to post this as a question on the Prius Chat forum that I belong to and see if anyone else has this problem and if so, how did they resolve it.

It does look like our fantastic summer weather is over. We have had some rain over the last couple of weeks and rather than temps in the upper 70s, most days have been in the upper 50s or 60s. Right now we are in a few days of sunshine and daily high temps in the mid-60s, which is sure something we can't complain about. I just kind of hate to see the summer end.

A Blogger friend asked after my last post if I was going to change the name of my blog, now that I don't have an RV anymore. That is something I've wondered about before as Huggy hasn't traveled with us in the RV since we bought this new one in March of 2007, so the name hasn't been totally accurate for two and a half years. I probably should change it, or maybe just stop posting. All of these blogs seem to eventually end and perhaps that time has come for mine. My original purpose for starting it was to keep my family and friends informed of where I was and what I was doing as Huggy and I traveled around the Western United States in the RV. That has all changed, totally. I'll ask those who still bother to check my rare posts what you all think. Should I end it now? Or maybe just rename it and continue with no real direction?

Something new but it's not blue

2009-09-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

I told you in my last post that things were changing around this Phillips household. That is almost an understatement. We gave some thought to our vehicles. We are just not using the motorhome enough to justify the expense of keeping it. When we do use it it's for fairly short trips as Pat doesn't want to be away from home for more than about a week at a time. She also has never cared for the Smart Car ever since I bought it and won't ride in it on the freeways. So we decided to get one of these

and traded this

in on it. The new one is a 2010 Toyota Prius hybrid car.

When we trade in a vehicle we of course are getting a wholesale price for it, although in Washington State there is a sales tax trade off up to the value given for the trade in against sales tax due on the new vehicle. Since we got more for the RV than the Prius cost, we didn't have to pay any sales tax and that probably saved us about $2200. We still lost money on the RV as compared to what it should sell for on the retail market but we opted for this method for its speed & simplicity. The offer for the Smart Car was too low to consider so it is in a consignment lot owned by a family friend to see if we can get closer to its true retail value.

My son and I went to The Green Car Company in Bellevue, WA last March 13th to look at an electric car. I didn't think that car was a good buy but when they suggested that I try a Smart Car I liked it and went ahead and bought it. As I said, Pat has never liked the Smart Car and this Toyota Prius, as a hybrid car, is much closer to the idea of an electric car. And it is fun to drive, too.

The 2010 model Prius is what Toyota calls the Third Generation of this car and there are quite a few fairly big changes. So, I guess it was better in that way to wait until now than had I bought one last March when it would have been at the end of the Second Generation production run. We have a lot to learn about this car and all of it's systems but I think that will be fun. And it will actually get about the same mileage as the Smart Car on the road and better than the Smart in town. Here are a few more photos. By the way, I took these photos this morning at the Lions Club Park along the Skagit River here in Mount Vernon. We got the car on Friday, a day after my birthday, so I guess you could say it was a birthday present. They are very popular and we have been waiting for it since ordering the car on August 19th.

This is a three-quarter view from the rear. The tail lights are all LED units so are bright but use very little electric power. It has four regular passenger doors plus a hatch back door to load things into the back of the car.

The car has five doors counting this rear hatch. It will seat four adults comfortably and there is a seat in the middle of the back seat that a child could use. Those seat backs fold down flat and I can actually carry my RC airplane and its wing back there. I couldn't do that in the Smart Car.

This photo was taken with my 10mm extreme wide angle lens and I see that I should have straightened the steering wheel before taking the photo. The cars come in four models, called II, III, IV and V. I don't know what happened to model I. We ordered a III which is very well equipped from the factory but we did add a Navigation System and floor mats.

Here is a closer view of the Navigation screen. The map displayed is showing the current location of the car. I didn't realize how dusty the small screen below it is until I saw this photo! This small screen reports on the car comfort system that sets the inside temp, using either heat or the AC to maintain whatever temp it is set for. Many of the buttons along the left side of the big screen relate to the car sound system.

This is the main instrument cluster. It displays the vehicle speed, odometer, gas gauge as well as some Prius specific things like your current miles per gallon as the vehicle is being operated, which system is moving it (electric or gasoline), what the mileage has been for the last 5 min, 10 min, 30 min, current tank of gas and total overall average, plus some others that I am still learning. I am having a hard time deciding which screen I want to leave up most of the time as they are all interesting. The car gets an overall mileage average of about 50 mpg and used regular 87 octane gas while the Smart Car works better on higher octane fuel.

The steering wheel has buttons to control a lot of the functions of the car. There is a built in Bluetooth system that really seems to work. We have tried to use those little things that clip on your ear but they don't seem to work well, for us at least. This system does and it integrates well through the car voice control system and the Navigation system. If, for example, we are driving someplace that we are not familiar with and decide we want to find a place to eat. Using voice commands we can get a display of restaurants that are close or ask about a specific one, like Olive Garden. Then we can have the phone call the restaurant to get a reservation and have the Navigation System direct us to the place. Isn't that fancy?

Pat has been in on picking out this car from the start. She likes it so it will be a keeper for us. When we ordered it, the dealer suggested we list more than one choice of colors as we might get it sooner. Pat wanted to list blue, blue and blue but Ed, our salesman at Foothills Toyota in Burlington, WA said he didn't think that would help a lot. We listed blue, silver and a darker metallic gray in that order. This was on Aug 19th when we were told it would probably take 4 to 8 weeks for the car to arrive. On Sep 3rd they told us that a silver one with pretty much what we wanted was on its way and that could be our car if we wanted it. We told them we would take it. The paperwork they gave me told the ship name that it was coming from Japan on and I found a way to track that ship. It arrived in Portland, OR to unload cars for the northwest on Sat, Sep 5th, so then it was just a matter of how long it would take to get it up here and cleaned up ready to deliver.

I go walking with some of the guys in our park on Mon, Wed and Fri mornings and I guess our salesman called while I was out doing that Friday morning. He told Pat the car was here and they setup an appointment for 13:00. Then Pat got called to work the rest of that day at her job where she is a substitute receptionist for the school district (this funds her "lipstick account") so she wouldn't be going with me to see Ed. She told me to drop her at the school district after lunch and go see Ed as he had a question for me. I got there and Ed said the car was ready. I texted Pat with "It's here!" and she texted me back with, "I know." The sneaky little rascal!

We've had it now just over two days and love it. I have a lot of friends with earlier editions of the Prius and they ALL say that they love the car. I think that will also be our experience. In fact, I'd guess that Pat will like it well enough that when we do sell the Smart Car, she might want to trade in her beloved VW New Beetle ("Baby") on a new Prius for her!

We saw a GREAT magician show last night!

2009-08-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning while listening to our local radio station, our favorite DJ Joe Flood interviewed a young man who was presenting two shows at our restored Lincoln Theater here in town on Saturday, August 29th. He is a magician named Sterling Dietz who has only been practicing the art for four years but recently was the overall winner in the World Teen Magician contest in Las Vegas! He is 18 years old and just this summer graduated from Lynden Washington High School, a town just a few miles north of us near the Canadian border. We both thought that sounded interesting so Pat called and asked for two tickets near the front where we could see pretty well. We decided to go the the show at 19:00 rather than the afternoon show, and she got two in the center section, seats 1 and 2, row A which is right in the front. You couldn't get better seats!

The show was phenomenal! This young man has a great stage presence, works very well with his audience (of all ages) and really seems to know his craft. The show does include others, especially one main assistant, and involves music and dance a bit. He has a website that has a lot more about him including a short video. Take a look and remember, he is just 18 years old now.

I didn't even try to take my camera as I know it isn't right to take photos of these where you can freeze time and look in great detail at what he is doing, so I only have a scanned copy of his poster that he autographed for Pat & I and a scanned image of my ticket. If you ever have the chance to go see Sterling perform his magic, GO!!!!!

Here is Sterling in one of his outfits.

Here is my ticket.

We have been busy over the last two weeks, including attending another melodrama play last weekend at the RiverBelle Dinner Theater. I do have photos from that performance but haven't yet had the time to get them ready to post. Hopefully soon. We also have been making some changes that will affect our future lifestyle. More about that later, too. In the meantime, enjoy what is left of summer. We are enjoying pretty nice weather right now and it looks like it may well continue at least for another month.

Is summer over?

2009-08-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

All the Back To School sales that are going on and articles in the local newspaper would have me thinking that summer is about over. School seems to start earlier and earlier as time goes on. In our area we usually don't have very reliable summer like weather until after about the 10th of July but this year has been different. We had rain the day after we got back from our North Cascades Loop trip in mid-May and almost none since then. The temperatures have been pretty consistently in the 80s with a few days actually into the 90s. Until about a week and a half ago. Since then we have had some rain and cooler temps. But, now the thermometer is heading back up with talk of maybe into the 90s by mid-week.

Often I prefer to take trips after school has started in the fall as our September weather is usually beautiful, but that is also when I hope to go to the Spokane area for a week or so. Eastern Washington is cooler and more comfortable then than it is in the summer and we coastal residents are not used to hot temps. Maybe we will go there and down to the ocean for a few days. But we do need to rebuild the tow dolly in order to safely take the Beetle along and you got to have a tow car.

We did go to the local Skagit County Fair this past week and Pat was a lot braver than me and had a caricature drawing done of her by a artist who was there. I'll post it here and see what you all think of it.

I guess it is okay but I think I like some of my photos of her a lot better. But these things are not done to try to make them an actual portrait. And this was done just two days before she spent the morning at her hair dresser. Oh well.

We attended a Melodrama play Friday night

2009-08-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Friday night we attended a play at our local River Belle Dinner Theater here in Mount Vernon. It was billed as a musical melodrama and titled, "He Ain't Done Right By Nell." It will just be there two weekends and then followed by another for two weekends called, "Curse You, Jack Dalton" that I think we would like to also go see. These are summer fare and not full dinner productions so the cost is much less- $14 each plus tax for adults. It was a lot of fun and of course I took some photos, over 150 all together but I've selected a dozen to post here. It was very hard to cut them down to only a dozen but I really feel that is almost too many for a blog post so have limited it to them. I did take a CD with all the photos to the play director yesterday so they will have them. By the way, a blogger friend from Whidbey Island, who produces plays for their local theater down there, is in need of a piano player for a production they are about open. If you or anyone you know might be interested, please click on the link here on my site labeled, Life After NEXCOM and talk with Mary Lou.

Here is what their flier says about the play:
"A gay nineties musical comedy. When Hilton Hays learns that Nell is a foundling and has no right to the Perkins name, he threatens to tell because Nell will not respond to his advances. Nell is too honest to marry the manly hero, Jack Logan, under the circumstances, so she dons her cape and prepares to roam the cruel world seeking a refuge for her broken heart. But wealthy Burkett Carleton has Hays arrested for stealing, and he discovers Nell is his long lost granddaughter."

That is a short summary of the play. There were seven characters and I know one of them quite well through church. I had never been to a Melodrama but it was done as in the past, with cue cards for the audience to cheer, boo, clap, etc. at appropriate times. I guess we could have thrown popcorn, which apparently was done in past years, but I think any popcorn that was sold there was eaten rather than thrown. Anyway, here are some photos, in the order they were taken.

Granny, coming down the step, is the one who found baby Nell in a basket outside the barn when Nell was a very small baby. The lady in the background is a friend of Granny's who is also searching for a Man (for her.)

The Villain, Hilton Hays, makes his first appearance. He is the manager of the local mill that is owned by the absentee Mr. Carleton. Hays is a perfect villain and shows his many despicable characteristics.

Hilton Hays along with the young lady he claims is his girl friend but in reality he is just using her as he does everyone. He does bum $50 from her as he apparently has no cash.

Granny's deceased husband had designed some invention that supposedly will be worth a lot of money. Granny plans to give the drawings of it to Nell as a wedding present but Hilton has become aware of it and tries to bribe Granny to give it to him to check out as he plans to marry Nell. So he says. He goes so far as to offer her cash (that he got from his "girl friend") and Granny is wise enough to take his money but not give him the drawings.

Nell, who has been out walking her blood hounds, makes her appearance and makes it clear that she has no intention of every marrying Hilton Hays. The love of her life is Jack Logan.

Here is Nell and Jack.

This looks a lot like the last one but it is actually a bit later in the play. The two have pretty much agreed that they want to marry.

Hilton Hays overheard a conversation between Granny & her lady friend where Granny admits that Nell was found in a basket outside their barn. Hays, being unable to get Nell to agree to marry him (he wants control of that invention) tells Nell that she is a foundling and has no right to the Perkins name. Apparently in the 1890s this was important as Nell decides that she cannot marry Jack and will just go off on her own. Hays looks around the Perkins home until he finds the drawings, which he then takes.

Nell, dressed in her cape ready to leave, tells Jack that she cannot marry him but he tells her that makes no difference to him and he still wants her for his wife.

Hilton Hays is exposed by his "girl friend" and Jack, normally a pretty calm person, threatens to hit Hilton. Hilton brings out his only true friend, a rubber chicken, which really seems appropriate. While they scuffle, the missing invention plans fall out of his pocket and he is exposed as a thief.

The "girl friend" has contacted her father who turns out to be Burkett Carleton, the owner of the mill that Hilton manages. He and his accountants have found many irregularities with money that Hilton has taken for his own use and have brought the Sherri f to arrest Hilton. While there, Mr. Carleton (my friend from church) notices the locket that Nell wears and asks to look at it. Due to a bunch of problems, one of Mr. Carleton's daughters married, gave birth and then died. Her husband gave away the baby and then disappeared leaving no trace of where the baby went. This locket was Mr. Carleton's daughters and it contains a photo of his daughter. Thus it is determined that Nell is his long lost granddaughter. She not only really has a last name but she is from a rich family!

Here's a photo with the full ensemble onstage singing (remember, this is a musical) at the end of the play.

We enjoyed it and definitely plan to return. They theater returns to their regular dinner theater programs in the fall and the first production will start the day after my birthday in September. That would be a neat gift! Are you listening, Honey?

Summer

2009-08-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

Our summer continues although the temperatures have definitely dropped from the record setting levels of last week. They are even talking about possibly some rain by next Monday. We are kind of enjoying the cooler temps, especially since we've been involved in activities that have had us spending a lot of time in our computer room which can really heat up. The reasons for this are twofold. Last Saturday we changed our Internet provider from Verizon DSL to Comcast cable which meant we had a lot of people to notify about our new email addresses. I hadn't realized how many places I had that needed to be changed! Anyway, the new system is up and running with download speeds about four times what we had with our 3mbs DSL system. The other reason is that Pat is the editor of the newsletter in our community for our Homeowners Association. They hold their monthly board meeting on the first Tuesday of the month and the newsletter goes out the day after- today. Here is a photo of the clubhouse in our park:

This was taken 12 Aug 2008 by a radio controlled model airplane owned by a friend of one of our neighbors. I have posted a couple of photos from that set but I don't think I included this one. The gazebo where Pat & I were married is at the left side. You can just see part of the roof of the first house south of the clubhouse at the lower left side and our house is the one beyond the one you can see. The large part of the building nearest the camera, with all the windows, is the swimming pool room where the largest privately owned indoor swimming pool in Skagit County is located and it is used regularly. The clubhouse also has a large library, a comfortable reading area with a large TV, a kitchen, billiards room with a poker table and what we call the mirror room. I think at one time it was a dance studio where one wall is done in mirrors and there is a waist high handrail that runs along the wall over the mirrors. This room is used for meetings, parties, potlucks, etc.

Here is another from that airplane. This shows the north side of the parking lot for the clubhouse at the far left side and some of the homes from the community. There are 120 manufactured homes in the park. They are all pit mounted so are not up in the air like you find in most parks. The requirements for landscaping are pretty strict so all the yards look nice. The common area on this side of the clubhouse has a shuffleboard court and a putting green as well as a large, open grass area. Our annual park picnic comes up later this month and this area will be well used for games such as Botche Ball. Pat & I have used it to fly kites.

I guess that is enough for now. I've got to go and watch some TV.

Hot

2009-07-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

We in the Pacific Northwest are used to cool temperatures. Our "hot" weather in the summer might get up to 80F or maybe occasionally 84F. It is rare to ever see 90F. I think another record has been set today, after one from yesterday. Only once since they started recording daily high temps in Seattle has it ever reached 100F. That was in 1994. Yesterday 103F was recorded and that was the 5th consecutive day of 90 or above which tied that record. Until today. It isn't likely going to beat the 103 but it is certainly over 90, for the 6th day in a row, another record.

These are records that I don't like to see beaten. I'm ready to get back to normal, maybe even for a little rain. You know, Seattle is well known for its rain and when it is here the weather is from the southwest off of the Pacific Ocean and it wouldn't be anywhere near that hot. I think most of my readers here know that we built a sunroom onto our house last year. We and the cats have enjoyed that room most of the time since then. But, yesterday it was a bit warm out there. This photo was taken about 17:37 looking out through the window in the door from our bedroom into that sunroom. No way was I going to open the door. And this was with the sliding glass door from the sunroom outside open and a large box fan pulling in the outside 100 degree air.

Enough said.

Old Coots Club on Patrol again

2009-07-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

There is a group of us old school buddies who have been getting together each summer in Spokane, WA, where we all grew up, just to stay in contact, find out what all has been happening in each others lives and just plan have fun. This summer the group, which we loosely call "The Old Coots Club," decided to take a road trip to the Seattle area from Spokane for a couple of days rather than the Seattle area bunch going to Spokane. That trip was this last weekend and on Saturday, after a breakfast in the Kirkland area, four of the group came up to Skagit County, my home stomping grounds.

We met at our house which was an opportunity to show the place to them, three of whom had not been here before. Then we went to lunch together at the Garden Cafe inside the Skagit Gardens retail sales greenhouse, followed by a tour of part the area.

Our tour went out the Fir Island Road to La Conner. This is a scene looking down the channel toward the Rainbow Bridge. The eagle is an example of some of the public art that is on display in this town. It is very tourist oriented and has some nice things on public display as well as many galleries.

Another must see place is the waterway known as Deception Pass. Here is found some very fast tidal flow when the tides are moving into or out of Puget Sound. All of the water does not go through here but enough does to make this somewhat hazardous to boat traffic, especially if you are trying to go against the tide flow. Don't try this in a canoe or sail boat under sail! You won't make it as you can't go as fast as the tide. This is one of the two Deception Pass bridges, the longer one that goes from the small island in the middle of the channel to Whidbey Island. The only access for autos to Whidbey is via this bridge or one of two Washington State Ferry System boat routes. The island is long, extending south to where the other end is just off Mukilteo, where the ferry goes out to the town of Clinton.

This is the shorter of the two bridges, the one that goes from the mainland to the small island. The photo has one of our Old Coots Club walking back from the bridge where he went to take a photo. The traffic was very heavy on this day. With beautiful weather on a Saturday, lots of people were out and about both in autos and boats.

We finished the day off with a dinner together at Grazie, an Italian restaurant in the north Bothell area, between Mt. Vernon and Seattle. We prevailed on our waiter to take this photo with my small Sony camera and he did a nice job of it. Pat went along to lunch and dinner, but stayed home puttering in the garden rather than going along on our tour. I drove the Smart Car on the Coots Tour and three of them got a ride in it but since Pat doesn't want to ride in it on the freeway, we took our big car to Bothell, the VW New Beetle.

Our group does a pretty good job of staying in contact via email. I think we are finding that it is good to stay in contact with old friends as we grow older. We are all retired now so have more time to travel. One of us comes all the way from New York, two from California, three from the Seattle area, one from Vancouver, WA and three are in the Spokane area although one of them is a full time RVer so does move around. They will all have to change my email address after this next Saturday as we are changing our ISP. But they will figure that out.

I joined the 21st century

2009-07-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

My brother has used an ebook reader for some years. I love to read and in fact probably have nearly half of the storage unit I still rent full of books, but I recently decided that it was time to join the 21st century. I bought one of these:

This is a Sony PRS-505 eBook Reader. I debated over this VS the Kindle from Amazon.com but in the end I thought this one would work better for me. The Kindle requires the user to only download books from Amazon.com and while I like their service and am even a stock holder in the company, I think I'd rather be able to have the options that this reader gives me.

I picked one in what they call blue color but it is very dark, pretty much a Navy blue color. I know it is easier to look at photos that are against a dark background and figured the page of the book would work the same way. It does seem to.

Here is the main menu and as you can see, I currently have 105 books loaded. It says that it can hold about 160 books but that depends on the size of each book. I can also use either an SD or Sony Memory Stick memory card to expand that considerably. In fact, I was able to buy a bunch of 2gb SD cards from Costco for only $5 each so am well set for quite awhile.

Here is a photo of the reader beside a standard pocket book so you can get a feel for its size. Its page size is just slightly smaller than the paper book but I have the option to select from three different text sizes. I've found that I generally like the mid-size one best. By the way, the paper book shown here is a great read and the author has half a dozen or so published with this character. They are set in New Mexico.

The text shown here is in that mid-size option. The screen is what is called ePaper and very easy on the eyes to read. It's much easier to use than a back-lit computer monitor screen and is even easy to see in bright sunlight. The battery is good for something like 5500 page turns before recharging and anytime you have it hooked to your computer, via USB port, it is charging those batteries. The USB port is also the way I download books to it. There is no built in light but Sony makes a cover that includes a lighted wedge that I bought and it works great. In addition to the USB connection charge I have chargers that plug into the wall (AC power) and one that connects to the 12v outlet ("cigar lighter") in vehicles, so we can recharge it from our solar panels in the motorhome. The list price is $300 but I bought mine online at about a 10% discount for $270. Amazon just lowered their Kindle price to that same $300 but you won't find it discounted any lower as they are the only source to buy one from, except perhaps on eBay.

There are many places where eBooks are available to download for this device. Sony has a store of their own and I've bought some there. Barnes & Noble owns Fictionwise which has many thousands of books, many of which are free. I do have to be careful to not download copy protected books that are not in one of the two protected file formats that I can use but there are a lot of unprotected formats including plain text and PDF files. The screen of the reader is not in color so photos are rendered as black & white and not real detailed, but it can be used that way. Many eBooks have covers that are from the printed versions and they look okay.

Any book that was published before 1923 is no longer protected by copyrite and many of these have been digitized and are available to download from many different sources. Google has over 500,000. Many of these are some of the real classics. For example, I have Tom Sawyer, Gulliver's Travels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The War of the Worlds plus others. I have bought a few new books. I am a real fan of books by Nelson DeMille and have read all but his latest which is still only available in hard back format. But it is also available from Sony as an eBook for $11.99, less than half the price of the hard back. I recently borrowed a book from a friend that I really enjoyed ("The Unforgettable Minute") and I found it from Sony for the same $11.99 price. They download in just seconds, even these full current books. Mysteries are my favorite genre and as you'd guess that is where I have the most books, currently 33.

Many authors are now publishing only in eBook format. It saves trees, is less costly as there are no books to print and I understand that authors actually get to keep a higher percentage of the cost of eBooks than they do from standard publishers. That sort of sounds like a win-win kind of thing to me.

If you have any questions that I might be able to answer, go ahead and ask. I am far from an expert but I am enjoying this device. It is a great way to be able to take a lot of reading material along on a trip in a very small space!

A new kind of mulch for your garden

2009-07-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

What my brother found at the Spokane Costco store is a mulch for garden and playground use that is made of recycled tires. It is a rubber product that is a little darker than the cedar bark sold around here for garden use but offers a lot of advantages. The cedar product is beautiful when new but it quickly fades to a gray color, after just a couple of months and fairly soon turns into dirt. You have to renew it every year. It has small slivers that will get stuck in your hands unless you wear gloves always around it and are pretty lucky.

The rubber based product is a little darker brown but that color is guaranteed to stay that way for 12 years. The product doesn't break down into dirt, in fact it is a pretty good barrier to grass, weeds, etc. growing through it. There are no slivers to get stuck in your hands and it is even easy to walk on. Are there any negatives? Well, maybe in the short term as the cost is higher. Our gardeners told us our area would need about a cubic yard of bark which would cost about $50 and probably another $50 or so for them to deliver & spread it. A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet. The rubber mulch comes in 1.6 cubic foot bags for $19.49 so it would take 17 bags of it for 27 cu ft at a cost of about $331. But it doesn't have to be done every year and really doesn't have to be quite as thickly applied.

We have bought 13 bags and still have one unopened and another with a bit left. I think these will work for us for this year and next year we may want to buy two or three more to top off any thin areas. After that I don't think we will need much over quite a few years.

Here is another photo of the garden area showing the mulch. Notice the cat planter? I found that at a Hallmark Store for Pat as part of her gift for our second wedding anniversary. So I guess you could say that we now have four cats.

This shows the mulch a bit better, being a closer view. We have had it now a few weeks and really like it. I've been told that it is available from Walmart but they carry smaller bags, so if you need very much then probably Costco is a better place to look. This photo also shows the stump for the other large bush that I called a bumblebee bush that we took out after the cold winter killed them.

Another view of the arbor we placed just inside the gate in the fence.

A better view of the white post top light that is just inside the gate. In the background you can see part of our park's clubhouse. This side of it has the indoor swimming pool inside. There is also a good library with many books.

Our new fence has been stained

2009-06-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

We gave our new fence awhile for the wood to dry out and then stained it with a semi-dark oil based pigmented stain. We got the stain at Sound Cedar, the same place the wood came from. It is the same stuff they used on the cedar on the front of their building which was stained with it in 2004, about five years ago and it still looks good. And it faces west so gets the afternoon sun. We didn't want to leave the cedar to weather naturally because it doesn't do that evenly and didn't want to use a clear stain as you have to redo it about every two years. At almost $34 a gallon (we used all of three gallons) it is fairly expensive, plus the time it takes to do the work. Anyway, we both like the results.

This is the outside of the fence looking at it from one end toward the other end. The sunroom is in the background and the patio outside it with the picnic table, chairs and propane barbecue. This photo has a pretty good view of one of the solar powered lighted post caps we used on the ends of the fence. It has kind of a stained glass look. Later you'll see the one we used beside the gate which puts out a clear, white light and actually gives enough light to be a help coming in when it is dark. They all have rechargeable AA size batteries and the light comes from clear LEDs so they don't use much electric power. It will be interesting to see if we get enough sky light in the winter to charge them to run long enough after our early darkness to be useful.

This is again the outside of the fence that faces the common area in the middle of our park but closer to the gate. You can see the clear light I talked about earlier as well as the cedar post caps that we used on the other posts. We also decided that we wanted an arbor and found that cedar unit at Sound Cedar, ready made in three pieces. Our fence contractor set post holders in concrete and they hold the arbor which we stained in the same stain. Also notice Pat walking along outside the sunroom and the two hummingbird feeders. We have planted a grape plant on each side of the arbor and hope to have it grow up it and give us some good fruit.

Here is the gate and arbor looking straight at them from outside the fence. The hardware for the gate is simple black metal but it is pretty heavy and should last a long time. It is a fairly long distance from the edge of our yard where the fence is located to the concrete sidewalk that runs down through the common area and during much of the year that grass out there is so wet that it is like walking on a sponge. We asked the park managers if we could put in a crushed rock walkway to connect our yard to that sidewalk and he said we could, so now we can exit our gate and keep our feet dry to get out to that sidewalk even during the wet time of the year. The girls came from our house to the gazebo via that main sidewalk for our wedding but then they had to walk through that wet grass to get to the sidewalk.

This view is about the same as the first one but taken on the inside of the fence showing part of our actual yard. Pat is very good with plants and has done quite a nice job of setting up our yard/garden. The soil here isn't very good, just a little bit of topsoil over clay, so we have a few larger type plants that are in the ground but for many we have used planters and other containers. We took out a hill that was mostly just bark and roots from some cedar trees and put in a couple of raised beds that are over to the left, out of the picture from where this view is looking.

The arbor from the inside. We are trying an upside down tomato planter thingy and that is it to the right of the arbor. By now the tomato plant is almost reaching the ground so we may have to move it to someplace higher but we are not sure, never having used one of these before. There was some crushed rock in the back yard but along both sides of the house they had used a fairly small river rock that was really hard to walk over, so we had the gardeners bring in a few yards of crushed rock and even it out all over the sides and back. It is much better now. We have some lawn in front and that is all that I want to mow- the rock is nice.

I probably don't really need to put this photo in but it does show our pampas grass plant. It was badly damaged by the cold weather over the winter but is starting to come back. It also has Pat in the background working in the garden area. Those tall cedar trees on the other side of our yard are where all those roots in that bark hill came from. I kind of wish they were a bit smaller and may trim them. I don't think the former owners of our lot planted them as the neighbors have more of them across the back of their lot but these three or four trees are on our side so I think I can trim them back.

Here we are looking through the side of the arbor toward the garden. We bought stainless steel hooks to put one on each fence post and Pat has baskets of flowers hanging on each of them except the one with the tomato plant and the two corners and ones by the gate. You can just see the grape plant starting at the bottom of the photo and the small tree is a dogwood that has about 18 lighted solar powered butterflies in it. They look interesting at night.

Here is the other corner of the back yard. You can see a stump of what we called the bumblebee plant. We had two of them, one on each side of the yard in the corners. They were quite large and had a lot of purple flowers on them that really attracted bees, especially bumblebees. The cold of the last winter killed them so we took them out and are finding that we really like how it has opened up the yard. Not to mention that you don't have to fight bees all summer out there now.

I have a few more photos but this is enough for one post. The others are a couple of photos of the arbor from a different angle, one showing the light on the post top better and a couple of closer views of the ground cover. We thought about getting more bark to use out there but it has the bad habit of turning into dirt pretty soon and that doesn't do anything about stopping weeds. It also doesn't look good for all that long. My brother was shopping at Costco in Spokane one weekend about the time we were ready to do this and he found a product he told me about that we used. More about that next time.

Bob is home!

2009-06-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

My son who has been in Afghanistan assigned to a joint Army/Navy thing there arrived back home in Washington State yesterday! How is that for a neat Father's Day gift? Now he can go back to being a Navy guy on shore duty for the rest of his assignment here before going to sea again. That should be for the next year and a half or so that he'll be home every night and on weekends.

RV Trip - The return home

2009-06-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

We left the home of our friends in Manson, WA on Sunday, May 17th. I got the VW Bug loaded onto the tow dolly fine and we headed out, after lunch, for one of my favorite small towns to visit, Winthrop. Winthrop has adopted an Old West kind of look, with wooden boardwalk sidewalks, etc. There are even a few hitching posts in front of some of the stores plus a snack place where you can sit on saddles to eat your ice cream cone or mocha.

Anyway, we got to the KOA park in town with no problems from the dolly and were able to get a pull through site so didn't have to take the car off. The park gave us a shuttle ride on into the downtown area and the Duck Brand Hotel & Cantina where we like to eat dinner. We did walk through town but it was late enough in the day that most shops were closed, then the shuttle picked us up and took us back to the RV. There are no TV connections at this KOA so we just read and listened to music until bedtime.

Monday morning we had breakfast in the rig, then got ready to leave. Our trip that day was only about 140 miles but across the North Cascades Highway (WA State Route 20) which crosses two mountain passes in the rugged North Cascade Mountains. Washington Pass is over 5400' elevation and the peaks around it rise well above that. The State does not try to keep this roadway open through the winter but they do try to reopen it by May 1st. This year they made their deadline although there was over 60 feet of snow that had to be removed from the roadway in places. This time of the year you will still see a lot of snow alongside the road.

I stopped about three miles before we reached the first pass, Washington Pass, to take some photos of the mountains. It was a gloriously beautiful day, with sunshine and really quite warm for that high in the mountains. I parked alongside the road in a wide spot that had been cleared and here are the photo results:

This first view is looking ahead on up the road toward the summit. The mountain peak shown ahead is one of the most famous in this area, called Liberty Bell Mountain. The Cascade Mountain range divides Eastern Washington from Western Washington. It is a curtain that stops much of the ocean moisture (read that as "rain") that we are famous for in Western Washington from going to the Eastern side of the state, so there is actual desert over there. We locals tend to think of it as the wet and dry side. These mountains are also geologically pretty new so the peaks are rugged, coming to sharp points as opposed to most mountains in the eastern part of the country where those sharp points have been rounded over eons by wind and rain. The roadway is still below the tree line but the higher part of the peaks are above that line, so there are no trees up there. The elevation of Liberty Bell is listed as 7720' and it is a popular peak to climb, with easy to hard routes.

This view is off to the left of the roadway and just shows a few more of the mountain peaks that were around us. The trees are all evergreens, mostly spruce or fir. On the wet side there are a lot of cedar trees while the east side, down lower, has a lot of pine. But, they are all evergreens with needles rather than leaves.

This view is just to the left of the previous one and looking a bit back toward Winthrop. You can see how close the road is to the slope where it drops off into the valley. I think it would be quite a challenge to safely plow snow from this road when the snow depth is measured in feet and you can not see the edge from the snow plows. These people do a great job at what they do!

Anyway, while here I walked back to check on the car on the dolly. Good thing. I found the strap on the right front wheel had pulled completely off the tire. The only thing holding that side of the car to the dolly was the emergency chain! We tried to remove the strap to start over but I had a hard time getting the ratchet to release so I could loosen the strap. I finally got it loose, then it would not return to position to tighten it. We fought it about 15 minutes, then finally decided we had to take the car off the dolly and have Pat drive it home, following the RV. She did that- about 104 miles. Other than this, we arrived home shortly after 15:00 with no other problems.

I've looked over the problem with the dolly with Pat's son-in-law and we think the biggest problem is that the dolly doesn't fit the VW. The tie down connections are off to the side rather than centered on the wheels, so the straps are pulled off to the side, where they eventually fall off with the vibrations from pulling it over the roadway. We plan to rebuild it to actually fit it to that car, since that's the one we will tow. We will also replace the ratchets that came with it as they seem to be fairly lightly made. J owns an auto repair business and used to have a tow business so he is pretty familiar with this kind of thing. I know a lot of people tow various vehicles this way and it seems to work fine, so I guess we just have to fine tune our rig. It sure was easier to flat tow the Saturn!

Addition: Wow, I just noticed my hit counter for this blog shows that I've had over 50,000 visits since I put that counter on when the blog was 3 or 4 months old. Thank you all for your visits!

My Son has left Afghanistan!

2009-06-08T18:58:00.000-07:00

My son left Afghanistan Sunday and is on his way home! He will probably arrive in the states sometime tomorrow and spend 14 days or so in out processing before finally returning to his home here in the northwest. I am so thankful that he is finished there and has left in good condition. Now wouldn't it be great if we could somehow get the rest of our armed forces home with no need for them to stay there?

RV Trip - Chelan/Manson, WA

2009-06-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

On our May RV trip around the North Cascade Loop drive, we spent our first two nights at Icicle River RV Park and I've already posted about our stay there. We next drove north to the town of Manson which is on the shores of Lake Chelan. Here is where a friend whom I worked with many years at Metro Transit in Seattle chose to retire to. We parked our RV in their driveway, connected to 120 volt power to just run a few things and were basically dry camping, using our own water and holding tanks, although we had the house right there with all of its systems.

R & D bought a home there which was on a former apple orchard and they originally did have about three rows of apple trees from the orchard on their property. When the rest of that property was sold, the new buyers of it were planning to put in grapes as they were starting a winery and wanted to grow some of their own grapes. I guess that you have certain obligations to maintain apple trees if you have more than a very few in order to protect the other orchards, and my friends didn't want that as a job so when the new owners of the bulk of the orchard asked them if they would like to have their trees "picked" along with the others, they did except for a very few chosen ones. They brought in a backhoe and chained the bucket to each tree, then picked them like a carrot. They were then run through a chipper to make a great mulch. This was about 2002 and there is now a producing vineyard where the former apple orchard used to be. I showed a photo that was a view from the deck of R & D's home, looking down across that vineyard toward the winery, which is named Tildio Winery for a type of birds that are found there. Here are a couple of other photos of the house and their view:

This is a similar view to the previous one but looking over the winery with a longer lens. You can still see a part of Roses Lake (R's fishing lake) as well as ridges and mountains around the area. Lake Chelan is something like 55 miles long, extending to the west-northwest from the town of Chelan. There is a small town named Stehekin at the west end. This link will take you to the City Guide for Stehekin. There are no roads into Stehekin from the outside and about the only access is via boat or aircraft. The "Lady of the Lake" makes daily boat trips from Chelan and carries mail, goods, passengers, etc. I do not know the permanent population up there but the City Guide says it is less than 100. If one wants a place to go that is a long way away from the rest of the world, this one fits the bill well. Plan to walk when there. This photo was probably taken on May 16th and as you can see, there still is quite a lot of snow at the higher elevations of the hills in the background. This area does have a "winter."

Here is a part of R & Ds west facing deck and some of the bird feeders located there. Many birds of various types are in the area, including a family of owls that has lived for some years in the evergreen glen behind the house. D especially enjoys feeding and watching the antics of the birds. Behind these picture windows is the living room so as you can guess, there is a fantastic view from there, too.

One of the things we like doing in this area is wine tasting at some of the many wineries. The dentist that D worked for many years for in the Seattle area retired over here and started a winery which is now probably the largest operation in the area and one of the longest running ones. It is named Tsillan Cellars which is the Indian spelling of the town, Chelan. This link will take you to their web site. I have posted photos from there in the past so really don't have a lot to add now, although here are two new ones.

This winery is on the other side of the lake from R & Cs home. The town of Chelan is about 7 miles down lake from Manson, at the foot of the lake, and this winery is just around the end of the lake on the other side. This view is from the winery which is located on a hill above the road and is looking across the lake. Manson is over there at the left and if the lens were long enough you could almost see the house where our RV is parked, except for the hill that is between there and the camera. Tsillan Cellars grows many of their own grapes on their own vineyards but they also bring some in from other growers, especially from other locations in Eastern Washington State.

The winery grounds are beautiful as are the buildings. Live entertainment is offered here often, outside when the weather permits. There is a large water system that starts with a pond at the upper level, then the water falls down to a lower pond that is stocked with colorful Koi fish. There is a small island in the lower pond, with a cover over it and that becomes a very popular place to enjoy a meal from the Italian restaurant at the winery, Sorrento's Ristorante (we ate our lunch there one day.)

This photo shows a young father showing his baby daughter the Koi fish from the bridge over to the island. Go check the winery website for other photos and more info about the place. If you are ever in the Chelan area, be sure to stop in for a visit and tasting and say "Hi" to Doctor Bob if he is in.

While in this area we didn't forget my daily mocha's. There is a new Starbucks but we sampled mochas from The Vogue in Chelan the first night there. They have live entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights so it can be a destination place of its own. We were back there on Saturday and took R to a local place near Manson for our mochas on Sunday, the morning that we left to move the RV on to the Western themed town of Winthrop which is located at the Eastern side of the North Cascades Highway. Our home is at the Western side of that highway. I'll do another post soon on our visit to Winthrop. This time we did not see the deer family there we photographed last year, but did again eat a dinner in my favorite Winthrop restaurant.

More later. Pat's granddaughter is graduating from Mt. Vernon High School tonight and it is time for me to make sure our cameras are ready for the event and to start getting ready for dinner before we go.

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

2009-05-30T14:29:00.001-07:00

Each year in the month of April the Skagit Valley in Washington State celebrates a month long festival called the Tulip Festival. I believe I've read that there are more tulip bulbs supplied to the world's gardeners from here than from any other place except Holland. Sometimes, like this year, Mother Nature didn't see the schedule and the tulips arrive late, but the festival still goes on. Those of us who live in the area tend to try to avoid the tulip fields during the festival as the traffic can be a nightmare to get through. But the tourists love it and keep coming back and the area is beautiful, especially if the weather cooperates.

Last year in January, Pat's daughter, P, and I took a class on digital photography that is put on by the Digital Photo Academy, a group sponsored by Panasonic that offers classes in twenty-some cities around the country monthly. You do not have to have a camera made by Panasonic to take these classes. Check the link for where they are, what they offer and what they cost. P and I still get emailings from them and we probably will take some other classes in the future. You may enjoy taking one of them yourself.

This spring they offered one that was in our backyard, a photography trip to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Unfortunately neither P nor I were able to attend this one but I did find this, a short 3 minute video on that class. This shows some of our beautiful area, tulip and daffodil fields in bloom and some of those who were able to attend. Enjoy.

Icicle River RV Park, Leavenworth WA

2009-05-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

Our first stop on our recent RV trip was one of our favorite RV parks, the Icicle River RV Park at the Bavarian town of Leavenworth, WA. This park is about three miles up the Icicle River Road which is the first road you come to as you enter the town from the west on highway US 2 after coming through Stevens Pass. We did stop at our candy store, The Alps, but knew they had a bad fire there over this past winter and the building was totally destroyed. They are operating from one (soon to be two) small buildings that have been setup near the location of the old building but they did not have room for anything but candy. I bought some divinity fudge, Pat bought some cashew bark, probably our two favorites, at least in what they carry. They will rebuild and hopefully by next season be returned to full operation. It has always been a good place to buy toads and I am married to a toad collector. The previous photos that I posted of our tow dolly were taken here in this park and here are a few more photos to show a bit more of the place.

This shows our RV parked in space 100 which is right on the river. Our VW Bug is shown behind the RV. We used to travel with a Saturn which can be flat towed behind the motorhome but I traded it in on the Smart Car. The VW is front wheel drive (ours has a diesel engine with an automatic transmission) but it has to have it's front wheels off the ground when being pulled behind the RV. So, we had to buy the dolly. More on that later in another post.

This is a view looking alongside the driver's side of our RV toward the river which was right in front of the rig. This is one of the most popular spaces in this park due to the fantastic view of the river. Right now the river is running fast and high due to snow melt in the mountains. Of course the water is also very cold. We went to sleep every night listening to the rapids outside our front door. This view shows our slideout extended. When we bought this rig I wasn't sure if I would like having a slideout or not. So far, I really do like it as it gives a lot more useful inside room. Ours isn't real large and there is only one so the weight added is not too bad. As long as it keeps working as it should, I'll like it.

This view is looking downstream from an RV site that is a couple to the right of ours as you were looking at the previous photo. I think this shows the general lay of the land pretty well and a bit broader view of the river. The elevation of Leavenworth is 1200 feet so it isn't way up in the mountains although it does look to be when you see them all around you.

Our first morning there I got up, turned on the furnace to bring up the temp inside to a more comfortable level and started the coffee pot. Electric heat turned was off as I always do while the coffee pot is brewing. This was just after 6am, about our usual time to get up. At about 6:20, while watching the news on TV (cable in the park) and enjoying a cup of coffee, all our power went off. The only things we had running were the fridge on electric power, the coffee pot but it was finished brewing so just keeping the hot plate hot, and the TV. I may have turned the electric heater back on but it would have been just idling as the propane furnace made quick work of bringing the inside temp up from 56 to 68.

I went outside to check the electrical breaker at our campsite post but it had not tripped. Next I checked the inside breakers in the rig but the only one that could have turned everything off was the main and it had not tripped. I looked around but the campers on each side of us were not yet up. However, the lights were on on the porch of the clubhouse, just behind our campsite. We listened to the radio running on our small inverter, drank our coffee and got ready to leave. In town, we had a wonderful breakfast at Sandy's Waffle Haus (remember this is a pretend Bavarian town and that is the way they spell it) and when back to the campground, I hunted up the guy who maintains the place. He said they had every campsite double fused and reset the breaker that had tripped. It was inside a locked box on the side of the clubhouse behind us.

Here is that clubhouse and you can see the large breaker box on the side of the building. We hoped that would solve our problem. We went back to town, did our usual shopping, managing to only buy one thing each. But we did enjoy a lunch at what is probably our favorite restaurant there, Cafe Christa and even went back later in the afternoon to share a decadent Kahlua chocolate mousse cake like thing. Pat knows the name of it but she isn't here right now so I can ask. But it was VERY good! We also had mochas at Starbucks.

We were intending to eat at the rig, heating things from our freezer in the microwave, for dinner. Pat started heating the one that would take the longest time while we also watched the news on the TV. After the microwave ran for about three minutes, that d@#n breaker blew again. Now it was about 17:30 and the office was closed but I managed to find the volunteer on duty, told him of the problem, and he came with the key to reset the breaker. Again. Remember that box has a padlock on it.

Back to the RV, Pat restarted the microwave, this time with nothing drawing AC power except the microwave, and it is only a 1000 watt appliance. We were on a 30amp service so should have been okay for up to something like 3600 watts (120v times 30 amps) but again after three minutes or so, it blew the breaker! Me back to the volunteer who unlocked the box, reset the breaker and this time left it unlocked. (The park was not very full this time of the year on a weeknight so this was pretty safe. I knew exactly which breaker tripped and needed to be reset by now.)

Back to the RV. Pat had been thinking and came up with the idea that it seemed to go after a steady draw of power for about three minutes. So, she cooked our dinner using just two minute bursts of the microwave. This time it didn't blow the breaker again, and we were able to use the TV, the fridge on electric mode, the heater (all night) and the converter that powers the 12v lights, etc all evening without it tripping again. It just seemed to go with the draw of the microwave after about three minutes of running.

The next morning (Friday), as we were getting ready to leave the park, the maintenance guy came down to ask about it. Our conclusion is that perhaps that specific breaker has grown weak. He has extras and was going to replace it in the main box before the next camper arrived to use space 100. I was almost tempted to just give up on the campground power and use our generator to cook that dinner, but didn't want to pollute the area with generator noise!

Finally, an RV trip!

2009-05-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

We like to go to Eastern Washington State in the spring or fall as it is a bit hotter than we like in the summer. By May the weather there is good and we from the wet side of the mountains are more than ready for some dry, warm weather. This is our second year in a row making the trip around the North Cascades Loop drive but it was our first one taking the VW Bug as a tow vehicle on our new tow dolly. It has been an interesting experience.

I had never secured a car onto one of these so we asked Pat's son-in-law to help. It was done and we got away from Mt. Vernon about 10:30 Wednesday morning. We made it about ten miles when we discovered one of the straps securing the driver's side front wheel of the Bug to the dolly had come off, been drug for unknown miles along the freeway and pretty well torn up. Back to Mt. Vernon. Pat's SIL found another strap, it was installed a little differently and we were again underway, but this time we made many stops, the first after only about 2 miles, to check on those straps. They were fine.

We arrived in the Icicle River RV Park about 16:00, took the car off the dolly and parked the RV in our assigned space #100. Here is the dolly parked beside the RV:

Pat commented that the trailer light on the right side of the dolly didn't look right. Here is the one on the left side:

The right side light looked the same except it was turned 180 degrees to fit that side of the dolly. Here is a photo of that part of it now:

As you can see, she was right in that it didn't look right. In fact, it was gone. We have no idea where nor when it came off but it is totally gone. Now we will have to get another one when we get back home. But it has been working okay for us since then.

We spent two nights in Leavenworth, then yesterday drove to Manson, WA along Lake Chelan to visit our friends, R & D. Last year we stayed in a RV park in Chelan but this time are dry camping in their driveway. The house is out in the country on a former apple orchard. R likes to fish and Roses Lake is just below the house. The former apple orchard is now a grape vineyard and the winery is just beyond the vineyard. One of our favorite activities in this part of the state is to visit the various wineries and their tasting rooms. The nearest winery is that one just beyond the vineyard, a distance of about 500 feet from their house.

Here is a view from their deck looking across the vineyard to the winery with a part of Roses Lake beyond. This is a beautiful are.

Now I must stop as we are about to head off for a couple of more wine tasting rooms. More later.

Comparing two cars

2009-05-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

I thought I would post similar photos of my Smart Car and the Wheego Whip that should be entering production this month. My car is a Smart 450 ForTwo, the original European model of the Smart Car. The Wheego Whip is an electric car based on a gasoline powered car that is built in China but imported to the US without an engine. An electric motor and battery pack is installed here and the car is sold as a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) which in Washington State where I live is limited to a top speed of 35mph, but to 25mph in most states. The manufacturer says the car is capable of over 50mph and once the necessary tests have been completed they plan to ask to have that NEV limitation removed so the governor can be removed. The car will then be more useful as it could be operated on most roadways legally in the USA. It will still have the limitation of how far it can go on a battery charge and I expect the higher speed will lower that range which I believe is listed as about 40 miles now as a NEV. The Smart Car holds a little over 8 gallons of gasoline and mine gives mileage between 45 and 55mpg so it has a cruising range around 400 miles between fill ups. The Smarts currently being imported by Roger Penske do not get that good of mileage, probably closer to 38 - 40mpg I think, due to them being slightly larger & heavier as well as having a larger engine and a 5 speed transmission VS the 6 speed unit in mine. These newer cars are known as Smart 451 ForTwo cars.

Here is my car, the Smart Passion Coupe 450 ForTwo:

And here is a similar view of the Wheego Whip.

Mercedes Benz, the maker of the Smart Car, sued this Chinese manufacturer in an attempt to keep the gasoline powered vehicles out of Germany, claiming that they were a virtual copy of the Smart Car. They lost in the German courts but the cars sure look a lot alike to me. The Chinese company said there were only so many things that a designer could do in coming up with a car of this size and that no one would ever mistake the two with the considerable difference in the price they sell for.

Here is an interior view of my Smart Car:

And here is a similar view of the interior of the Wheego Whip.

These two cars look very similar to me and I can sure see why you might think the Chinese car is a copy of the European one. Many of the features appear virtually identical. But there is a lot of difference between them mechanically, at least this Wheego Whip version that is being sold in the USA. I think the currently imported Smart Passion Coupe is being sold for around $16,000 and the Wheego Whip was expected to sell for about $19,000 with production in the USA to start this month, in May. I don't know how the accessories compare on the two cars at those prices although I don't think air conditioning is very viable on the electric car due to the amount of electrical power it would pull from the batteries. I'd have similar questions on how well a heater/defroster would work.

I really liked both of these cars and came very close to buying the Wheego Whip. The only thing that really held me back is the battery pack. I think there are some new battery designs that will be available and affordable in a couple of years that will make this car a lot more useful. Pat and I are finding that we use the Smart primarily as a town car. Pat still isn't comfortable in it going on the freeway although I have and it is fine. The electric car, even the NEV model with it's speed limitations, would work pretty well as a town car, if it could go farther between battery charges. They are coming but I just don't think they are quite here yet, at least in a package that the average person can afford.

For a look at an interesting electric car, go look at the Tesla Roadster roll out in this 3 minute U-Tube video. This car will go more than 35mph (about 100mph over that) and has a cruising range of over 200 miles. It's acceleration is very fast and it's a fun car to drive. But, you'd better have a spare $120,000 or so if you want to buy one.

Defending The Caveman (sort of)

2009-04-22T19:39:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night we went to McIntyre Hall at our local college to see the stage production of "Defending The Caveman." Pat won the tickets to this on our local radio show which was good as ticket prices started at $30 each. We had great seats, in the balcony but right in the front row. I of course took my camera and took a couple of photos of the stage to get a feel for the view I had, which focal lengths I would want to use and to set the exposure.

This is looking down on the stage from our balcony seats. This is a beautiful almost new theater and is very nice. I've been to other shows here and always enjoyed them.

This is a closer view of the stage. The play is a one-man production, with a guy on the stage talking to the audience, explaining the differences between men & women and how things really haven't changed since back in the caveman days.

It is a good thing that I took these two photos as this is all I have of the "production." An usher came to me and said I was not allowed to take photos here. I can not understand why there is any problem with still photos taken without flash, in fact it seems to me that they might help with promotion of these events. I can see why they would not want video with sound as that would give the whole performance in a way that could be shown to others and produce no revenue for the production crew. I can also see why they would not want flash photos taken as flash can be distracting.

People can order a glass of wine, a mocha, or even just a bottle of water ahead of the show and then go get it during intermission. You have to drink it in the lobby as you are not permitted to take food or drink into the theater itself. We were up in the balcony so went walking at that level to stretch our legs and I took the following photo looking down into the lobby.

This will give a bit more of an idea what this place looks like. It really is nice.

But we decided that since I couldn't take photos and we didn't find the play all that entertaining, we'd just go home and watch the rest of the Mariner's baseball game on TV. So we did. I don't know if I'll ever go back to McIntyre Hall as I sure don't like their photography policies and the prices tend to be pretty high, too. As I said, it doesn't make much sense to me but I think they've driven me away. Too bad as I really do like the facility and it, being on our local college campus, is a public facility. But there are a lot of other options in our area.

Ricky Nelson Remembered show

2009-04-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

We keep thinking that we are going to slow down but that doesn't seem to happen. I was lucky enough to win two tickets to a show that we attended last Friday night at our local Skagit Valley Casino called "Ricky Nelson Remembered." It featured his twin sons, Gunnar and Matthew Nelson who have had more than one top ten hits on their own but in this show they were mostly playing the music of their Dad, a singer that I have very fond memories of both as a singer and for his role of a kid in his parent's TV show, "The Ozzie and Harriet Show." Ozzie was a band leader, Harriet was a singer in the band, and they also had at least one number one song during their performing years, so these sons represent the third consecutive generation in the Nelson family to have number one hits. I was lucky enough to win these tickets on our local oldies radio station, KBRC but I'd have gladly paid to attend. It was good.

This is the slide that was displayed on the large screen on the stage when we entered the Pacific Showroom at the Skagit. The show used this screen to display various slides and video clips during the show of various things in Ricky's life.

Gunnar at the left side, Matthew at the right, with an image of their father Ricky displayed behind them on that large screen. Gunnar originally was a drummer, as was Ricky, but he has since taken up the guitar which he played that night.

For at least this show the Nelsons (the name of their own band) performed with a group known as the Stone Canyon Band, the name of Ricky's band. Here they are with, from left to right, the lead guitar player, the drummer at the rear of the stage, Gunnar, Matthew and at the far right, the keyboardist. I am sorry that I don't have the names of the band members.

Gunnar playing and singing, with his eyes closed just as Ricky often did. The boys don't sound exactly as Ricky did but it is pretty close.

Matthew playing and singing. I think this is a bass guitar.

At the left is the lead guitarist, who has been with the Nelsons for a long time. Next is Gunnar and Matthew at the right. You can just see the drummer above the cymbal at the rear of the stage.

I liked it when the two boys sung together but they didn't stay in this position very long. They did this maybe half a dozen times but I think I only got two good photos. Here is one of them.

And here is the other one.

It was a bit of a challenge to get the skin tones close to correct. They used a lot of both red and blue lights onstage and neither of those light colors leads to good skin color, as far as I am concerned. The corrections are not perfect but they look better than they did uncorrected. Anyway, here is a last photo from near the end of the show of the two boys together. It was a show that I'd go to see again.

Here is a photo of the main part of the Skagit Valley Casino that I took as I was getting into our car. The multi-story hotel part is out of the photo at the left. This is a pretty big complex and quite striking, looking like a large castle. The freeway exit from I-5 that is closest to our house is #226 and this casino is just off the I-5 at exit 236 so I guess it is about 12 miles from our house. We are not late night people and my free tickets were to the second show that didn't start until 21:30 and we didn't get home until after midnight. But it was good and exciting enough that there was no problem staying awake. Here is another show that if you have the chance to see, especially if you are old enough like us to remember Ricky Nelson, Do It!

"Drop Dead!"- the RiverBelle Theater play

2009-04-07T08:17:00.001-07:00

We have been busy. I've posted photos before that were taken at productions put on by the RiverBelle Dinner Theater here in Mount Vernon. We have had reservations for over a month to attend the current production there, a murder comedy called, "Drop Dead!" and we did that last Friday night, along with neighbors, D & B. It was our fourth play to see there and their first. While all of them have been good, they do seem to be getting better and better. Needless to say, we all enjoyed this one very much and are looking forward to seeing many more there. It sure doesn't hurt that the theater is less than two miles from home.

Here is the cover of the program. It had a couple of actors that we have seen before in other productions here and the director played a major part in filling a couple of roles. Plus he is the real life husband of the actress who played the sister/daughter, Mona.

This photo shows the brother/son, the director, the new wife of the brother and the stage hand. The play has two acts with a short intermission between them and occurs all in the one setting. The story line has the first half occurring during the final dress rehearsal the night before the opening night and the second half during the opening night.

Quite a few times during the production the brother goes offstage into the "blue light" and usually comments about the snow. I wasn't sure how the photos taken there would come out but they actually did pretty well.

The story line has this rather odd family coming together at the home of the parents after the father has been found dead in the library. This photo has the sister/daughter and the new wife of the brother, who it turns out is his 13th. The others have all died.

The butler is at the left, then the Mother who is 93 years old. The actress is supposedly both hard of hearing and very forgetful of her lines.

Remember, this is during the rehearsal half so we often have others on the stage. At the left is the author of the screen play who is upset at the way it is being presented and at the right is the one financing the play who also happens to be the father of the actress playing the new young wife. He is also a bit unhappy about some of the goings on that are happening- more later.

Once the young wife learned about her husband's marriage history, she seemed to be more interested in the butler than the original husband. Here she has lost her dress. I never fully understood the face painting on the butler, but it is different.

Again, remember this is the rehearsal half. Here the stage hand, who is a little different, is getting consoled by the director while the sister looks on wondering what is going on.

I like this young lady. She has appeared in four productions at RiverBelle and we have had the privilege of seeing three of them. She plays her roles very well.

Now the young wife and the butler have been getting a bit frisky and Daddy, the financier of the production, is getting upset. We also have the ace detective who is here to investigate the murder of the Father onstage.

The sister/daughter and the new wife have a bit of a battle. This is the second time through this scene as the first bottle, a sugar based one, broke rather unbelievably when she smacked it on the head of the sister. I don't think going to a fight with a bottle against a gun is a good thing, but neither of them gets hurt.

We are now into the second half after the intermission. This is during the first performance for live audiences. The Director came up with the idea of putting a ear receiver on the Mother so she can be given her lines from offstage and he sent the stage hand off to buy one. He came up with this rather large headphone set, and it really doesn't work all that well. Especially when the Mother starts repeating off-stage comments that are not her lines but she is hearing.

In order to make the role of the Mother work better, the Director dresses himself up in a like outfit and comes onto the stage to play the role. Now we often have two Mother's onstage at once which gets interesting. You also notice the new look of the butler. It seems the financier thought he should be a French Butler, so this is the look he adopted for the second half. Interesting.

We finally find out who has been killing all of the people- yes there are more than just the Father. It seems the stage hand is the culprit and here he is trying to make his escape while using the young wife as a hostage. He eventually gets captured and it ends well.

I haven't done a very good job of describing the story line and part of that is because I am not sure I fully understand the story line. But that may be a part of the idea- it is kind of a murder mystery farce. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and we are really looking forward to the next production there. I think our neighbors will also try to attend along with us. You don't have to go to the big city to enjoy good live productions. Look around your local community- you'll no doubt find a lot of things that are well worth your support. Go for it!

Another birthday

2009-03-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday Pat and I drove south to Auburn to attend a birthday party to celebrate the 12th birthday of my oldest granddaughter, K. I can't believe that she is almost a teenager already. She was born while my older son was on his first deployment in his Navy career so she was about three and a half months old when he first was able to hold her. The Navy lets those sailors who's wives have delivered babies while they were deployed be the first off the ship, and B was about the second of the bunch of a dozen or so.

K is now 12 and I guess that makes her kind of still a kid but not yet quite a teenager (I know teenagers all think they are adults but we know better.) I have no idea what a girl of that age wants in the way of birthday presents so I took the easy way out and got her a gift certificate for a store where I know she likes to shop. She did get quite a few gifts and I think mine was the only gift certificate, but much of the rest of the family lives closer so were able to know more about what she would want. I did take a few photos-

Here's the birthday girl looking through a bag with a number of gifts inside. Yep, she is still enjoying this opening gifts thing.

This is the card from Pat and I. It is a funny one. She is still young enough that funny birthday cards work, but she is young enough that they are not "aren't you getting old" themed. It was fun picking it out.

She sat across the table from Pat and I for awhile and I got what I think is a pretty cute photo of her snuggled against the shoulder of her other Grandpa. When she was a small baby until when Annie & I moved to Mount Vernon, K would spend most Saturday nights with us and go to sleep on my lap in my recliner chair. She was so cute and sweet then. She is still cute and sweet, but not small enough to go to sleep sitting on Grandpa's lap in a recliner. One more year and she will be a teenager.

I guess wonderful memories like that is a part of the fun side of growing older.

Well, I did it, BUT got Smart

2009-03-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

Last Friday my son, M, and I drove down to the big city of Bellevue to see and drive an electric car known as a Zap Xebra. It is a 3-wheeled vehicle, carries four passengers and under Federal definition is a motorcycle because of it's 3-wheeled configuration. It was interesting and sure gets a lot of looks as you are driving around but I was afraid of a couple of things. With its Federal motorcycle category, I could find it defined that way here, too, and if that were the case I would have add a motorcycle endorsement to my drivers license in order to drive it and other people would not be able to drive it who didn't have that endorsement. That, plus a few other considerations caused me to decide not to get one.

BUT, the same company, The Green Car Co., has a few of the European versions of the Smart Car. This car was developed by Mercedes Benz and I understand that it very popular in Europe where you can buy one with either a gasoline or diesel engine. The car is sold here in the US but those imported here have an engine produced by the Japanese company, Mitsubishi. I don't know why, but it does not get the same mileage as the original version. There were about 3000 of these cars imported from Europe that are the actual Mercedes Benz powered ones and this company had four left. M & I drove one and I fell in love, at least as far as you can with a car, with it. It drives very nice, has plenty of room for two people and will even carry some luggage or other items behind the seats. And it will go a lot farther than the 25 miles the Xebra is rated to go on a battery charge and operate at speeds much higher, so that you can drive on freeways and other highways. That Wheego Whip electric car I posted about earlier is built on a Chinese version of this car.

So, we started talking about me getting a Smart Car. I guess SMART is sort of an acronym where the S stands for Swatch, the watch people and the M for Mercedes Benz. The car is very customizable with different color panels and many accessories, kind of like a Swatch watch. I added a few of the accessories but actually like the "standard" Mercedes Benz silver/gray color best so stayed with it. I did add rubber floor mats of course (I live in an area where it has been known to rain) and couldn't get one without the double cup holders to have a place to put a mocha. Then I like having a tachometer so you know how fast the engine is turning over and that also comes with a matching analog clock, so I added that. The roof is clear so sunshine comes through and I thought the sliding sunshade would be needed on those days in the summer when our sun does shine, or if we take it into Eastern Washington where the summer sun shines a lot. The stock oil pan doesn't have a drain plug so the old oil has to be sucked out of the dip stick hole. They now have a replacement oil pan with a drain, so that will go onto the car when it gets it's first oil change.

Here is my car, sitting in our driveway. It is just over 8 feet long and not quite 5 feet wide. As I said, the seating is very comfortable for two. You sit up fairly high rather than dropping down low like both the Miata and Saturn, so I think Pat will like it better.

Here's a straight on front end view. Some have told me that it looks kind of like a smiley face. I have never had a car with this kind of headlights but they seem okay. I haven't driven the car yet after dark- I forgot to bring my gate & garage door openers from the Saturn so will have to wait for them to come from the dealer via mail, hopefully tomorrow. Right now with Daylight Savings Time it doesn't get dark here until well after 19:00 and our gated community closes it's gates at 18:00. After that you need the clicker.

This three quarter rear view shows how close the rear wheels are to the back of the car. It's engine is in the rear and drives these wheels through a Tiptronic 6-speed transmission that can be manually shifted or let run in full automatic mode. There is no clutch even when manually shifting- it is just like those used in European race cars. The glass part of the rear hatch hinges up and the solid part hinges down. I think I will be able to carry my RC airplane with that upper part open so it can stick out a little. I haven't tried that yet.

A closer view of the labels on the rear of the car.

You are looking inside through the driver's door. The seats are cloth- leather is available but I really prefer cloth. I've still got a lot to learn about the controls, etc. This morning I got the rear windshield wiper going, making a swipe every 11 seconds or so, and had a hard time figuring out how to turn it off! It was easy once I discovered the answer and I suppose this car with it's blunt rear end will get that window pretty dirty so having the washer and wiper will be handy. Now I'll have to find out where I fill that fluid in that rear washer.

A closer view of the dash board. The tach and clock show up well. The radio is a Sony AM/FM with a CD player and it plays MP3 files. There is also an input on the front of the radio for axillary devices and the sound is pretty good. I was out with it this morning, filled the fuel tank and since it was only about 35 degrees F I got to test the heater & defroster. I'm glad to report that they both work well. It also has air conditioning which we sometimes use here more to de-humidify the air in the car during our rainy season than we actually do to cool it in the summer. Since it doesn't get above 80 degrees here very often, we do not have a big need for AC systems.

This photo was not taken in my car but it is the same. The engine is small and located in the rear of the car under the floor of the storage area where it drives the rear wheels. It looks to me like things are pretty well crammed in there but that seems to be the way many cars are built these days. The designers don't seem to really think much about those having to work on them.

This photo was one taken Friday and of a different car but they all come with this medallion on each side and the only difference is the different VIN number on each one. This tells a bit about the car. Like I said earlier, I don't know why these versions are not the ones imported by Mercedes Benz but I am glad that I was able to find an original. It had 8 miles on it when I bought it but is now getting close to 100.

I will miss my Saturn. It was our tow vehicle to take along behind the motorhome. Now we need to buy a car carrier trailer that we can drive the front wheels of the VW Bug up onto and will take that car when we travel. This one would have to be put fully up onto a trailer to take it along. Anyone want to buy an aluminum tow bar and a toad brake system?

Update: I have learned that there are only about 1065 of these European Smart Cars that were imported and of those, 750 are the Passion Coupe, like mine. I thought I had read somewhere that there were about 3000 but that is not true. The one officially imported now by Roger Penske is quite a bit less expensive but there is also a long waiting list to get one. And it doesn't get as good of mileage, at least partially because of its larger engine.

I haven't had the car yet quite two weeks and it has 199 miles as of tonight. I love it.

I may buy one of these!

2009-03-09T19:42:00.001-07:00

I've been toying with the idea of buying what is called a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV), an electric car with a legal top speed, in my state, of 35mph. Why you ask would I want something like that? Well, think about most of the trips you make with with a car, or at least those that I make, with my car. I don't usually go on roads with a speed limit over 35, although I do sometimes hop onto the freeway to avoid more concentrated traffic areas. Most of my trips are not over 12 or 14 miles, round trip. Short trips like these are hard on fuel powered vehicles and our VW is diesel powered so they are probably even harder on it. Last summer the price of diesel fuel here got to $4.999 per gallon although it is down now, just as gasoline is but I don't think that will last long. A car that costs pennies to charge the batteries sounds good. And it is good for the environment, at least here, where most of our electric power is generated by water power so there is no coal burned to make that juice.

Anyway, I started this out thinking about a Zap Xebra. Some friends who live in the Eugene, OR area have one and Deb says that she loves it. But, it is a 3-wheeled vehicle so is legally considered to be a motorcycle. I'd have to get a special motorcycle license and then add a trike endorsement, just to drive it, and almost no one else would be able to do so. Legally. I continued looking and found one called the Zenn, which I guess stands for Zero Emissions, No Noise. It is a two seat car but does have 4 wheels, so is considered a car. It is based on a small French made car that over there is gasoline powered. The body is shipped to Canada where it is set up with it's electric package. It looks pretty good but I did talk with a gal in Anacortes who owns one and she isn't too happy about the life of the batteries nor the help with her problems she has been getting from the manufacturer nor the dealer in Seattle. I have continued to look.

Yesterday, I found this (these photos were downloaded from the Wheego web site):

It is called the Wheego Whip and is from a company in Atlanta, GA. The body is made in China and shipped to California where the electric package is installed. They have a few on the road now and will start shipping them to customers in May. The price is about the same as the Zenn and unfortunately the dealer in Seattle is the same one, but hopefully the factory will be more supportive. I've exchanged email with them and they seem to respond quickly. Maybe that would continue after one buys a car from them.

Here is a photo of the interior. It is a two seater but they do look to be comfortable. There is a choice of outside color but all of the interiors are the same.

The instrument cluster is a bit different. The speedometer only goes to 40 but that is okay with a car that isn't supposed to be driven over 35 and most states limit them to 25. The other two gauges relate to the battery power and how much power you are using. The car does have an AM/FM radio with a CD player & a USB connection for MP3 files. It has most of the things you'd expect in a regular car like power doors with remote access, power windows, power adjusted outside mirrors. A/C is available but I would not need it living where I do but I will use the heater/defroster and the windshield wiper. The back opens up like a station wagon and there is a pretty good amount of storage space there which is over the batteries. So it is very practical for runs to the store, over for a mocha, etc. Almost everything you would do with a regular car but not to the gas station. It has AGM batteries and they say its range is about 40 miles although it will probably make 50, but all that depends on how you drive it, how many hills there and what the outside temperature is. Batteries don't work as well when it is cold as they do when they are warmer.

Here in this final photo you can see the "gas cap" door. The battery charger is built in and the extension cord plugs in here.

I have also found one called a BG that looks good, so I need to learn more about it.

If I buy one I will probably go ahead and sell my Saturn along with it's towing system and the brake system I use when pulling it with the RV. Then I'll need a toter trailer that I can drive the front wheels of either this car or our VW New Beetle to take along on RV trips. I will also have to start locating places where I can plug in to recharge while eating meals in restaurants, etc. Kind of a new way of thinking about getting around, but it sounds like fun and if fuel prices go back up to the $5 a gallon range, one that will be much easier to afford. Anyone want a low mileage clean 2000 Saturn SL1 that is all setup to tow behind a motorhome?

Friday night free entertainment!

2009-02-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

Last night Pat and I went to the local Senior Center after dinner to watch and listen to a jam session by the Washington (State) Old Time Fiddlers local branch. They do this twice a month here, on the 2nd and 4th Friday, although the 2nd Friday one is shorter in the music department as they also hold a business meeting first. This is kind of a practice session for them and they never know who all will show up to play, nor how many there will be in the audience. It was the second time for Pat and I and we've really enjoyed them both times.

I have a cousin in Sacramento, CA who plays a fiddle in a Blue Grass group. Ann & I were visiting them there over the 4th of July in 1995 when he hosted a bunch of musicians at a party at his home and we were part of it. Neither of us had ever followed that genre of music but we both enjoyed it and I find that Pat also enjoys Blue Grass. One of the guys that I walk with here in our park had told me about this group and we finally remembered to go listen to them last month. This month we had it on our schedule. There is a big week long show of Blue Grass music in a rural town not far from us and we could take the RV. Maybe.

They never know how many musicians will be there nor which ones it will be, and the same with the audience. It is a drop in kind of thing for both and goes from about 18:30 to 21:00 hours. Of course I have a few photos that I took and will post them here:

Here are a few of the musicians and some of the audience. A large van that arrived from one of the local retirement centers brought a small bus load of their residents which swelled the attendance. I guess they are fairly regular attendees but were not there in January. Pat & I arrived early enough that we were seated in the third row but to the right of those in this photo.

There are quite a few instruments represented. This photo shows a fiddle, harmonica and guitar- there were many of each but there are also some unusual things. One guy plays a washboard. Another plays a saw. With a violin bow (photo later.) A gal plays a little horse that she taps on a small wooden plank she sits on and it provides rhythm. Last month a guy had a galvanized steel wash tub that was upside down and had a single string attached to it's center that went to the top of a stick he held. It was plucked and gave rhythm. He seemed to be able to change it's sound by how much he pulled on the stick, making the string tighter or looser. There is a piano for certain songs. The daughter of this fiddle player in this photo also plays a fiddle, very well, but I understand that she cannot read music. Just hears something, then she can play it herself.

This bass player was here this time but not in January. He stayed in one place as the bass would have been kind of hard to move around and I had a hard time getting a clear photo of him without someone from the audience or another musician getting between us. But this one came out pretty well.

Here is a photo of some of the other musicians, including the saw player, sitting on the right. He also plays string instruments like a banjo and guitar. The washboard player is the guy in the cowboy hat sitting behind the guitar player in the center of the photo.

Here's a closer view of the saw player. It provided a rather weird sound but it fit well with the other music. And he could actually carry a melody with it. It wasn't real loud so they had a microphone placed pretty close to it. I've heard of people playing a saw but this is the first time that I can remember actually seeing & hearing one played.

We will plan to go to these jam sessions on a pretty regular basis. I may even try using my camcorder to see if I can get something on tape along with the music. It is fun and the price is sure right. Free.

Greater Tuna

2009-02-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

Yep, that is the name of the play we saw last Friday night at the local River Belle dinner theater. Greater Tuna. Tuna is a town in Texas with a population of something like 250. Here is the cover of the program:

This is our third play to see there and it was very good. We are already planning to go to the next one called Drop Dead, Mar 20th to April 25th. They are presented only on Friday and Saturday nights. Our neighbors are going to go to this next one with us.
Greater Tuna has only two actors who each play about ten different parts. Here is an early scene with the two starting out as newscasters on the local 225 watt radio station. They get about ten minutes into the news presentation when someone comes in to tell them they forgot to turn the main power switch on so they have not been broadcasting. See the main switch on the wall, set to "off"?

I can't remember all of the characters names but I think this guy is the local Humane Society guy. He appears quite a bit during the play.

This "lady" is the mother of a boy and twins, another boy and a girl. Most of the story kind of one way or another winds around these people.

Here the Mother is with her daughter who is distraught over finding out that she has been turned down to be a cheer leader. Again. And it is her senior year so this is the last chance. And she has been turned down six other times before. Her twin brother is upset with her because she keeps trying to get into his jeans and splitting the seams on them as she is too big to fit.

The Mother is being interviewed by a big city reporter for information about her committee that is trying to get certain books removed from the school libraries. Like the dictionary. It has some bad words in it, you know.

Here the Mother is making a point to the interviewer. I just managed to catch a view of her between the silhouettes of two others in the audience who were in front of us.

Both characters were expressive but this one was amazing in the looks he/she could get. I can't remember for sure just what this phone call was about but you would hear both sides of them as the other phone was on the other side of the stage.

The Mother and another lady have gone to the funeral parlor to view the body of the Judge who died recently. He was quite a bad fellow it seems and they went mainly because they wanted to see him before his journey down to Hell was to begin.

The Daughter in rare form.

I think this fellow is the Father. We didn't see him much, twice and both times with his fiddle. He really can't play the fiddle. But he thinks that he can.

The Reverend of the local church who is behind the ladies committee to ban all of the bad books, along with the Chairwoman of the committee. Quite the talker and of course he has a very high opinion of himself.

The local Sheriff along with the older brother. The Judge had sent the older brother off to reform school in his youth for some pretty minor thing. Now later in the Judge's life, the older brother manages to inject some air bubbles into his blood system which is probably the reason he died. But no one except the older brother knows that.

The younger brother. He is worried because his friend who is with the Humane Society has talked him into taking another dog, "Yippee." Yippee is so named because he barks all of the time. And the younger brother, who loves dogs, already has a herd of ten. Now eleven. Mother won't be happy.

The two actors taking their final bows at the end of the play. I've done a very poor job here of trying to explain the play. There is a lot going on but it was very good to watch. Those actors were amazing. They played so many roles but never mixed up any lines. If you get the chance to go see Greater Tuna, do it.

Sam, the Koala

2009-02-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

I have been exchanging email with Meow, a blogger friend from Melbourne, Australia, about the terrible fires they are having near there. This morning our local newspaper had a photo of a fire fighter there named David Tree who was sharing water from a bottle with a small Koala bear he found in some of the burned out areas. Meow sent me some other photos of other Koala's and a link to a U-Tube clip (5 min 42 sec) from a New Zealand TV station where they show a part of the clip of David and the Koala, who has been named Sam but then turned out to be female so I guess she is Samantha, and an interview the news anchor did with the firefighter. It is fascinating and well worth looking at. Here is a link to that clip on U-Tube.

Meow's blog is linked on my Blogroll, the one at the bottom, but she hasn't been keeping it up very faithfully, I guess she's been more active on Facebook than here.

Will Blogrolling come back?

2009-02-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

I guess I have been tardy at updating things on my blog. Today I decided it was time to update some addresses that I have in my Blogroll, so tried to log onto their site. It seems they have taken it offline to change to a newer version and it sounds like it has been that way for a couple of months or longer. I don't know when or if it will come back, nor if it will be as a free service as in the past. Perhaps it is time for me to move to something different.

So, I am asking other Bloggers what are you using to list your contacts on your blog, in a form that allows those reading your blog to click on the listings and be taken there? I use Blogger so it does need to work there as I really don't want to try to change to another system at this point. Any suggestions?

50 years ago today

2009-02-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

50 years ago I was 15 years old and a fan of the new "Rock 'N Roll" music. One of my favorites was Buddy Holly, a guy only seven years older than me but already becoming famous in the music world, or at least in my music world. There isn't much about death that comes home to roost when you are 15, but that day one of those rare things happened. Very early that morning Buddy Holly, along with two other budding Rock 'N Rollers, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, along with the 21 year old pilot of their chartered airplane, were killed when that plane crashed in an Iowa corn field just after takeoff. A few years later singer Don McLean released a song called, "American Pie," in which he came up with the phrase, "the day the music died." This was in reference to that plane crash and the deaths of these three early Rock 'N Rollers.

Much has been written over the years about these deaths and the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa where the last performance of these three occurred the evening of February 2nd. There was a large get together with some famous people last night to remember these three. I've done some looking online today and one of the nicest remembrances that I've found is in the Des Moines Register newspaper. It is a video that has been setup to play online and takes about 8 minutes and then there is a lot of other material there on their site to view, if interested. As long as you have a broad band connection, go check this video. It is great.

Installing Vista seems to have worked

2009-01-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

The UPS delivery guy really surprised us by arriving at 18:45 hours last Wednesday night to deliver my package with Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate inside. It took two tries but I did get it installed on my desktop machine and it is working fine. Of course I have a lot to learn as it is different from XP. I have had Vista Home Premium on my laptop but haven't done very much with it in the past. This time I have had to get some new drivers (I never printed from the laptop so didn't need new printer drivers) and even the sound system driver that came on the CD supplied with my computer, that I just bought in mid-November, would not work. But the computer manufacturer did have what I needed online to download and it did the trick.

I have reinstalled quite a few of my programs and did have the data files backed up to both the internal D drive (two internal hard drives) and an external hard drive. About the only thing that is really going to take some time is getting Photoshop Elements Organizer up and running. I decided that there was a better way to organize my photo files on the hard drive so made those changes during this move. I didn't even try to reinstall one of the backups of my old albums as I'd have to go through all of the photos and reconnect them to the data files. I think it will be easier to just start over and re-enter all of them, then redo the tags and comments. But it will be quite a chore as I think there is something over 5000 photos and that is just in the album I made up since I've met Pat. The older one I may just reuse as I haven't changed many if any of those locations in the hierarchy of my hard disk.

We have been doing a few things in addition to working on resurrecting my computer. Yesterday we went to a before noon ($5 admission fee) showing of the movie, "Frost/Nixon." It is one that we've been waiting for and yesterday was it's first day in our town. It is good and that makes the second good movie we have seen recently in the theater, the other being Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino."

A couple of times a month some of the area musicians from the Washington Old Time Fiddler's Association meet at the Mount Vernon Senior Center, on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month, in the evening to jam. It is open to the public. This is something I've wanted to go see for quite awhile and we finally made it and will go back as these are fun.

Summer has not yet come to northwest Washington State. Not even Spring! Our forecast for tomorrow shows a high temp of only 32! I don't even want to think about the low, but it's in the lower 20s range. Then, if it is an accurate forecast, come Tuesday it will start warming up and probably get wet again, but we should be back to more normal temps. A week from tomorrow we are into February and then flowers should start blooming. It has to warm up for that to happen, doesn't it?

Computers - a Love/Hate relationship

2009-01-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

My new camcorder arrived last Friday and I got its battery charged and actually took a short clip that evening in the living room at home. Boy, is it small in size. Then I wanted to see what it would look like in my new video editing software, Adobe Premiere Elements 7. I took my new software package to the computer room to install it on my desktop PC Saturday morning. That started out well but I soon noticed that it was trying over and over again (it tried 4 or 5 times) to set some value to a system program called .NET Framework. It then failed to install.

Let me back up a bit. Last November I bought a new desktop computer. I have not been a fan of the operating system Windows Vista (I have it on my laptop but haven't used it much) so I paid an extra $100 to get the new machine with Windows XP installed. It also came with a program that I wasn't familiar with called Move and a cable from LapLink, a company I've heard of that I think is primarily involved in designing & selling software/hardware systems that allow a user to keep his or her desktop computer and laptop in sync with each other as far as data used by the same program on each machine. But Move was supposed to move programs and data from the old PC to the new PC. Sounds good as anyone who has gone through the problem of getting a new machine all setup with the programs & data from the old one will know. I decided to try it.

Well, it worked, sort of, but after taking about ten hours to move my "stuff" I found that it all didn't move very well. Some programs and drivers wouldn't work so I ended up having to uninstall & reinstall many of them. At least I still had the data on the old machine. But there was one thing that balked and gave me the message that it had a conflict with a program called .NET Framework. It suggested that I uninstall .NET Framework, so I did, and then my old program worked fine.

I soon discovered that every time I turned the PC off my Auto Update tried to install two updates to, you guessed it, .NET Framework! I tried to reinstall that from the XP disk that came with the new computer but by then XP had updated itself from the Internet and I got the message that I was trying to install an older version to a newer one, so it didn't work. I tried to download the newer one online from Microsoft but their newest version failed to install. This was mainly just an irritant to me, something that slowed down turning my machine off. Until last Saturday when I tried to install Premiere Elements.

So, what to do. I tried a number of things, including the rescue disk that I made that didn't work, either. I even got out an old never before installed full copy of Windows XP that I tried to install, figuring that I'd have to setup all of my programs again and wait through many updates to the OS, but nothing worked. And then finally I got the infamous "blue screen," after which nothing worked. I couldn't boot up into Windows. The machine just wouldn't do anything.

Since then I have ordered a full copy of Windows Vista that is due to arrive tomorrow and I will again, with it, try to boot the machine from a DVD drive. Then I think I'll reformat my C drive, install the operating system and have to start over setting up all of my programs. At least I do have all of the needed data on both of two hard drives in addition to the C drive that will be wiped out by reformatting. I hope I can remember all of the passwords that the machine "knew" so that I didn't have to remember them!

Am I a happy camper (computer user)? No. I paid extra money for this machine to get it with XP, whereas I could have bought it for less with Vista in the first place. And now I am paying out more money to buy a full (I can't just use an upgrade version) copy of Vista. The good news is that all the programs I use plus any new ones that I will be buying in the future should work fine on Vista. I even have a couple of old DOS programs that I wrote and compiled that work on this laptop under Vista. Both my brother who is retired now but was a computer systems manager for our State and a good friend who is a Microsoft retiree have said that the bugs and problems with Vista have been worked out and it is now a stable platform. It is a little different from XP in appearence but I've learned that from using this laptop which came with Vista. I know that I will learn it and I guess I'll be better prepared for the future by having it on my machine. Maybe by the end of this week I'll be able to install and use Adobe Premiere Elements 7.

But it still bugs me.

Weather, Mexican Train and digital video

2009-01-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

Huh? How do these three different things relate to me? Well, let me tell you. Our weather warmed up, a lot, and we got a lot of rainfall over the last week. Enough that along with the snow we had on the ground when all of this started, we had flooding around the whole western part of the state. One recording station down on the Pacific Coast has recorded over 20 inches of rain since the first of the year. That rainfall, plus the melting of two feet or so of snow, caused the ground to be super saturated to the point that it couldn't absorb more water. So, the small creeks and streams swelled way over their banks and we had flooding in places where it had never before flooded. Our main river (the Skagit) came close but the dams upriver were able to hold back the worst of it so that it barely reached flood stage, which put some water into some fields and over a few roads but there was not much damage in our immediate area. From it. But other areas and other rivers were not so lucky.

But the damage from smaller streams and super saturated hillsides sliding down has brought a lot of problems to many people. A twenty mile section of Interstate 5 about halfway between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, the main north/south highway on the west coast, was closed for over two days. All of the mountain passes through the Cascade Mountains were closed to both truck and rail traffic. They are now as of this afternoon finally open but the cost due to delays in moving freight was considerable. The forecast calls for more rain this weekend but at normal winter amounts, then a week or more of sunshine and dry weather. We need it.

On to Mexican Train. I wrote my last post a week ago, just before we played our weekly game of dominoes called Mexican Train. Everyone antes up a dollar. The challenge is to accumulate as few points as possible, playing from the 12 spot dominoes down to the blanks. A game takes two to two & a half hours. The winner gets all of the dollars except for one, which goes out as a booby prize to the person who gets the most points. Last week, I won one of those, Pat won the other. I won't say who was the big winner and who the big looser, but we did keep it in the family and the proceeds will finance our playing for three more weeks. One of which was last night, when neither of us won anything. Bummer.

Now digital video. I expect all of us have had some experience with video taping things. I've had a couple of camcorders, the most recent one a VHS-C unit we bought ten years ago just before a trip to Hawaii. I've always wanted to go to a digital camcorder but was never willing to spend the money on one. Well, I just did. I ordered one last night from Amazon.com and it should be here early next week. Boy, do I have a lot to learn as photography with these things is a LOT different from digital still photography. I've got six books on order (two are here) on digital photography and my editing software of choice, Adobe Premiere Elements 7, which I picked up today.

I did a lot of looking at various cameras and "talked" (mostly via email) with quite a few people. I wasn't going to put out the $3000 - $5000 for a professional camera system and I decided against even going for an HD system. I don't know how much I'll use it so will just start with a standard definition system that will do a good job with wide screen images. My other systems have been Panasonic brand and that is what I stayed with this time, a Panasonic SDR-H60 hybrid camera. It is hybrid in that it has a built in 60GB hard drive but it also takes SDHC memory cards that it will save your data to. Either the hard disk or the memory cards. The camera has a 50X zoom lens so it covers an extremely wide range of focal lengths and it has what is probably about the best vibration reduction system built in which is important to help keep those very long telephoto views stationary. Just the slight shaking in your hands as you hold the camera (if it isn't on a tripod) can make those long shots look odd as the camera moves around. If you are interested in it, Google that model and take a look.

Now I have a lot to learn about a different area of photography and to start thinking of "stories" I might want to make up videos on. I wonder, how I can get one of me flying my airplane?

Happy New Year!

2009-01-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

I would like to wish everyone a Happy 2009. 2008 wasn't too bad a year for us although our meager investments in the stock & bond market became more meager, but overall it was not a bad year. However I think this year is dawning with more promise and hope than I've seen in a long time and that seems to be from many different people.

We are still having winter weather but I guess that isn't too surprising considering that today is only January 2nd. We woke up this morning to a light dusting of snow but it wasn't enough that it kept me from going on the three day a week mens walk from our park to the hospital, where a group of us meet for coffee. The sun did come out although I don't think the temp got much above freezing unless you were directly in that sunlight. Pat & I took advantage of no rain to take out outside holiday lights down and get them packaged away for another year. Maybe tomorrow we will tackle the Christmas tree. We use real trees and after a couple of weeks they become too dry to safely leave up. Otherwise I'd be tempted to leave it up all year as I do enjoy them.

Our bad weather for two and a half weeks has caused some problems with deliveries. It is kind of amazing but the US Post Office did manage to come around every day and deliver the mail, but UPS and FedEx were nowhere to be found for a couple of weeks. I had ordered an upgrade of Adobe Acrobat that was supposed to have been here Dec 19th, delivered by FedEx. It finally came on the 29th. I'm sure glad that I didn't pay any extra for expedited delivery service! I guess that shows who is more dedicated to doing their jobs.

Since last night, our normal Mexican Train game night, was a holiday the game was postponed to tonight. That happened last week too but then it was canceled due to the snow & ice. Won't be a problem tonight, so at 18:15 we'll go over and again try our luck. Mexican Train is played with dominoes for those who are not familiar with the game. In honor of Mexican Train, we are going out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. See how that works?

Warm sunlight, cold snow

2008-12-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

Pat noticed the way the very warm setting sun was kissing the trees to the east of our park with light yesterday afternoon, and called me to come see. I tried taking a few photos of the scene and will post three of them here. The sunlight looks warm but the temperature was right about freezing level so the warmth is just an illusion.

This first photo is what Pat noticed while wrapping gifts at our kitchen table, looking to the east. The house is our neighbors across the street, the trees are on the hill behind our park up where the condominiums are located near the golf course. I doubt there is much golf being played now- we have something like 16 inches of snow.

This is Little Mountain, just to the south of our park. It is a telephoto shot so the distances have been compressed- it is not really this close. If you look carefully you can see the RVs that are on the storage lot in the right lower corner of the photo. Ours is one of those lumps of snow.

Here is the view to the north with the foothills in the distance. The poplar trees are bare of leaves but their branches are dense enough that they reflect this very warm sunlight. The snow on the evergreens almost looks warm. It isn't.

The light you find from just before sunrise to an hour or so after and in the hour before sunset to just after is almost magic. The challenge with a camera is trying to keep that magic in the light. I think it will be a lifelong learning experience for me but I do enjoy it. I just wish this snow would go away and we'd get back to our more normal weather pattern!

Christmas lighting and Snow

2008-12-18T20:02:00.000-08:00

Winter came to us this week. Over the last weekend we got about four inches of snow which isn't too bad, but then it turned cold and we had a couple of days when the temperature didn't get above freezing. The roads got cleared fairly well as the humidity was down and the city did get sand out. I had our driveway and sidewalk cleared and it was in good shape. Up to when we went to bed Tuesday night.

Then Tuesday evening it started snowing again. Hard. It kept it up until about 16:00 today at which point we had over a foot of snow. That is very unusual for our area as we normally have none over an average winter. Now our friends in Canada are sending another mass of very cold air south so it will clear up and be sunny but we'll have night temps in the teens and daily highs only up to the mid 20s for the next couple of days. On Sunday it is supposed to warm up a bit but then we will also get more snow.

Here is a photo of our house taken today about 17:00 just after I got home from getting my mocha at Starbucks (some things you just have to do, regardless of the weather.) I should have cleared the snow off the little snowmen, and the bush at the right side of the house has so much snow on it that many of the lights there do not show well in this photo, but you can see what was done by Mother Nature.

We just stayed home yesterday with me clearing the driveway and sidewalk about five times, only to have it fill back in with snow. We have something over a foot of the stuff now. I really don't like snow but we have a lot less than my brother who lives east of the mountains in Spokane. They set a new record for the amount of snow that fell in a 24-hour period, over 19 inches. They currently have more than two feet of the stuff and it has almost brought the city to a standstill. I guess things could be worse here!

Christmas parties and computers

2008-12-12T20:44:00.000-08:00

Every year our community holds a Christmas Party for the residents on the second Tuesday of December. This was the third one for Pat and I to attend together and she was one of the table hosts. I don't have a lot of photos to post but here are a couple taken this year:

This shows the room before the party started. It is held in what we call the Mirror Room. The decorations and table settings were beautiful. There is enough room for eight tables, each set for eight to be seated. The party committee members prepared turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy while the other foods were brought by those who attended in potluck style. There was plenty of food.

Here the tables are filled with happy people, eating a great meal. The table in the foreground is the one Pat hosted and if you look carefully you can almost see her in the lower right corner of the photo. It was a fun evening and I think everyone was home by 21:00, after cleaning up.

I've fallen a bit behind on posting here but we have been busy. I've got my new computer up and working- I'm using it now to write this. I love the machine- it is very fast, even at downloading files from the camera memory cards. It came with a program called PC Move that involved hooking a special cable between the two machines through their USB ports that transferred not only data but program code and the necessary registry information. I have had some struggles to get some of the programs working and still haven't tried my two flight simulators. It may turn out that I'll want to remove them and reinstall each in order to have them work right. I did order the machine with Windows XP as I am not fond of Vista after fighting with it on my newer laptop. I've made the jump from Microsoft Office XP (2002) to MS Office 2007. It is a lot different but so far hasn't been as much of a problem as I was afraid it would be. You know the idea of trying to teach an old guy new tricks. Well, the menus are different but so far, even with MS Word which has more changes than about any other of the programs, they seem to be pretty obvious. I'd say that there are definitely some things I like better about it. I almost have my other computer ready for Pat to move to it, probably will have that completed by the end of this weekend. Now to go wrap some more gift packages.

Kite flying from our ocean RV trip

2008-12-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

One of the things we did while at the ocean on our RV trip to Ocean Mist RV Resort at Ocean City, Washington last August was take our kites along and fly them. Here at home the winds seemed a bit fickle whenever we wanted to go kite flying but there is usually a steady breeze on the coast that comes off the ocean. The day these were taken was no exception.

Here is Pat flying my kite. Hers is a frog but my owl was up so I asked her to take its controls while I took some photos. This patch of grass is behind the RVs that were across the roadway from ours and between the RV park and the ocean itself. It was a great place for kites what with the steady wind, no trees nearby and plenty of open space.

A closer view of my kite. They are pretty inexpensive kites but actually fly pretty well when there is enough wind and it is fairly steady. I think she got them at Walmart for $5 each and that included the string. Pretty cheap fun!

My new computer that I ordered from Costco.com came last Wednesday. The monitor to go with it came a week sooner but it only came from California while the computer itself came from New Jersey. I ordered an extra 500GB hard drive and an extra DVD player/writer from Amazon.com and of course they came from different places and the HD didn't arrive until Monday this week. I only wanted to crack the case once so waited for both of them to arrive before installing either. I started setting it up on Friday, installed the two drives yesterday and finally got Microsoft Office 2007 installed last night and just today got Outlook setup with my addresses, past emails, etc. from the other machine. I have this new one sitting on a small RV table beside the other one but am about ready to swap the two machines. I'll put the other one on the laptop counter near Pat's computer to move her things to it, then put it in place on her computer desk. One of her daughters will take her old one home so all of them will be in use. I've now got enormous storage space with almost 2 terabytes of storage on hard disks, counting the external drives. What a change from 25 years ago when I first started playing with computers!

I am outraged over this!

2008-11-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I bought a DVD movie that I just watched. It is a documentary titled, "Who Killed The Electric Car?" from Sony Pictures. I had heard of the General Motors EV-1 cars but didn't know much about them. Now I know a bit more about the cars and about how they have been removed from the marketplace in 2001 and some of the maneuverings of various US car companies, oil companies and others in the industry of transportation to kill them.
Here is the cover of the DVD and I suggest that everyone should buy (mine was $9.99 at Fred Meyer) or rent this to watch:

These cars were affordable and with the later batteries they had a good range of miles that could be covered. It would appear that they were removed from the marketplace by GM because they didn't want people to be able to buy them. The petroleum industry seems to have also been against them as they used very little of their product, mostly only lubricants. And the large auto repair/maintenance industry was against them- no more oil filters, spark plugs, oil changes, etc. The dealers who did work on them (GMs Saturn dealers) said about all that they did to the EV-1 was to have them come in every 5000 miles to rotate the tires and fill the windshield washer fluid. Of course there would be wheel bearings to pack, tires and brake components to replace as they wear out, etc, but that would be pretty small amounts of work compared to other vehicles.

Our government was also a party to this. They did offer a tax incentive of up to $4000 for the purchase of electric/hybrid vehicles but much larger tax incentives, at least for businesses, on large SUV type vehicles.

These American car companies are now all close to failing. The government has already given them $25billion in tax payer money to help finance their "move" into smaller, more economical vehicles. They HAD them in the EV-1 and others from Ford! Now these same company executives are going, in their private jet aircraft, to Washington DC to beg for another $25billion in order to "save" their businesses. I am really beginning to think we would be better off if they all file for bankruptcy, restructure themselves and come back with new leadership and perhaps a different outlook on what they should be doing.

If you would like to see more on this subject (the EV-1 and electric cars) go to Who Killed The Electric Car to learn more about this film and Plug In America dot org to learn more about pure electric cars. It might also be time to contact your senators and representatives to express your opinion on this bail out.

Now I'll get off my soap box and go myself to explore those two web sites. And write my letters.