Pileated Woodpecker

The other day Norma called me from the kitchen, "Come and see the woodpecker!" I did not move all that quickly, thinking it was one of the Northern Flicker Woodpeckers that frequent our feeding stations. Nice, but not "run and see" nice. "Hurry, you're going to miss it". I came out to see this beautiful Pileated Woodpecker eyeballing our suet feeder. We don't see these big guys very often.

We had company on Norma's actual birthday on Sunday so we never had a chance to do anything special. Last night I managed to drag her away from her garden long enough to go down to the docks and Dick's Fish & Chips. I like Dick, he and I were called for jury duty (and rejected, they evidently did not want old, gray haired guys) at the same time a few years ago. We sat at the tables on the dock and enjoyed his great fish & chips before heading home for some key lime pie "ke lam pa" with whipped cream. Memories of Florida.

Patio Party 2014

Here are a few candid shots from Saturday's Patio Party. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and evening and many of our friends turned out. Conversation was great and the food was plentiful. What is not to like?

Karen, Val and Norma (the Birthday Girl)

Wes (my old boss from the 60's), Brian and Brooks

Colin, Nancy and Annake

Sierrah, LindaLee and Kathryn (in charge of the tequila tasting table)

Pensive Sierrah

Croft entertaining the ladies

Sierrah and Jayde dancing in front of the mirror.

And a final, stolen from LindaLee's Facebook Page (Jayde, Kathryn and LindaLee)

What Is A Cantilever?

"What is a cantilever? How can it open and close without wheels?" Were Norma's first questions.

We are having our annual patio party on Saturday so Brooks and the granddaughters came up a day early to install our cantilevered, rolling gate across the the driveway. Our yard is completely fenced but the twenty foot wide driveway was left without a permanent gate solution while everyone decided on the best way to do it. Brooks had this idea in mind right from the start and he finally won out. He was right all along.

He spent a full day welding the 46" high, thirty foot long steel, sliding gate together back in his workshop at home before loading it on his truck and bringing it up. In the meantime I ordered the four rollers from a fencing supply company in Ohio where they sold them for a fraction of their cost in Canada. Here, they are $200 each X 4 or $800 for the set. At Discount Fence Supply in Ohio they cost me $285 for all four, shipping included! This only works when you have two or three weeks lead time.

It took Brooks and I three hours to install the gate, including the wasted time for me to drive downtown to exchange the too short 6" carriage bolts for the required 7" version. The gate rolls back and forth on rollers behind the fence on top of the 7' high retaining wall, so it was not the most convenient or safest place to work but the job was completed with only one small cut on Brooks' hand.

The total cost for Phase I was about $700 for parts ($0 for labour). Phase II will be to add a chain drive to open and close the gate. Each car will have a remote control and there will also be a push button on the fence post. This might be done later this year but more likely next summer.

"Balance, drill, tighten bolts, repeat..."

 Norma, "Brooks, are you sure it is perfectly level? Don't forget to finish painting it". Brooks, "Yes mom".

The finished product! There are rows of fine stainless steel wire stretched horizontally to keep the deer from sneaking through the gaps.

RV Ice Making

One of the problems we have when RVing in hot weather is getting ice for a refreshing drink in the evening. The freezer section of our RV fridge is normally loaded to overflowing with frozen food so there is no room for bulky ice trays. Our solution has been to buy a bag of ice when we need it. These bags contain way more ice than we need so after we fill a couple of sandwich size bags and cram them into the freezer, the rest of the bag is either given away or goes to waste. These bags average three dollars each so after adding the price of gas needed to go and get them, it becomes an inconvenient, expensive affair.

Recently London Drugs had an Igloo brand portable ice maker on sale for $99 (reg $149) so we bought one. Yesterday we unpacked it and tried it out. It will be a great addition to the RV! It turned out the first batch of nine ice cubes in about twelve minutes and then nine more every seven or eight minutes after that until the internal bin was full. We dumped those into a Ziploc bag, refilled the machine with water and away it went again. After repeating this for eight hours we had several bags of ice in the house freezer, ready for our weekend party.

We now have one of the new electric "smart meters" so I went online and checked our power consumption for the hours the machine was on, comparing it to those same hours on a normal day. It looks like it costs about five cents per hour to make ice. Forty cents to make ice that would probably cost $6 plus gas to go out and buy. Not bad. Life is good with a cold drink in hand and the tinkling sound of even more ice being made!

Using Gmail?

I have been using Gmail for about ten years now, starting from back when you needed an "invitation" to get started. I really like it for two reasons. 1) it stores my mail on their server so I can get at old messages from any computer, not just the one I downloaded it onto and, 2) it has a great spam filter that keeps out 99.9% of the enlarging your penis ads and other garbage. It is easy to sort and store mail away in folders and they offer a huge individual storage area for free (15 GB right now).

However, if you have friends who like to send you photos, videos and other huge files, this storage can and does fill up. If you are like me and do not delete these emails as soon as you read them they stay on the server forever using up valuable space. It has always been difficult to sort Gmail files by size until now.

To find these large files simply type "size:5m" (without the quotation marks) in the search box at the top of the Gmail page. This will display all your files that are over 5 MB each in size. You can substitute other numbers to find smaller files. You can then examine each one and decide if you want to keep it or not. I just did this and was able to delete about fifty storage hogs that I had no further use for and reduced my storage use from 20% down to 9%. Only 50 emails were using up over half of my storage space!

Equipment Failure

We are having our annual patio get together with friends next weekend so yesterday it fell to me to pressure wash the patios, steps and walkways. I fired up my two year old (but used only two or three times) electric pressure washer. I just got started and "SNAP", something broke and water started pouring out of the unit. I took the covers off, thinking it might just be a hose failure or something simple but I found a pot metal piece broken.

I took it down to Home Depot where I bought it to see if they would so anything for me. Yes I know, two years old, but if you do not ask you will never get anything. They said no so I looked over their supply and finding nothing that jumped out at me, I went shopping around town. I eventually found a 2000 PSI unit on sale for $99 and bought it. It is about 25% more powerful than the old unit and required no assembly at all. I connected the hose and wand and away I went.

I put in about three hours and got the rear walkway and retaining wall done as well as the main patio and front concrete steps. There is still another three or four hours left on the front walk and driveway but that was enough for one day.

The weather was not great today so I took the day off. I love retirement! Tomorrow is another day.

I think the old machine is repairable so I will put it at the end of the driveway with a "FREE - REPAIRABLE" sign on it and see how long it takes it to disappear. Some enterprising DIYer might be able to fix it. I considered trying some Liquid Steel or two part epoxy on it myself but was too lazy and I would have had to go to the store for that anyway.

Supermoon

We had a clear night for the "Supermoon" display. Otherwise known as the perigee moon, it is when the moons' eliptical orbit brings it closest to earth.

I took some shots with my Nikon DSLR and 400mm lens as well as with my new Panasonic ZS40. I placed the Nikon on my tripod and used the ZS40 on my mono-pod to keep it steady. The zoom on the ZS40 gives me the equivalent (in 35mm terms) of a 1125mm lens. The ZS40 took the best photos with the results being sharper than the Nikon that night. Anyway, enough of the technology. Here is the best photo of about 50 I took at various settings. This one was ASA 640, 1/500th at f 6.4, tweaked a tiny bit with Picasa which I find myself using much more than either PhotoShop or Lightroom.

Calgary Stampede

Death In The Afternoon

I was raised in Edmonton, Alberta and every year or two my dad would take the family to Calgary for the Stampede. I remember it as being hot, dusty and loud and I don't think it has changed much in that regard. Where it has changed is in the treatment of animals. Never a year goes by without at least one animal being killed and many more tortured.

The body count at the Stampede so far this year is one steer fatally injured in the steer wrestling competition. It lay dying on the arena floor while people ran with tarps to surround it so the sensitive, paying public and their children did not have to see what was being done with their admission money. It is better not to have these things rubbed in the customers face.

I had the opportunity to go to a bullfight in Mexico a couple of years ago but turned it down. I do not consider it "entertaining" to see an animal killed in front of me. A friend of ours did go and he came back quite shaken, saying it had been a mistake to go.

Can you see much difference here? Can the crowd? They are cheering in both cases. Is this "sport"? It certainly is not for me and I will not watch it. Bullfighting or "Cowboying".

This Can't End Well

My workshop is about 150 feet from the ocean and is a natural refuge for the Norway Rats who frequent the rocks on the beach. They come up periodically looking for an easy handout like our stash of bird seed and/or to poop all over the floor. I employ some countermeasures to this rodent invasion, one of which is a couple of huge peanut butter baited rat traps. These are huge traps, the kind that could easily break a finger if a person were careless when setting it.

Yesterday I was checking the trap line and discovered some rat poop on the workshop floor. This warranted a  closer inspection which showed the trap near the bird seed bucket to be missing altogether. I guess a rat sprung the trap but it did not hit anything vital (like it's neck) but may have caught his tail or maybe a leg. Oh boy! Where is it? Where did it drag the trap off to? I checked under my power saws, work bench and in the wood pile but no luck. I guess it is possible I left the door open for a while and the rat entered, got trapped and left through the door. I prefer this scenario to the one where he is still somewhere in the shop, dead or dying and getting ready to stink and attract flies. Norma wants me to check around the yard but really, I do not want to find it. I set a new trap and this time screwed it to the floor. Maybe the same rat will drag the old trap back and get caught again in the new one. I have lots of peanut butter.

Eagle Watch

I finally found what is drawing the eagles to the beach in front of the house. There was a lot of activity again today so I walked down to the beach once more. As I got close to the road that separates us from the beach I could see where the eagles and a couple of vultures were feeding. I crossed the road and got as close as I thought they would tolerate without becoming nervous and found a log to sit on and watch. They were busy feeding and therefore more tolerant of company than normal.

There were some bloody ribs sticking up from the rocks and then I saw a hoof. A deer! That was the daily special! It was a small deer, maybe one of the babies that has been around and it may have been hit by a car and catapulted onto the beach or perhaps was injured and made its own way to the beach before succumbing to its injuries. In any case its' unfortunate death supplied food for the avian predators and the cycle of life continues.

I was zoomed in on the vultures feeding when suddenly this big guy landed. I managed to get him just as he touched down. I would liked to have had the time to zoom out just a little but I am happy with this shot. I think it just might get framed and will hang on my study wall.

Here comes his/her mate in for a share. The blood on his/her beak gives away the fact that he/she has been here before and is back for seconds.

These birds are larger than they look. An adult can easily have a wingspan of seven feet and they live for 25 to 40 years. They normally mate for life unless one of the pair dies, in which case the survivor will seek out a new mate. The head feathers do not turn white until their fourth year. They are very impressive birds.