This past weekend was light and even more so into Monday, without telephone lines and computers working. Our home computer was fine, but not this morning, when John was out with the farrier, and I was trying to call about medical bills and get on the web to read and send emails. Nothing was working. Our phone lines were down until late afternoon. So I used the time to finish my tax form and print it out. I finally got fed up and quit and went to the other room to rest up for going to my exercise class and to pick up my “fixed” computer because they got in the power cord. I expected at least to pay for their time in diagnosing and in ordering the part, but not. He told me to close my checkbook, as it was all covered by Apple. That’s still hard to believe, but he said so.. that I had an Apple Care contract on my machine, and that extended the warranty two years. Well that is still not enough time in my book, but who’s to argue. I thanked Jason and Chuck and told them how much their support meant to us, and for hosting our blog since Dec 4th 2009. He was surprised that it was still going and people were still reading it. They are just a portal for us, WordPress is the actual service, but Jason did set it up (for John – on the phone). The blog URL begins with ‘ccsoe’ — for Complete Computer Services of Ellensburg. It’s so nice to have my computer working and back in my lap.
[An aside on WordPress (WP): Some folks try to disrupt web sites just to see if they can, or maybe they are angry about something. Attempts to disrupt any WP blog affects them all, and as there are so many, this is a daily issue. Mostly attempts at disruption do not work and users (us creating and posting, and you reading) never notice. Last month the defenses failed for a short time and anyone attempting to work with WP encountered a problem. Links below are to two posts written as the gurus at WP worked to re-establish the system:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/some-turbulence/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/wordpress-com-suffers-major-ddos-attack/
. . .[if such things are of interest – follow some of the links in those stories. jfh]
And this afternoon after exercise, John picked me up and we went to the bank and also to get my fixed computer. Tonight we are going to go to a talk on Moons in our Solar System. Dr. Bonnie Buratti of the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, CA, will give a public lecture titled, “Moons: The Weirdest Planets in the Solar System.” She is a planetary geoscientist who specializes in understanding how planets and their moons form and evolve. Dr. Buratti’s visit was sponsored by the JPL Outer Planets Colloquium program. ( http://outerplanets.jpl.nasa.gov/ )
Here is the abstract of what we heard: Our solar system has at least 170 moons orbiting the main planets. Before these moons were visited by spacecraft, astronomers expected them to be boring, dead objects devoid of any geologic features. We now know they are fantastic worlds – with features unlike anything seen on Earth: giant sulfur-spewing volcanoes, globally cracked ice-covered surfaces, liquid lakes of hydrocarbons, and colossal watery plumes. Yet many of these worlds are also earthlike and familiar. Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, has often been called an Earth in deep freeze, with cloud systems, lakes, shorelines, drainage fields and even perhaps rain. Scientists believe that the most likely places for life to evolve outside the Earth may be in the water-interiors of the moons Europa, Enceladus, and possibly Titan.
Here it is Tuesday all day, supposed to be a light day, and it was not. We started at 7:30 am with John leaving for the vineyard. I began my day early too, on the computer I now have access to again. After a lot of work I ate breakfast and got ready to leave for a much-needed haircut from my neighbor. I had also started reading — we are reviewing research proposals for the SILVERHILL INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND CONSERVATION, in Ontario, Canada (Our connection is its founder, a friend from our Cincinnati days). Then later in the afternoon, while John was gone for a lunch after pruning, I worked more on taxes and emails. I’m pretty tired tonight and we have to get up very early tomorrow morning because I have been invited to the lunch tomorrow after the wine grape pruning. I’m looking forward to that.
Oh, also today I was in touch with a friend’s husband –the friend had hip surgery early this morning. She came through it well.
Wednesday, oops, awoke to snow. So John went to the vineyard alone and I’m going over separately for lunch, driving the 66 miles one way in my own car. We couldn’t put the dogs out in < 35 degree weather and snow. The sun is up and the temp is rising. By the time I left at 11:00 a.m. it was sunny and the temp was 43 (higher on the porch). I gave the 3 of them some water, and left Meghan in the house with the cat. She made it through the several hours fine. We both returned by way of Quincy, buying gasoline for both cars, and getting choc milk for me. Gasoline is a bit cheaper there than in Ellensburg. Quincy is a small town in the midst of an irrigated agricultural area and very “laid back” until recently, when Microsoft, Yahoo! and Intuit came to add “server farms” to the mix. See the several links embedded in this:
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~jmapes/quincy.htm
If you use Quincy, WA in the “Fly to” box of Google Earth you can see the town – it is about 2.5 miles wide. Zoom out and put the town at the top – have it show roads — and have “281” and the I-90 symbol near the bottom edge. Where “281” leaves I-90 to head north is the town of George, Washington. Isn’t that clever? The green areas are fields of alfalfa, corn, onions and such things, and fruit orchards and baby trees for sale. Here is one of the major suppliers:
http://columbiabasinnursery.com/index.html
From the home page, click on ‘cherries’ and ‘apples’ for photos of the fruit. Study this site’s pages and you could become an orchardist! For instance, scroll to the “apple rootstock” section at the bottom of the apples page. On John’s route going to and returning from pruning, he has passed a plot where a new orchard is being planted. They had a crew of about 40 workers, thousands of baby trees, miles of wire, many hundreds of posts and a large machine to push them into the ground. The machine looks like the one in this photo (a different application):
. . . and a few years from now the result will look like this:
http://www.kingorchards.com/september/pages/DSCF2326.htm
. . . except all the vertical posts are treated wood like the one in the foreground. The green circles between Quincy and George (WA) are fields with circular pivot water supplies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation
The brown section (west of the road between the two towns) is called the Ancient Lakes area and is composed of canyons and lakes resulting from “ice age floods” about 15,000 years ago.
http://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes-of-the-week/ancient-lakes
The story of the floods is in the link below (with a slide show):
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw09302007/2003905120_pacificpice30.html
Back to lunch: It was spectacular and lasted 3 hours. There were 3 types of meat or sausage, and one was like a prime rib sliced; it was fantastic. Also a chicken liverwurst, I really liked, and several types of cheese, including Brie (yum) and 3 different kinds of crackers, a big salad and for dessert a fruit (raisins made locally by one of the crew) dark bread. White Heron wines and several others. That’s the most wine I have drunk in 3 years. There were 11 people around the table… yes, big table. I also took some pictures of the table, the room, and from the house out over the vineyards and down into the Columbia River “gorge” there at the bend of the river at West Bar, and Crescent Bar.
It snowed on us coming back across the hill into the valley (up by the wind towers; all running today). We got home just after 4:00 p.m.
I just woke up, and it is still evening. I guess I wore myself out today. I did some emailing stuff, called to see how the hip surgery went, loaded a few dishes in the dishwasher, and then laid down at 6:00 because I was tired. I guess. I slept for 2.5 hrs through John cooking and eating dinner.
Thursday–awoke to beautiful sunny morning, and John took off for more pruning. I stayed home for an expected telephone call, and I will be going to play music this afternoon and visiting my friend who had the hip replacement. Will be nice to go back to KVCH for a visit and not as a patient. The day ran together and I forgot we had to go to a talk on the ice age floods. It was very interesting, and covered the Scablands part of WA (from Lake Missoula, across WA). It lasted till 8:15 or so.
I did make it by to see the lady with the new hip but she was sleeping, soundly. Her husband and son were there so we whispered a few things. Her husband had told me that her red blood count was low, and they were giving her a transfusion. They realized it when this morning she couldn’t put any weight on the new leg with the hip and yesterday after the surgery, she had. I guess she has been in pain too. So I only stayed a few minutes and told them to tell her hello when she awoke, but I surely didn’t want to wake her. I’m sure she had a rough night last night and didn’t have a good night’s sleep. I remember wishing to take an afternoon nap when in the nursing home (rehab center).
Friday.. lots of things to keep me busy, from shoulder massage, to playing and singing music and eating at the Soup Kitchen, followed by exercise and a visit to my friend with the hip surgery who was moved to a nursing home.
Here it is Saturday already. Wow, time flies. John spent last night and this morning working on his Trail Rider Club Newsletter, and got it folded and stamped and mailed out from our mailbox at the end of the driveway, this morning. We got back to working on the review of the research proposals. We still have over an hour’s work to put in to writing up the evaluations. We’d be rich if this weren’t volunteered efforts on our part. I took off this afternoon for town and to play and eat at Briarwood, a retirement community we go to every second Saturday of the month. Afterwards I made a stop at the grocery and filled John’s car with gasoline.
One last note that may upset a few of you out there. If you have ever lived in a rural setting in a house that was not well constructed, there is a problem of mice entering, from where we do not know. Our cats of the past have been good mousers, even with some set traps in places near the garage where some might be coming in behind the kitchen stove. Well, you all have been hearing about the kitty cat we rescued back in early December, at approximately 8 weeks of age. She has continued to grow and is now about 6 months old (has had her shots and been spayed). This week she has caught two mice (both in the middle of the night), so we figure she is paying for her room and board. We took them from her after she killed them, before she could eat them.
Okay.. I think I should stop and send to John to put on the blog. He may not get to it until Sunday morning, because of a late dinner and still needing to work over the proposals. I know he will embellish it with educational links referring to my statements.
Here’s hoping you all have another good week and we send our best regards to all our faithful readers and link followers. We may succeed in introducing you to our region’s landscape and geography without your having to come in person.
Enjoy, from Nancy and John in Ellensburg, WA