Blogging again

It has been quite a while since I last posted anything to my blog so I guess I might start posting here again.  It was a pretty good way to get things off my chest and document our adventures.

 

I have been working on a bookcase/closet project and I finished it today.  Karen is deep into the tax business so she’s gone all the time now.  I have no end of projects that need to be done, but that’s the way it is when you are a home owner I guess.  Here is a picture of the book case side, this used to be the door into our office.

Now we need to finish painting the office and then the walls will match.

Fishing at Shasta

Last week Dennis, Bob and I spent the week fishing down at Lake Shasta.  I stress the word FISHING because there was little catching going on.  We got rained on a couple of days which seems to be normal for us even though we tried to pick a time when it wasn’t going to rain.  There was one day early in the week that I actually got most of my heavy clothes off and got down to a t-shirt but it was short lived and never happened again the rest of the week. 

One day we stayed in until after 1:00 in the afternoon waiting for the rain to stop, which it finally did.  I didn’t catch a fish that day but both Bob and Dennis did. 

The last evening we were there I added up the number of fish we had caught during the week and to my surprise it really sucked.  I looked back through my fishing log and found a year when I had caught over 180 fish myself and this year I only got 29.  At least we did get some nice ones the day we ate them for dinner so that was good.

One thing about fishing, you just have to love being there and enjoy it for the outing and when fishing with friends enjoy the company and I did both of those.  Catching would have been a good thing too, but then I guess you can’t have everything, can you?

Nice day for a bike ride!

And after I got some chores done, that’s exactly what I did.

I went out Stampfli Lane and up North Arm. It is all flat ground so not much exertion necessary and it was just a lovely day, nice and warm. Things are starting to get real green and the willows are even starting to come out. There is water running just about everywhere and the mosquitos are probably loving it since they are out in numbers.

I found a few little wild flowers but the prettiest ones were growing in our yard. I just love that I have a yard where wild flowers grow naturally. The weather is not going to stay this nice but then who would expect it to in the spring anyway. Next week we are planning on going fishing down at Shasta. Karen has to stay and work but I’m going with Bob and Dennis. So far the weather looks like it will cooperate with us but you never know. We have had to sit in pouring rain under a tarp trying to stay dry on some of our past trips and none of us wants to do that anymore so we are hoping for the best next week… we’ll see.

Happy Spring!

Yeah, first day of spring and you couldn’t tell by the weather.  I have been taking pictures from my deck of the changing of the seasons.  I have a spot marked out so my camera is always pointing exactly the same direction and today was my vernal equinox picture.  As I found out when I looked back through my pictures, it looks very similar to my autumnal equinox picture taken 6 months ago.  It’s been a long winter, to be sure and we don’t see an end in sight yet.

 

Come on spring, we are waiting for you!

Wow! My internet service!

Frontier High Speed Internet!

Winter’s back!

As well it should be this time of year.  Normally if we get weather like we have had this past week I just like to stay home and keep the wood stove stoked up but when your wife works in Quincy, about 20 miles away, you can’t just hole up and stay put.  Last night on the way back from picking her up in Quincy we got stopped when a big rig jack knifed and blocked the road.  We were there for a little over an hour and a half and the snow was just dumping the whole time.  They finally opened the road again and we got home around 9:00 after leaving Quincy a little after 6:00.  Driving conditions were what I like to describe as horrendous and if I didn’t have to be there you couldn’t have made me go no matter what.  So much for my vow to never drive anywhere when the road conditions are that bad.

This morning I went out and took a couple of pictures in the yard so you can see how much it snowed here in the last few days.

We are supposed to have a break today into Monday and Tuesday and then next week about Thursday it’s supposed to come again with a chance of snow even down into the Sacramento Valley.  By that time all of this will be gone and we will be ready for the next batch.  I’m not gonna drive in it!  Yeah, Right!

Coriolis effect

Somewhere in my past training I remember hearing that tree growth is affected by the turning of the earth in what is called the coriolis effect.  My spell checker says it is spelled wrong but I don’t think it is.  If you do a Google search for it you’ll find that it indeed spelled correctly.  Anyway, the other day I was out hiking in the hills around my house and I found this old snag that really shows the coriolis effect.

It is common to see snags with this effect and anyone who has done any amount of firefighting has seen this but this tree had a really tight spiral and I thought it looked cool.  Anyway, when you see this, now you know what it is.

Sunny days

I just love that I can take the dogs for a walk up in the woods so close to home.  There is nothing like a nice walk out in the woods to get the cobwebs out.  I always try to hike to the top of one of the highest points out there but they just aren’t high enough for me.  There are some much higher hills around the valley so I’ll have to vary my routine I guess.  Maybe I should walk up to the cell towers and maybe I can get some decent cell service there.  Probably not since it’s AT&T, no bars in more places, cell service.

I’m sure winter will return before long so I have been trying to get out every day after getting some of my project work done.  I’m working on a remodel of our office.  The office was a bedroom but we wanted to use it for our office.  The problem we had was that the heat from the wood stove didn’t get in there and it was always cold.  It was an easy fix really, I took out a 5 foot section of wall and made an opening between the office and the living room.  Now it’s nice and toasty in here like it is in the other rooms.  I had to move some electrical fixtures and I’m closing off the old doorway and making a linen closet there.  It’s so very nice having your own house so you can make changes like this.  Sure love that!

Surprise at Costco

So I’m down in Chico doing some shopping yesterday. Karen has to work 6 days a week during the peak tax season so I had to go by myself and I just did what we usually do and went straight to Costco first. I was pushing my cart back in the meat department and I hear someone tell me to get a new shirt. When I looked to see why this guy was giving me shit about my old crew shirt, I see this kinda fat faced fellow who I immediately recognize as Scott Grendahl. Wow, the luck of running into someone you know in a big city like Chico.

We blocked the aisle for about ½ hour chatting and catching up a little. He lives in Chester and works in Susanville for Cal Fire as a Crew Captain and does just like we do and comes down to Chico with a big cooler and stocks up on groceries. Anyway what a surprise to run into anyone I know in Chico.

Now what does this have to do with this picture you might ask, well actually nothing. I took this picture today when I took the boys for a walk out on Forgay Point. You can see what a nice day it was, that’s Mt Jura and Taylorsville is just at the foot of it on the right side. The watercourse is Indian Creek. Do you see any snow in the foreground? I thought not. It’s up on the mountains where it belongs and down here it’s been pretty nice indeed. I’m loving this mild weather and even though staying dry is not good for the water situation, I’m happy to enjoy it while I can.

Why did I move back to California?

I had this question recently when I talked to Karen’s boss down in Redding.  He couldn’t believe that we moved from Idaho back to California so here is the reason:

Today, January 22, it was so nice that I got a chance to get some sun when I took the dogs for a walk.  Believe me, you couldn’t do this in Idaho.  Not only are there no mountains or trees near Idaho Falls, but the high for the day there today got up to 24° and there is no way I would be sitting out in the sun in 24° with my shirt off.  Not to mention of course that I had a really nice walk in the woods and didn’t need to drive anywhere.  Ya really gotta love it!

Bait and Switch

Well, let me get on my soapbox.  Yesterday Karen made an order on the Kohls website.  They had a free shipping promotion for orders over $75 and her order came to over $80 so we expected to see  free shipping  when we got to the checkout.  Well, there was none of the sort and try as we might by reading all the fine print we couldn’t understand why.  I told her there must be some sort of glitch in their shopping cart system and suggested that she either call or email them and report it and get it straightened out after she made her order and before she paid off the balance. 

So this morning she gets an email from them explaining that they applied all sorts of smoke and mirror credits to her order and the actual “amount” is under the $75 free shipping limit so she didn’t qualify for it.  Her credit card will be charged for the over $80 amount so what in the hell are they talking about?  When it says that there is free shipping for orders over $75 and your order comes to over $80, then it’s a no brainer, isn’t it?   Like I said, we had gone through their checkout and ordering process looking to see where the loophole was if it existed and we couldn’t find it.

Now I buy quite a bit of stuff online and if I ever had this happen to me, the company in question and I would be permanently parting ways.  A big company like Kohls should not be practicing these bait and switch tactics and it says something about their integrity.  No matter what Karen ends up doing about this, I refuse to do business with a company using these very questionable business practices.

Kohls, YOU SUCK!!!

Small World

So, talk about it being a small world, Karen and I were eating dinner in a restaurant down in Redding the other night and I see this guy who looks like somebody I used to know.  I kept looking at him and the more I did the more he looked like Bill Lachenmyer who was a District Ranger at Laufman way back in the early 80’s.  Low and behold, he and his wife had taken the booth right next to us so I went over and asked him if his name was Bill and of course it was.  I haven’t seen him since well before I retired but he really looked the same.  We met his wife and talked about old times and had a nice impromptu visit pretty much blocking the aisle.  Anyway what were the chances we would run into anyone we knew who worked in Milford back when we did?  Who woulda thunk?

Yesterday Karen was in her H&R Block meeting so I decided to take a walk over in Jones Valley on the Clickapudi Trail.  It was all foggy and cold but I walked at a brisk pace and kept fairly warm.  It was nice to get out and stretch my legs and see what the lake was looking like.  Here’s a couple of pictures I took back in the head of Clickapudi creek canyon.

  

It never got all that warm down there in Redding yesterday and there was a high fog layer over the whole valley that we didn’t get out of until we drove back up Highway 36 out of Red Bluff.  Still it was nice for a change of pace and I had a great walk out on that trail.  And getting to see an old colleague was icing on the cake.

New Phone

I got this interesting browser for my phone, it's a sort of 3-D kind of interface, check out this video.


It's a little jerky but this is a 2X version of the original video so it's running twice as fast as real time. I really like this phone I have to say, more of a mini computer than a phone since we have AT&T at our house or as I like to refer to them, "No Bars in More Places" phone service, so using a phone for talking isn't all that easy. Since this phone is wifi connected I can use it around the house running off of our wireless system. I just love technology!

Computer age

Yep, we are in the computer age.  When you can make a cryptic representation of your personal data that looks like this

you know you are playing with electrons.  This thing is called a QR code.  If you have a program that reads these things they will tell you what data they hold.  In this case this graphic has all my personal contact information and I made it so I could play around with a new app I got for my phone called a tag reader but unfortunately I have only been able to read one tag and not this one.  I do happen to know what kind of information is in this but not because I saw it on this new app.  Anyway, I just think this stuff is way cool.

Do you like snow?

Well, I do.  I really don’t mind snow as long as I don’t need to go anywhere and it melts off in a reasonable amount of time.  The last 2 days have been steady rain and I was afraid of the flooding potential that brings.  The lake out in the meadow has grown quite large and now most of the huge meadow is under water.  Since the colder air moved in it has all turned to snow and it is piling up quickly with the huge flakes coming down.  I measured 5½ inches when I shoveled it off the deck a little while ago and now there is another 2-3 inches and there are some huge flakes.

You can see one of them in that picture on the top left side.  Yesterday I was out in a pouring rain trying to unplug the culvert going under our driveway.  It had gotten clogged and the overflow had started running down the driveway into our garden area and then into our first pond.  You can see what it looks like today, a major change.  Heavy wet snow like this causes power outages and so far the power has only gone out for a couple of minutes once but we have the generator handy if we need it.  Ya just gotta love living in the mountains!

Back home from the desert

We got back from Saline Valley yesterday after a very nice trip.  We went down to Taft first and stayed a couple of days with Judy and had a great visit and got to see a whole other life.  Taft is in the oil fields and Judy’s sons work there.  We saw all 3 of them and all of their respective offspring.  After our quiet lives up in Greenville sometimes it seemed like a mad house when they were all together but it was a controlled mad house anyway.  The weather down there was very nice and I wore a T-shirt most of the time.  Ya gotta love that this time of year.

After leaving Taft on Monday we drove over the Tehachapi’s into Mohave for breakfast.  I had never been over Highway 58 which was the route we took so it was all new to me.  I was very impressed by all the windmills over on the desert side.  We didn’t get any pictures of them but there were so many you couldn’t count them all.  They must be able to generate quite a bit of electricity there due to the strong winds.

Next it was up to 395 and Olancha  for the last gas stop before getting

on the dirt road to Saline.  The Saline Valley road had it’s usual road closed sign up but we didn’t find any real bad spots.  I was surprised to find that my new Windows phone had good enough cell service at our campsite for me to download web pages and send email.  I could have made some phone calls but I didn’t.  I was able to check on the weather though and I decided to come home a day early on Thursday instead of staying till Friday like I had planned because of the bad weather coming in.  Turned out that it was the right decision since it started snowing this morning and hasn’t stopped since and we have about 3-4 inches already and more coming.  The roads were clear yesterday and they sure aren’t now.  Nice to be home warm and safe!

Walking

We actually got out and went for a walk today and it was pretty nice.  I took this picture from across the meadow of our house.  My new camera has a 12X zoom on it so it brings things up pretty close as you can see.  Notice that you don’t see any neighbors close by… just the way we like it.

On another note I have a Google Voice account that I haven’t used much since I didn’t have much use for it until today.  We have a home phone here but it’s for incoming calls only so I got to thinking that I might be able to make Google Voice work as a way to call out on this home phone.  I tried it out and it works like a champ.  Our cell phones don’t work very well from home since the cell tower is just over the hill from us and we can only make calls from a few spots in our house.  This new ability helps a lot since we have cordless phones so now we should be able to call out from anywhere in the house.

Speaking of phones, I finally broke down and bought a new phone.  I wanted a smart phone so I ended up getting a Windows  phone, a Samsung Focus.  The phone itself cost me 1 cent… yep, hard to believe, huh?  I can’t believe they would actually even charge me for the one penny but they did.  AT&T doesn’t have any unlimited data plans any more so I had to get the 2 gig plan and the total for phone and data with messaging  comes to $70/month.  I would just dump AT&T altogether but there are too many people I know in that network and I can call them for free.  Anyway, a step up in technology for me.  Ya gotta love that!

Winter wonderland?

Well, we got our first substantial snow of the season last night.  Since the elevation here is around 3500 feet I guess it’s safe to say the snow level must be around 3000’.  I also see by the traffic cams that there was some snow that spilled over into Honey Lake Valley which always gets rain shadowed out.  I used to hate that when I was wanting rain and snow and didn’t have anywhere I needed to go but we don’t have that problem here on the west side of the mountains.  There is more predicted for today and the outside temp right now is 33° so whether it’s snow or rain, we shall see.

It’s funny that as the seasons change we seem to grow tired of the scenery and when it changes so drastically overnight it looks so beautiful.  I’m sure that by March I will be very tired of seeing this beautiful scene when I wake up in the morning but for now it’s still very pretty.

Back from Idaho

We got back from Idaho yesterday, or maybe I should say we got back from Utah.  We only went up to Idaho Falls last Thursday for a funeral and the rest of the time we were in Logan Utah so technically we came back from Utah.

 

Anyway, the first night we stayed in Wells Nevada and woke up to several inches of snow on the ground.  Not what I wanted to see on a driving trip.  The interstate was pretty clear but there was a little slush on a couple of the mountain passes between Wendover and Wells.  It could have been much worse I guess so it was all good.

 

On the way home we stayed in Lovelock Nevada and just before we got there we saw the most beautiful sunset so Karen tried to take a few pictures of it with my new camera and here they are.

		Trip to Utah VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I’m trying a new way to post pictures on this blog so let’s see how it works.

 

So we are back in Greenville just in time for a major winter storm which is supposed to be here by Friday.  Our friend Eric is coming here on Saturday and that seems to be the worst day of the week for traveling.  Wouldn’t you know it!

Back to Idaho

Yep, we are heading back to Idaho for a few days to attend a funeral.  Today we will just drive to Wells to spend the night and tomorrow we will be in Logan Utah where we will be staying with Krista.  The funeral is on Thursday and it’s only a couple of hours drive from Logan so that is a good place for us to stay.

 

This morning the sunrise was beautiful so we were out on the deck taking pictures.  I was trying to edit some of them when Karen took this picture.  You can still see the sunrise in the window.  A little frosty this morning but not as cold as Idaho Falls where it snowed yesterday and it’s still on the ground this morning.  (I looked at the Idaho Falls web cams.)