Bogieblog

Shade for the Summer

At the end of last May, I regaled my readers with the shades/blinds I had installed above the kitchen sink and behind the pellet stove. At the end of that post, I had ordered an electric shade for the bay window beside the refrigerator. It took a couple of weeks to arrive but I wasn't in a hurry to put it up because the willow tree provided a lot of shade. Along with the large plants in that window, sun entry into the south facing window was not a huge issue.

Since then, a large piece fell from the crown of the willow tree, damageing the roof and pand providing the impetus for taking the willow tree down a year before I had planned to. The willow came down in late July and I was in the middle of a lot of other projects (some involving work that needed to be done after the roof was repaired), so never got around to putting up the shade.

All that was a rather long intro to the revelation that I put up the shade last weekend :)

This shade, like the one over the kitchen sink is see thru - you can see thru to the brighter side. Which once again means it is not a privacy shde, but that is swamp land next door and really, even if someone were wanting to peak into the window thay would only see into the kitchen and the doorway into the office, so I'm not worried about it. Below is a video of it in action - it does go all the way up and down but I had to clip some leaves from the one plant before I did that. Sorry for the shakiness - my hands have fine shakes so affects the phone.

 

 

Training Day

Today I spent 8 hours in class and am now the proud holder of this certificate:

Oh, and I also got a patch for my vest

This class was organized by the HOG Chapter that I belong to and opened up to a couple of other local HOF chapter members. We had 32 participants in the class. We were originally supposed to hold it at our sponsoring Dealership, but with so many people attending the venue was changed to a library that has a lot of classrooms.

All participants paid their own class fees and instructor travel fees (he came up from past Boston). We also kicked in money to donate to the library for allowing the use of their large conference room that had tables/chairs for the entire mob (plus extra - we could have had 50 fit easily), a projector screen and computer set up for PowerPoint slides and of course the  necessary restrooms. Plus we had lots of room to hold 3 different training scenarios at the same time.

We all had a good time and learned lots. It helped that a couple of people had attended this class before so were able to help with the training scenarios - otherwise it would have taken forever getting thru them with just the lone instructor.

UPDATE: Someone sent me a picture of my attendance. I have no idea who the other people are - they are from different HOG Chapters.

Liar, Liar

I inadvertently lied to Cop Car yesterday. She had sent this email:

This relates to a post way back on December 16.

Right after I replied, "Nope", I realized I had done some work on it last Sunday. However, technically I hadn't finished it, so I guess if one were to be inclined to split hairs, I didn't actually lie.

I got all the leaves painted and wanted them to dry several days before staining the rest. It took quite some time to do just the little bit I accomplished. And that type of work irritates my shoulder injury (as do other seemingly benign actions. so without further ado, here are one end and the middle sections.

It may take a while to get back to it as next weekend I have the Winter Storage party at my H-D dealer, where the bike is stored. Sunday I will catch up with everything I didn't get done this weekend because of training and meetings.

January Thaw

We had a much needed January thaw this last week. It got above the single digits on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday it was in the 40's and Friday it was topped out at 60 with rain thru Saturday morning before we once again went back to below freezing Saturday. Saturday's high was 56 (at just after midnight) then by 10 am it was down to 28 with the temps slowly falling thru the day. All the warmth and rain resulted in massive thawing. My garage flooded (per usual) but the sump pump did its job. The back yard developed a stream.

And the swamp next door also had a nice babbling brook develop.

My roof was in desperate need of the warm temps as the roof hadn't dumped since at least a week before Christmas. That means it had at least 21" of snow on it as well as a half inch (at least) of freezing rain between layers of snow.

Now it is back to the reality of winter at a current temp of 7. Tuesday morning should be back in the negative numbers and then Wednesday snow is forecast.

The warm temps were much appreciated, even if they only lasted a couple of days.

New Look

So I had issues with with the comments that started sometime after I posted last Sunday. Ruth let me know that she was unable to save comments (got a 404 error upon submital) and I confirmed from 2 different browsers than what she was using (Mozilla Firefox and IE). The funny thing was, in that time Cop Car was able to comment from IE. In four tries, I got a comment to go thru, but the next try did not work.

I contacted the Typepad team and they determined that at least part of the issue was the code in my very old templates. I had made these templates sometime in the early 2000's and haven't found a need to change. The team encouraged me to use one of their template builders so I wouldn't have to mess with any code. I followed their advice and the resulting look is from that endeavor. I was able to customize and specify content thru the builder very easily.

The change solved my issues with the 404 error with both Firefox and IE. Alas, Ruth had different difficulties with Chrome in that the "Post" button never became "Live" for her. So back to the Typepad team I went. Thru a series of trials from both the Typepad team (using Chrome) and Ruth, it was determined the most likely culprit was something unique to Ruth. She was a real trooper trying different ideas (most thought of by her), until finally she downloaded another Chrome-based browser that worked.

We still never figured out what was unique about Ruth's set up - which would have been nice in case it crops up for other people. But, hey, sometimes you just gotta say "Good enough is good enough." Thank you so much Ruth for being willing to try different things and report back results!

I would also like to thank the Typepad team, who was incredibly patient and went thru my original custom code and made suggestions for fixing it, or updating thru their builder, then made suggestions for testing the Chrome set up that started having other issues.

Issues with Comments

Seems the only person who can comment at this point is Cop Car. I've tried Firefox and IE, Ruth has tried Chrome. I'll try to figure out the issue

Tale of Two Forecasts

On January 2, NH1 posted this forecast on their FB page. I got chit for posting this. As on person wrote,"I didn't see that on Channel 9".

This is the forecast from Channel 9 on January 3 (posted on their FB page)

And this is the updated forecast early morning 1/4/18

Well, my area got hit with 14" of snow as did a whole lot of the state. Hmmm - 'nuff said.

Snow Blower Maintenance

This is my first year with the new Snowtek snow blower. The directions say to perform its first oil change after 2 hours of operation. The first snow storm of the 2017-2018 season only porduced 1 hour of use. The next snowblowing took place just beofre leaving for Kansas over the HChristams holiday. When I got back, I had to snow blow again. So I didn't get to the maintenance until it had about 4 hours on it - but I did get it done.

First was getting the correct oil. The engine manual specified 4-cycle automobile oil at 5w-30. I went to the local O'Reilly's and looked for 4-cycle oil. I could find 2-cycle oil but not 4-cycle. Now, I sort of believed that it would be regular car oil, but was unsure. So I played the dumb girl and asked one of the parts technicians. He was very helpful and asked all the questions as to dino or synthetic, viscosity and how much. So he made sure I got the right stuff and even pointed me to what was on sale to save a couple of $$. I also got an oil pan and a combination of cheap funnels (you'll see why I needed 2).

I got home, pulled the car out of the garage (and let it run to charge the battery), and got everything set up. Now, most models of the Snowtek have the drain plug located at the rear of the engine. My luck placed the oil plug above the right tire, so I couldn't put the oil pan just below. I tilted the snow blower by placing the left tire and blade on 2x4's and after much grunting I got the oil plug removed.

The set up of the 2 funnels looks strange, but it got the oil to the pan without a mess. My only area of trepidation was that the oil wasn't draining out of the tube when I removed the plug. It took just a few seconds for me to realize that I needed to remove the dip stick, and the oil ran out freely at that point. It drained so quickly that I poured some new oil into the engine and watched for it to come out.

Once I was sure the oil had drained, I put the plug back together and added oil.

The engine manual said it needed 16 oz but by the time I had gotten the oil to register at just below the full mark on the dipstick, it was closer to 20 oz. I had been discussing changing the oil on the pellet/firewood hoarders forum, and others who had the same brand of machine, had warned me it would take more oil than the manual suggested. They had alos offered other suggestions - such a helpful crew on that forum!

Once I had the dipstick secured, I checked for leaks and reefed once more on the plug to ensure tightness. Now for the big experiment - I started up the machine and let it run for a minute. There was no spurting oil, not even any leaks!

A smooth project for a change :)

Bomb Cyclone to start the Year off Right

Okay, okay, I hate the cheesy special names they occasionally come up with for storms. The "bomb cyclone" name just makes me cringe. It was a Nor'Easter. Even a Nor'Easter is a special name, but it is different from a regular snow storm as it barrels up the coast, and causes not just snow, but has the potential for flooding - especially if there is a high tide. This event timed in the MA/NH area during astronomical high tide and massive flooding, along with the snow occurred.

Thursday morning started like any other morning; I went to work in the wee hours of the morning. Many production people had made it in even earlier so they could get in 6-8 hours of production before the worst of the storm was expected to hit. I was of the same mindset - arrive at 5:15 am and leave sometime before noon.

Even leaving work early, it was a tough commute home. Many schools closed for the day so at least the traffic was light. However, it was snowing heavily - albite very small flakes, but they made up for very limited visibility. While I was on main roads, at least there were tracks in the snow to follow (they were plowing so tracks stuck). However, once I hit RT 149, 12-13 miles more to go, they had not plowed at all. With the heavily overcast skies, heavy snow coming down, and 4-5" of snow on the road obliterating tracks, it became very challenging just figuring out where the road was, much less where your lane was when passing vehicles going the other way.

I got home about 1:30 and there was 5+" of snow. After taking care of a few things, at 2 pm I went out to take a first pass with the snow blower.

While I was at it I roof raked the edge of the roof over the propane tanks (It has been so cold that the roof hasn't dumped since a week or more before Christmas). I finished just before 4 PM and by that time we had about 10". The wind had whipped up quite a bit and was re-depositing snow in the snow blown areas. Plus, it was still snowing heavily.

Friday I got up at my normal time and saw that there were some decent drifting (even the ramp to the back door, which is under a 3' eave, had 18-24" drifts on it). Additionally the road plow had made several passes leaving a good size berm at the end of the driveway. After taking care of the animals and making coffee, I logged in remotely to my work computer at 4 AM and sent an email that I would be working from home that morning. Then I started working on projects. At 8:30 I went out to face the wind and cold and started snow blowing the driveway and to the tent garage. I made it to work by 11:15 am and stayed late.

The wind has been ferocious since then so I have not done anything besides clear the tent garage of snow. Today the wind should abate some, plus it should get over single digits, so I'll snow blow the paths and other areas that have drifted over (mostly those places I had not touched on Friday morning). I also need to roof rake eaves on the other 3 sides of the house - although it is supposed to warm up toward the end of the week and hopefully it will dump by then.