Between “manly men doing manly things,” and “hold my beer and watch this.”
Category Archives: Home Life
Barb’s daughter made the Huffingtonpost
Reentering the U.S. After a Year Abroad: Responsible Intentions by Maddy Lisaius.
Be gentle in the comments.
Empirical evidence
Yesterday I drove across about 150 miles of nearly straight road through a boring desert in central and eastern Washington. I was able to empirically determine my alertness level was better while listening to the works of Van Halen over that of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
A new Internet connection
Off and on for a couple years and then starting in during the week between last Christmas and New Years I have spent a LOT of time trying to get a good Internet connection to my brother Doug. I have a good connection at Boomershoot Mecca but Doug and his family are blocked by the woods behind their house from Teakean Butte which is the source of my connection. They have a satellite connection that cost a lot of money, is unreliable, has HORRIBLE ping times, and poor transfer rates.
Mecca is 1.6 miles from our Dad’s house and is blocked by a small hill. Doug’s house is about 75 yards further still. And Dad’s house, a machine shed, and the hill block their view of the Boomershoot site. So we had to find a way around the hill just get it to Dad’s place. From Dad’s place it is a pretty easy hop around the machine shed. But first we needed to get to Dad’s place.
The obvious answer is to put a repeater on the hill between Mecca and Dad’s place. But we don’t own the hill. The nickname we have for the owner is “Wicked Witch of the Boomershoot”. So you can imagine how well such a request might be greeted with. I wouldn’t be surprised if she complained about us transmitting electromagnetic waves over her property—if she knew about it.
Anyway the best we could come up with was putting a repeater on a hill I own 1.7 miles from Dad’s house. Yup. We go further way to get a better signal to Dad’s place.
The ordinary Nanostation2s should work for several miles under ideal conditions. But this isn’t an ideal situation. We are probably actually just out of line of sight. In December I couldn’t get things to quite work unless I chose a different hill which belongs to cousin Alan. We probably could have gotten permission from him but at that location we needed to have two Nanostation2s, one pointed toward Mecca and the other toward Dad’s house.
I ordered a parabolic reflector hi-gain external antenna and came back the end of February. And found to my delight that I had good signal strength with just the Nanostation2s, completely different results that when I had done my tests in December. I still wasn’t able to get a high bandwidth connection but I was pretty sure it was a configuration issue on my part. Doug purchased the equipment he would need to get solar power on my hill to power the Nanostation2 and I planned to come back in a few weeks and do my part with the configuration of the Nanostation2s.
I went back in April and again tried to get a connection. Now the Nanostation2s alone didn’t work. The signal strength was back to what I had in December which was too low to be usable. What is going on? I suspect some differences in the ground conductivity or something. I just don’t know for certain. Again I gave up for the moment.
This weekend with the help of daughter Kim, Jacob, and Jeff I did some Boomershoot cleanup, mounted more solar panels on Boomershoot Mecca, and took down a solar panel that Doug was going to use for the repeater. I then proceeded to do some more signal strength testing.
I put up a twelve dBi antenna (a Nanostation2 has a 10 dBi internal antenna) on my hill attached to a Ubiquiti BulletM2 (the same one I used at Boomershoot with great success) and with the parabolic (24 dBi) antenna on a Nanostation2 at Dad’s place was able to get good signal strength. But for some reason the bandwidth sucked. Probably a configuration issue I guessed.
Doug wanted to avoid mounting anything on the outside of Dad’s house so I moved the parabolic antenna to the BulletM2 on my hill and used the internal 10 dBi antenna on a Nanostation2 at Dad’s place. It should only be a 2 dB loss compared to the 12 dBi antenna we were testing with before.
Signal strength was good but the bandwidth was in the toilet. I’m talking throughput to the Internet on the order of 60 kbs download and 10 kbs upload. It has to be a configuration issue. I spent hours trying all kinds of things with no success.
I finally decided the BulletM2 on my hill had to be the problem. So Monday afternoon I put in a Nanostation2 in place of the BulletM2 driving the parabolic antenna:
It worked. Just this minute I have 2.11 Mbps download and 0.68 Mbps upload from my computer through a WiFi access point in their house, a switch, five Nanostations (remember I needed to hop around the machine shed), the router at Mecca (two miles away via the Nanostation path), and to the outside world.
Tomorrow I bring my Verizon Network Extender to test out in their house. I’ll finally have them connected to the rest of the world in a civilized manner.
Update: Early (6:19) in the morning the connection to the rest of the world was less busy and I got this result:
Yeah. I’m all thrilled about something that is considered poor service by anybody in a major city but this is out in an area where it’s tough to even get cell service. Only Verizon and Inland Cellular even have a hint of service here. And then it is very spotty and intermittent. You have to travel at 20 miles, as the crow flies, to get service from AT&T or T-Mobile.
Their satellite ISP has an advertised (but never realized) download rate of 1.5 Mbs and upload of 256 kps plus a download data limit of 17 Gbytes per month. Ping times are in the 1.25 second range. If you watch a few movies and do a bit of web browsing you exceed that data limit. This is so much better and they will have a solid Verizon connection in their house in a few hours.
Careful what you wish for
When I started dating again after separating from my ex-wife I jokingly put the following in my online dating profile:
I’ve thought that I would like a harem of super models with a mean IQ of 150 and a minimum of 130. But I’m pretty certain drawing a square circle using a unicorn horn is more likely. Also, taking care of more than one woman is probably beyond my ability so, upon further reflection, I have decided I’ll just have a more conventional relationship.
Barb L. liked my profile and, in fact, after being on Match.com for a month, I was the only person she was interested in meeting and she let it expire without meeting anyone else. I have been the only person she dated after kicking her ex-husband out of the house.
After meeting her I was quite smitten. I stopped looking and concentrated my attention on Barb. It’s worked out well.
What I didn’t know was that while I was joking about the harem of super models in my profile was that Barb actually turned down a modeling career. She is very smart and probably would have been bored with it as well as having much better long term prospects in her chosen career.
A few months ago she told me about the modeling stuff and showed me some pictures she had stored in the garage. You can see damage to some of the pictures but you can also see that even when joking you might get something of what you were asking for:
This says her height is 5’ 11”. It might have been then but she is now nearly 6’ 1”.
She says she used to call this one “Barb on the rocks.”
Stereotypes
Weer’d made a comment in this post that kind of bugged me:
Still I’ve noticed that the more homogenous a population is in an area the more revolting the racism can be. I knew a ton of people in Maine who would drop the N-Bomb frequently, and would make horrible cracks about blacks….but I always wondered if they had even SEEN one.
It’s a LOT harder to make such cracks when you know people of a minority or other groups.
Where I grew up there were virtually no “people of color”. Technically the family farm was (and is) on an Indian reservation but most of the land had been purchased by whites over the years and no Indians have lived there since before I was born. 20 miles away, in Lapwai, the entire town was (and probably still is) essentially Nez Perce. But we only saw them when our schools competed. They were serious competitors just like the kids from Grangeville and Kamiah who also had few, if any, non-whites. Their athletic ability was everything. The only pigmentation that mattered was that of their uniform. The inferiority of that pigmentation did not extrapolate to an inferiority in the pigmentation of their skin.
I’ve been sick
I was late in posting QOTD yesterday and today. I’ve been very sick. It wasn’t until today that the doctors figured out what was going on. It was a “perfect storm” of an undetected cavity in a tooth in proximity to a wisdom tooth fragment left behind after the extraction. A soft-tissue infection developed and even after the antibiotics kicked in enough for the visible infection to go away I still felt terrible. I have seen three doctors so far and will see five before everything is taken care of. I’m somewhat functional now but only with the help of drugs.
It’s amazing the effect something going on in a length of gum tissue less than an inch in length can have. Late morning on Wednesday was the worst. I was shivering uncontrollably. I was in bed with a down comforter and four blankets, doubled over, on top of me. It was 70 degrees in the room and still I was shivering and for inexplicable reasons, because I didn’t have significant pain at the time, had streams of tears rolling down my face. Barb turned on a space heater and heated the room up to I don’t know what temperature before I finally was able to stop shivering.
I’m so glad this didn’t happen during Boomershoot.
Quote of the day—Barb L.
You will be delicately chilled.
Barb L.
May 3, 2014
[This was as we were leaving my Dad’s house to go to the Boomershoot site in the morning. I had left my coats (three of them) and sweatshirt at Boomershoot Mecca. I was just wearing a t-shirt and Barb was bundled up.
I had often thought Ry was king of clever descriptions. But Barb is a close contender. She makes me laugh multiple times a day with the clever and funny things she says.
But I wondered as we drove away, if there is such a thing as “delicately chilled” then that surely must mean there is such a thing as “harshly chilled” or “roughly chilled”. What would those be?—Joe]
Quote of the day—Barb L.
You are on the Boomershoot channel. I’ll get you back in ten days or so.
Barb L.
April 23, 2014
[There is a certain amount of truth to this.
This was after me talking about a number of tasks I had completed or had yet to do for Boomershoot 2014.—Joe]
Disney ship accommodations
Disney pays a lot of attention to detail. This is true of their parks as well as their ships and island. Every night when we were having dinner our bed was turned down and a towel folded in the shape of an animal was waiting for us on our bed:
The food tasted wonderful and was presented beautifully. Here is an example:
There were three swimming pools on board. One for kids, one for teenagers, and one for adults. This is the adult pool:
On the last day, even before we were were off the ship, they had the pools drained and were washing down the ship with cleaners.
In the evenings we saw a movie (Frozen) and a extraordinarily well produced play. The attention to detail in the props and production detail was amazing.
Pirate museum pictures
As mentioned in a previous post when we were in Nassau we visited the Pirate Museum which I really liked.
Yes. I know. The following pictures all suck.
But if I had just posted the following text everyone would have wanted more:
I measured the barrel. 55 inches.
They had breech loaded flintlocks in the early 1720’s!
And grenades!
Disney cruise in the Bahamas
We spent most of week of February 17th on the Disney ship Magic in the Bahamas. I had been on Disney’s sister ship Wonder several years ago but this was Barb’s first cruise. As with me Barb had never had much interest in going on a cruise until after having actually been on one. Part way through the cruise Barb was talking about “the next cruise we go on”.
This was the entrance to the ship. Notice the resemblance to Mickey Mouse?
This was the going away party. There was loud music and some of the Disney crew were doing cheerleading. I found it an interesting psychological study.
After observing the party from an upper deck Barb and I found a little quieter spot and watched Port Canaveral fade away in the distance.
The next morning we arrived in Nassau. As we approached the harbor a pilot was brought out to our ship to guide us in.
Arrival of the pilot.
Departure of the pilot’s transportation.
This was the flag near the bow of our ship.
This is the harbor at Nassau as we arrived. Do you think maybe they have a lot of tourists?
The last time I was here a tour guide said the walkway between the buildings was a hotel room for rent—at $20,000/week IIRC.
We did a self guided walking tour through parts of Nassau and “fought” off the aggressive tour guide who really, really wanted to give us a tour in his limo. The most fun thing we did at Nassau was go through the Pirate Museum.
The next day we arrived at Disney’s island Castaway Cay.
The first thing we did was rent bicycles and go for a ride across the island.
This picture was taken from an observation tower on the far end of the island.
From the same observation tower.
They claim the highest point on the island is less than 16’ above sea level. I can believe it.
We also fed the sting rays and went snorkeling with them. Barb thought they were “SO CUTE!” I thought they were a little ominous but it was fun to swim above them as they went “flying” through the water just above the bottom.
Most of the rest of the time we spent on the adult beach. It was very pleasant.
Someone had used shells to make an outline of something.
I’m not sure what the name of this bird is but it was pelican like. Taking pictures of it while we were on the beach gave me something to do.
I’m not sure if it was diving for fish or just making very ungraceful landings.
This was how it looked as we left the island.
The next day we spent the entire time cruising around in a circle. Then during the night we returned to port. We were off the ship and back to the airport by 9:00 or 10:00. I didn’t know how long it would take to get there when I made the airplane reservations and we were scheduled for something like a 6:00 PM departure. There were no seats available on an earlier flight so we waited in the airport. We flew to Houston and found out our connecting flight was something like five hours late. We didn’t leave Houston until after midnight. It was something like 2:00 AM Pacific time when we finally made it home and into bed. And, of course, we were fully adjusted to Eastern time. We were really, really tired.
The vacation was totally worth it. Much of the rest of the nation was enduring snow and bitter cold. And best of all I sent some of the bloggers who were discussing the cold an email sympathizing and included this picture from Nassau:
Hoover Dam
While in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago we also visited Hoover Dam. I had driven by a time or two but had never stopped and took pictures and went on a tour. I’ve been on tours of Grand Coulee and Dworshak which are also very impressive but Hoover, for some reason seems to generate more awe for most people. It is an impressive piece of engineering.
We took a tour of the power plant which involved going through some tunnels near the base of the dam.
This was on the ceiling of some of the tunnels to keep the tourists from getting dripped on from some minor leaks.
Zion National Park
Two weekends ago we visited Zion National Park in Utah. We were visiting Las Vegas and since gambling doesn’t hold that much interest for us we drove to Zion National Park and spent most of the day there.
As Barb said, more than once, “When you see it you understand why they made certain areas National Parks.” Zion has a resemblance to Yosemite in that what Barb said about it also applies, “Meh. Maybe I’m getting spoiled but one stunning view looks pretty much like another.”
Yup. That pretty much describes Zion. It’s not surprising the park gets over a million visitors per year.
This was on our drive to Zion Canyon. I think it might have actually been in Arizona. We crossed the Northwest corner of it on our way.
Another picture that probably is in Arizona.
You just expect to see Wiley Coyote and Road Runner zip by you any moment. Is the dust in the picture below from them?
Again, probably in Arizona or outside the park near St. George Utah.
It’s beautiful to visit but Barb and agree there is no way we would want to live there. We like the tree covered mountains, rivers, and lakes too much to spend much time away.
The rest of the pictures are from inside the park and I’ll mostly let them speak for themselves.
Close up of the upper right corner of the picture above it. Notice the size of the trees to get a clue as to the scale.
There were some people climbing the cliffs. A small group of people were pointing at someone on this cliff. I couldn’t really see it so I took a picture with my telephoto lens, then zoomed in on the spot they were point at then asked them if this was what they were looking at:
Yup. Just as I thought. It was just a rock formation.
Xenia on display
Daughter Xenia is going to have some of her art on display at the University of Alaska Anchorage this week:
One of this year’s Student Showcase presenters, Xenia Vlieger, has been interested in art, storytelling and theater since elementary school.
“As I got older, I became more anxious doing theater and more interested in storytelling through images,” she said. She graduated last fall with a bachelor’s degree in art, with an emphasis in photography, but was still allowed to participate in Student Showcase for images she made in 2013—including an experimental photography piece entitled, “Thank God I don’t think out loud.”
She is also giving a presentation and “will discuss self-portraits and why they are important, her process for creating the piece—including how the image was conceptualized, edited and then printed—and also, how the symbolism of the image and materials used to create the piece relate to each other.”
Very cool Xenia!
We have interesting friends
Some friends of ours are leaving the area for a year or two and we recently said goodbye to them. We had only met them a few months ago but really liked them. They are very smart, happy, high energy people. When we went on the cruise in the Bahamas last month we invited them to go with us. There was no one else we even considered.
They didn’t go. They said they really tried to make it work but just couldn’t. The fact that it was a Disney Cruise did not seem to be an issue.
In my personal life I keep this blog in the background and don’t bring it up unless I think they are going to be okay with it. I hadn’t mentioned it to them until this last meeting. I explained it was a little controversial and could bother some people.
It turns out they have blogs that are “interesting” too.
NOT safe for work.
Blissfully Open and Compersive Times.
We have interesting friends.
The long way back
As I mentioned yesterday I went to Idaho a couple weekends ago. Originally I was going to take my friend Elizabeth with me and drop her off in Pullman. Her daughter is going to school at Washington State University. Elizabeth would stay with her daughter then Saturday the two of them and her daughter’s boyfriend would visit me on the farm for a Boomershoot private party. Due to conflicting schedules Barb was not going to be able to go with us.
A week or so before the trip I asked Elizabeth if she was still planning to go. I wanted to arrange for additional explosives handlers if the private party was still on. Elizabeth decided not to go because her daughter was coming home for spring break in just a week anyway. Fine. The weather wasn’t looking all that great anyway.
When I found that walking was the only viable way to get to Boomershoot Mecca to make the targets and that still another cross country walk with the targets and guns would be required I was pleased things turned out the way they did. What I didn’t realize was that the trip back on Sunday was even more reason to be grateful for the change in plans.
I worked on Boomershoot stuff Sunday until mid afternoon then stopped to visit daughter Kim on the way back and didn’t leave the Moscow area until much later than I usually leave. Much of the rest of story is contained in the texts I exchanged with Barb.
Smokey! NO!
Brother Doug and his family have a cat, Smokey:
They also used to have a dog, Nick, who Smokey loved to torment. Nick would be sound asleep on the floor and Smokey would sneak up and pounce on him. Nick knew he was not allowed to put a permanent end to the irritant but would push it as far as he dared. He would grab him by the head, with the cat’s face stuffed deep into his mouth, then shake him back and forth. The cat apparently concluded the Jonah and the whale threat was worth the amusement factor and continued to do this for years.
One time Smokey did something that got that him the simulated mauling treatment while outside with wet sticky snow on the ground. Nick flipped him back and forth over the snow long enough that the snow embedded deep into his long fur. It then packed and stuck around him until he was nothing but a snowball with a face, tail, and four paws sticking straight out to the sides. Nick left him on the ground unable to move. His legs could not be moved enough to get his feet on the ground for coordinated movement.
The family was concerned but wasn’t sure what to do. He was packed in the snow so tight with his legs spread so far apart that they weren’t sure his leg joints were even still in their sockets. They brought him indoors and rather than risk addition stress on his joints just let him melt on the floor. Smokey recovered just fine but still didn’t consider there was a long term lesson to be learned.
Nick never initiated anything but never passed up an opportunity to inflict a desired punishment upon the cat. When someone yelled at the cat about some wrongdoing, like scratching the furniture, Nick would come running and nail the cat to give it the time honored visit to the tonsils and a vigorous shaking. He could be at the opposite end of the house, apparently asleep, and the words “Smokey! No!” would get him from full slumber to full cat head gagging in under five seconds.
All this is the back story for the real story I wanted to tell.
Nick was a really smart dog. He figured out that sometimes when Doug left the house with his rifle he would return with a dead deer and that after a short while Nick got tasty deer bones to chew on. Since hunting deer with a dog is not allowed Doug had to resort to things like putting the rifle out of a window at the opposite end of the house from Nick, leave the house with Nick inside, then retrieve the gun and go off into the woods in search of deer. If Nick were to see Doug leave the house with the rifle he would make life inside the house miserable for the inhabitants until Doug returned or he were released.
One time Doug was not sufficiently sneaky with getting the rifle out the door and Nick was on the lookout for an opportunity to join the hunt. Doug was just heading over the hill behind the shop into the woods when Doug’s daughter Amy gave him that opportunity. She absentmindedly opened the door on some minor excursion and Nick bolted through the narrow crack between her legs and the door. He launched out of the house like a fighter jet off the steam catapult on an aircraft carrier. He had acquired a lock on Doug, was on full afterburners, and time to intercept was measured in a handful of seconds. Amy realized she had messed up and yelled for Nick to return. After a couple of attempts with absolutely no response other than what appeared to be an attempt to break the sound barrier she finally yelled, “Smokey! No!”.
Disregarding the inadvisability of an instantaneous transition from full afterburners to full thrust reversers Nick did just that. There was a cloud of gravel and dust in the driveway and parking area between the house and the shop as Nick went from just subsonic in one direction to nearly supersonic in the other. Amy held the door open wide and stepped aside as Nick blew past her into the house in his quest to find Smokey and make sure he got what was surely due to him.
Doug had a smart dog but he has a smarter daughter.
More on registration
This should have occurred to me much sooner. The world is unstable. Trouble in the Middle East is growing. Putin’s Russia is pining for a return of the “Glory” of the Soviet Union while radical Islamists pine for a new global caliphate, and China is a rising military power. The U.S. Continues to commit economic suicide. We’re well on the way to becoming a full-on surveillance state, with global information sharing.
You’re homosexual and you want to get married, thus putting your name on a list (a database) of homosexuals.
As gun owners and supporters of liberty, we know well the dangers of registration and lists, as they almost always lead to confiscation or something else unpleasant.
Just sayin’. Once the novelty of this great idea of “gay” marriage wears off, there’s nothing left but the long term implications. Communists, socialists, Progressives, Fascists and jihadists aren’t known for their respect of basic human rights, whatever they may have you thinking right now. And they all love lists, and the more detail the better. Lists are power to them. And they all consider the Earth to be vastly over-populated already.
As a white, male, heterosexual business owner, employer and father who has guns and openly advocates liberty, I’m already a target of just about everyone else on the planet. I’m already out of the closet, so to speak, and so I’m not afraid to say this. Someone had to.
I’ve never been all enthusiastic, eager and giddy about being added to yet another list in someone else’s database, speaking just for myself. Some friends of mine, a man and a woman, just got married, and kept it off record as much as possible. In their minds it’s none of the state’s bloody business. Maybe later you’ll be glad to have read this. I don’t know.
A “real” author
I just signed a contract with Castalia House, a recently started Finland-based publisher, to be the official publisher of The Stars Came Back. By some combination of luck, skill, happenstance in a changing marketplace, and doing enough things right to compensate for what I didn’t, I managed to move more than 2700 copies of the book world-wide between 13Jan2014 and 18Mar2014. Not bad for a total noob, and quite above expectations, if not as many as one may absurdly hope. So why would I cut my profits by sticking a middle-man in the mix? Because the book is already selling and done, the change to my bottom line for this book is very minimal, we have a good deal to come out with a conventional prose format version of the story, one where I won’t have to worry about upfront costs for editing and new cover art. (He says my old cover fairly screamed “self published,” and was quite surprised that it was selling as well as it was).
He’ll also handle translation into at least two other languages, possible audible books, and taking it to ink-on-paper (something I’d been only slowly making progress on), meaning I’ll get a fair percentage of markets I’d get zero from otherwise. It also opens the door wide for sequels and offshoots and other projects I’ve been mentally kicking around but didn’t have the resources to go after.
The funny thing is, I didn’t really intend to submit the story in an attempt to get a publisher. I had tried to post a question in a previous thread in which Vox compared indie publishing and working with a publisher, but the blog kept eating my post, so I just emailed the question to him. Basically I was asking “how does all this affect someone like me, a self-published author that is doing OK, but is a total no-name noob at it all?” He asked me to send in a copy for him to take a look at. I did, more thinking I might get some professional feedback, or maybe a plug on a blog read by people that might like the story. Shortly thereafter, it seemed like we were both a little surprised how things worked out. But as he said, “who am I to argue with the market?”
It’s been an interesting ride. Guess I can add “Raconteur” to my biz card.