This is a photo of what we in the Pacific NW call Silver Frost. To get it the air has to be very calm, have water vapor, and temperature below freezing. Little crystals grow on everything, and they grow, and grow. Touch anything and the ice falls to the ground in a small pile. A little wind will shake a lot loose but we haven’t had any wind. This is now the fifth day and the NWS thinks it might end on Tuesday evening.
and on horse hair hanging from wire
Sunday, Jan 13 This morning the wild turkeys were back out front. One of them came over the snow next to the 4′ fence and was closed inside the yard, when the 4 others decided to leave for the back of the house. She fretted quite awhile, and finally I opened the door when she was close to a place she could launch herself over, and she flew out. I think she has the proverbial turkey brain. All 5 turkeys have hung around the base of both bird feeders, all day. Deer have been sharing the space, but seem to be compatible, and cannot get to the tops of the feeder. Yet the Douglas squirrel is a robber of seeds and the little birds consider her/him a gate-crasher to be avoided. Our chores have moved back and forth from kitchen to computer, for the most part. I worked this morning on an update to the White Heron Cellars page for the 2012 greetings, I still have yet to finish the family reunion page and a couple more. Also, sharing time with writing a letter of recommendation for a former colleague to receive honor as a distinguished non-tenure track teacher. It comes with $2,500 check. I have known her since 1993, when she began teaching as an adjunct at CWU, Geography. Also, John and I have shared a lot of time in the kitchen on clean-up of counters and shelves. He’s accomplished the normal chores, and I’m back at the computer. We never got to the installation of the light fixture in “my” partial bathroom, and we haven’t been to town to get a replacement fluorescent bulb for the non-working (new) one. I was cleaning up my cwu.edu email account today and found this message: The U.S Census Bureau’s 18-month agenda to realign its field offices across the nation for the first time in 50 years will be completed by January 2013. The restructuring, announced on June 29, 2011, closes regional offices in Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Kansas City and Seattle. That’s going to have an effect on several of our students. We have placed them there in the past, even with the title, “geographer.” Also, I was in graduate school in the sixties with a fellow who retired as a Geographer from their DC office. The temperature was down to 13 degrees at 9:00 p.m., heading lower. John and I just made the long awaited chocolate chip and walnut (aka Toll House®) cookies. We’re chilling the dough but did bake and taste a few. Monday, Jan 14 Almost all day was spent on the letter of support for my colleague for the distinguished teaching award. Also shared time with baking cookies, to give to our favorite computer support folks and our auto repair shop. John and I have eaten our share too. He’s taken the dogs for exercise and hay to the horses. We had a turkey get on top of the garbage can out front and when he shooed her away, she flew around to the backyard and landed inside the 6’ fence. He had to get her out of there too, before a dog using the doggie door could chase her into the fence. The dogs have access to the yard through the doggie door at will. I captured a flying picture of the latter one, but it’s still on my camera. Also this morning, I received some help interpreting things I made some mistakes on or omitted on the Raclette write-up link regarding White Heron given in last week’s blog. See below on Thursday’s write-up for more on that project completion. Finally, right before 3:00 p.m. the temperature went up to 40 and so did the wind gusts! Intermittent cookie baking continued all afternoon. Tuesday, Jan 15 Left here very early this morning (before 9:00 AM). We had two appointments in Yakima, one at 10:00 for the ’09 Subaru (fog light died) for an oil change and checkup plus replacement of the bulb. We had to pay for the light but its installation and the other stuff is covered by our (almost) new car package. Then we went for a read and paper printout of my ICD. We try to do the 3,000 miles on the car and the 3 month check-up on the ICD on the same trip. Both were successful. The cardiology clinic (doctors) has split from the device services and testing part. Now, after getting through the front door there is a fork in the road and you have to go to the left side to see a doctor and to the right side to get connected to a machine. Oh, wait . . . no one has moved and the folks are the same. Our government decided to pay more for a procedure done in a hospital than they will pay for an equivalent procedure done in a clinic. This was to save money. So, . . . the clinic is now part of the hospital across the street. The hospital protocol is to always have the patient bring “papers” along while the clinic always assumed you hadn’t changed your name or Medicare number, and so on, asking only to have you alert them of changes. So we took the right fork in and returned via the left fork, as we have always done – and headed off to Costco. The city did block off a street from the parking lot that passes through a section with nicely landscaped houses. We frequently go that way but had to turn right. In spring that area is very colorful, so we’ll just go through on the next street over. So, at Costco gasoline is 20 cents/gal cheaper than EBRG. We did not find any of their “special buys” exciting so except for the “very berry sundae” we only bought needed things. Actually, we got a good price mark-down on the Turbo Tax 2012 software, and Nancy has to find time to complete it. Then, back through EBRG for more stops and chores. (Super 1 for drugs & groceries, Seth’s Auto Repair, Fred Meyer’s, CCSOE (email and web page provider), and dropping off Costco purchases for two friends. Two of the places were to deliver cookies thanking them for their services. Now John is baking more cookies and I’m ready to leave to play music at a nursing home. Back from that, and we had a good snack-full supper of cheese, sliced meat, and chips. Guess we could have added an apple. Today, I forgot to mention I took along my new Kindle Fire (KF). Managed to get a WIFI connection at the Subaru place and finally registered the KF. I have to figure the password on our WIFI here at the house; that’s the way I sit in one end of the house with my laptop and have access to our main computer with DSL modem. Managed to figure how to read one email account, but not how to open multiple ones, or send a message. Started reading the owner’s manual (always a good idea, but something I seldom do). Now, however, we haven’t yet figured out the password for our in-house system. Need that before I can test logging on to multiple Gmail accounts. While I was gone to town tonight, John installed two motion activated lights he bought at Costco today as an experiment. They are LEDs powered by 3 small batteries. One is in the dark living room on the path to the doggie/cat door. Now, as a dog heads to the outside, the way lights up and the exit is visible. We haven’t noticed if the cat manages to turn it on but he doesn’t need it. That room is supposed to be a living room and was in-style in the early 1980s – meaning no ceiling lights or even a switch on the way in. Pole lights were the thing, either pedestal with a light on top, or multiple small shades on a single or branching tree, and sometimes on a line hanging from the ceiling. We put a large skylight in the roof when new shingles had to be put on but we’ve not opened the ceiling to it yet. So that room is high on the list of things to “fix” – but first we have to clean it out. Wednesday, Jan 16 This morning John was awake very early, but I slept in. I didn’t have long because of going to play music at the Food Bank Soup Kitchen. My only reason for going to town today, but it was worth it (except for the cold room to play in and freezing our fingers off). I was busy taking care of all sorts of things about bills. I needed to work on more projects awaiting attention. Finally, I skipped out and left John with the chore of baking the rest of the cookies, emptying the dishwasher and loading the stuff off the counter. The most impressive thing he did was clean up the floor beside and underneath the small TV table beside my recliner. He pulled all the stuff that had fallen off, behind, and under, leaving it all on the floor in front of my chair, to encourage me to clean and sort it before I could sit down. Good ploy, it worked! The food bank soup kitchen folks fed us pasta with chicken, a large slaw salad with raisins and carrots, tomato halves stuffed with a tuna/onion salad, really quite good. Finally, for dessert, a piece of breaded plantain with key lime yogurt, topped with coconut chips. Different, for sure. A number of the “servers” sang along and kept time to the music. Once home, I had to work on our hay paper, which my co-author returned with revisions after review comments from another colleague. I found a couple of things to change and okayed the rest. He got it set up and sent off to the editor for peer review. I hope it is accepted. That would be cool. Then today I was also taking pictures of the crazy wild turkeys around and inside the backyard. Now at 7:00 p.m. I just heard that because of the flu, all activities are being cancelled at Dry Creek (assisted living), where we were to entertain tomorrow. It has taken me over an hour to reach everyone to let them know not to show. Some folks have a much longer drive than I do and mine is 20 minutes. One older couple comes all the way from Yakima. That’s the farthest. John fixed a wonderful dinner including especially nicely cooked small pieces of chicken breast with various seasonings and lemon, fried cauliflower, and toasted cheese rolls I brought home today. For dessert, we had John’s raspberries on ice cream. Tonight John made some excellent progress on putting photos directly into the blog, to circumvent the need for me to make a web page of information if not much text was needed to explain. You can visualize his efforts, test, and results on the Jan 16 posting after last week’s and before this. It’s a great picture of a Mule deer buck with a nice rack who was around our place a few years ago. Today I took a couple more pictures of the turkeys inside the backyard and one flying out. John had to chase 3 out late afternoon. I completed the story of the Raclette web page we gave you last week, making some additions and corrections. It is found here at White Heron. Thursday, Jan 17 Spent much time revising the support letter for my colleague using comments from other geographer friends, on my final edition finished last night. I shipped it off to my secretary to put on letterhead to get it into the nomination packet. Also I shooed a turkey out of the inside fenced backyard. Some quail made it back there today to feast on seeds. Now I was ready to figure out the KF-reader password WIFI problem. That was a major effort and accomplishment, taking over an hour. Had to go through 3 people at FAIRPOINT where we have our telephone/DSL connection. It took awhile to get the okay, in order to get to tech support, and be carried through (looking over John’s shoulder and giving instructions from the tech support guy). Mind you, before that, was a bunch of time exchanging information about my account PIN, the details from the back of the modem, explaining how long we had had this setup between my laptop and the home computer, when it last was replaced, and on and on. The fact we have had this for several years, made no sense according to their records on our account, which was not noted as having wireless! Finally, we got through to a tech support person. Phew. Then a bunch more time on the computer going through details to access our account to change the password, so that I could use my Kindle Fire to access the web, from home. Once that password was changed from the weird default one used at setup, I had to go to my laptop, and reattached it to the “new” presence of WIFI with the changed password. Then I had to open my KF and connect, using the changed WIFI connection. Now, everything is working again. Nice, but no time to play with the KF now. Need to get back to composing our annual newsletter before Valentine’s Day. Funny, we just received one such from our friends in New Mexico, apologizing for being so late in January. We have them beat! Okay, now have to clean up my memory card on my camera in case I decide to video tonight’s presentation, 7:00 tonight, at a lecture on Cornwall and birds, from friends we know in EBRG. The married couple went to SW England hiking along the Cornwall coast in Sept, 2012. They are putting on a slide show for anyone from the community to attend free.
We’re back–late. The Audubon meeting was late starting for the darnedest reason. The person with the key got caught at a railroad crossing (no joke). He was supposed to be there to open the building at 6:30. We got there at 6:35 and no one was around. It was 25 degrees outside, so we sat in our car after standing around 10 minutes freezing. Finally, he got there at 7:00 when it was supposed to start. They were still LONG in starting. The master of ceremonies talked for awhile about the organization and passed around a number of frozen birds. John and I never quite understood the reason or significance. Most were little song birds, or immature robins, but there was one larger hawk. The speakers didn’t start until 7:30 and went for over an hour. It was a very interesting talk. At the end, they offered cookies made of dates and butterscotch chips. We brought our two home, because we needed something warm to drink. I did record the evening but haven’t looked yet at the video.
Friday, Jan 18 Not much happened today, but we worked a lot on the computer and taking pictures of the beautiful silver frost, i.e., frozen fog. John took many very nice photos on his camera (better than mine). I worked some on Facebook clean up again from the reappearance of my stolen identity fake account. Jeez, what a PITA. And shooing wild turkeys from the backyard (inside the 6′ fence). Finally, one of our Brittanys (Meghan) helped by going out the doggie/cat door and chasing them out.
Night-time birthday party, leaving at just before 5:00, returning just before 10:00 pm. Great cheeses and crackers with wine at the start (Cheddar and Cougar gold, which is really white). Cougar gold is made at Washington State University on the east side of the state; their mascot is the Cougar. Then back to the dinner table set for 10, with roast beef and mushrooms, rice and mushrooms (for the one vegetarian in the group, veggies, a carrot/celery salad, a green salad with raspberries and blueberries, and rolls. For dessert, we had a chocolate frosted chocolate cake, with a layer of some sort of fruit, made by their daughter-in-law who couldn’t come to the dinner because she and her hubby are good bowlers and go to Yakima on Friday nights for a bowling league. David has won the Senior Division of WA bowlers, again this year, and will be competing in the Nationals in Reno. I set my computer to upload 3 hours of videos (time for the transfer), from last night’s presentation on the walk along many miles of the Cornwall (England) coastline, with a few getting there and back photos (Hudson Bay, Greenland ice cap, Heathrow and London). When I got home, I checked it out and sent to a couple of friends who might be interested. If you are interested, jot me a note on email, and I will give you download instructions. Only consider this if you have a fast broadband connection to the Internet. Ours is DSL on the phone line because of being about 6 miles farther out than Charter® has laid cable.
Saturday, Jan 19 I checked an email account early morning and found a message from an ex-colleague whose friend had died unexpectedly. I first called him to get more of the story and to try to comfort him. Then I needed to call other mutual friends to notify them, and give them his home phone number, which they may not have had. We left here after 1:00 to go pick up an 89-yr old lady with macular degeneration who cannot drive, but she loves to hear our music, and this afternoon was a music and eats thing. A lady living there had died just a bit ago and this, although a regular play date, was to be in her memory. Our pick-up guest knew the woman who died. John went shopping while we were “doing” the memorial music – many singing along — for the 97 yr old lady who died. She (Ella) used to come to our potluck play times and would get up and dance with one of the residents. She particularly loved waltzes, so we were requested to play Tennessee Waltz. John got back in time to hear half of our song fest and to eat with us. There were many sweets, and half sandwiches (egg salad & meat/cheese), to go with the homemade Tortellini soup. I won’t need any dinner tonight. Last night when we got home late, there was a call from a neighbor a mile away that another mutual friend was in local hospital, so I talked to her this morning and then when we got home from our afternoon of activities, I called and talked to the gal in the hospital. Her system is not processing food right, her pulse is high, her blood pressure low, and she is starving to death causing problems to her system. Blood tests and cat scans have not revealed an answer yet. Now John is making brownies for yet another music jam up at the Swauk-Teanaway Grange at 2 pm Sunday. We’ll sample them (with strawberries) and then go to bed.
Hope your week was great.
Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan
putting on a slide show for anyone from the community to attend free.