Bacon New Years

I have resolved that for 2011 I will not give up bacon. I do not eat a lot of bacon and on the rare occasion that I do have some I do not pile it up really high. This is probably because I envision my wife over one shoulder and my doctor hovering over the other wispering to me that I should watch my intake of fatty things. This is known as guilt. If it were not for guilt I would fry up a whole bunch of bacon every day until I could no longer stand the taste. I am not certain that the moment would come that I actually could not eat bacon, which is probably one of the reasons that I have never followed through with this thought.

There are many things that we think that we will never utter in company. Well, that is true for most people although I have met a few people in my life that just blurt out whatever comes to mind. The brain is a pretty tricky place and really needs a filter most of the time, so just verbalizing all of our thoughts in this day and age would eventually land most us in some sort of lock-up, either mental or criminal. For intstance you do not want to say the single word "bomb" while waiting to go through the security check point in the airport. Neither should you say the word "gun" to a policeman if you have just been pulled over for speeding. These thoughts, if verbalized, would get you in some amount of difficulty.

I want to live a long time and see my children continue their adult journeys, and my grandchild grow into whoever she chooses to become. These are a couple of the reasons that I wil not eat all of the bacon my brain would like to experience - the other reasons I can't talk about.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Roasting Day

Nearing the end of a roast.

Guatemalan - Huehuetenango!

A Sumatra dark roast.

I needed to get enough coffee in the bins for our travels. You never know the coffee terrors that await on the road. Some trips the coffees that we find are horrible, but once in a while we find a gem. Mostly, though, we find mediocre coffees.

Ever since we gave up our commercial 30 pound roaster, and the business that went with it, I have never, ever regretted laying out the cash for a good one pound sample roaster and green beans in 150 burlap bags. You would be surprised how many beans a coffee snob can go through. Or maybe you wouldn't.



Edinburgh

Things we should probably not dwell on in the Northwest

I bought an un-tethered weather station and mounted it out on our dock to keep it away from obstructions. It reports in every second or less to the base station, which is plugged into my PC where a program grabs and stores all of the data for display. Weather watching in Oregon is kind of a hobby for many people because it changes frequently and, usually, several of the measured parameters are on the move simultaneously.

When we lived in southern Arizona our weather station consisted of a thermometer. The seasons were hot, hotter, hell, and pleasant in Phoenix. Here on the Oregon coast we have reached hot on one day in ten years and it happened to be when relatives from southern AZ were visiting. The temperatures then were 65, 62, 104 and 61. Almost nothing here has air conditioning for good reason.

I got my weather station running on November 6th. Since that time I have been learning about the software program and its limitations while creating a web page with the built in "Wizard" and working out some kinks in the wireless connection between my office and the router located in the house. My antique PC is using a USB concocted wireless thingy and it tends to drop the signal once in a while. The result is that my web page does not update every 5 minutes like it should, although the data for the time period is still stored. If the cable TV company ever fixes the low signal strength at our house I will go back to them as my ISP and hard wire my PC connection again. That whole thing is a long story. Dealing with the cable company is probably similar to dealing with the Social Security Administration - you know that the answer is there somewhere in the bowels of the organization, but there is no useful map and the chances of finding someone willing to help has the same odds as hitting the Power Ball lottery.

Anyway, I have been dutifully following the collection of the daily highs, lows, wind speed, rainfall, etc. and just realized this morning that it could become the source of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).  I pulled up a monthly report that I have looked at often and realized that it has only NOT rained on three days since the 6th of November.

Pass the vitamin D, please.

Idiot Factor

These are instructions we have had to place on the wall at our vacation rental house at the beach. It is still amazing to me the things that people will do in a rental that they would never, ever do in thier own home.
It is like having to post a notice to not put explosives down the garbage disposal. We as landlords should not have to do this, but we do.
Our experiences reinforce my belief in the saying that, "Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious."

This is now on the wall at the beach house:

Instructions for the Directionally Challenged

This is a crank used for opening and closing the venting windows above your head. The windows are never latched. Turning the crank counter-clockwise will open the window. Turning in the other direction, clockwise, will close the window.

Some people have tried to go in the wrong direction using all of their strength. We have speculated that these people may have even hooked the crank up to a very large electric motor or similar device to overcome the mechanics of the windows operating mechanisms because the internal gears have been stripped or forced into misalignment. This takes considerable force (F = ma). It also costs a tad of Dinero (money) to repair. Please do not do this. When the sun is beating in on an afternoon the room can really become quite warm and you will appreciate being able to open these windows.

Remember – Lefty loosey (open), Righty tighty, (closed). This is not too much to ask.

Thank you,

The Owners

Instrucciones para la carne de cabezas
(Instructions for the meat heads)

Se trata de una manivela de apertura y cierre de las ventanas de ventilación por encima de su cabeza. Las viudas no están trabados. Al girar la manivela hacia la izquierda se abrirá la ventana. De inflexión en la otra dirección, hacia la derecha, se cierra la ventana.

Algunas personas han tratado de ir en la dirección equivocada con toda su fuerza. Hemos especulado con que estas personas pueden incluso han enganchado a la manivela a un motor eléctrico de gran tamaño o un dispositivo similar para superar la mecánica de las ventanas de explotación debido a los mecanismos de los engranajes internos han sido despojadas o forzadas a una mala alineación. Esto toma mucha fuerza (F = ma). También cuesta un poco de Dinero (money) para reparar. Por favor, no hagas esto. Cuando el sol está jugando en una tarde en la sala de realidad puede llegar a ser bastante caliente y usted podrá apreciar la posibilidad de abrir estas ventanas.

Recuerde - afloja Lefty (abierto), Diestro whities, (cerrado). Esto no es mucho pedir.

Gracias,

Los propietarios

Another tenant instruction:

Storm Door Etiquette

The outside door is called a “Storm Door” because it helps to keep our wintertime sideways rains from being driven past the seals of the regular door that you see before you. A “regular door” facing south on the Oregon coast is pretty useless when it comes to separating you from the weather outside.

Please help keep this storm door properly latched.

We get some really big winds here on the coast, which are fairly often above a Category 1 Hurricane force in the winter time. Summer winds are no slouch either. The last time that the storm door was not closed properly, the wind ripped it, part of the frame and a little bit of siding out of the wall, tossed it through the outside deck glass and railing and down the hill a bit. This would have been spectacular to see in person and maybe shoot some video for YouTube®, but all I was privileged to see was the resulting wreckage – and the bill for the repairs.

Thank you for your help,

The Owners





Please ignore this posting. This door closes just fine all by itself.


Bill’s Handyman & Repair Service


997-3288

Locked Out

For some reason Google had about a zillion people locked out of their blogs because they changed the log in procedure to allow only Gmail addresses. This put us poor folks into a useless loop with their help option, which continued to insist that a Google account be used. Anyway, they finally let me back in with my non-Google email address.

I bought myself a new, fairly complete weather station that is now sitting on the top edge of the viewing dock wind screen and I have been getting familiar with what it can do. It has a little solar array for each instrument to keep the batteries charged up and transmitting their data to the station located in my office nearby. I also purchased a program that displays all of the information on my PC in various graphic forms, and is capable of pulling in radar images and other stuff via the Internet. It is all pretty coool stuff if you are in to that sort of thing.

I have now purchased a web domain name and hosting services and am working on getting a page running that will give near real time information to me, or you, wherever we may be. I suppose that one could just go on the Internet and get that sort of information from an official weather station, but that would not be nearly as much fun. I will probably use the new web site to check on how nasty it is at home when we are traveling away to warmer, nicer places in the late Fall, Winter, Spring and early Summer. According to Julie there are only a couple of weeks a year that the weather here is any good, so we may be gone quite a bit.

Mostly I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to do new things with my otherwise atrophying brain. It's a journey.

My other Winter projects involve getting under the DeLorean to fix things that are now nearing 30 years old, and I can only spend so much time in contorted positions in one day without risking permanent damage to my joints.

More Inverary Cemetary

Neil Munro's Father, Mother, brothers, sister and more in the Inverary, Scotland cemetary. In the bottom photo we had cleaned off some of the lichen to show the design at the top.