I built this gadget around 20 years ago. It’s been in use on a mountaintop ever since, until being brought down to my shop today. Three of the cylinders are marked “C” and the other three are marked “L”.
I remember having it the back of my 1966 Chrysler Town and Country station wagon parked across the street from the Federal Building in Moscow, Idaho right after the Oklahoma City bombing and wondering if I was going to get hassled for it.
The Gadget
Grandson Bryce took some off his first steps the other night when Barb and I were visiting and watching videos with son James and his family:
Son James has often said he is glad he didn’t inherit the packrat gene from me. Barb has hinted at similar thoughts on more than one occasion. I’m a long way from being a hoarder but I admit I keep things most people would throw away.
I heard this story over the weekend when visiting Idaho but SIL Julie blogged about it so I’m comfortable telling about a relative of hers:
The funniest find of the day was a small box I pulled off the top shelf of the pantry. I opened it and there was wedding cake! Very petrified wedding cake. Their parents were married 64 years ago…
I grew up in Alaska, and still have most of my family there. Summer is a great time to go places with the kids, and visiting home is always an item high on the list. But, because Alaska Airlines normally has a defacto monopoly on flying into Juneau, it’s usually around $500 a ticket from Seattle. When Delta decided to give them some competition this summer, priced promptly got cut in half. The daughter has been there once before, when she was two, and the son only in utero. So, we went. Continue reading
If anyone gives you any more t-shirts I’m going to put a stake through their heart.
Barb L.
July 27, 2014
[See here for background. Present context is deliberately withheld.
Send them to the address listed here. I’ll anonymize the source and take care of things from there.
Thanks.—Joe]
Is there an end to my shelf-building? Probably when I run out of walls to put them against.
Bah! Who needs walls for your shelves?
Plus the shelves are wide enough that I can double the depth of the books and easily access them from the other side.
I took a firearms class today to get the new Idaho Enhanced Concealed Weapons License. Mike (from the link) taught the legal portion of the class. During the class he said the criteria for many lethal force self-defense situations is what a “reasonable man” would have done in the same circumstances. He used me as an example of such a person, “We need an EE as our reasonable man, right?” He also suggested I send him a picture of myself to add to his slide. So, within five minutes I had taken a selfie and emailed it to Mike.
This evening I received an email from Mike without text. It just contained a PDF of the slide:
Therefore, just so you know, I’m the quintessential Reasonable Man.
I’m in Idaho for my nieces wedding and although I could have stayed at Dad’s house the weather is really warm and I like sleeping under the trees in a sleeping bag. So I went to Boomershoot Mecca and put pads and a sleeping bag and pillows down. As I was getting settled I saw the sun setting.
The picture doesn’t do it justice.
It’s a full moon tonight too.
I wish Barb could have come with me. It would have been perfect.
I mentioned Huffman wheat a couple weeks ago. There was some more news about it yesterday on the local television station when they interviewed Brad’s parents and his boss:
Last summer, a University of Idaho alumnus passed away suddenly in his sleep at the young age of 22-years-old.
Today, his family and peers honored his life by presenting a new variety of wheat that he helped create to the public. Rachel Dubrovin brings us the story behind the U I–WSU Huffman variety.
There is an article about it in the Lewiston Morning Tribune (account required for the full article):
Bradley Huffman’s interest in plant breeding began at an early age – and to some, he was a natural.
That’s why Jack Brown felt it was fitting for the new wheat variety released jointly from the University of Idaho and Washington State University to be named after the recent UI graduate, who unexpectedly died in June 2013 at age 22.
Someone I know is skeptical of the benefits of sleeping on a waterbed. I have a really nice waterbed with a mirrored canopy (only partially assembled in this picture):
So I was thrilled when I ran across this newspaper article recently:
I’ve had problems with my back in the past and this article says waterbeds are great for your back.
There is just one problem with the article. Check out the date on the newspaper: 
For the 4th of July this year Barb, her daughter Maddy, and I decided to go hiking near Mount Saint Helens. I have been interested in going for years but it just never worked out. This year we made it happen.
Mount Saint Helens exploded on May 18, 1980 and created the largest debris avalanche in recorded history. I heard the boom from it over a 100 miles away in Kirkland Washington. The ash from it fell on our farm in Idaho 275 miles away. I still have a pound or so of the ash that was swept off of the patio from my parents house.
We went on an eight mile (round trip) hike through part of the area destroyed by the high speed avalanche and blast from the explosion. We walked to within five miles of the crater. You might think five miles is a long way away. But the eruption killed trees 17 miles away. The scale of the destruction is amazing.
Taking a picture of something five miles away with the wide angle lens in an ordinary cell phone usually results in the object being invisible. This is not the case with Mount Saint Helens:
In addition to offering the opportunity to view extensive wheat variety trials, the field day will introduce a first in wheat breeding – a new variety released jointly by the University of Idaho and Washington State University.
The new soft white winter wheat will be named UI-WSU Huffman in honor of UI College of Agricultural and Life Sciences’ alumnus Bradley Huffman, who suddenly and tragically died last year at age 22. Bradley grew up near Cavendish on a family farm operated by his parents, Doug and Julie Huffman. He worked in the university wheat breeding program throughout his undergraduate training. During this time his contribution to the breeding program was significant, said UI plant breeder Jack Brown.
This new variety offers “high yields under dryland conditions, with excellent quality and good resistance to two important wheat diseases, Cephalosporium stripe and yellow stripe rust,” said Brown, who oversaw the variety’s later development and release.
UI-WSU Huffman is a joint release because it resulted from a cross between Bruneau, a cultivar developed by former UI wheat breeder Bob Zemetra, and a wheat breeding line developed at Washington State University.
The new variety will be licensed by and marketed exclusively by Limagrain Cereal Seeds. All of the seed royalties that would normally be allocated to the cultivar breeder and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences will go to the Bradley Huffman Scholarship for Plant Breeding and Plant Sciences to commemorate Bradley Huffman’s life.
Brad was my nephew. He died just a little over a year ago.
In the “it’s a small world” category, Jack Brown, quoted above, has kids that went to school with mine. Almost 20 years ago he was also on the same bus as my ex-wife and I when we went on a multi-day field trip with the kids to Oregon to learn more about the Oregon Trail. He was Brad’s boss at the University of Idaho. It was his idea for the naming of the wheat and the scholarship in honor of Brad and he pushed it through the bureaucracy.
Barb, both my brothers, and I went for a walk yesterday to check out one of the WiFi Nanostations I put up to get a new internet connection to brother Doug the last time I visited the farm. Doug just has a temporary installation for the solar power and the mounting of the Nanostation is still the steel fencepost I used but it is still working:
The signal strength at this station was about 10 dB lower than the last time I was there and by realigning the antenna we regained 3 dB but we were unable to account for the other 7 dB loss.
It was only a short distance away so I suggested we visit the highest point on the farm. According to the GPS on my phone the altitude is 3161 feet (+/- 10’) above sea level.
From there I had brother Doug take a picture of Barb and I:
As you can see in the background there is a very nice view from there. Some of the geological features are 30+ miles away.
I made a Facebook friend request to someone I have known for over 30 years. I hadn’t had any contact with her for probably four years but it sounds like a mutual friend from our past lost their son and I wondered if she knew something about it.
In response to my friend request I got this:
Hi Joe, I am chair of the Veterans For Peace Environmental Cost of War and Militarism Working Group. Because you have chosen to become a militant enemy of your local environment by exploding bombs on it, I do not want to be your Facebook friend.
Killing everything in that spot of Mother Earth that you choose to desecrate for fun and leaving behind the heavy metals to poison the water of future generations is appalling to me.
I’m not just picking on you personally. I’m against bombs, bombing ranges, chemical and depleted uranium weapons, mining where the people of the land are forced off of their property, and many other things involved with the military-industrial-1% complex.
If you could put some of your intelligence into figuring out how to bring down global capitalism and war profiteering, encourage farming and local food buying, conversion from fossil fuels and endless consumption to conservation and cleaner energy, stopping fracking, nuclear power, and the war against the indigenous, I’d love to hear your ideas.
Helen
I knew she was of significantly different political persuasion than me even when we were close. But wow! Bring down “global capitalism”?
I think we are done here.
Barb and I finally found time to go on our first hike of the season. We went to Talapus Lake:
You would think they would know better:
A level 3 sex offender was arrested after he kidnapped a little girl from a Beacon Hill Park. On 6/5/14, just shortly before 7:00 p.m., the complainant called and stated that a male tried to “touch his little girl”. The complainant went on to say that the suspect was surrounded by people in the 9300 block of Carkeek Dr S. Officers quickly arrived and found 3 people beating one male, who was down on the ground.
I sort of understood the protective instincts of parents for their offspring before I had kids. You know you should never get between a mother bear and her cubs so probably there is something similar with people.
But after they were born, it’s like, “OMG! If you try to harm one of my kids you have a death wish! You would rather have a momma bear chasing you than me because she isn’t as smart in the chase, she isn’t as persistent in the hunt, and she isn’t as creative when she catches you.”
If child kidnapping had a high risk of a nearly immediate beating and/or being shot it probably would reduce the incidence more than the threat of an arrest, prison sentence and/or GPS tracking device.
I’ve donated to numerous charities over the years. It’s difficult to say which I have donated the most to. One could add up all the money but there are some donations that aren’t measured in dollars.
I donated my eighth gallon to the Puget Sound Blood Center last night:
I don’t know for certain but I think that if I were to add in the blood donated to the Red Cross I’d be close to the 10 gallon mark.
Between “manly men doing manly things,” and “hold my beer and watch this.”
Reentering the U.S. After a Year Abroad: Responsible Intentions by Maddy Lisaius.
Be gentle in the comments.
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.