Good Morning! 59F @ 8:45AM. Cloudy and windy with periods of rain this afternoon. High 64F. Winds S at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch. Winds could occasionally gust over 50 mph.
The rain stopped yesterday afternoon and I took a little walk around the property looking for erosion in the mud but found very little. All the dust settled real nice, but is very soft in some spots and will likely stay that way until it dries out later in the week. The rain did a great job rinsing the dust off all the wood and rocks on the ground, and it'll be easy to spot them for pickup now. Heard from my old firewood buddy and he's interested in picking up some of the manzanita, likely toward the end of the week. I just want to get the fuel off the ground down below the house and get the area cleaned up so it can be disced and planted.
This series of storms have really been hammering you guys up in Washington and Oregon! Lots of rain and even tornados?
So far here it's just been heavy sustained wind, saw one gust of 45MPH yesterday and there are supposed to be more on the way. Lost two oaks last year to wind, snapped off about six feet above the ground. One's in the wood pile now, the other will need winched up from below the driveway.
Hope that dash comes off easily for you, Kyle. The one on the van was full of hidden screws, and I'd never have found them all without a step-by-step off the Internet.
Nice job on the Cub, Drew! Probably just a small adjustment on the carb for that backfire.
Had an enjoyable but not productive day yesterday. Last week I read an article about late '60s rock music and ended up ordering a bunch of CDs from bands I'd never heard, and they showed up in a big batch Thursday. So I spent some time ripping them to the computer and listening, and ended up really happy to discover some more old music from groups I never knew about. Aphroditie's Child, The 13th Floor Elevators, Bubble Puppy, as well as some old favorites I'd just heard on the radio like Country Joe and the Fish, Cream, Grateful Dead etc. One, from Pretty Things called SF Sorrow, was one of the first rock operas and supposedly inspired The Who's Tommy and others. I didn't notice it when I ordered, but it also came with a DVD of the group, reunited recently to play the whole album in the Abbey Road studios. It was a great intro to their music, and I can only imagine what these guys looked like back in the day (they're all old geezers like me now).
But the real highlight of the day was finally breaking out the Hotpot that Don had recommended several months ago. I love pot roast, and had one that had been in the freezer too long, and with the cool rainy weather it was a perfect time to eat it. But I got busy in the garage and forgot that the roast was thawing out on the counter, and didn't notice it until four o'clock or so. Oh no, gonna be a late dinner, right? Not with the Hotpot pressure cooker. It also has a setting for searing the meat, which worked great, then it used the same pot to pressure cook the roast (45 minutes), then another ten minutes to pressure cook the potatoes. Then all that was left to do was pull the meat and potatoes out of the pot, stir in a little wine and flour, and there was a nice gravy. Clean up was a breeze, as the gravy had softened anything that was sticking to the pot, and there was just the one pot to wash. There was nothing but steam inside the pressure cooker itself, so that just got a wipe from a paper towel. Thanks Don!
