utenzi

I went on a hike yesterday at Shallow Ford in Burlington, NC. When I left the house is was sunny with clear skies but by the time I arrived at the park, 40 minutes later, it was pouring. Fortunately the rain slowed down before I'd gone very far and the rain stopped completely 40 minutes later. We've had a number of days of rain at this point and you can see the effect the precipitation has on Basin Creek.   This bridge is completely surrounded by water. One side is 6 feet from dry ground and the other is around 50 feet from the "shore." You can barely see the bridge from dry ground on this side. The creek spread something like 50 feet on this side of the bridge. Fortunately the path, despite being under water, was firm and easy to walk on. I didn't see a single person on my two hour hike on the two main trails at Shallow Ford---I guess nobody wanted to cross the bridge over Basin Creek---but I did see a few deer and one really large black snake.

Now the pipeline is looking a lot more like a pipeline because there's a few miles of pipe laying about. Natural Gas Pipeline The next step is when they weld all the pipes together. One of the workers told me that they do this above ground so that the welds can be inspected by x-rays before they lay the pipeline into the ground. I guess you would want to be damn sure about how well the pipes are connected once you start pushing natural gas through them. Big booms are expensive and, given that the pipeline runs right behind my house, unhealthy. Because of all the safety aspects of this phase of the work, it's going to take them 2 months before they're ready to lower the pipes into the ground. Until then, lots of dust and from time to time, mud too.

There's a natural gas pipeline under the ground behind the house. It's been there for 65 years. Now the two pipes that are underground are about to have company---a third pipeline is going in. This is what the pipeline area looked like after they started trimming some tree branches back. The dog loves to run after thrown sticks so she was in heaven. Not so many sticks now and it's a bit ugly---and the dog is now red from clay dust. Just kinda ugly. :-( It''s amazing how much of a difference 3 days can make!

Here's an interesting book I received from Net Galley a few weeks ago. Nihal of the Land of the Wind is a beguiling book filled with many bewitching scenes painted with words of power and grace. I really enjoyed reading it and hope that the rest of Licia Troisi's novels are translated into English soon. My only issue with this book is that often the beauty of the prose interferes with logic but I doubt that will bother many readers. This book works much better using strong imagery and stark characterizations than it would otherwise. I strongly recommend this book. The main character is Nihal and she's the last remaining person with Elf blood left in the world. This is due to a vendetta by the villian of the story, Tyrant--and with the voices of her slaughtered people constantly filling her dreams, she's out for vengeance wielding the amazing black crystal sword forged by her foster father. And there's dragons too! This volume chronicles Nihal's

By Passion Play I'm not referring to the dramatic presentation depicting the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth, rather I'm referring to the 2010 movie starring Mickey Rourke, Megan Fox, Rhys Ifans and Bill Murray. I recorded the movie a couple of weeks back because the description sounded interesting in a peculiar way, and got around to watching it last night. Here's the summary of the movie from Amazon : The last thing washed-up jazz musician Nate Pool (Mickey Rourke) wanted to do was betray sinister gangster Happy Shannon (Bill Murray). But it may be the last thing he does unless he can deliver Lily (Megan Fox), a beautiful and mysterious carnival sideshow attraction. The stakes can't get any higher for the two lovers as they try to elude the merciless killer who will stop at nothing to keep Lily for himself. Kelly Lynch and Rhys Ifans costar in this gritty and unpredictable tale of redemption in the hard-boiled tradition of classic film noir. Believe me, that desc

The Sensory Deception is an amazing ride. Ransom Stephens takes you from the moneyed halls of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to the dirt poor coast of Somalia's pirates and then onto the deep jungle of the Amazon Basin. The sense of wonder he conveys using the idealism and technical know-how of the entrepreneurial protagonists is matched by the thrilling settings and the situations in which they find themselves. I highly recommend you read this book, it's incredible. Farley Rutherford and his team of technical wizards have invented a device that allows a person to totally experience the world from the viewpoint of another being---human or otherwise---seeing, hearing, smelling what they do. This book is about how they use this technology to try to change the world. Let's hope that this is a case where reality soon catches up to fiction because this is a device that can really change minds and souls. Imagine experiencing the loss of polar ice from the p

 We received 5 chicken eggs on Easter so in a way they're Easter eggs. True the hues are limited but you can see there is some variation: two white, two light brown, and one brown.  And we also received one turkey egg but that didn't seem very Easter-y. As you can see, it's a lot bigger than a chicken egg. Around 50% or 60% bigger. They taste a little different than chicken eggs but not bad by any means. After laying their eggs, I let the chickens into the garden next door, so to speak, and they had a grand ole time eating weeds, scratching out bugs, and munching on blades of grass.   Even the rooster got interested for a while. But then he stalked away. Apparently gardening is work for the hens.

Incy Wincy spider went up the water spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain, and Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout again.   I don't think I'd call this one "incy" or "wincy."  It's a big sucker. But it's web is in a bad state of repair. The beastie has made itself quite at home on my back deck and doesn't seem to find my taking pictures bothersome so we've found our balance.

I've watched a few of the new shows for the Fall Season and I'm not very impressed. I guess for quality I'll have to wait until the end of the month when Dexter and Homeland get their respective starts. So far I've seen the first 3 episodes of The New Normal, as well as first episodes of Go On, The Mob Doctor, Guys with Kids, and Revolution. The New Normal: I though the first episode was uneven, some jokes worked and some didn't. The grandmother (Barkin) was too harsh for me, but of course she was supposed to be, and the two prospective dads were a bit too cutesey. The second episode clicked. The jokes worked and the preachy aspects were worked in quite well. I decided that maybe this show was going to live up to the hype. Unfortunately in the third episode they only had the preachy part on board. What jokes were there fell flat, very flat. I'll try a few more episodes and see if the quality evens out. Guys with Kids : Run away from this show. It sucks.

Actually the phrase should be Rough Wooing but the word "woo" sounds too much like the background chorus in a Motown song for me. In any case, Rough Wooing is a somewhat caustic reference to the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh . I know, I know. Pinkie Cleugh sounds a little cutesy too, doesn't it? How about this one: Firth of Forth? That's a location in Scotland that the battle was near. The Gaelic version of the name, Linne Foirthe, sounds somewhat more serious. And a serious battle it was. In Scotland the battle is also known as Black Saturday, and for good reason. While estimates vary, something like 30,000 Scots went up against around 17,000 Brits and at the end of the day a third of the Scots were dead but only 600 British died that day. That's the kind of lopsided result that can really make a nation mourn for centuries. It happened in September of 1547. The King that started it was already dead, the future king it purportedly was started for was only 9 yea

Sometimes when you read a book description you wonder just what demographic the book is aimed at. That's what happened when I saw the blurb about a book by Linda Laird titled The American Grain Elevator: Function and Form . Here's the blurb: NEW BOOK! Explains the who, what, where and why of these sometimes massive structures that puzzle the traveler and are mostly taken for granted by the locals. The 111 pp. paperback, with over 150 regional illustrations, tells the story of how grain storage began, elevators were invented, who owns them and how they work. Includes sections on a variety materials used in the Midwest from the 1800s to today; with many historic photos and 86 full color examples of an important building form that is integral to our American heritage and agricultural economy. I just have to wonder how large an audience there is for this book. For all I know, it could be huge and untapped---I've not seen many grain elevator books around---but it's not

Every once in a while when I read the description of a book the idea pops into my head that the writer was following a definite strategy for marketing the book. Case in point, today I read the description of a recent release, Joshua's Revenge, by Richard Wren. The blurb goes: Yosemite Park bears are being killed and eviscerated for their body parts to be used in Chinese medicines. Joshua, a Yosemite Ranger, is assigned the task of finding the gangs behind the killings after his best friend, another Ranger, is murdered by one of the bear killing gangs. The trail leads from the backwoods of Yosemite to the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he’s faced with beatings, murders, kidnappings, and gang warfare. Fortunately, Joshua was born with superior athletic attributes and his well kept secret of being a world champion Oriental Martial Arts expert is put to the test. When his wife is captured and tortured, he must use trickery, misdirection and imagination, as

 This is what happens when a guy tries to repair some pants with a sewing machine. Havoc! In my defense I wasn't trying to be neat, nor tidy, not even pretty. I just wanted to keep my bits from dropping through the bottom of my pants. You see, the entire crotch was torn out of these poor cargo pants. It started off with one small tear, as these things usually do. But then it got bigger.  And then a tear started on the other side of the seam and that tear kept getting bigger. Soon they started looking like chaps---they covered my legs but little else. So this was my solution. I cut some cloth out of an old t-shirt and sewed it over the torn material of the pants. The pants' material was so thin it couldn't handle the repair on its own. Admittedly it'd have been a lot better had I used brown thread for the repair but I don't use my sewing machine very often and it's a miracle I did this without sewing my fingers to the pants.  Here's a smal

As long as I can remember, women have objected to being objectified. And conversely men usually say that they'd not mind that sort of treatment. It's quite easy to understand why women would object to being viewed as sex objects by others. And I think we can dismiss the apparent male attitude as just wishful thinking: Men want to be sexual objects because they don't feel that women view them that way now. Well, a study that just came out from Sarah J. Gervais at University of Nebraska-Lincoln adjusts those assumptions a bit. Apparently both men and women tend to view females in terms of body parts yet neither gender views men that way. That's a bit surprising. The study is published in the June issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology if you want to check it out. Here's a link to it . Through an interesting group of interactive exercises with a group of 83 undergrads (45 females and 38 males), it was determined that these participants viewed images

I know, I know. What is the world is that nasty weed doing next to the house? I can't stand this plant but for some odd reason my girlfriend didn't want me to kill it. Sure, back when it was a foot or two tall it was one thing: just a weird looking weed. But after 6 months time the damn weed was taller than the house---seriously!---and she finally agree to let me cut it down. So out came my machete and fun ensued. Whacking things with a big knife is really fun, y'know? The picture below shows the cross section of the cut plant. It looks amazingly like a tree. This nasty weed has just been growing this year---it's amazing that it got so big so fast. I hate to imagine what would have happened had we let it go a lot longer. Does anyone know what kind of weed it is? I've never seen anything grow that fast before that could get so big. Weeds usually only get yay-big, not tree-like. Notice the white Shepherd on the right of the first picture and the white

I got a free copy of How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley via a Goodreads contest. Entering the contests on there is a great way to increase your books-to-read pile for free. The only problem is long odds---often there's over 300 entrants per book to be won. Y'know, this is a difficult book to review. It's so fragmented. Part sob story memoir and part open hearted travelogue. The author, Amy Finley, had a brief fling with fame when she sorta won the third season of The Next Food Network Star. Finley's troubled marriage led to her resigning from her new show The Gourmet Next Door . Interesting stuff, no? Well none of that is in here but on the other hand the first 100 pages, more or less, are filled with annoying whining about her marriage and indirectly there's plenty of evidence here of why her insecurity led to those problems. So why the 4-star review? When Finley isn't whining, she's a very talented writer. There's a scene in the last th

We picked up these 4 light Brahma chickens back in mid-April when they were around a month old. They were so cute back then. Now they're almost old enough to reproduce. We bought them straight run (gender unknown) so there was no telling what we'd end up with. In this case we got lucky 'cause there's one male and 3 females. Perfect for breeding a few more Brahmas as well as having eggs to eat. The first picture is the Brahmas in the back of the truck when we got them back here from the guy we bought them from over in Burlington. The second picture was taken yesterday afternoon in a new enclosure we made for the chickens. The rooster is the one keeping an eye on me and my camera. He's a good bit larger than the females and more direct. Once they start laying eggs we might have to keep them penned up part of the time. Right now they roam as free as they please.

Some jokes to lighten a Thursday afternoon... Animal Tales ---bunny--- Once upon a time in a nice little forest, there lived an orphaned bunny and an orphaned snake. By a surprising coincidence, both were blind from birth. One day, the bunny was hopping through the forest and the snake was slithering through the forest, when the bunny tripped over the snake and fell down. This of course, knocked the snake about quite a bit. "Oh, my," said the bunny, "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I've been blind since birth, so, I can't see where I'm going. In fact, since I'm also an orphan, I don't even know what I am." "It's quite OK," replied the snake. "Actually my story is much the same as yours. I too have been blind since birth and also never knew my mother. Tell you what, maybe I could slither all over you and work out what you are, so at least you'll have that going for you." "Oh

Everybody wants to save money. Especially numismatics , y'know? Ummm, sorry about that. Actually my point to be made is how entertaining the "backtalk" can be at money saving websites. The one I usually use is Dealsea . Here's an example of the chatter over a $130 computer monitor earlier today: 06/25/2012, 12:55pm why LCD displays are still on the market? LED backlit ones are better. 06/25/2012, 12:57pm Why Hyundai cars are still on the market? BMWs are much better. 06/25/2012, 01:05pm Why android is still on the market? iphone is much better. 06/25/2012, 01:06pm Because they are much cheaper and are for the people like YOU. If you're rich enough, you would not loiter around here.. 06/25/2012, 01:09pm In Russia they put YOU on market 06/25/2012, 01:26pm Backlight doesn't make that much difference. I would rather have IPS LCD with CCFL(Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) backlight than TN LCD with LED backlight. 06/25/2012, 01:55pm Why do o

Feeling a bit down? Want to know why you're not feeling great?  You might have a substandard EmExome! Curious about what an EmExome is? Okay, probably not but the good folk at Emory University Healthcare are hoping that you say YES . They've got a new service where they examine a bunch of your genome and then give you feedback, the amount depends on how much you pay, on what genetic problems you might have. The perfect way to really know yourself!  LOL Unfortunately this isn't cheap. There's 3 levels of service and the least expensive is $3,000. Yes, the price of a nice small hot tub. Personally I'd rather soak in that nice hot water but if you're really inquisitive maybe you just have to know what's contained in your DNA. And if you want more explanation and hand-holding, then there's also the $5k and $9k levels. Yikes! Here's their explanation of the EmExome concept: What is the EmExome? The exome is estimated to encompass approximate