Summer 2005 Photo Blog

The Weed - Update

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:59:56 +0000

In a previous post, on June 20, I mentioned The "Weed". It is an inkberry/pokeberry plant (phytolacca americana), and the reason that I have posted pictures of it in the photo blog is just because it has been able to persist and grow so large without anyone cutting it or pulling it out. The thing even tipped over and continued to grow.

The berries are now mature, and the stems have gained a very nice magenta color.

Most people call this species a weed and have many problems with getting rid of it. The plant actually looks good, especially when the berries are mature and the stems are red. People spend so much time and effort trying to keep ornamental plants healthy. This one takes care of itself and grows to be about 7 feet tall in the worst clay soil imaginable, and goes without rain or water for weeks at a time. It also acts as a good bird feeder...

Delay on New Photos...

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 21:01:25 +0000

Today was the first day of school, the end of the summer vacation. It was the first time ever that it rained on the first day since I have been going to school. Every other year, it was hot and sunny.

I generally do not write personal journals in my web logs, like those found at Xanga.com, but today was a special occasion...Also the camera is being used elsewhere, so I do not have any pictures despite this being a "Photo Blog". They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are the thousand words:

At about 7:30 AM, I drove to school taking 3 neighbors along with. Music played in the car included Ryan Cabrera - On The Way Down, Bodies Without Organs - Conquering America, and Bodies Without Organs - Open Door.
At about 7:40 AM we arrive in the Selinsgrove High School parking lot, parking in the middle of the parking lot. A crowd of excited girls was yelling and screaming and taking pictures of each other.
I went into the school, waited until 8:00 AM, then went into the hallway and waited to go to home room in the same place that I have waited for the last 3 years. Andrew, Kevin, some other people who also stand there came along as well, just like they did for the past 3 years, except for Kevin who moved here from Maryland in 2004.
Home Room was just like every other first day, the barrage of paper and forms which needed filled out were handed out and we waited for the freshmen to get their brains turned on, and we realize that was once us.
Wondering out into the hallway involves mass socialization and traffic jams, freshmen with maps and their schedules in hand.
The smell of fresh paint on the toilet stalls is quite evident, covering up grafiti and profanity of past years.
The problems with the lack of air conditioning in most of the school was amplified due to the extreme humidity. ..

Trip to the Coast

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:13:06 +0000

This past week we went "camping" in Fenwick Island, Delaware. The reason that I quote the word "camping" is because it was not quite like what most people call camping.

We have an RV, the type that is towed behind a vehicle. We parked it at a place called Treasure Beach RV park. In this RV park, there are over 1000 camp sites. A total of about 10 of them are for come and go vactioners. The rest are RV trailers that are planted permanently on cinder blocks and have a hard PVC pipe leading from the sewer assembly on the camper to the sewer hole in the ground (the poop chute). There was cable TV at this campground, at no extra charge. There were flagpoles throughout the campground which contained the United States flag and some had NASCAR flags on them. These poles illuminated the night sky since every single one had lights strung around it. There was an electrical connection at each site capable of supplying 70 amps (50A hookup for those bus-like RVs, plus a 20A recepticle for plugging in your flagpole lights, beer keg fridge, or electric grill) of juice at 120 volts. There were canals throughout the campground which eventually led to a bay which led to the ocean.

Travelling by RV is much better than a hotel room, though. It is less expensive, and you can do much more. Bikes, kayaks, and whatever else can easily go with. That is not as easy when staying in a hotel. It's not really for the lazy folk, as there is no housekeeping service to clean the crap out of your toilet.

The sun is setting over the RV Park.

Ocean City, Maryland was about two miles away. Ocean City itself has beaches but we went to Delaware's Fenwick Island State Park beach instead. It cost $8 ($4 for DE residents) to park there. Since when do you have to pay to use a sta ..

Squirrel Laying Down

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:33:08 +0000

I happened to get this picture of this squirrel laying on the railing of the deck.

It is rare to see this kind of thing, sice squirrels generally are very active. It was very hot weather, so maybe it was trying to cool off...

Radio Show 15

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:11:53 +0000

On August 8/9, we made Radio Show 15. The radio show itself was really only a small part of the whole operation, since we did many things after it.

10:00 PM-12:00 AM - Radio Show
12:00 AM-2:00 AM - Fire Burns to heat water for shower and pool.
2:00 AM - Trip to Dunkin Donuts for Andrew to buy something.
2:00 AM-2:30 AM - Swimming
2:30 AM-3:00 AM - Outdoor Shower (NOT NUDE of course

First of all, we had to devise a method to dispose of Andrew's farts...and here's what I came up with:

A hamster-wheel style blower from an old microwave oven is used to suck the air through the cardboard mailing tube and then up the plastic dryer vent hose. It then exits through the little cleanout door at the bottom of the chimney. It is vented, untreated, to the outside through the flue. It then drifts around the neighborhood in the form of a stinking green cloud.

Then the outdoor showers...

The water had to be heated to take a comfortable shower. We built this simple furnace for the purpose, and by burning wood and charcoal briquettes, the water inside of the copper coil was heated just enough to make warm shower water.

And finally, the shower!

The shower was made from ..

Sunset

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 21:00:17 +0000

Here is a nice picture of this evening's sunset.

Nice reds and oranges - one of those "fire in the sky" sunsets. Usually, in this particular spot, the summer sunrises and sunsets are usually a bit less than spectactular (since the sun gets down below a large hill and line of trees when it sets, and it is the autumn rises/sets that are amazing), but tonight was an exception.

To run all of those air conditioners, what do we do? We burn coal!

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 23:15:30 +0000

Thursday was one of the hottest days of the summer for the Northeast U.S., and seems as if I have said that before. The electricity load on the PJM - the world's largest centrally-controlled electricity grid - peaked at over 130 billion watts yesterday. The PJM grid is what feeds energy to the web server which served this page to you. (although since it is so close to the power plant, the energy never really gets on the grid)

Every building must be refrigerated down to below 75°F, and to do that we burn lots and lots of coal. Ironically, burning coal emits more global warming causing greenhouse gases than any other method of electricity generation! I think that most air conditioning is excessive...far colder than it really needs to be.

In some places, such as Japan, homes are limited to a 5 kilowatt electricity supply. That's not enough to run even a clothes drier, water heater, or a large central air conditioner. In the U.S. most people have a 200 amp breaker and 120/240 volt service, so theoretically we have 48 kilowatts to burn. The transformers that supply power though are usually only 15-50 kW and they may be shared between 2-5 other homes. I have seen two houses on a 10kW transformer once...that's pushing it.

A Gardener's Nightmare

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:32:02 +0000

We have a "garden", consisting of pumkins, gourds, melons, and tomato plants. No, I did not plant any of these things on purpose...it is the result of composting combined with sub-zero temperatures last winter. When I compost food waste, the heat of the composting process normally destroys the seeds and they do not germinate. When your compost pile freezes solid and never reheats in the spring, things get hairy. I mixed the compost with some barren soil at the beginning of the summer, and I did not screen it due to the fact that nothing was going to be planted there. Now every plant imaginable is growing in it. There are a lot of weeds, and vegetable plants.

I did have a heater for the compost pile to help it along, it was a 60 watt heater made from an old toaster heating element. 12 volt AC current was supplied to it via a 14 gauge cable from a transformer ripped out of an old HP Plotter. It worked, but it didn't make sense to burn 11 cents worth of electrcity from coal each day when it wouldn't hurt to just store the waste in the bin over the winter.

Car Audio Enhancements

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:27:24 +0000

Today I helped a friend build subwoofer enclosures for his car audio system. The enclosures are built from a high density particle board and are in the form of a scalene trangluar prism, 14 by 30 by 33 inches and 14 inches high. There are two enclosures, with a 10 inch subwoofer mounted in each one. The box is a sealed cabinet design. I would have created a vented design myself but he wanted to go with the sealed design. The whole thing is located in the trunk of the car.

Here are a few pictures from the building process:

Today also happened to be one of the hottest days this summer, with temperatures in the upper nineties (Farenheit) and heat indexes into the hundreds. There hasn't been a day this hot in years, especially since the past two summers barely had any days above eighty degrees. My digital thermometer said that it was 100.6°F at one point, by I believe the reading was raised a bit due to the fact that we were working by a paved driveway, which was absorbing and emitting massive amounts of solar energy. I did not check my UPS voltages to see how low they got today, since air conditioning load (or should I say refrigeration load for those people who keep their air conditoners at 60 some degrees! In my opinion, you're just wasting fossil fuels when you do that..) was probably at an all time high.

An Outhouse Fear

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 22:53:09 +0000

Finally an update to this thing after almost two weeks! I do not have any new pictures, since I have not had the camera for about a week (someone else is using it). I do have a small video, though. I got the video tape from when I went with a friend to his cabin over the 4^th of July, and have started to edit it. Basically, when his sister and her friend were outside, we took her camera down to the outhouse and took a picture of the outhouse seat itself and then one of the "solid" waste down below. She turned on the camera later, started to look at pictures, and noticed the brown liquid...

798 KB Windows Media Video

The video is in Windows Media Video format, only because I used Windows Movie Maker to extract it from the 3 GB MPEG file that it is contained within. "Right-click" the link and select "Save Link As" (or "Save Target As" ). This will allow you to place it on your machine instead of streaming it, which probably will not work well. Don't worry, there are no pictures of the unavoidable human wastes, just Andrew's sister dancing around screaming "IT's IN THE OUTHOUSE! YOU HOG!"