Author Archives: Mark P

Cool cats and wind chill

Posted on by

It has been cold here for the last couple of days. We have been stoking up the wood stove, but with the strong wind, the house cools off enough at night that by morning the heat usually comes on.

A new stray dog has been roaming around, eating cat food and keeping a good distance between any himself and any human. We put a plastic dog house out for him (her?) but he’s too skittish to get into it. We have started putting dog food out, hoping he will stop eating the cat food. Instead, of course, he eats the dog food and then the cat food. We have been worried about the dog staying out overnight in this weather, but he seems to have survived the coldest night so far.

The cats seem to have found their places. This is where Leah has set up a nice cat den under the stoop in the garage.

sly under the stoof

Sylvester slept here sometimes before it got so cold. Now he comes inside. So do Chloe and Smokey.

We put a two-story cat house in the driveway with a nice covered porch and a lot of cedar shavings. Some cat or cats have been sleeping there, but Leah was afraid it was too cold, so we put a cat house made from a cardboard box in the garage. Leah put a comforter in it, and Rusty often can be found there. Dusty occasionally lies in it, too.

dusty and rusty boxed

I had to take this picture from a distance to avoid spooking the cats, so the flash didn’t do much to light them. That tail end is Dusty’s. The front end is Rusty’s.

For the really cold weather – Wednesday night it went down to 10F (about -12C) — we got a heated pet pad for the box. It doesn’t really feel warm to the touch, but it’s supposed to heat up to a cat-friendly temperature as they lie on it. Rusty has been in there, but Dusty, unfortunately, seems not to use it. We aren’t sure where he sleeps. We suspect he’s spending time in our driveway culvert, but we hope not. We also suspect that Sylvester and Smokey chase him out of the garage, and sometimes even away from a nice spot in the sun.

Lucy and Zeke have coats, but Thursday morning I cut our walk short because with the wind it was just too cold. Friday, even though it was a few degrees warmer, I left Lucy at home. It was about 19F (about -7F), but with only light wind, it was bearable for Zeke and me.

Which brings me to the wind chill factor. Wind chill factor seems to have been designed especially to let TV weathermen spread panic. OK, that might be extreme. They only try to enhance the public’s perception of the severity of the risk of cold weather.

The idea of a wind chill temperature has been around for more than 70 years, and it has been criticized for various reasons for about as long as it has existed. I personally don’t like wind chill or its warm-weather opposite, the heat index, or the “feels like temperature.” The biggest criticism of wind chill has been that it overstates the coldness. I think in some circumstances it does the opposite. For example, I have been outside while visiting friends in Colorado on a clear, still night when the temperature was -5F (about -20C) and it did not seem extraordinarily cold. I was not prepared to strip to my skivvies and snow ski, but it was not unreasonable to spend some time outside. On the other hand, I have been outside when the temperature was near 15F (about -9C) with a strong wind (15F with 30 mph wind gives a -5F wind chill), and it was nearly unbearable.

I think the heat index temperature is even less realistic. If the temperature is 90F (32C) with a relative humidity of 65%, the heat index is 103 (expressed as a Fahrenheit temperature). I have suggested that a test of that is to pick such a day and sit outside while you turn your house thermostat to 103 and give your house a chance to warm up. Then go inside and see whether it feels the same as outside.

I’m sure there are benefits to telling people that weather conditions may be so extreme as to pose some potential danger if you’re not prepared. But the biggest benefit seems to be to the TV weather forecaster.

It was snowing as I wrote this earlier Friday evening. After dinner, Leah and I drove down the mountain to eat and go to the grocery store. There was about a quarter to a half an inch of snow on the road. That doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s melted and refrozen, it turns into a thin layer of ice. That was enough that one car was in a ditch about seven miles from home, and we had to stop going up the mountain to let someone turn around to go back down. We had no trouble. Just a couple of days ago we traded our front-wheel-drive Volkswagen for an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Just what I wanted it for.

Construction update

Posted on by

There has been a lot of work on our new lot, but it’s hard to see the difference from the last time. Some large piles of dirt and roots have been hauled off. The rough outlines of the house and garage have been marked; the bulldozer operator (who works for neighbor John) put plastic drink cups on the stakes so he could see them more easily. You might be able to see them here.

newpano

It was quite cold Sunday morning when I took these pictures, so I gave the dogs a short walk down Lavender Trail, across Fouche Gap Road, and then up the other side of the gap. When you reach the end of the road, you can see our lot.

lot from oppositeYou can see the red dirt, the wheat straw that was scattered to hold some grass seed, and the light-colored gravel that neighbor John spread on what will become the drive. The tree we saved is right in front of the gravel.

From the lot, we’ll be able to keep track of what’s going up at the end of the road where I was standing.

lav_trail_fromlot

There is a bit of extracurricular activity at the turnaround. It’s fairly secluded, so some innocuous and not so innocuous behaviors take place there.

The major development is the delivery of our house plans. This is a draft of the main floor plan.

house plan

The house will end up not oriented precisely with the compass points, mainly to take advantage of the view, but I think we’ll still get some decent solar gain in the winter. This is the drafter’s conversion of my self-drawn plan into a computer drawing. She told me that if we lived in the same county where she lives, my hand-drawn plans would have sufficed with the inspection department.

We lack two items for a building permit. One is a site plan, which should have already been supplied by the surveyor. It will show the lot and the location of the house with respect to the property lines, so we can demonstrate that we meet the setback requirement. The surveyor has done his work. He was supposed to have delivered the plan more than a week ago. I can’t understand why people will do work and then procrastinate and delay their own payment.

The second item is soil testing for the septic system. There are apparently few soil testers in this area, so I was pretty much dependent on one man. He was supposed to have contacted me several days ago, but has not done so. He seems to have plenty of work. I assume he will be more prompt when it comes to getting paid for his work.

 

Catching up on sunrise

Posted on by

We had some nice sunrises in the first two weeks of February, but I haven’t gotten around to posting them.

This was February 1.

cloudysunrisefeb1You can see the plume from the Euharlee power plant on the horizon. I don’t remember the temperature that day, but on a cold winter night there will typically be a fairly large electric power demand, so the plants will work hard.

This was February 5.

skypano_feb5This is actually a vertical panorama. I couldn’t quite get everything I wanted, so I (actually, Photoshop Elements) stitched two shots together.

This is from February 13.

cloudy sunrisefeb13Since the sun is rising earlier these days, I don’t get out on the deck often enough to catch the sun right at the horizon. I usually see a good sunrise when I’m walking the dogs around the house first thing in the morning. The sunrise changes so quickly that I usually can’t get back inside, grab the camera and get out on the deck in time to get the most dramatic shot. That’s why the sun is so high in the sky in these pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Poor little Mule

Posted on by

Doesn’t it look pitiful down there, the poor, little Kawasaki Mule?

poor_mule

I had driven it down the slope of our new lot towards Fouche Gap Road to get to a downed hickory. I failed to get enough firewood last summer, and this tree looked like a good bet. It had broken off a couple of feet above the ground but it hadn’t broken entirely off. That held most of it off the ground, so it didn’t rot. It seems pretty well seasoned. I took the Mule down on Tuesday with my chainsaw to cut it up and then back on Wednesday to haul the rounds up the hill and to our current house.

I got the Mule a few years ago to haul firewood, rocks and landscaping material around the yard. It was a little hard to justify then, but there is no way I could have brought the hickory up the hill without it. I expect to use it for firewood gathering in the future, and I think that’s going to make it worthwhile.

The slope down towards Fouche Gap Road is fairly steep; with the deep leaf litter on the ground, it’s actually hard to walk down hill. The Mule takes the slope down easily, although it was not particularly comfortable when I had to go across the slope a couple of times. I made it down to the tree and was able to turn around so I could head back uphill after putting the first load in the back. On the return trip, I got the Mule turned around, but it slipped downhill a little and rolled over one of the rounds. It was wedged in under the rear suspension just tight enough that I couldn’t move.

log_under_muleIt’s hard enough to get traction going uphill with all the leaves on the ground. With the log stuck under the rear suspension the tires just spun, even with four-wheel drive.

I tried to figure a way to dislodge the piece of wood, but there was nothing around to use, and the Mule is far to heavy to try to pick it up. I had no choice but to climb back up to the top and then walk home to get a shovel. Unfortunately, once I got back to the Mule, I couldn’t dig the offending round from beneath the rear suspension, so I had to go back home again to get a come-along and a six-foot tamper/pry bar. All that gear was too heavy to carry by hand, so I drove the truck.

I used the big pry bar to pound the tree section out and get the Mule moving again. I divided the remaining wood into two loads because I was a little worried about making it up with a heavy load. Once all the wood was at the top, I put it into the back of the Mule and took it home. Then I walked back to get the truck.

All that climbing and walking seems to have been a little more than my knees wanted to do. They’re bothering me a little tonight.

I made this panorama starting down towards Fouche Gap Road, then turning to look back up the slope towards where our house will be.

mule_panorama2

You really need to hold the camera level to make a good panorama, but it’s hard to do that on a slope like this. Photoshop Elements does a really good job of stitching the shots together. If you end up with blank areas like in this image, it will offer to fill them in. It can do a reasonably good job with something like sky or even water, but it can’t put trees in when they’re not there, so I just left the blank areas in the image.

Bloom?

Posted on by

I just noticed our first blooms of the year.

crocusesThese little crocuses are our earliest bloomers. They are so small they are easy to miss. These are under a dogwood next to our driveway. More surprising to me was the appearance of daffodils sprouting in the island next to the driveway.

daffodilsThey aren’t blooming yet, but you can see where the blooms are going to appear.

Does this mean we’re going to have spring this year?