Altitudinous

A few weekends ago some friends invited me back to a cabin in the mountains. I'm not sure why I was invited back. Maybe they just haven't grown tired of me yet. Anyway it was a great time.

This is one of the sights I was greeted with in the morning. It was quite cool for the time of yea when compared to where I live. Ah altitude. We cooked some, drank some, went skeet shooting, and I made some decent peach ice cream for the first time.


Saturday and Sunday we went down to the river so some of us could fish, walk around, read, sit end enjoy the day, etc. I trudged out to the middle of the river to perch upon a rock and read and take some pictures. These are up and down river shots.


Then alas I had to come home.

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Busy and Lazy

Man April was a busy month for me. I was at the house for all of one weekend that month. And once I was gone for 6 days straight. So what was I doing. I'll cover part of it in other posts. But for now I'll ramble about these.


The first weekend I went to Atlanta on Friday evening with some people from work. I was a late replacement for someone else. I work on Campus and they work off Campus, so we don't normally mix much. I think I fit in pretty well and might have just extended my friend pool. We went to see Jeff Dunham the comedian. Many of you have watched him. Let em tell you right now I haven't laughed that much since my Dad and I went to see Jeff Foxworthy. I suggest you watch Jeff Dunham on YouTube if you haven't seen his act. My back was sore the next day from laughing. It was his second show of the evening. He came out a little drunk, asked for some Jack D., and then had us rolling for almost 2 hours. I think he came up with some new material on stage, and If he was truthful he said it was one of the weirdest shows he'd done in a long time. I judge that to be a success.

I got home at 3:30 AM and got up at 7:45 so I could drive to see my family. Yeah I took a nap later that afternoon, but it was so worth it.

The next weekend I had accepted the invitation of a friend to come to a mountain cabin the father of a friend of his owned. Man that was a confusing sentence, and I knew what I was trying to say. Anyway here's a picture of it.


Actually my friend described it as a lodge rather than a cabin. I tell you what that is a nice place right there. Central heat and air, a wrap around porch, 5 or so bedrooms with real honest to God beds. It was wonderful. We got up there and we made pulled pork BBQ and fried chicken and hot dogs and hamburgers throughout the weekend. Mmmm Fried Chicken. I sat out on the porch, when it wasn't chilly, and read the Benjamin Franklin book I've been trying to finish. When it was chilly I sat inside and basked in the sun coming through the windows or glanced out at the mountains while I relaxed reading. I haven't had a chance to do that in such a lovely place in a long time. I included some pictures below of the view from the porch.

But that wasn't the best part. I also got to do something else. We went skeet shooting. That's the first time I've ever gone. I probably put a total of about 110 rounds through the old double barrel. I still don't have a name for it yet. I'll have to ask her again. Anyway, You know what. I 60+ year old 12 ga double barrel hurts when you shoot 100+ rounds. I imagine it tripled if not quadrupled the number of rounds I've put through it. Though I didn't think I did very well, 31% maybe, For a first time at skeet I had a hell of a lot of fun. Plus I think I was getting better near the end. But the things it did to my shoulder. My entire Pectoral was sore the next day. And later in the week the whole area was bruised. I took a picture for posterity, but I'm not posting hairy man-nipple here. Damn that was fun though. Maybe I can do it again sometime.

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New Addition

Well I have a new addition to my house. The couch in my den has been replaced by an actual new couch. That's right, that is the first new couch I've had. I have to say it's quite an improvement over the old one. Alas I didn't get any pictures of the old one, but that's probably for the best. However I do ramble on about the pictures of the new one.

So this is a picture of the illustrious new couch. It's actually about a foot shorter than the old one, but much of that is arm rest. The back is a little shorter, but it sits higher. The cushions are much firmer, which should soften over time, and they are much shallower. I like it. Well of course otherwise I wouldn't have chosen it. You can tell it's a gold color with a hint of green and maybe cranberry or wine in specks. The thing is this is the tipping point. I was content with the status quo, but that has changed. Next is the craptacular carpet in front of the sofa. It too moved from a previous abode, and was merely there to provide sound deadening and some scuff protection to the floor. So my search has begun.

This is the first foray. A few small pieces I picked up at one location to test in the lighting of the den. This like the other picture had to be color corrected slightly to make it look closer to reality. Darned flash. Anyway, the one on the left I wanted to use to confirm it was too busy for the room. The big version is even worse, so it's right out. My Godsister likes the middle one. It brings out the colors in the couch well. It gets more of the red and brown in the full size version. The one on the right I like, but I'm not sure for this room though. It's a dark forest green around the edge that transitions to a lighter green/beige in the middle. The three rectangles in the middle are the same green/beige with lots of blue speckles. The two vines are a dark wine. The big version is almost identical with the vines getting slightly thicker, but mostly longer with more leaves. I'll look some more places to see what they have.

What do you think?

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Big Project Pictures

You know I didn't ask anyone if I could post these, but they let me take them and you can probably get a tour of the thing if you ask nicely. So I'm gonna post pictures and Ramble about them. Follow if you want, but there are 10 pics to load. I kind of started to know his project was coming about a month ahead of time. The thing was no one told me anything about it. I knew nothing about the equipment or how it was to be wired up. It's hard to prepare when you know nothing. It's not unusual for me to have no formal forewarning, but usually I get to see the equipment come in and I can figure out what kinds of connectors and cables I'll need. This is one of the first jobs where I was really blind. Plus the guy who designs this stuff kind of assumes we should keep lots of everything on hand. Yeah if I had an infinite budget and storage space.

Enough preaching and on with the show.

Well everyone wants to see the money shot first, so here it is. This is the bank of HD displays in the area. That's right there is an even dozen of the things. They are 1080p Sony Bravia sets, 52 or something inches, but I can't remember the exact measurement. I'm just glad I didn't have to put them up, but having them already up lead to a few wiring headaches. Those will become a little more apparent as the post moves on. We had to loosen the mounts, which took a 3/8 socket and 3 extensions. Of course we didn't have one of those at work, so I had to go buy them, on the University's tab of course. I kind of like being able to justify tools we should have had all along. This was a theme for the project. Since I didn't have good foreknowledge I didn't know what I needed to bring with me. I was planning on essentially packing up most of the shop to take with me, since the site was 15 minutes from the shop. But was told I shouldn't need that much stuff. After looking at the display mounts and the equipment on site, went to ACE and packed up most of the shop to take down there. I love showing people they don't know what they are talking about. Anyway, on with the tour.

Here's a pic of the control center. We started calling it Houston. Anyway there are four workstations at the back and six at the front. If you look, yes those are two 27 inch Dell monitors for each of the workstations. They are higher resolution than the Bravia displays. And those are wireless keyboards and mice for the computers. I don't know the specs for the computers, but I do know that the right hand display for each workstation in the back row is linked to a transmitter that sends it's image to the equipment in the wiring closet. What is this transmitter? It's a small black box that converts the image from the computer to a form that can be transmitted over Ethernet cable. Quite a long distance actually. Well, lets just look at the next picture.

There we go. This is a receiver on the back of one of the Bravia displays. It's slightly larger than the transmitters. It takes the RJ45 (Ethernet) cable and converts it back to VGA. Not bad considering it was taking a 1080P signal. We had to use Scotch Mounting Foam Tape to mount the receiver and the power supply to the back of the display. It worked out pretty well. Routing the cables so they wouldn't be damaged by the display mount when we pushed it back was fun, but not as much fun as attaching the VGA cable to the display by touch. Hopefully they will prove robust and won't have to be replaced. What I don't show here is another connection that comes over the Ethernet cable to the television. See they ordered these monitors before consultation with my group. They look nice, but they don't have a serial communications port. That means I had to figure out how to send an IR signal over Cat6 Ethernet cable. I'll show you that in the wiring closet.

And here we are at the wiring closet. We get the whole right rack. We were supposed to get only part of it, but Network Services didn't need all of the two racks they had. It's funny, but I think we had more equipment in there than they did. I'm not sure whose cost the most, but I bet they were ahead. On the left, you can see the computers feeding some of the displays out in the room. In the middle was a 1080P LCD display so you can see the computers while in the closet. That way you can move a USB keyboard and Mouse around for config purposes. Of course they also use a remote access system to do that from outside the room, but sometimes you need direct assess. I said was before because the display actually stopped working after a few minutes. We had to send it off for repair/replacement. Oh well, I didn't spec it.

This view is at the top of the rack. That top piece is the Crown amp that runs the overhead KSI speakers. There's no need for surround or anything here. Plus we can always upgrade the system later. The next two pieces are Crestron equipment. On top is the controller that runs the show, as it were, and below that is the final audio mixer/equalizer. On the shelf below that is the power supply for the Crestron gear and the DirectTV receiver. I don't know why they didn't spring for the HD version. I mean with those Bravia displays out there. Oh well, another future upgrade. Under that are the two Rolls mixers. Why two? The top one is for the computers in the rack next door. It dumps into the bottom one along with the DirectTV audio. The bottom mixer has a cutoff so that if the computers say something it cuts out the DirectTV audio to make sure the computers are heard. You can see my test audio cable coming down in the front. That was plugged into one of the multi-adapters I've made for diagnostic purposes. You gotta test the amp and speakers with some tunes.

This is the patch panel. The black cables carry the video out to the receivers behind the displays. The white cables combine three to one and run up to the back of the Crestron controller. That's my solution for sending IR over Cat6. On the other end behind the displays, I have a one foot Ethernet cable plugged into the wall jack. I put the IR probe's wires into an RJ45 jack. That I plugged into the short cable. Frankly I'm kind of surprised it worked so well right off the bat. It was a pain though.

Those black cables loop around and plug into the back of the Magenta Research Mondo Matrix Switcher. They plug into the outputs on the switcher. As you can tell, there is a lot of space for expansion in that thing. The inputs are filled from four cables coming from the four workstations in the back of the control center, the eight computers in the rack next door, the DirectTV receiver, and the Security camera system. However, the output from the computers next door have to change from VGA to Cat5. That happens below the switcher.

There you can see the front of the Mondo Matrix switcher, and below that is the Magenta Research Morph-It. That box is basically a backplane system designed to hold and power cards to do specific tasks. Here we are using it to run a couple of cards for skew control for the four workstations and six transmitter cards to take VGA from the computers, DirectTV, and security cameras and turn it into Cat5 for the Matrix switcher. However, DirectTV and the security cameras don't give us a VGA signal, so if you look at the bottom of the pic you can see one of the two Extron scalers we used. Those things can take almost any video signal and turn it into almost any other. This setup allows us to put any signal from any source on any and all displays.

Following those VGA cables over and you get to the back of the half dozen Mac Minis running Windows. He he that's funny. Under those are two Dell workstations. Those 8 machines put out a surprising amount of heat. If you look at the white cables leaving the Minis those are the audio cables going up to the Rolls mixer. Yeah I had to solder those 3.5 mm mini-stereo plugs on the end. Loads of fun that was, but not as much fun as the other end.


This is the other end. That's the back of the Rolls Mixer. That top row of plugs are all 1/4 inch mono plugs and there is one for left and right on each channel. One channel per computer. I had to take the one wire from the PC, strip it, double the sleeve/ground/common wire, and put the left and right channels in two different plugs. That took most of the morning right there. If I had known that earlier I probably would have tried to order pre-made cables. Oh well. So that's one of the things that kept me busy for a week.

This post ended up being a lot longer than I had intended. I'll try posting more stuff later.

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And so it begins...

Well this is one of the first pictures of a harvest. I included a Dr Pepper can for scale. I brought this stuff to work and gave quite a bit of it away. In honesty I've already harvested some squash, cukes, and 3 eggplants previously, but this is the first one that really felt like harvesting rather then picking one or two things for a friend. This stuff is growing fast. The squash are about 3-4 days of actual growth. They doubled in size each day. The same goes for the zucchini. It's crazy. And you can see the mutant conjoined squash on the right. It's just strange. I'm going to have to get a basket or something to carry this stuff in. The tomatoes haven't even really started to come in. Lord I'm gonna have my work cut out for me.


Well, now to get ready to go home and mow the grass.

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Time Sink

Well I'm back at work after my long weekend. I'm hoping it's going to be a slow day, but who knows. I'd better get these posted while I can. Follow the link all ye with broadband connections.


This is a picture of the rows of okra. I planted it in two stages about 2 weeks apart. So far the okra hasn't been growing really fast. I think the first batch went in while it was still a little cold. Hard to believe that given how hot it's been, but really it hasn't been all that hot. It's just been incredibly dry with little wind. We haven't had rain in weeks, and the rain we did get came after weeks of going without. I'm having to water the garden a lot, daily for some things, but I don't water wholesale. I water each plant or down the middle of the row. I think I'm wasting very little water. I also don't water my lawn. I think it's a waste of water and money. My neighbor waters his lawn and uses a sprinkler in his garden. He has grass growing all in it, and his lawn starts wilting if he skips a couple of days watering. Anyway, I think the dryness of the weather and daily doses of cold water on the roots has stunted the okra, but they finally seem to be taking off with some big leaf production. Or maybe okra just takes a while to get situated before it starts growing. This is the first year I've grown anything here after all. The green between the rows is where I thinned the okra during the weekend and a little bit of centipede grass that came up in the pathways. I have mostly centipede in the yard, and it's the best kind of grass to have in the yard and accidentally get in the garden. It's drought tolerant, grows slowly, and stays fairly short. The centipede in my yard is brown; witnessed by the foreground of the picture; but if I put a sprinkler on it it turns green in a matter of 30 minutes. Gotta love it.


This is the corn. It's growing a might faster than the okra. The first two rows I planted are about 2 feet tall now and going strong. I wish I could get some soaker hose to leave between the rows to make watering easier. Oh well. The nozzle on my hose started malfunctioning this weekend and I had to go get a replacement. It'll have to do until later.


These are my cukes. I have them growing on the same cages I made for my tomatoes. Next year I may make larger cages. I don't really care for cukes, but lots of other people do. This garden is primarily for give away produce anyway. So far there are a few small cukes and one that's about 7" long but hooked like a clothes hanger.


The tomatoes are doing pretty good. A few are over 3 feet tall now. They seem to be alright with the weather, but I have been really putting the water to them.


These are of the the same Romas of which I took the first picture exactly one month ago. Given that the plant is now 10 times larger I can assume growth has been the primary goal for the past month. Virtually every blossom on the Roma produces a fruit. These things are enormous producers. I'm going to have Romas coming out my you know what. I'll have to start making sauce or something with them. If they ever start ripening.


This is the first fruit on my Brandywine tomatoes. It's much smaller than the picture makes out. I've mentioned before that the BWs are considered an heirloom variety and considered one of the most flavorful tomatoes. I was curious about them when I got them. Honestly I didn't know what to expect. I figured I would probably lose one and the insects would eat a lot of the others. Well the dadblamed things are the tallest of my tomato plants. Plus they stand up the best. They also don't branch as much as the other tomatoes, nor do they bloom as much. So far the BWs seem to have a pollination problem. I'm afraid the dry weather and the bee die offs may be adversely affecting their reproduction. Or they could just take longer to get busy making babies. I'm really curious about them though.


This gives a good indication of the rows of yellow squash and zucchini. They were doing ok and then all of a sudden about 1 1/2 weeks ago they started growing like crazy. I've got a few small zukes and squash, but the squash are straight with no bulge at the bottom. That happens some with the first fruit, cause the blossom's don't get pollinated properly. I'm just hoping we get enough bees and such to start pollinating them. Next year I may have to follow my Dad's lead and plant some flowers around the garden to attract pollinators.


This is one of my cayenne peppers. two of them have been putting out like no body's business. One still looks like it wants to die and another one is just odd. From the looks of it two will produce all the pepper I need. Oh and those are some of the free-range cantaloupe in the foreground. They aren't bothering anything, so I'm letting them go.


This is my first bell pepper. I don't really care for bell peppers either. And unfortunately cooking doesn't improve their taste to me that much. Usually a plant for which I don't care for the raw taste improves greatly with cooking. I think it might be allergy related. But with bell peppers there's a bitterness or something to them that just turns me off. Raw cukes cause a similar dislike, but at least pickling can make them delicious. Oh well, more stuff to give away.


And finally the item that I am most pleased with. This is a picture of the very Ichiban eggplant I took a picture of before. Yes that we 7 days ago, and you are looking at a week's worth of growth. It's amazing. I would go hit the new okra and corn seed with a little morning water and look at this plant. I would come home from work 9 hours later and the dang thing was visibly longer. In the mornings you can see how much it grew last night because it doesn't turn purple till the sun hits it. And I have 2 more fruit growing on two other plants. I pulled up the logs beside them, because I think insects in the logs were coming out at night to feast upon the yummy eggplant leaves. I was seriously expecting to lose two of the plants or have little production. The early insect damage seemed to confirm that feeling, but removing the logs and a one time sprinkling with Seven dust seems to have fixed that. I love it. And from the looks of it I'm gonna have a lot of these before too long. The guy I bought them from said they love heat and sun. Well they seem to be liking where I have them. Next year I'll move them from behind the asparagus ferns so they can get even more sun.


Well that's about it for right now. There's not much going on in the yard, since we haven't gotten any rain. Hopefully we might get some in a few weeks, but I'm not holding out much hope. So far I'm pretty happy with what's happened. Not bad for a first year attempt, though I did have second hand experience from the garden's my Dad, Godparents, and television allowed me to get close to. And I got a whole lotta sun this weekend too. Come on tan.

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Chlorophylling a Promise

I mentioned last time I had a couple more pics to put up. I'll follow precedent and put them after the link.


Hopefully this yard and garden work will start taking up less time, but not right now. I wanted to post that my Dwarf Crepe Myrtles did survive the frost earlier this year, but not without significant damage. You can see the dead ends of the branches. I'm waiting to see if they put out anything, and then I'll trim them back later in the summer. I do like the way they look though.


My Cukes are coming on. Too bad I don't really like cukes. Maybe I can get a sliced pickle recipe. They have female blossoms that should start growing cukes this week.


And this is my surprise. This is one of my 4 Ichiban eggplant with a small fruit growing on it. I took this at 3:30 PM, and by the time I finished watering at 8:30 the fruit was larger. There are two others growing on the other plants. Have to start thinking about what I can make with these.


I've got a movie review I need to write as well. I may have another soon after too. Well now it's time for bed.

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I Think My thumb is Infected

Or something. Cause I'm thinking it may be turning green. Only time will tell. Since I don't have much of anything else using up my time, I decided to post more pics of my yard and garden. I swear I feel like on of those new Dads that always shows everyone pictures of their child. Maybe it'll wear off in a year or so, since I still haven't been in the house for a year yet. So you have the freedom to look at the pics or not, and since there are already way too many pics on the front page, you have to follow my rambling link to see them.


This is one of two lilies my Mother gave me last year for my birthday. She planted them, and they seem to be liking it. I had to move the other one to plant my dwarf crepe myrtle. It hasn't quire forgiven me for that yet, so I'll just show the big one.


Behind my property was a dead and rotting pine tree leaning against another tree at about a 70 degree angle. I knew it was only a matter of time before it fell. I wasn't looking forward to it, because it was tall enough to land on my fence at the back and break it. Well i stepped into the back yard the other day and as I was walking I heard this crack. I turned in time to see the tree falling. I winced and went to look at the damage. The thing broke in two, folded back on itself, and missed the fence by 2 feet. Nice.


I tied several of my tomatoes up on Thursday evening. I went home Saturday, for Mother's day, and came back Sunday evening. Dog gonnit if some of them hadn't grown and flopped over again. Some of the plants had grown over 3 inches in 2 days. I can go in the garden in the evening and see a noticeable change int the plant size. The stakes were a temporary support until i got the cages built and set in place.


Well that rate of growth made me move up my timeline. I went and bought 150' of concrete reinforcing mesh. It's not terribly expensive, and it works much better than those $4 tomato cages. I didn't need 150' but I didn need more than the 50' on the smaller roll. It's kinda rusty, but the galvanized fencing with the same mesh size came in 330' rolls. This is one of my 'Sweet 100' tomato plants. I even has one little tomato on it already. Those mesh holes are 6" square, so yeah, that plant is almost 2 feet tall. I've got to finish up the cages tonight.


This is one of my Romas that i need to put a cage on. It's starting to collapse under it's own weight. That big tomato is the same one I photographed earlier. On my 4 Roma plants I probably have a dozen tomatoes growing.


These are my two rows of corn.The green in the walk paths is from some weeding and thinning of the corn plants. I probably need to pull another 1/3 out. The two wet rows behind these two are freshly planted corn. I wanted to spread out the harvest.


These are my little okra plants. I need to thin them desperately. Hopefully I can do some of that today. Again the two wet rows behind it are two more rows of okra.


The sad thing is that I still have space in the garden. Maybe I'll plant some green beans, carrots, or something else. Do you guys have any suggestions?

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Giddiness?

For some reason this has made me far happier that is should make a normal person. I was out putting pine needles around my plants in the garden when I found this:


This is the first Roma tomato to appear on my plants. The thing probably started growing before I put the plants in the ground. Now I'm gonna have to figure out how I want to stake the plants up

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Cheaper but not easier by

I had some family come by the house yesterday to help in the yard. If I lived closer to my place of birth this might be a weekly occurrence , but as it is it only happens occasionally. I'll take any help I can get. They brought some additional garden plants by, and they helped mow and trim the yard. then they helped put out mulch in some of the beds. I'm glad they could come by, cause Lord knows I couldn't have gotten it done by myself. I've got some updated pics following in my rambling way.

This is that Painted Maple I bought last year. I's doing pretty good, and I expect it to grow a lot this year. We put some mulch around it, and I plan on watering it some. It has only been in the ground a few months.



This is what the front walk looks like now. I sprayed weed killer on the grass in the enclosed area. It was a Bermuda grass I think, and the rest of the yard is Centipede. That means it always grew three times faster that the rest of the yard, and it was never the same color. It was a pain to mow, and didn't do much for the yard's appearance. So I killed it, cut it short, put newspaper down as a weed stop, and put mulch on top of it. I think it looks a lot better. later I may put in a ground cover or something.


This is the evergreen shrub that was on the house side of the walk. Someone had planted it too close to the walk and the driveway. My bet is that there were two at one time and one died. However, if there had been two of that size there, it would have been quite difficult to get between them. I was thinking of moving it, but the root system was too extensive to expect it to survive the attempt. So I cut it down and ripped the stump out. This is the remains.


In place of that I planted two dwarf Crepe Myrtles that I got at the SC Botanical Garden sale last weekend. They were bitten by the frost, but are starting to put back out again. They will have the nice bronze looking leaves and in late summer they will have the nice red blossoms. I got my Godmother a few a couple years back and they make a nice showing.


Being lazy I had left my fall wreath up for far too long. Well someone took advantage of it and decided to build a nest on it. I've got another nest on a shelf in my garage, and a nuthatch is using a birdhouse next to the driveway. There're babies all over the place over here.


Last Fall I started a fern garden in my back yard. The previous owner had planted some hanging basket ferns in the ground and they appeared to be doing well. I picked up three ferns at the Botanical Garden sale and planted them in the same area. This one is an Eastern Wood Fern I believe. It's an evergreen native. You can see the old foliage under the new fronds. It's doing pretty good.


This is the second fern I got in the Fall. It's a Lady in Red. The stems of the fronds are a scarlet color. It's deciduous, so all this is this year's growth. It's a real beauty.


This is the last fern I got in the Fall, a Cinnamon Fern. It's deciduous as well, and the reproductive stalks are similar in color to cinnamon sticks. You can see one of the hanging basket ferns in the ground behind it.


This is one of this year's purchases. It's a Royal Fern. I put it at the back, because it's fronds can get 5 feet long or longer. I'm anxious for this one to grow.


This one i got at Lowe's of all places. It's a Japanese Painted Fern. I was struck by the coloration, but upon reading up on it, it's a pretty good fern. The only qualm is that it loses some of it's attractiveness in drought. Eh. I'll just have to give it a drink occasionally.


Now I'm off to do more things. A home owner's work is never done.

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