Silicon Valley Redneck

Brief spring, now back to winter-ish

For a couple of days there, as the warm rain chased away the remaining snow, it felt almost vernal!

... Vernal enough that the lawn started growing.  No!  Stop!  It's nowhere near Spring yet!

Anyway, that's over now, and we're back to chill, occasional freezing nights, and assorted rain.

Most of the backlog of packages got here eventually - Joy got one today; UPS still has two of mine somewhere.  The UPS driver today (not our usual driver) confirmed that they're working through the backlog, and added that some packages are on trucks but they don't have enough drivers for the trucks, so some managers are being called up as drivers.

And, speaking of the chilly season: I think I've figured out yet another reason those cheap solar-powered landscape lights so often don't survive Winter.  It's that little LiFePO4 cell is what!  Or, rather, the charging of it.  They're OK to discharge down to -20℃, but apparently charging them below 0℃ damages them.

Ergo, if you have days that are sub-freezing but sunny, there'll be damage happening.  Taking them indoors for Winter should avoid that problem.

Thawing out

Driveway is nearly clear.  UPS came this morning (much earlier than usual), and dropped off two small packages.  Various larger packages now show as out for delivery, supposed to be arriving Real Soon Now... but the truck seems to be on the far side of Knoxville.  I think that may be the depot, and maybe the packages are on the truck but the truck isn't moving.

Assorted other packages, both UPS and USPS, are delayed, coming sometime.

Patches of the front lawn, and large areas of hayfields and pastures, are more or less clear.

I shoveled quite a bit of snow out of the truck bed.  Other snow & ice on the vehicles, I'll just wait for it to melt (which should happen by tomorrow afternoon).

Joy thinks we should have a snow shovel for next year.  I suppose I can look for one when I'm out shopping.  Might be on post-snow closeout!  Or might be sold out because everybody else had the same idea.  Oh, look: high-rated shovel of the right general character is sold out at Amazon, but marked way down for "order now for delivery sometime after mid-February."  Maybe I'll go for that.

Wednesday, rain.  Rest of the week, rain.  But not freezing rain!

Anyway... gotta run some errands tomorrow afternoon, in between the freeze and the rain.  Need straw, electrical stuff, and groceries.

Things slowly return to normal...

We got mail in the mailbox yesterday!  And parcels all the way up at the top of the driveway today!

UPS is still sheltering in place, buy maybe will start trying to catch up next week.

I eventually got the driveway somewhat usable by going out in the freezing, getting out the tractor, fully extending the fangs on the box blade, and tearing little furrows through the ice (and into the gravel), leaving a roughened surface with gravel mixed in with the snow & ice so today's sunshine could warm the gravel and melt the ice.

Sprinkling the snow with fertilizer turns out to be somewhat effective (and the runoff should be a lot less harmful to the lawn than road salt would have been).  Having much effect in a hurry, though, would take a lot of fertilizer, which I was disinclined to apply.

Anyway, the driveway is more or less usable, and the cars should be reasonably exposed by Monday afternoon.  I got out yesterday (freezing weather and all) and started all of them, leaving them running long enough to recharge their batteries a fair bit.

(Checking the Amazon orders-in-progress: we should soon be receiving one each of jump-starter pack and 12V tire pump, which will give us a total of one of each per vehicle.  Seems like a good idea.  And charging up the jump-starters can be a twice-a-year thing, maybe when it's time for the new insurance cards.)

And I'm trying to figure out fiddly details of oven installation - looks like I'll need to install a run of armored conduit in the cabinet, alongside where the oven will go, to a junction box in the top of the cabinet.  And, we'll need strips of wood (with nice square edges) for tightening up the opening in the cabinet.  Probably Tuesday afternoon I'll make a Home Depot run for conduit, wires, conduit hardware, project wood, and suchlike fiddlies.

Mighty chilly out there.

Temperature got negative, briefly, just around sunrise.  Now it's creeping up into the teens.

Joy insisted on bringing the ducks in for the night; they're making a ruckus in the walk-in shower.

The chickens' water bowl, inside the coop, froze overnight.

Yesterday afternoon, after a short-notice conference call, I did a bit of snow reduction on the driveway, using the tractor.  The snow is now thin enough in places that the sunshine should be warming up the gravel and promoting melting.  Dunno if either USPS or UPS will be attempting deliveries out here today; they both had a snow day yesterday.

It occurred to me that scattering carbon flakes atop the snow might be a good approach, if only I had a supply of carbon flakes handy, and a good way of dispensing them.  (Thought this morning: carbon-dust emulsion in the backpack sprayer?  Using hot water so the hose & nozzle don't just freeze up instantly?  Or!  I wonder how the bug fogger would work with dry powder.)

Then... I'm dimly remembering a book I read in, IIRC, junior high school.  For a class, to write a report on.  A Cage of Ice?  Sounds about right.  Dang Russkies were planning to melt (as Flanders once suggested) the North Pole.  By sprinkling it with carbon.  If memory serves, my report included an analysis of the insolation at such latitudes, the amount of ice involved and the energy required to melt it, and the amount of carbon required to cover the area, and demonstrated that the plan (as Smart remarked) would not work.

But, I'm not trying to melt the North Pole.  Clearing a mere few inches of low-density snow from a driveway in the temperate zone might in fact be practical.  Notes for next winter....

Other note for next winter: the indoor waterer for the yet-to-be-built new coop should include a 24V heater (and of course a temperature sensor).

The thing I forgot to include in yesterday's post

Minor update to the oven saga.

We did get a neighbor to help remove the old oven; it's now sitting on a dolly in the dining room.

We need to make various alterations to the cabinet: the opening needs to be taller, but not as wide.  And: we somehow need to shoehorn in a junction box in a place the cord from the oven will reach - the most likely approach is to narrow the cabinet opening on one side, leaving enough space on that side for a box.

And, now as I think of it, I'll probably be wanting to wrap the incoming power cable in metal flex conduit from wall to junction box.  Time to go measure the cable.

It's snowy out there.

Somewhere around 6" of snow accumulation on the lawn, I think.  More is still falling.

Temperature has been around 30℉ all day.  As the snow tapers off, the real cold front is supposed to move in... 20ish lows tomorrow, then getting down into single digits overnight and possibly dipping into negative territory Wednesday morning.  Mostly sunny and -1℉, how fun!

The ducks were initially afraid to leave their coop this morning, maybe because the world looked wrong or maybe because I was wearing my ushanka, but the eventually decided that snow was fun.  The chickens, meanwhile, spent the day in their coop; I brought them food pellets and water, and retrieved one-each egg.

The minimally-supported bird netting over the top of the chicken run is very saggy indeed, with its burden of ice.  Rebuilding the fence, and having a better-supported mesh roof, was on the agenda for last summer, but then all the summer plans got repeatedly put off.  Maybe this year... along with a bigger, better chicken coop, more resistant to the elements and better suited to locking the critters up for days on end in extreme weather.

Looks like Thursday afternoon will be the next reasonable opportunity to go anywhere - as in, temperature above actual freezing so the roads should be fairly normal.  Then, Thursday night, we're supposed to have snow again.  Next weekend, back to single-digit lows.  Whee!

Meet the new year, same as the old year.

No exciting new developments, and not much exciting planned.

Well... there's a lot of stuff we have planned, but the likelihood of much of it actually happening is not great.  Between looking after my father and the difficulty of finding usable contractors in the building trades, things do happen slowly if at all.

I need to line up a neighbor to help move the old oven so's Joy and I can make alterations to the opening in the cabinet and get it all ready for delivery of a new oven.  Calling neighbors is maybe a tomorrow-afternoon thing; today, I have a bit of a headache and very low energy.  Ordering the new oven (from a different store, that uses a different delivery service) happens after we've at least started the cabinet alterations.

Turns out that chickens get more seasonal their second winter than their first - between needing extra nutrition to get over their fall molt and needing enough light to feel like the days are long enough for egg-laying, they tend to slack off.  I have an interim day-stretcher set up, and have been giving them some nutritional mush (lentils, rolled oats, and calcium carbonate powder) plus kitchen scraps in addition to their upmarket pellets, scratch grains, and dried insect larvae.  They've gone from averaging a bit over one egg per day (for the entire flock) to a bit over two, which is more consistent with household egg consumption, and the shells have gotten a bit less fragile.

Still no sign of snow.  We've had some freezy mornings (some with lows in the lower 20s), and a little bit of rain, but no snow at all.  Some serious rain would be a Good Thing, as we really do want the pond to fill back up.

And... before any long strings of rainy days come along, I should build a couple of poultry feeding stations - boxes about 18" cube-ish, with one side that hinges up to become an awning.  Stick a feeder inside, and it's protected from the rain; close up the awning side, and the food is protected against rodents at night - no need to carry the feeder back & forth at dawn and dusk.  The plan is in my head, more or less; the materials are on hand; I just need to find time & motivation to build the things.

On the work front, there's still a little to be done on the current big ToasterCo project (which seems to have gotten seriously behind schedule, but I'm not the one holding up the parade), and I think there are other little sub-projects lurking in the background.

One of these days, I need to clear off the table against the side wall of the garage, install the two levels of wire shelving I bought a few months ago, and organize a bunch of the odds & ends into plastic storage bins that can go on those shelves.  I also need to re-organize a lot of the stuff that's currently in plastic storage bins on existing shelves, and label the bins so I'll be able to find things.  (This, of course, requires a cleared-off table.)

One of these days, I need to procure some proper workbenches - at least one with an upper shelf on which to put test & measurement equipment.  But there's a bunch of tidying and table-clearing to be done first.

Ah, well.  Back to whatever I was doing this afternoon.