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Category Archives: Misc

Yet Another Person Exposing Secrets

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*Updated* For some reason it embedded the wrong video.
Remember folks, this is all fake.  Washington looks nothing like this and all the animals you see are in the zoo.  You do not need to come to Washington to see this, you will be totally disappointed.

All you have to remember is it is cloudy in those “beautiful areas” 226 days out of the year.  Remember, that gloomy weather is linked to depression.  So if you do come, please just visit, we’ve already got an influx from California we’re dealing with.

That’s not fog…

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So lately around fort freedom the environment has been less hospital than usual.  So first, here’s a view I regularly see on my drive home:

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Lately however the view has been quite different.

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Since the picture off Google maps isn’t that great, here’s another set from in front of my house:

Cold Winter Day

That’s from winter 2010, here’s what it was when I got home Friday:

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Here’s the thing though folks.  That isn’t fog, it isn’t overcast, it’s smoke, and it smells like I’m sitting next to a BBQ smoker.  Seriously I went to CD’s Smoke pit Saturday for a Bacon Explosion Breakfast and there was no difference in smell there or when I got home. 

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I love that smell but it does get tiring.

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Above is a snippet of an image via NASA, what you see is a fire hose of smoke pointed in my direction.  You can just make out the Idaho Washington border, find where the border meets the Snake River (where the border starts following the river) and that is just south of my AO.

Day to day the smoke varies too.  Here’s what it was like driving home from Moscow Saturday.

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What I should have seen:

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We need rain out here in the Pacific North West.  We need it bad.  Currently a lot of the regular stomping grounds for hunting will probably be shutdown specifically because of the fire danger.

A Piece of Advice

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Never tell a guy who’s over 6 feet tall, weighs 300lbs, open carrying a firearm who’s familiar with explosives and wearing a kilt, “Hey Nice Skirt!”

 

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It’s not a skirt dumb ass, it’s a frickin’ kilt!  Besides, do you like cancer!?  Because if you hate the kilt, you love the cancer!  In the words of The Oatmeal, Kilt Love good, Cancer Bad!

So here’s the deal.  My kilt came in late this year but alas there are many other awesome guys worthy of your support, well in the running, and there are extra incentives for your donations.

So head over and donate and support the blogger of your choice.  Prostate cancer hits home in my family and KTKC is most definitely a worth cause and I shall participate next year… To prove I’m not kidding, I’m teaming up with the bloggers above to produce a video for next years fund drive.

Kilted To Kick Cancer

Sometimes It Just Doesn’t Make Sense

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I had a crazy dream last night.  By crazy, I mean the following mantra was applied:

There are very few problems that cannot be solved by the suitable application of high explosives.

Overall there’s nothing wrong with the above statement.  The reason it is crazy is because it violated all laws of physics.  Here’s how it went down:

I’m called on site for some issue a utility is having with a recloser.  For some reason they ground only two phases of the recloser while working on it.  The third phase, for what ever reason was packed with explosives and detonated… this fixed the problem.  It’s crazy because it defied all laws of physics since the recloser wasn’t rendered to its molecular components.

Now it is worth noting though, explosives are used in the power system.

Had I been involved in that, or shock testing, things would have been a lot more normal and note worthy.

It’s a bummer I cannot find a way to combine my job with the above, that would just be AWESOME!

Getting back to the dream, using explosives and not annihilating a complex mechanical mechanism just doesn’t seem right.

I Hate It When People Post Stuff Like This….

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It lets everyone else in on the secret, then more of those monkey’s from back east keep move out here.  Do as Ry said and play it full screen. (If you’re using RSS, click through to this post or to the video itself on Vimeo, you need it in HD. The RSS strips that.)

And for those of you out of the area, it’s a giant scam, it looks nothing like that, it’s all Photoshopped, and you do not need to come out here and verify my statement as being true or false. 😀

Purely Pacific Northwest from John Eklund on Vimeo.

I highly recommend clicking over and reading his description of the project.

h/t to Ry.

The War on Mice

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Those who know me know I hate varmints and vermin with a passion.  We had a small problem last year but we quickly got it taken care of and didn’t have any further issues.  Well this year they have returned, with a vengeance.

Our cats clued us in to their return as they started staring at the access panel to the Jacuzzi tub again.  We opened it up and there was evidence galore they had recently come back.  Down went the kill traps and the wait began.

Yesterday morning I woke up to this:

The other trap had been set off but evidently they got lucky and didn’t take a metal bar to the face.  I reset the traps and away we went.  The wife got home and informed me of the following:

That’s right, two more of the little buggers took metal bars to their necks.  I reset the traps and not even 3 hours later I’m informed by the wife, they’re full again.

Now I’m saying, holy !@#$ Huston we have a problem.  I clean it all up.  Reset the traps and add in two more.  I wake up this morning to find the sneakiest bastard of the bunch:

The little bastard tripped three out of the 4 traps and some how didn’t get snapped… Well the 4th trap broke his neck and ripped open his nose.

Earlier in August the wife and I signed up for pest control which thus far had worked well.  Took out a couple of larger wasp nests that were forming in areas that were difficult for me to get to.  We’ve seen fewer creepy crawlies overall.  At that point we hadn’t seen much in the way of mice signs so they didn’t do much at that time.

Well now that harvest is in full swing, and I’ve killed 6 in 24 hours, they’ll be back out on Thursday.  TMW is less that thrilled right now though because I’m leaving with Joe tonight for Mecca and then we’re headed to Reno for GBR tomorrow morning.  So that means if there are any more of the little buggers she gets to clean them up and reset the traps.

As an FYI, just about everyone has mice problems this time of year in the area, even brand new construction.  It’s the down side of basically living surrounded by wheat fields.  I would poison them, but the last thing I want is for them to die in the crawlspace.  The house would stink to high heaven and then finding the little buggers would be an interesting venture all of it’s own.

Miscellaneous Wisdom

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Seek, and ye shall find; scratch, and the door shall be opened to you. -Catskrit Proverb

It applies to cat’s more than people, but they are merely scratching to ask.  I wish more people would apply this, cat’s have seemed to figure it out quite well.