Western Mockingbird enjoying a desiccated grape in our backyard.
Photos
Oops. Didn’t quite get the focus right. Still looks delicious. And was. Left over cranberry sauce + Humboldt Creamery vanilla ice cream.
#caturday
In the Micro.Blog app, I’d love to be able to selectively disable cross-posting sites instead of all or nothing. Here’s hawk bum for reading my unsolicited feature request!
Gorgeous day today in Northern California. This is from the same place where we saw the Northern Flickers (and Nutall’s and Acorn Woodpeckers).
Northern Flickers galore on the trail today. Managed to photograph one.
Wednesday, November 23, 2022 →
My contribution to Thanksgiving is cleaning up the kitchen after major steps are completed by my wife & cranberry sauce. Can’t wait for tomorrow. Lots of prep today!
The 5 Ghz WiFi setting to transfer from X-T5 to the Fujifilm iOS app is surprisingly usable with only a few seconds per 20MB 40 megapixel JPEG. Excellent. The 2.4 Ghz, like for the X100V, is still garbage at 10+ seconds per image (not actually measured but felt like it).
Backyard House Sparrows - 84mm equivalent & cropped to zoom, using those X-T5 40 Megapixels! I am planning to get a 200 mm lens in a few months & really start birding.
Put the ale into secondary fermentation this morning and my sample is at 5% ABV! 🍺 🙌
Here’s me on the Snyder Creek trail gazing at the talus field, but still wanting to be out of there (rockfall is the reason for this talus). This is pretty near the end of the trail where there’s a camping area and a paternoster(?) lake, Snyder Lake.
Back in September we visited Glacier National Park. We didn't take the Going to the Sun Road, but opted for the lesser traveled Snyder Creek trail. Here's a couple of fuzzy caterpillars taken with a Fujifilm X100V.
I’ve had good success with an old 200 Mbps powerline adapter, so I’ve finally splurged on a gigabit adapter plus an 8 port switch. A few weeks I’ll know if this is worth avoiding running LAN cables for decidedly non-mission critical stuff like Apple TV, Sonos, & RaspberryShake.
Phat Tyre Ale is now fermenting. A couple of mistakes were made but nothing critical (probably). It’s getting easier and less stressful every time as I refine my protocols. Original gravity at 1.048-1.050. Close to the documented 1.052!
Funky moonrise tonight.
Went to New Clairvaux Vineyard (home of Trappist-Cistercian monks) to pick up our first wine club order. It’s such a nice grounds.
Sierra Nevada Brewing’s Narwhal Imperial Stout is really good.
Thoughts on Heat Pump Heating
Saturday, November 5, 2022
The weather chilled enough that our new Fujitsu 36LMAS heat pump is fully operational transferring outdoor heat into the house (during the cooling season it does the opposite). Our equipment continues to be amazingly quiet, quite unlike the natural gas furnace the heat pump replaced. It’ll be interesting to compare costs with last winter, though heating a house with a fully variable heat pump doesn’t work the same as a single cycle furnace.0.34” of rain today! Finally, the rainy season has begun in California. 🤞
Region appropriate milkweed seeds sown today. Hope we get enough rain to avoid regular irrigation for germination and establishment. 🌱
Replaced a leaky toilet valve this morning. Now that have had quite enough low grade anxiety & I feel accomplished, time to be extra lazy.
More signs of Fall with flocks of birds migrating overhead.
Thumbs up on Apple’s Shared Photo Library. We set it up to start with photos starting on 10/24, skipped the Moments, and set it to Manual. Now our Camera apps are set to Shared Library and everything is working very well. It did take quite a while to configure the shared library.
Found European Fanta at World Market yesterday, and it goes very well with pizza. Fanta being slightly sweet and made using actual juice is so good.
It’s the time of the year where every two weeks I prune the front yard native plants back. I fill the green waste bin and then I stop. That makes it easy to not overdo it. After and (way) before photo of our California buckwheat. I left twigs of assorted sizes for wildlife.
I replaced our two bedroom smoke detectors. The new ones have sealed 10 year batteries so no flimsy 9V cartridge to deal with. Love that these new First Alert detectors activate upon attaching to their mounts. Painless.
Shedding of a mantis on our rosemary plant.
Cleared out the pepper plants that were vigorously revived from rain ~18 days ago & put some clover seed down. The garden is ready for winter. I’ve got a pile for drying out leaves on stems so I’ve got a supply of compost browns without clearing leaves on the ground. 🌱
Mantis in our happiest avocado tree.
That’s a lot of Rice A Roni 😬
