Pictures from outdoor exercise.
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I right-clicked on a picture, copied the image location, then manually added <img>link</img> to display. Replace < with [ to make the code active0
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Pear harvest day today.
They are Bartlett pears, so they have to ripen in a cool, dark place for 7-10 days. Finally this year I decided to sort the fruit as I harvested it. All the misshaped fruit and those with obvious signs that the worms inside are ready to come out got culled. I put them in a separate box and put them out in case anyone wants them. I put a few windfalls in there, too. I got three boxes for myself. I will dry as many as I can, and of course I'll eat a bunch fresh and give some away. Some will probably get fruit flies and get composted. That's why I decided to only bring the best fruit in to ripen.
I probably should start working on the prune plum tree, too. The Chojuro Asian pear ripens on the tree, and it won't be done for several more weeks.
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Spiders in the brush.
<img>https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP2UHZmuaueDHRjVqhBBOnIKum8uEY2il20Qj6jVzeLu8NmpOyf22Kbdz_NLQu36Q/photo/AF1QipPvMD8VTWfoC7g9wWJbE8Yl30ij3layQi9pLpj2gr_?key=c2ctTGxFRFA2WU14ZFU4REtKRHl0dV9BelRnNHlB</img>I right-clicked on a picture, copied the image location, then manually added <img>link</img> to display. Replace < with [ to make the code active
Thank you for trying to help me, Mac!
I tried the [] and the photo did not display. So I used <> and that works - sort of. Posting photos on this site is a lot bigger pain in the *kitten* than it should be. I'm done for today.
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Spider spider burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Designed thy dark web's symmetry1 -
Today is an event called Open Streets. That's because they close the streets. Sort of. They move from neighborhood to neighborhood each year; this year it's near me. This year it crosses a four-lane state highway as it goes along residential neighborhoods between two parks.
Down at Tunison Park they had a kids-bike carousel. Kind of cool.
To cross Highway 99, folks waited for a short time, and then flaggers stopped traffic while pedestrians and bikes went through. One time I went by, there was an Elvis impersonator singing in the intersection.
Back closer to my neighborhood, they had some demonstrations of new things they are doing to help cyclists like sharrows and bike lane "separators."
In the parks they had music, food vendors, and other cool stuff. Along the road all along the way, residents had other activities for people to participate. Free books, free advice, free LISTENING, etc. Kind of fun.1 -
We played our penultimate match on Thursday. Yes, it was the second to last game of summer season. So sad. We lost pretty badly, but we had a GREAT game. The team we played was fun, had good spirit, was talented & fast, and gave us a great time. Too bad we don't get to play 'em again until next year.
Outdoor exercise is great, and a friend just forwarded an article suggesting that exercising outdoors is better for stress than indoors! Get out there~1 -
I spent some time in the garden today. I harvested a whole pint of Sungold cherry tomatoes plus one Cosmonaut Volkov slicer. I thinned out the fruit on the Chojuro Asian Pear... again! Should be some good fruit. I pruned some other plants, and I harvested some Italian Prune Plums. I picked a couple nice cucumbers, and I probably should cut some more grapes. I also enjoyed some of the flowers.
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My buddy called me Saturday evening. I was enjoying a pint with some friends. He said he and his wife were going to do the drift dive at Florence at 08:00. I told him I sure wasn't going to make THAT dive. They like to do two dives with the drift first as the flood tide comes to a halt and the crab hole at slack. I have one of my two bottles in the shop for hydrostatic testing and visual inspection, so I could only do one dive. If my buddy had called earlier, he probably could have gone to pick up my other bottle... Oh well. I'm so glad he called, because I haven't dove the crab hole in quite some time.
The Crab Hole is the second dive park in Oregon. Or the first. There's another in Woahink Lake a few miles away that's pretty shallow but has some interesting features underwater to navigate to. The entry for the Crab Hole used to be a fish ladder for a hatchery. It was revamped to make an easy entry.
A fun thing happened on the way over. Something I've only ever experienced once before on my truck. All the numbers on the odometer matched! I'm a palindrome junkie....
Visibility wasn't terrible. It was crab-tacular! It was maybe eight feet... maybe a little less. It didn't help that there was an open water class going out to the crab hole to stir things up. I found a nice stainless steel gaff as well as a nice piece of fishing tackle -- a flasher on a spreader with a nice drop weight. It was pretty recently lost, and I gave it to my buddy who can use it when he trolls for salmon. I kept the gaff.
I also got two crabs. Even that was a bonus since there were quite a few folks diving plus boats throwing pots. I hate crab pots falling on me.... There were some big females and lots of small crabs. I found one nice big legal male, but it was too soft, so I let it go home. I got a couple legals, one pretty big and one just a little bigger than legal.
I'm glad I remembered to fill my 5-gallon water cooler jug with HOT water before driving over. Nothing like having five gallons of hot, FRESH water when you get out of 46-degree sea water! Warm your hands, rinse your regulator, and even get some crud off your suit when you take it off. Then... fill with fresh seawater to cook your crabs! Only thing better would have been if I packed my cooker with me and cooked 'em right there by the sea.
I ~REALLY~ thought after last week's rain the lobster mushrooms would be up along with the porcini. So I went on a side trip through the coast range on a foray. I didn't find a single lobster. I did find one russula, but it wasn't "lobsterized." What did surprise me was seeing a chanterelle cap through the moss. Ummm... it's too early for that. I got a handful and headed back to the truck. I made a couple more stops and got a couple more handfuls. I didn't even carry a collecting bag, and in fact was just wearing shorts and Keen sandals. So it's not like I was really pounding the trail, but I did spend about two hours and covered two hilly miles. Then at my last stop I found WHITE chanterelles. I find them occasionally in the Cascades, but usually not in the Coast Range. A bonus -- the mushrooms were dense and dry since it's still August! That will be a bonus the next few days.
I cooked my crabs last night and ate the little one. It was really delicious. I also had some avocados that were absolutely perfect, so I had some of those. I guess stomping up and down the hills and schlepping my dive gear around did burn some calories! And I can't eat while I'm diving or on a foray. Some neighbors came by while I was cooking because the kids were super curious. That's fun because those neighbors don't generally come to talk, so I'm glad to foster better relationships with others in my little part of our village.
I took a short detour on the way home -- about six miles. I go through a town that has decent men's clothes at Goodwill. The local thrift shops get really picked over since we're a college town. I found some shirts, and.... believe it or not, a SPG (pressure gauge) for diving! There were three very old regulator sets for like nine bucks. None were even rated for the pressure bottle I use. There was also a console boot that only had one gauge in it -- an SPG. I gave the staff my driver license, went out to my air bottle, an tested the gauge. Holy Cats! It works. That means if I sell my old regulator set, it can go with all the gauges it needs, and I can still have a spare SPG in case my console computer fails on a long trip.
I need more weekends like this! So glad I got to sleep in Saturday and then get so many chores done I could take the day on Sunday to go dive/hike and spend the last day off finishing up chores and shopping. Yay!3 -
That horrible tragedy you've read or heard about is hitting close to home. Conception was the middle sister in the fleet I go dive with each August. I'm already signed up to go back next summer, but I wish I had enough vacation to leave now and go get on their next trip. I would gladly take any slot someone cancelled last-minute.
Most folks may not know that Conception was stolen in 2005. A vagrant somehow got her started and crashed into three boats taking her out of the harbor. One sank. The thief grounded the boat on Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was sketchy, but they were able to tow her back to the dry for refitting. It was uncertain if she would survive the tow. She did not survive this terrible incident. My heart aches for the survivors back home. My only hope is everyone died before they were even aware of the fire.
I wrote last month about seeing a California Halibut. That was at Platt's Harbor. Same place as this terrible tragedy happened. It could have been me. It wasn't, and yes, I WILL be going back to dive with Truth Aquatics next August if not sooner.3 -
@mtaratoot - you are a man of many talents! The harvest looks absolutely beautiful! We haven't been as lucky, despite having a greenhouse! Our tomatoes are still green, peppers look good, still small. Cucumbers have been great and yummy. Carrots are tiny, beans coming in slow, zucchini not great.
Fall arrived with a vengeance on Sept. 1. Leaves are changing and the nights are very cool. Not sure how much more we are going to be able to get. Am gonna start looking for green tomato recipes. lol.
It certainly was a terrible tragedy about the loss of life on the dive boat. Sure glad it was not you.
Haven't been on here much, life has been so darn busy. September is insane with work travel. Am really hoping I can just slow down soon.
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September signaled a change in weather here in Ottawa Canada too. The leafs haven't started falling yet but they've changing colours already... a few weeks early at the least...0
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Still high summer here in southwest Missouri, USA. Heat isn't abnormal, upper 80s to mid 90s F (30 to 35 C), but the humidity has been killer. Very unusual for the mid-west. Dew points above 70 F (21 C), very muggy, pushing the Heat Index over 100 F (38 C) nearly every day since mid June.
Makes me think we've moved down into the sub-tropical southern swamps.2 -
d_thomas02 wrote: »Still high summer here in southwest Missouri, USA. Heat isn't abnormal, upper 80s to mid 90s F (30 to 35 C), but the humidity has been killer. Very unusual for the mid-west. Dew points above 70 F (21 C), very muggy, pushing the Heat Index over 100 F (38 C) nearly every day since mid June.
Makes me think we've moved down into the sub-tropical southern swamps.
I can attest to that! So hot here in NW Arkansas!0 -
We had a pretty small group at the aquarium. I didn't even get wet. Well, just a little from handling wet gear and putting it in/out of the rinse tanks. I volunteered to do deck manager duty for the first dive and was planning to switch with someone for the second dive. Then another team member showed up... 90 minutes late. So I could have gone and done a dive, or he could have. Instead we had two people on deck supporting one dive team. Waste of our time. We sneaked in a short second dive to clear a bunch of fish from the observation pool back into the pelagic (open sea) exhibit. The two divers who were already in their kit did this along with staff. The other two on the team plus a couple more staff operated the seine net and the gate. We got ALL the animals out in one pass. Success! I actually got some pictures, but that's proprietary so I'm not posting 'em here. Against policy, but it was an interesting job. I finally got my kit on to do a dive, but the other person had some issues with equipment, so we scrubbed the dive. No diving for me. Oh well.
Since we haven't changed the time back to standard yet, I had plenty of daylight to go to the forest. We had about a half inch of rain in the valley the last couple days, and a lot more over on the coast and in the coast range. I know that with the warm weather later this week, it will be a good weekend to forage for mushrooms. I figured since I was already in the area, I'd go stomp around.
Looks like it was worthwhile. I got my limit of a gallon. I left many more than I harvested. Some were getting old and soggy, so I limited my hunting to choice specimens. Some were too small, but they will be full sized soon. I like the small to medium sized ones best, but some of these were TINY. I found only one lobster mushroom, but it wasn't even the whole mushroom. It was the base of the stipe and some trimmings from around the outside. It was pretty obvious someone had already been hunting this site which means I had to get off the game trails and look under ferns and other brush. There used to be a lot more salal on this site, but I think it gets harvested pretty heavily by commercial hunters just like the mushrooms do.2 -
I'm not knowledgeable enough about mushrooms to be comfortable hunting 'em. I love cooking with them but the grocery store will remain my happy hunting ground. lol1
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I noticed my device told me I had climbed one or more flights of stairs yesterday. There are no stairs in my life in general, and I wondered what was up. Then today I realized -- up and down the ladder harvesting fruit! That's really the only connection to outdoor "exercise" in this post
I'm going to leave some of my Asian pears on the tree and hope they do fine through the ~almost~ freezing temperatures tonight, and maybe even get SWEETER if that's possible. I tried to dry some this year. I quit doing that years ago because they never came out that good. Texture was all odd. But I tried a different slicing method this year. Takes lots of space in the dehydrator, but the dry quicker. I was pleased with the result, so I'm drying more!
Then yesterday and again today there was a bonus. We typically only get a breba crop of figs. The main crop rots before it's ripe. Our odd weather actually started ripening figs, and for some reason, the starlings left some for me!
So now the dehydrator is full with Asian pears, Italian prune plums, two kinds of figs (the third tree just isn't giving me anything ripe yet), and some tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. I will keep cycling things through as trays become available. Yum! I think I'm going to get a new dehydrator this year. I've said that before, but I keep using this old, tired one. Adding another would drastically increase capacity.5 -
Just a little hike in the woods
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Met a friend one day while working to work.
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Sometimes I walk at night.
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scaredofscale wrote: »Sometimes I walk at night.
Me too... It's curiously peaceful...1 -
Yesterday was The Great Willamette River Clean-up, an event sponsored each year by Willamette Riverkeeper. In years past, I would go upriver to another city and participate with my partner in a tandem canoe. One of my paddling clubs sponsored one of the events up there. I remember the first time we went, the organizer gave us a sideways look as he was concerned about us in the tandem given there are some class II rapids and all. But after he saw us, he realized we had plenty of skills not just to navigate the river, but to really get to some difficult garbage.
Fast forward: My partner cut me loose after 13 years, and I decided to participate in one of my local events sponsored by an organization I'm involved with. I thought it would be fun to take my raft and be one of the "mother ships" that people in kayaks and canoes could offload bags of trash into. We also stopped along the way, secured the boats, and hauled out some large amounts of stuff from abandoned camps. When there were active camps, we'd offer to take garbage and leave garbage bags if the people wanted.
At the confluence, we got out and cleaned up a lot of stuff, and I saw, right there by the river, a habanero with ripe fruit. Was it a volunteer, or did someone plant it? Who knows. Very interesting!
There were two other rafts, only slightly smaller than mine. There was a small fishing cat with a gear platform. There was a drift boat. There was a sled that State Parks brought. It was good we had all this capacity, because we had a lot to collect. Everyone else was in kayaks and canoes.
This is the view from my seat as we got close to the end of our trip:
This is my boat before I unloaded it:
Someone took a picture of all of us with the pile o' garbage, and I'll probably get a copy of that some time.
My device said I burned over 700 calories in a little over three hours.3 -
Why, oh why, do people figure they can just toss stuff away...? It doesn't just disappear...
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Half day mini rowing "camp" on my home river, coached by a multi-time Big Ten coach of the year, assisted by his wife, a high-level masters rower. I'm in the bow (left hand end in photo) of a double in the approximate center of the photo, in a fluorescent yellow shirt, orange hat, behind the similarly dressed 80-something-year-old guy in center foreground in the single.
(My double partner is 73, and had a hip replacement on July 1 of this year; 4 weeks to the day later, she was back rowing a boat.
).
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Why, oh why, do people figure they can just toss stuff away...? It doesn't just disappear...
Well, like my old sainted uncle used to say, "Peoples is *kitten*."
To be honest, a lot of what we cleaned up was from homeless camps. Some people are homeless by choice, some not so much. Some of this tragedy is from mental health issues. I feel for those folks who are sick and can't get help or don't realize they are sick. I am sad about people who's luck put them in a place where they can't afford a roof even if they have a job. Others are just slobs. Cleaning up these camps before the river comes up is just a nice way to give back to the river I love. Some stuff we just couldn't get out -- already buried among rocks. We tried to free a shopping cart that had been there for years. We found some bikes that were also impossible to get out. Some things were just out of reach. There were active camps that certainly will contribute more garbage, but what can a person do?
What I don't get is empty bags from fast food restaurants that people toss out of their damn car. That really gets me. You can save it and put it in the trash. You don't have to put it in the river, which is where it's going if it gets into a storm drain. It's those people for whom I wish a special place in hell.
But yea, @UncleMac -- there is no "away." Even what we send to the landfill, which is where all of this old stuff is headed, isn't "away." Those of us who can afford to would really serve ourselves, our friends & families, and our future generations by being a little more responsible and maybe buying less stuff.
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Half day mini rowing "camp" on my home river, coached by a multi-time Big Ten coach of the year, assisted by his wife, a high-level masters rower. I'm in the bow (left hand end in photo) of a double in the approximate center of the photo, in a fluorescent yellow shirt, orange hat, behind the similarly dressed 80-something-year-old guy in center foreground in the single.
(My double partner is 73, and had a hip replacement on July 1 of this year; 4 weeks to the day later, she was back rowing a boat. ).
Yay rivers! Glad your weather is letting you stay on the water!1 -
Those of us who can afford to would really serve ourselves, our friends & families, and our future generations by being a little more responsible and maybe buying less stuff.
Agreed. Yet one of the booming businesses in the city where I live is self-storage places... climate controlled safe storage for your excess "stuff" for a monthly fee... So crazy...0 -
Agreed. Yet one of the booming businesses in the city where I live is self-storage places... climate controlled safe storage for your excess "stuff" for a monthly fee... So crazy...
Guilty to some degree.
I buy a lot second-hand, and I re-purpose whenever I can. I like to repair rather than replace, and when something needs to leave my ownership, I try to find another owner other than the landfill.
But boy howdy do I have a lot of "stuff." I have a weakness for button-up shirts. I have a collection of long- and short-sleeved shirts to wear to work. I only buy them second hand, and focus on things that are 50% off the already lower price, and only those that aren't threadbare, have bleach stains, or are otherwise not suitable for work. My closet is full, so my new rule is if I bring home a new shirt (like I did yesterday) I have to get rid of one that's already there. This is good. I have some shirts I really like the print, but that really don't fit me well... or don't fit me well anymore (yay!). Funny -- sometimes the shirt that goes away is the shirt I just brought home. Not often, but it has happened.
Perhaps a bigger "transgression" is gear. I have a lot of hobbies, many of which are gear-intensive. I paddle whitewater kayaks, sea kayaks, and canoes. I row a raft. I SCUBA dive. I telemark ski and am trying to get back in to cross conuntry skiing. I play guitar. I used to homebrew, and I used to make fermented foods. For some of my outdoor pursuits, gear can cross over from one to another. A good example is thermal layers. These I do buy new, and I wear them until threadbare. Some things don't really cross over; I have a paddling drysuit and a SCUBA drysuit. I also have a SCUBA wetsuit, but it's so warm I need to get another one for a warm-water trip I am planning. I also have a shortie 3mm wetsuit for paddling. Then just thinking about the raft.... SO much gear. I have a kitchen that can support about ten people, rescue gear, repair gear, and....
I have actually been thinking about getting a storage unit. I don't have a good place to keep my boats out of the sun other than under some trees where they get detritus on them. I don't really have space to make an addition to my house, and my spare bedroom is already the "gear room" and is pretty full. I've thought about balancing the expense of an addition to years of renting a space, but I don't remember where the break-even point is. I am working on downsizing my gear collection, but the reality is I have lots of stuff to support the fun aspects of my one and only life.2 -
Most of us are guilty of holding onto too much stuff. At least you're using your stuff.
I've got boxes from my most recent move still unopened. I'm lucky enough to have space for everything but the clutter does bother me. It might not seem as cluttered if I didn't have a half-completed renovation happening.1
