Author Archives: Joel

I got a Paratus Day card from Commander Zero yesterday! Which reminds me this is the third year in a row he has sent one… He always adds some small appropriate gift for the season, which is appreciated… Last year … Continue reading →

An extremely generous reader, quite out of the blue, asked, “Could you use a better camera?” Olympus E-620, the only DSLR I’ve ever even seen up close let alone owned. With three lenses and a nice case to boot. I … Continue reading →

The left front leg on my ground mount rack has been loose for an embarrassingly long time; I discovered it in early Spring and only now have gotten around to fixing it. Not a lot of excuse, just kept, er, … Continue reading →

I lost my driveway’s entrance into the wash in late July during the biggest of the early monsoon floods. It was a colossal pain in the ass all summer but this monsoon was a wet one (14 and a half … Continue reading →

I knew it was going to boil down to not very much. I wouldn’t know how much not very much was till I got there. I sterilized five jars and hoped I wasn’t being too comically optimistic… …and to my … Continue reading →

I left the pears to soften up for five days and that may have been a mistake: Two different species of bugs had pretty thoroughly colonized about half of them. Quite a bit is going to the chickens. I was … Continue reading →

“Dammit, Tobie! I’ve had that brush for years!”

FBI Rally In D.C. Ends Without Incident

Points for brevity, at least… As so often happens when I receive business-style spam, I’m left wondering “what was the point of this?”

I put this out here back then with great trepidation, since I hate asking for things in any case and I’m downright neurotic about expensive things. It ended kind of spectacularly. So spectacularly, in fact, that I never even unpackaged … Continue reading →

Summer will be done before I know it. My field of high waving flowers has faded… …and I thought I was being relatively attentive about the pear tree. Unfortunately… …turns out I wasn’t being attentive enough. So when all was … Continue reading →

Busy morning. Toward the end of his morning walkie Tobie finally managed to bring a bit of juniper branch all the way home without losing it; apparently assuming I wouldn’t let it inside the cabin he immediately flopped down on … Continue reading →

I bake every five days or so, usually well before I’m out of bread in summer because it molds before I finish eating it. Less often in winter, because it doesn’t. I’ve been doing this for most of the fifteen … Continue reading →

Tobie and I went on an unusually long walkie this morning. Beautiful day in a recent series of beautiful days, a little warm for comfort in the afternoon but pleasant in the morning and it seems we’re looking at Monsoon’s … Continue reading →

(This turned into another wall’o’words post. Apologies.) PREAMBLE: Longtime readers will have noticed that I seldom do political posts anymore. Honestly they were never anything but filler to help me fulfill the Post Every Day rule, which is hard to … Continue reading →

A quickie little project for D&L turned out quite a bit more difficult than expected. I think it might have been easier if I’d gotten in there before the mud dried, though it certainly would have been messier… A corner … Continue reading →

Coming home from the Monday morning water run has become a bit of a stressful thing since Tobie decided he could chew and scatter whatever he wanted if Uncle Joel wasn’t home. I cleared out the lower cabinets and bathroom … Continue reading →

It has bugged me that, after waiting on the order of 10 years for this tree to fruit, most of the fruit will be wasted. Right? I mean they’re not going to be as good as commercial pears no matter … Continue reading →

But Tobie does the best he can. He’ll go nuts with one of his toys for a while, keeping himself occupied… But sooner or later he’ll see if he can get me involved in the game. This is nothing I … Continue reading →