Only one week left of the Big Top Chautauqua's season. I am hoping to climb the hill and get some photos on my last day (next Saturday) but in the meantime,  ( here are some mushroom pictures that I took... :) )



( Click here to see more.... )

I often notice the weather at night when I am doing outdoors chores or walking the dog. Sometimes there are truly amazing sights like double-rainbows around moons, or vast cloud formations lit up all silver. Frustratingly my limited photography skills are not up to capturing anything in the sky at night, even with modern day cameras-for-dummies. So, I have often been unable to share these experiences or articulate them verbally later. I'm hoping that this Blog medium will be a happy alternative. Here's giving it a try!

We've had between a foot and two feet of snow on the ground in Ashland for a while now. Yesterday a little bit more dusted the top of it, big fluffy flakes that never amounted to a serious accumulation. But early this morning at 3AM I went outside to put out the recycling and made an astonishing discovery! Apparently this new thin layer of snow had very different visual properties when it came to reflecting light.

It was bitterly cold and the sky very clear, with a large waning moon. The first thing I noticed was that the huge bare swath of snow in our backyard was literally sparkling brightly in the moonlight. The closest thing I could compare it to is sparkly sidewalks I've seen in front of some buildings in California. Every step I took as I trekked back and forth carrying recycling containers to the alley, the sparkles were constantly shifting. Wow!

But the craziest thing was my deep path of footprints. Instead of sparkling, they glowed! The moon was as overhead as I've ever seen it, and shining straight down to illuminate the bottom of each print. The sides were shadowy and dark and the bottoms smooth and reflecting a solid glow upward that made the prints stand out from the rest of the yard light-wise. I have never seen anything like that before. All I can say (again) is, wow!

(crossposted to weathernerds)

Today I repotted a couple of house plants that needed it. Really needed it! One had blown its plastic pot clean in half with the force of its root growth, and the other had been falling out of its pot since I bought it for $2.99 at the ARC thrift shop on my way out of Colorado 2 years ago. I also repotted and cleaned up most of my indoor herb garden.



The parsley are not big enough to harvest any leaves from yet but they are growing faster and faster. I tentatively think these remaining 5 plants (two are in one pot) are now "established" enough that they are out of danger. Cross fingers! I transplanted these today into the pots shown. I have been trying to err on the side of transplanting soon on these because they are said to have a taproot and like a deep pot.



Three Basil have survived to date and while they are growing painfully slowly they all have multiple leaves now. The one shown at front has six!



Mixed results on the onions I planted. Two went rotten, but this one took a firm root and divided into four green onions. Hurray! I cleaned it up and added more dirt to protect the new roots today. There was also an additional one that appeared to be succeeding like this one, but wasn't yet as far along... it still had a good "belly" of living white onion around the divisions.



Of the 20 or so onions that had been preserved hanging up in pantyhose for cooking with, five sprouted and one went rotten. I got rid of that last one and pulled out the greening ones to plant.



Here's the table with today's roundup of onions at different stages of development!



Onions are the winner of which crop was the first to be harvestable. Pictured above is my first green onions :D



This boxelder bug is apparently overwintering in our basement. The picture is slightly blurry because he/she started to walk away as casually as possible when it saw me looking at it. LOL

This morning I worked on the ongoing project of preserving the bounty from the Chequamegon CSA. In this case I was freezing pre-cooked corn (having removed it from the cob) and carrots, as well as loose raspberries. I also did some research and decided placing all the paper bags of potatoes in the coldest part of the basement, still in the bags, was going to be the best bet for those. Unfortunately no part of our basement is really going to be under 55 all winter. In the future we may need to set aside a corner of it for root cellaring and make sure it doesn't get too much heat over there.

I found evidence in the basement of this sad little guy who did not make it after the wood loading of yesterday. Aw! :(  I realize slugs are the enemies of gardeners, but what a horrible way to die... all alone on an endless concrete desert with only your own footprint(s) as witness.



For the bulk of the day I worked on server stuff. It was actually kind of frustrating. My efforts were centered on a pair of very nice old Pentium 1 machines that were going to be "wtf" and "omg", the primary and secondary mail and DNS servers for the network here at the house, and I only found out very late in the process that it was not going to be possible to use P1's. The latest 2.6.x Linux kernels will not install on a P1 which I had already known, so I had gone back to a 2.4.x kernel from a couple Slackware releases back, then was manually updating all of the apps. I had done my research in advance to make sure all the latest versions of the apps were compatible with a 2.4 kernel and none of them claimed they weren't. Unfortunately though, it turns out openssh requires glibc 2.4 or better, and that requires a 2.6 kernel. Gack!

The only pair of regular production PII machines I had lying around were, to put it bluntly, dogs. Passed over a dozen times for other projects, they were both gutted of parts. One had an ill-advised unique drive rail system that had clearly never caught on in the industry and that I had never found a way to mount drives to that did not involve duct tape and cardboard. In my experience nothing good ever comes from wasting days trying to gimp along a machine like that, which had in fact happened before with that very box, so I was leery to go there.



The other was a Dell Dimension that was never terribly reliable even as a brand new Windows machine. I didn't really wanna go there either.



That meant my options were to go out and buy more production machines (which would stop me for the day, since there's no place nearer than Duluth/Superior to do that, and nowhere on a Sunday) or use the pair of old Compaq Proliant rackmount servers I had on hand. I really hadn't wanted to waste those on the tiniest jobs of the system, but it appears I will need to redefine those as the tiniest usable machines I own, and start looking into buying better stuff long term on eBay. The good news is, there are some really nice machines out there for cheap. I am particularly a fan of the older (circa 1998-2002) Dell Precision Workstations. They make kickass Linux boxes! The former Big Pig (now renamed "orly" in the theme of kfap.net servers being named for online-speak words) is one of those.



Well. I started tearing into the Compaq Proliants around 8 at night, so I knew I would not be able to do a lot before the day was over. These were really nice machines about 10 years ago. I buy mine on eBay but to get them at a very cheap price, about $100 apiece, they have to be kind of messed up. I had got these right before our house sold in Colorado, so I had to basically open the box, look inside, then tape the box back up at the time. This is the first opportunity I've had to really investigate my finds properly.

Most of the issues so far have been related to misconfiguration and old firmware, which could be solved by obtaining software tools for free off the HP website. I really like the HP site and Compaq Proliant is excellently and firmly supported despite being an old product now. I'll just take the issues one at a time until I have completely gotten the BIOS and firmware straight and all hardware appears to be working. Then there is a lot of rigamarole needed to get a Linux system onto one of these but I have done that part before so I am not too worried there.

See, isn't this exciting stuff? :-p

Here's a cute picture of Daisy and Zinger snuggling on the couch, where I would go to watch TV while stuff was compiling/rebooting/etc:



As I was going to bed I noticed that it was raining... I knew that would happen. The wood pile was still covered though. Ha ha! I win!

Hello,

This was kind of sad and beautiful at the same time: the wings (only) of a large dragonfly still spread as if in flight. Apparently the former owner was eaten by a predator (or scavengers) and these are all that was left.



The red objects are windfall apples. Many apples are falling from the tree now, though the ones still on aren't quite ripe yet.

I threw more wood down in the basement today, and now I can actually tell the woodpile is smaller! The rack in the basement is now full so tomorrow's efforts will begin the filling of the wood room itself. Notice the swell view this picture has of the jungle like growth at the rear of our lot. Yikes! I need a machete or something.



I also cleaned up and organized more of the tool shed as shown below. It mainly consisted of pulling out all the smaller flower pots such as would only be useful indoors or for starting seeds, so that they can live in the basement, and then removing all old dirt from the larger ones (putting in the compost heap) so that the pots would stack well for storage. Still a bit more to go, mostly having to do with the pegboard out of view on the right-hand side. This shed really is big enough to store a driving lawn tractor, at least if there wasn't a lawnmower in there too.



Once it is fully organized my next project in there will be to install a vent, the type that will suck air out when the wind blows so water can't pool up underneath the tools in the spring. I figure before snow falls might be a good time for that. :-p

Today's podcasts that I listened two were a couple about Buddhism, my Mandarin Chinese lesson again (I am still on the one about saying "hello"... nee hau ma!), one about a fellow's efforts to return a painting he figured out was stolen during WWII looting, and one on Manners in the office.

In other efforts today I finally got off my ass and ordered some books about how to go fishing in Lake Superior, so I can catch some fish to put in our fabulous chest freezer that will be arriving on Wednesday. My Spouse will only eat Salmon but since I am here alone half the time I figure I could catch different kinds some of which would be only for me. We do have a membership in Chequamegon CSA (a farm cooperative for organic vegetable and fruits) and another for free-range farm bred chickens, both of which will add a lot to the new freezer before the end of the season.

Today started out with a bang as I had run out of cat food and dog food simultaneously, so I had to get up and go to the store right away. Our "fur children" (heh) are used to a morning feeding. In addition to the grocery store I also hit The Wart and got myself some new tennis shoes (since mine were falling apart),  some gas lantern wick, and some supplies to build a "good job!" display for myself to ensure better compliance with my uh, exercise schedule. It has a calendar and stars to stick on the days I do what I am supposed to. LOL... the scary thing is, I actually do find it motivating.

Towards the middle of the day I threw another heap of wood down in the basement. But hmm... what's that? (See arrow below, pointing at a suspicious... item.. amongst the wood).



Upon closer inspection I discovered it was 4 bumblebees who appeared to be engaging in either an orgy, or some sort of very very friendly house-moving activities. The close-up below shows a huge specimen, the queen I suppose, with 3 smaller bumblebees riding on her back. The rearmost one is in a position where mating would be possible (I didn't inspect to see if they actually were, sorry) while the other two are farther up on her back. Whew, sounds like a good time but doing it in a woodpile seems like a good way to catch a few splinters if you ask me.



Here's the wood rack in the basement, with only about 1/6th of its capacity remaining:



This view of the woodpile from the kitchen window shows that it is barely depleted. It's almost laughing at me. Grr!



However, there are 5 days left to move the rest before the next load comes so I think I am right on schedule.

Well, it's getting late-ish so I'm off. :: waves ::