I play DragonRealms, an online text-base RPG (that means you type everything and there are no pictures; you just imagine it all in your head). At one point my character went to a festival with a lot of booths selling things and one of them had tiny pets such as crickets and katydids. The pets would ride on your shoulder and do cute things like chirp, walk in small circles and look up at you curiously. What really stuck with me was the name of the tent though: "Small Friends". So when I got a refurbished replacement for my first (dead) PDA, a Palm Tungsten T3, I named the unit "Small Friend".



The first one only lasted a few months so I didn't have a lot of hope but lo and behold this Small Friend has provided years of service and has stood up well to my usual treatment of dropping it on the floor a lot. In fact it has lasted so long the original rechargeable battery has now gone south. This month I found someone selling cheap replacement batteries for only $5! I figured if they are that cheap now they will soon no longer be available, so I went ahead and bought 2. In the unlikely event my Small Friend lasts another 5 years, at least I'll be set for batteries. There is a great website with photos and instructions on how to swap out a T3 battery. I followed these and my only comments are to add that you may need to use a small flathead to pop a small tab holding the bottom on (on the ass end of it between the "tabs" they tell you to pull out) in step #3. Also, in step #8, on my unit it was a little hard to tell if they meant you to include the black piece with the top or pry them apart, because mine were fairly firmly attached together. It turned out you definitely want to leave the black part behind attached to the front. It helps a lot to go around and pop the rest of the sides first, despite them saying you should start with the top :-p

Anyway the $5 battery worked great, and the only headache was it wouldn't resynch to my PC right away and kept crashing whenever it got to the Versamail part. Since I don't use Versamail anyway I finally just deleted it off my Small Friend and everything synched up properly. A few years ago we both trained ourselves to stop keeping tiny pieces of paper with notes on them, drifting up into big mounds of clutter. This thing syncs with my Outlook and my SplashID so all my tasks, notes, calendar, contact information, and passwords are portable with me and shared back and forth. I don't know what I'd do without my Small Friend! <3

Also in small buddy news I now have a new Camera! My Spouse bought it for me as a belated birthday present. Excellent! It is a Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital ELPH. They can be gotten on eBay for about $60, or at least that is what this one was.



It fits in this great pouch to which a small tripod gleefully (and conveniently) hugs:



The main advantage of this camera over my other one, a Canon PowerShot A40, is that it will focus a lot closer. A LOT closer. It also has much bigger pictures pixel wise. I was playing with it today and here's a picture I took of our cat Zinger while he was sitting on my lap:



Using PhotoShop I kept cropping it farther and farther to see how much detail was available... amazing! And this is nowhere near as close as it can focus either.







Fun stuff!

Also courtesy of my industrious Spouse I now have a fabulous new Outboard for my 12' aluminum fishing boat. It's a 2.5 horsepower gasoline trolling motor. It is a Johnson HD-25 produced from 1946 to 1950. I can't really show you a picture now because it's already clamped onto my lumber rack and taken apart into about 1,000,000 pieces, but here's what they look like when complete:



The 2nd one from the left is a Johnson HD-25. Apparently they are a fetish item for fishing because they will fire at one stroke per second, making for incredibly slow trolling. Putt... putt... putt.... I hope my Spouse can get it working! I am given to understand I may be helping out by manufacturing some leather washers in the not so distant future.

I also did buy replacement oars for my boat. They are new, blonde varnished pine oars. I also had the old ones in the living room while waiting for the new ones to arrive. There have been a lot of jokes about me "bringing 'ores home" especially the twin blonde "'ores". LOL

Alas, my Prius (whose Bluetooth name is, by the way, "New Friend"... my desktop is "Big Friend" and my iPod Shuffle is "itty bitty friend") got hit by a deer on the way back from the trip to pick up theoutboard. It looks like a lot of damage cost-wise but luckily my Spouse was not hurt.  I'll take it in tomorrow for an estimate.

I am pleased, nay, ecstatic to announce that I am now the proud owner of a Fine Yacht of my very own (see above).

I have to admit I've been fantasizing about boat ownership since I was a teenager, so in other words for a rather long time. Mostly wooden boats or ships, but since I started listening to Bass Edge podcasts I've been able to see the positive side of motorboats as well. Now, I never quite envisioned myself owning THIS particular type of boat, but hey... fishing has given me an excuse to actually buy one and the price was right, that being $150 on Craigslist.

It is a rowboat and came with oars (which need replacing) and its own trailer (which needs electrical work and a paint job). It also needs a small amount of leak patching so I will soon be learning all about that!



Here's the "topside" which I failed to photograph before we turned the boat over to keep snow out, so it is currently the underside. There are 3 homemade wooden bench seats, a homemade wooden transom and a piece up front also.



Here's another angle showing the trailer a bit more. It's a pretty minimalistic trailer. I find the boat and trailer completely unintimidating as it's quite possible to simply pick it up by hand and place it on the ball hitch of the truck. Quite a far cry from the horse trailer we had back in Colorado! But they are so light that I will have to watch out not to bounce it right off the back of the truck when hauling it over bumps.



There are 3 areas that will need patching. This one was already patched once but since it's cracked I will need to redo it. There is old green paint left on the patch. The outside hull has traces of not only green paint, but also white and blue from different times. I will probably be leaving it silver on the outside. I could see repainting the (burnt sienna painted) topside simply so it doesn't blind me in the summer sun though.



This one doesn't appear to have ever been patched yet.



Nor this one. I will get to learn all about patching aluminum boats. Whee!

Alas I have it on good authority a boat of this stature is not usually named, so I guess it will just have to be a generic Fine Yacht for now.

I plan to take it out on the local inland lakes, ponds and streams to practice my fishing this summer. That will be fun! :)

Hello!

Yesterday I tried the manly art (hehe) of Fishing for the first time. Although I didn't catch anything it was quite fun. I knew that the sport fish were likely to be up large deep rivers or at river mouths at this time of year, but I decided not to stress out too much about success/failure my first time and go somewhere easy just to test out my skillz. So I headed down to the marina here in town and asked the fellow working there where he recommended I try and he suggested the end of the harbor wall where it was easy to fish both inside and outside the wall. He said a few people had caught fish there in the past couple weeks so it wasn't completely insane, but I still knew it wasn't the ideal setting.

I spent a couple hours practicing casting into and against the wind, with and without different size weights, and learning what the spinner and spoon do in the water. I could clearly see what was baitfish-like about each one, if used properly but it will definitely take practice to do it well at a distance (IOW when I can't see what I am doing). I got the gut level feeling that I did not have the right color/pattern of either type for the conditions. Now I have something specific to shop for, that will be a lot more fun than standing there like a dope and finally resorting to getting an "assortment".

I did actually get one bite that I was not able to bring in. It felt very light and looked smallish (about a foot and a half long and dull gray). I only caught a glimpse of it as it broke the surface and flapped as fast as a sparrow's wing in the instant before it got loose and vanished. The whole thing happened so fast I am still not sure what I did wrong. I don't think it was hooked very hard. Maybe I should have done something to make the hook go in farther before I tried reeling it in. The other possibility since it was such a small fish is, maybe it had just bit down on the body of the spoon, then let go when it put up a fight. LOL

My goal was to catch 1 fish before winter as a proof-of-concept, so we'll see if I get another chance before it gets too cold to be fun.

While I was in the port area I saw a really cool looking, but tiny 2-masted schooner come in to refuel its inboard. It had no sails up and was being manned by a single old guy who looked like he really knew what he was doing. Its name was the Pirate's Witch but I was not able to find out more about it on the web. It looked like one of those deals where someone got a modern yacht custom built as a mini schooner. Neato!

On the server front, all actual email operations have been turned over to WTF and OMG, and the old system has no email responsibilities anymore. I forwarded all left over email that people hadn't picked up to the new server so that's done. I still have about a day left of adding capabilities to the new servers, and then tomorrow I will start work on the new webservers. Since it is going to be a while before I get to Minneapolis and I want the network there shut down ASAP, I have decided to reassign the 2 Compaq Proliants I have here as the new webservers. My Proliant administration CDs arrived in the mail (gotta love eBay!) so I can get to work on that tomorrow. Later when the old dead system's machines come back here, 2 of those can be the replacement OMG and WTF.

The new webservers will have differing capabilities. One will be PhP enabled and the other will be fast CGI. Each will have a mix of available languages in addition to Perl and C. Java, Python, maybe Tcl. But they probably won't both have all the choices. I hope the Java environment is more stable now than it was when I first ran one back in 1998.

The Chequamegon CSA share I picked up yesterday was quite the bonus crop. We had not received one the week before so this was kind of a double one as well as being the last summer share of the year. There were a huge pumpkin and a huge squash which were loose. Then inside the box there were green peppers, medium-hot peppers, jalapeños, tomatoes, a big bag of apples and pears, fresh big yellow onions with the dirt still on(!), cilantro and parsley, eggplants, a few handfuls of herbs, a head of leaf lettuce, about 10 medium size beets with the greens on, a bag of carrots, etc. etc.

I am going to be busy preserving this week haha.

Today I threw the first part of the new woodpile down, partially filling the 3rd row in the wood room. It's hard to show perspective in these digital photos but the top of the front row roughly follows the same height and angle as the ramp. There is a notch in the top of the 2nd row for placing a drip pan, which is the blue rectangular thing you can see up there. The chrome vent pipe for the natural gas boiler passes over that point and drips because it is too low there and condensation accumulates inside.



In the future we plan to lower the lintel of the wood room door a couple inches, allowing a steeper slope upward for the pipes that pass over it. This should prevent the leaking as the water will run back down to the bottom like it is supposed to. However there was not time to do that this summer alas!

I also covered the new woodpile thoroughly since there's rain every day and every night of this week's forecast.



This wood fell on the row of flowers planted alongside the deck, squashing one of the four completely flat. Since one had already inexplicably died earlier in the summer, I guess I'll need to plant two replacement ones next year.

In other projects I am working on a log-spraying station for putting the Anti Creo Soot stuff on each log before it goes in the boiler. This prevents creosote build up. Apparently it really works because our chimney sweep fellow had fervent glowing praise for us when he came this spring. "Whatever you were doing, keep doing it! It looks really good!" Mwahaha.

Here was the prototype log spray station I built last year. It was made from a shallow cardboard box with its flaps taped to form a trough for the log. I then enclosed the entire thing in a large black lawn bag for waterproofness. It worked so well I didn't even bother to build a new one last year, but simply used the 'temporary' one all last season. I could have easily used it again this year just replacing the plastic bag. After a summer of sitting around with that stuff dried on it the plastic was starting to break down chemically.



Gotta love white gaff tape. I probably wouldn't have used it if I had realized at the time it costs $22 a roll for the good stuff!

The new station is made of 2x4 framing and plywood surfaces, like the rest of my bright blue workbench projects I've been doing. It will be 36" working height and contain a trough quite similar to the cardboard one, only of wood. Here's a picture of the frame under construction. It is upside down in this view. You can see the drill press table, and the household supplies shelving in the background, speaking of bright blue workbench projects :D



The legs are different heights because it has casters on 2 wheels, so it can be moved around easily for cleaning up underneath etc. It wil have a bottom shelf for storing the extra bottles of Anti Creo Soot. It'll also have a handle on the non-wheeled side to help in picking it up, and a holster for the spray bottle on the side. Here it is with the casters (they were cheap ones that we had lying around in our parts room):



Today I got as far as starting the sloped portion before I wore out and packed it in:



These are just resting in place, atop the 2x4 legs whose tops are cut at 45°. By the time this part is done I think I will have exploited every known way to cut a piece of plywood at 45° on our table saw, and maybe a few that hadn't been invented yet. Wish me luck!

Tonight as I was winding down I watched a movie from Netflix while tying stuff for fishing. My theory was that if I prepped a lot of stuff to use in advance, it'd save time on site and I could wear myself out with actual attempts to fish rather than screwing around with gear.

I tied a drop line and a clip onto various size weights, figuring that it might be nice to be able to clip on and off different ones until I get a feel for how heavy is good. I hope nobody laughs at my packaging but I figured it was the best way to keep them straight LOL. Each one is in its own individual snack size ziploc. Then they are all together in a larger zip loc.



I also tied a leader onto some of each of the spinners and spoons, also with a clip. I am using swivels so hopefully line tangling won't be an issue. Cross fingers!



These have their own box that I had bought along with them, but I am not convinced this will work out. The leaders want to escape the individual compartments when I open the top.

Tomorrow I will be tying on a weight and learning how to cast in the back yard. I experimented a little with just the pole in the living room, learning to use the controls and just tugging on the line with my fingers. I was really surprised by how nice the pole feels in my hand and how comfortable the casting motion is. This is actually going to be fun! I had been focusing on the utilitarian goal of catching fish to eat and it hadn't occurred to me that I might enjoy it as a sport too! Ha ha.

This morning the L strip I caulked in the basement looks really good, but the instructions on the caulk say wait 36 hours before subjecting it to water so I have to wait longer to test. I am eager to see!




The church near our house has either installed a new bell or turned on a long disused one for the first time in at least a couple years. It is a chorusing chime song sounding uncannily like a ringtone my Spouse used to have on a cell phone. As a result I keep going on high alert when it rings (once an hour). At least I know what it is now though. When it first started up about 3 days ago I would listen intently and move around the house trying to figure out where the heck that cell phone ringing was coming from. LOL

I forgot to mention that on my wild (hehe) shopping spree yesterday I also forced myself to do the scary deed of investing in fishing equipment. Scary because there is a huge learning curve and there was no way to start out without making at least some mistakes. Following book and internet advice the best I could I got a 8' spincasting pole called an "ugly stik" (hope that intimidates the fish) and 10 lb line. I got an assortment of 5-6 each spinners and spoons, some sinkers for fishing near the bottom, and a box of snaps and such for putting stuff together. I placed all these things in a small olive-green canvas tool bag I already had lying around. Total cost: $24. So at least if I make a fool of myself it is low cost humiliation :) 



According to my info this time of year certain salmon and trout will be returning to the streams to either spawn or overwinter, so my best bet for shore fishing is to fish near stream mouths and harbor breakwalls near the streams where those types of fish are found. Sound right? Uh... we'll find out eh. I keep telling myself I only need to catch about 10 edible fish to pay for this gear. LOL

Speaking of edible, today I need to go pick up the second round of fresh free-range organic chickens from the co-op farm. This time I need to be smart and cut them into pieces first before freezing, so some can be pulled out in per-use increments. I still have two whole ones frozen if I need a whole one.

Also the other load of wood is due to arrive today, probably while I am out fetching the chickens. I have the first load entirely stacked now. I'd say the wood room is about half full at this time. I nearly have 2 full rows going the long way, with one long row and 2 short rows still left to go. We're going to have a lot of wood outside to start the winter.

No new disasters to report in the basement tonight, thankfully. I put the bags of this year's accumulation of homemade salsa in the new freezer last night and they are still frozen solid today. I guess that means the stockpiling can commence in earnest now! I threw half the remaining woodpile down the chute and filled in the gaps at the top of the wood rack, then added to the 2nd row in the wood room. The floor is all dry now except for a low area right in the doorway where some water had moistened the old wooden threshold, now an inch lower than the rest of the floor. It's on the list to be filled in next time we open a bag of cement.



The pile up in the back yard is so small now I anticipate no difficulty getting it tossed down and out of the way for the 2nd truckload arriving tomorrow night after 5PM. Just looking at this room I am thinking the majority of that load will end up starting the winter in pallets on the back yard. Hopefully the greener portion of that load. I know at least 1 cord of it will be pretty green as I am the last order of the season and they kind of ran out of seasoned stuff.



Light level is a bit odd in that shot because the sun had gone down and even though it was still quite light out the flash chose to come on and illuminated the silver tarp.

I received my fishing books today and began to read. I learned that Lake Superior has been getting stocked with various sport fish for many decades. I learned that Lake Trout ("Lakers") are the original fish but were devastated by overfishing and predation by sea lampreys. Sea Lampreys still kill as many per year as commercial and recreational fishing combined, and you'll catch some with round lamprey bite scars or even a lamprey still attached. Lakers come in many different flesh colors and my Spouse may actually enjoy the red fleshed type which is supposed to be most tasty. Also I learned that there are many different types of salmon stocked some of which are getting fairly established. There is good advice in there about what gear to buy to start out but it is also fairly evident that there is no way to get started in angling without looking and feeling like a complete fool the first few seasons. Woo! Sounds like a job for me all right.

In the course of reading I encountered a number of new terms that made me laugh and some that made me cringe. For example, I had never heard of a "bug slick". What is a bug slick? It's when conditions are right for a layer of small debris and dead insects to form a sheen or mat on the surface, like an oil slick only made out of dead bugs instead. I thought you might appreciate that.

One of the more cringeworthy ones was when an author stated that if one needed a float one could just use an air-inflated nightcrawler. Ouch! I would have no trouble piercing a nightcrawler on a hook but I draw the line at... actually, just how would that be done? With a tire pump, or mouth-to-mouth? It doesn't really bear considering does it.

At any rate, reading this book I have realized that in addition to a fish identification guide I also need a map or something showing a lot of publicly accessible fishing spots because apparently you have to move about a bit to find them.