Travels and Thoughts

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Travels and Images

WEEK 34 2005

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Saturday 27 August 2005

Saturday - not much up. The front lawn got mowed, edged, trimmed. It was beastly hot and humid, so the back yard remains a wilderness.

Another 'found' CD. Personally I wonder why anyone would waste a 25 cent CD
on rap in the first place, but it's nice to know that they saw the error of their ways.

Friday 26 August 2005

Friday - warm today, just hitting 100F or so. I got a late start on my walk, but it wasn't too bad. The trick is to wear a big hat (well ventilated), and bring lots of water.

I experimented some more with the GPS my brother B gave me last year, a Garmin Eagle Explorer. My brother M and I were kicking ourselves for not having brought one on the hike last week, so I was inspired to take it on the walk this morning for familiarization. It does latitude and longitude, track, waypoints, bearings to/from waypoints, compass, ground speed - it's an oldie but goodie.( M's also calculates altitude, and has an airport and roads database, which isn't all that much use in the woods.)

True story: I decided to try out the bearing and distance to a waypoint feature, and so set it to look for waypoint #1. But it seemingly wasn't working properly, pointing off to the northwest rather than to the northeast where my house was. After puzzling for a while I realized that waypoint #1 was my father's house in Martinez, hundreds of miles away, not my house in Lancaster!

D'oh!

What? Oh, well, since you ask so nicely...

Distance: 276 miles.
Bearing: 306 degrees.

Friday cat blogging:

As if I would ever again be foolish enough to take Riley's "rub my tummy" invitation...

Thursday 25 August 2005

Thursday - finished reading The Hungry Ocean. It's by one Linda Greenlaw, the real life skipper we see on occasion in The Perfect Storm (portrayed by Maria Elizabeth Mastrantonio). It's a good book -- she essentially covers a single swordfishing trip, but that voyage is only the frame on which to hang various digressions. She writes on where the swordfish live, what it takes to bring in a haul, the gear, the boat, the boats owner, the psychology of fishing, the weather, sailors superstitions, life and death, differences between crew and captain, how she got into fishing, and more. Not deep stuff, but fun and informative.

It looks like she has a couple of other books that might be good reads as well.

Wednesday 24 August 2005

Wednesday - meeting with various people on work related stuff, too late to post.

Instead, courtesy of Opentopia, I give you: Scandinavian Webcam Coeds. [Safe for Work]

Tuesday 23 August 2005

Tuesday - saw this book at a thrift store the other day:

Yes, that kind of wiping materials. I guess it is actually a big business...

Monday 22 August 2005

Monday - working away on things.

After the hike Saturday I helped someone with a solar power system. My friend had a spare couple of photovoltaic panels, about 200 watts worth, and a spare solar hot water panel. By using a 12 volt DC pump the idea was to augment their pool heating needs without any recourse to the grid at all.

So, we measured, cut and drilled a frame for the photovoltaics, painted it, assembled it and the panels, wired up the pump like the electrician had specified, and rolled the panel into the sun. Worked like a charm!

I'll post a photo sometime. For now it is on the ground, but eventually the unit may end up on the house roof, out of the way.

Sunday 21 August 2005

Sunday - it was a good hike. After finding the trail head - it was unmarked at the road - we started walking about 9:00 am. The first thing we noticed was that there had been a forest fire sometime in the last few years (Check out the Picture of the Week for a good shot of this area). The guidebook spoke of a shaded path - it isn't, not on the lower part, not any more. Still, it wasn't too bad - there was no smell of burnt wood and a great deal of grass and small bushes at the lower elevations. As we climbed on good switchbacks there was more and more growth. About a third of the way up we began to see trees that were not completely killed, with shoots appearing.

"Not Dead Yet!"

Unfortunately the gnats, flies and midge's also began to appear at that point - perhaps they live on the trees?

The fire hadn't burned the whole mountain - the last quarter of the trail was reasonably shady in old unburned oak and occasional pine groves.

The top of Liebre Mountain, with an old jeep/fire road.

The mountain is only about 5000' high - there was quite a mixture of pine, oak, and chaparral along the trail. There were hawks and even deer - several times we startled them, and it was easy to see the indentations where they had nestled in high grass.

After reaching the top - and it is really a long mountain ridge - we considered walking to Bear Peak, another two miles to the east, but decided that we had insufficient water for the hot day it had become, and headed back.

All in all a fun day and a successful hike!

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: The Horse Trail Campground trailhead just off the N2 is the scene of a fairly recent forest fire, not this year but probably last year or the year before. The low altitude deciduous trees are burned and dead, but there are grasses and bushes now growing down at ground level.

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