Friday, May 30, 2008

Great party last night at the Northern Lights Community School graduation ceremony. When you have 14 participating high school Seniors you can do things a bit differently. Traditionally, the Juniors give the grad dinner, Matt's a Junior. We brought the big BBQ over and with two other big BBQ's we helped cook up burgers and dogs for about 100 people. Then the Jazz band (with Matt on the Bass Clarinet) played "Eye of the Tiger" as the Seniors came in. Most of the Seniors were very casual under the black robes with blue jeans and sneakers in plain sight. Every Senior got to take the podium; some sang, some spoke, some cried. One very refreshing song was performed by the Praise Team from "The Rock" with the member Senior playing guitar. Another student pulled what I call a "Dumbledore"; he came to the podium and spoke a few words: "toaster. box. aluminum." and then sat down. As the grads left the stage the full band played Pomp and Circumstance. This graduation ceremony is very special for these students, since most of these students would have been high school drop-outs without the intervention of people who cared and NLCS. One of the grads is 21 years old. They are all smart, sharp people, but they were poor students or had too many complications in their lives or had a specific disability such as dyslexia to do well in a traditional school.

Had some showers move thru the area last night, including while were cooking. Very drizzly this morning with a chance of T-Storms today and tomorrow.

Matt plowed the garden Wednesday evening using the W6, and then while discing the garden the WC broke its fan belt. Had to order one from NAPA, should be in today. He probably should have ordered the lower radiator hose also, since the hose needs to come off to replace the belt. If I'm lucky they might have the hose when I pick up the belt, but I doubt it.

Gas is still at 3.899, although I see that oil prices have dropped sharply ($127/bbl). I don't think that prices at the pump will drop, but I'm still hoping they will since I need to pick up some good gas for the tractors and the older cars this weekend. Need to fire up the 455 and hear it again!

I'm hoping to start tearing down the '70 Ventura II and the '77 Catalina this weekend if the weather will cooperate. There is definitely a line of showers in North Dakota heading this way, but if they don't amount to much the ground might be hard enough to work on the lawn.

Traffic last night on the way home from work was a bitch. My normal 20 minute drive home took 40 minutes, all of the extra twenty minutes in negotiating the traffic thru town. Summer construction has closed a four block section of Hwy 2 in the middle of town. Since the detour is very poorly laid out over roads that were already busy, the traffic in downtown is really bad, so a lot of folks (myself included) take the long way around town past the Hospital on Golf Course Road and across County Road 63. It now appears the County Road 17 is closed for construction and the detour for that is now running past the Hospital as well, so that there was a solid line of cars on Golf Course Road yesterday afternoon. Then, a block past where Golf Course Road crosses Pokegama Ave and becomes 10th St the road was closed for more construction. I don't know what was happening, if there was a train or an accident or what, but traffic to cross the Horn Bridge was backed up over a mile (traffic across the Hwy 169 bridge is backed up that far during the day because of the construction on Hwy 2). So, I finally managed to change lanes and sneak down a couple of back roads and go home via the Blackberry bridge. So, this morning I came to work via the back roads and I will go home that way today. If I can get out of the Hospital Parking lot onto Golf Course Road. Even at 7:00 this morning traffic on Golf Course Road was much heavier than normal, I usually see one or two cars but today it was a solid string.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Kinda fun having this blog. I was browsing back thru my posts and found one where I did some comparison's on the price of gas and the price of a new car. I decided to update it with todays numbers to see where I'm at:

Regular unleaded today is 3.899/gallon
1993 Chevy G20 (Gladiator) averages 14 mpg $200/mo maint
1988 Plymouth Voyager (VGer) averages 23 mpg $200/mo maint
2008 Ford Escape Hybrid 34 mpg city 30 mpg hwy (EPA est). We'll use the city even though I drive mostly highway. $35K or $1050/month
I drive about 1400/month or 17000/year.

Cost per month (very simplistic) based on gas at 3.899, 1400 miles per month, and above maint OR payment:

Gladiator: $592
VGer: $438
Escape: $1218

I don't think so.

Even looking at it more simplistically:
Gladiator $4760/year gas
VGer $2890/year gas
Escape $2040/year gas

So, over a year, I would save $850 in gas driving the Excape over VGer. And the payments are $1050/month? Even with the Gladiator I would save only $2720, not even 3 months worth of payments.

I don't think so.

And I won't even look at what the price of insurance will be for a new car, or what the price of maintenance might be in five years on the Escape.

I don't think so.
Gas is still at 3.899.

Spent most of the day Friday on the M-D W6 plowing and discing the garden. Then got the A-C WC running again on Saturday (bad battery cable) and used that for discing the garden. What a difference. The W6 is a brute, just walks the 2 bottom plow thru the garden. The WC is so much smaller and has much better visibility, turns much sharper (narrow front); much better suited for discing a small area like the garden.

Moved the '69 Pontiac Catalina Wagon, '70 Pontiac Ventura II, '77 Pontiac Catalina, and '81 Plymouth Horizon out to the front yard on Monday afternoon, I need to start stripping them down and salvaging parts. Gonna let Matt and the NLCS haul some of them away as part of their fundraiser, but I haven't yet decided how much. Still need to move the '89 Dodge Caravan Turbo, '89 Dodge Caravan, and '91 Plymouth Acclaim out front also.

I'm just about ready to decide to quit the car hobby. I love tinkering with the cars, I love looking at the nice ones. But I'm just no longer up to all the physical labor involved any more. At the very least I'm going to knock it down to one car project instead of the four car projects I'm currently staring at.

That will still leave me with more hobbies than I have time for, but maybe I won't feel so pressured.

Saturday was the North Central Minnesota Farm and Antique Association's annual auction. Matt and I took an old ground drive rake down to get auctioned, haven't heard if it went or not. There was some VERY nice equipment down there, including a restored John Deere A, a restored Allis Chalmers WD, a running Ford 9N, a really rough Ford 8N, a "yard art" Farmall F-12 on steel, and an unstyled Allis-Chalmers WC in rough condition (as the guy said, "it ran the last time I used it"). I've never seen a treadless rear tractor tire before. The tread was worn smooth on that WC! I think a neighbor down the road bought that one. There were two or three or four more tractors also.  Probably one of the biggest auctions they have had with hundreds of items. There was nothing that I needed, so we went home to work on Matt's WC.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Gas: Price at one station in GR is at 3.859 at 7AM although the other3 I passed were still at 3.799. The word on the street is that the price is expected to go to or over $4 by this weekend (Memorial Day). Price per barrel went briefly over $135, current price (Bloomberg.com) is at 132.90, although the rumor is that it will go over $141 in next month.

I have a feed for the gas price map at GasBuddy.com that I want to post here, but I need to figure out how I want to present it.

Gorgeous weather. Matt started to plow the garden last night, I'm hoping to finish it this afternoon.

Auction at Blackberry this weekend, need to finish getting the rake down there. They have a lot of equipment in the auction, I think I heard almost a dozen tractors. Saw one, a fully restored Deere on steel. I probably have a pic of it here.

I need to resume searching for a camera.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Gallup's latest "Cultural Tolerance" survey shows that more people think wearing fur is morally bad (39%) than people that think that divorce is morally bad (22%). Link to Gallup Poll results. Sad sad sad sad.

On a brighter note, if this weather continues the garden might be dry enough to plow and disc tonight or tomorrow night.

If society disintegrates a garden might be nice. Not that I think it is likely to do so any time soon, mind you. Some days I wish it would, other days I hope it doesn't. Not sure which it is yet today.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Beautiful morning today.  Yesterday we had a series of thunderstorms roll thru, each one worse than the last.  It would be really nice for about an hour, then a thunderstorm would rip thru with lots of wind, thunder, and lightning and a little rain; lasting about 20-30 minutes.  Then nice for about an hour until the next t-storm rolled thru.  Lots of reports of downed trees and power lines.

At one point about 3 PM I needed to run into GR for fencing supplies (working on the pasture fence during the lulls between storms).  On the way in I saw a tree leaning against a power line and smoking.  I pulled off the road, called 911 and reported it. By the time I got off the phone there were flames on the ground.  Another guy in a pick-up stopped, grabbed the bed liner from his truck and started beating out flames (very windy at this point) I ran across the road and helped him until we had the flames pretty much confined to the area right under where the sparks were falling.  Sometime during this the GRPD pulled up and sat there watching us.  When we had the flames confined to the one small area he yelled at us to get out of there, the GRFD was on the way and he didn't want to see us get caught by the power line if it came down.  Well, we didn't want to get caught by the power line either, we had been watching it and talking about as we beat down the flames.  So we beat feet as fast as we could and got out of there.

Drove by about 8 PM, looked like the line didn't break.  The tree was chopped into 10-15 foot sections, and the burned area on the ground was about twice as big as when we left, but they contained it.

Drove around a bit more.  The last of the storms had passed, none on the horizon anyways.  Saw several other places with downed power lines and lots of downed trees.

Found out what caused the major power outage the other day.  Two mating seagulls bridged a main transformer.

I put the rain gauge out on Thursday.  With all those thunderstorms we barely had enough rain to try to read, like maybe 1/8 inch.

Todays forecast is for clear and bright.

I noticed on my cruise last night that gas fell to 3.679.  Whooppee.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Yahoo! News: Zimbabwe issues new 500,000,000 note because of 165,000% inflation (as of February, no figures released since then).

Check out the new Windows Live! service, Skydrive. 5GB of space, free.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

It appears as though power is out on the entire south side of Grand Rapids. We are running on our Emergency Generator Power right now at the Hospital. Made for an excellent drill, we have been having minor glitches with systems and connections going down whenever the power goes out, but it looks like this time everything worked the way it's supposed to. Didn't lose any systems or network connections. Only took 2.5 years.

Yippee!!

Edit

Went out at lunch time to fill the Gladiator, it had enough gas to get home but not enough to make it back to town. Power was off everywhere south of Highway 2, the gas station I wanted is one the south side of 2 and had no power. So, I went across the street to the north side of 2 for lunch. I was originally going to stop at BK, on the south side of 2, and get Whopper Jrs for $1.25 ea, but with no power that wasn't going to happen. So, instead of paying $3.00 for lunch for 2 I spent $22 for lunch for two. I think the Subway is the ONLY fast food on the north side of 2, and they were PACKED. I ordered the Big Philly Cheese. I'm hopeful that the sandwich I had was not a good representation, because it was horrible. The picture looks much better than my sub looked, and I could almost imagine that the picture (poster) might taste just as good.

By the time we got thru the line and done eating the power was back on, so we went to fill the Gladiator. I quit at $95 (broke) even though it wasn't full. My rough guess is that it will cost about $115 to fill that tank.

Just saw at Yahoo! that oil spiked at 126.98. Story also says that National average is 3.73. I need to do some math to correlate the price of gas with my paycheck, but I'm pretty darn sure that my paycheck ain't going up that fast.

On another note, I see a news item that ALL poultry in Seoul has been destroyed to try to contain an outbreak of Avian Flu (H5N1). More than 6.8 million birds have been killed in South Korea. Worldwide, 243 humans have died according to the World Health Organization.

High Fuel Prices. High Food Prices. High death toll in Burma (typhoon, greed). High death toll in China (earthquake).
Because gas in Bemidji was at 3.559 on Saturday, I kinda expected gas in GR to drop to that point yesterday or today (after fishing opener). I was rather surprised to see gas at 3.699 when I headed home yesterday. And I really don't see any reason for it, unless the devastation in Myanmar is supposed to have an effect on the oil supply.

Weather yesterday and today is windy and drizzly.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Went to Bemidji Saturday for Jon's grad. Gas there was at 3.559 while in GR it is still at 3.599. Filled up Vger at 3.599, not much choice.

MN weather this last weekend; Saturday was rain mixed with snow, woke up to a bright Sunday morning with snow on the ground, but warmed up into a decent day for working outdoors.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose as high as $125.12 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange...
--AP News from Yahoo!


The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year....

Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land.
---The Clean Energy Scam Time Magazine Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

I don't like this picture....

Thursday, May 8, 2008

I'm so far behind and so tired, just want to lay down and sleep right now.

Gas went to 3.599 on 5/7, just as I needed to fill up.

Worked on Vger all day 5/6, front brakes were dragging badly. Ended up replacing calipers, pads, hoses, and lines. Vger has only been averaging 18 mpg; I'm hoping that this gets me back up to 25 mpg.

Beautiful weather last few days, highs in 60's, lows about 30. T-Storms Tuesday night, I don't have the gage out yet but think we got about 1/2 inch of rain, maybe more.

Forgot to mention that on the evening of May 2 we went to Bemidji State U. to a performance by the Wind Ensemble. Very enjoyable, brought back some memories. They performed some rather difficult works directed by a guest composer, very impressive, I recall how hard that is to do.

Our new Super Wal-Mart is now open. Layout is totally different from Bemidji and Hibbing stores, will take a while to get used to. But it will be very nice not to have to drive 50 or 100 miles just to go shopping, only 20 miles.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Gas went to 3.439 yesterday afternoon.

Raining this morning.