Happy Spring everyone. Enjoy as the weather warms up, the days get longer, and the sound of motorcycles increases every day.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

Nice picture; and ah yes, . . . SPRING! As much as skiing and sledding and snowball fights were a gas; it is time to move on with the seasons.

Been a mild winter and relatively manageable thaw here in the sticks. The 2 big late snowfalls did make the annual fall runoff a good one. The driveway was a goo pit for only 3 days, and the stream rose about 3' and took out a section of my bridge.

Time to consider a 3rd generation bridge. Unfortunately, even though the stream averages only about 30' wide MOST of the year, I have to build it to withstand that few days each spring when all H2O breaks lose. I'm feverishly scrounging for up to 6 telephone poles (30'). I need to get it high enough that the deck is above high water level in spring, and that means lots more length. I found a convenient crossing where the high ground on each side is just a 60' spread, with a little island that will serve as a perfect place to build a middle pier. I figure with some deep enough pilings (fence posts pounded 6' into the streambed), a well reinforced poured concrete pier should hold; especially since this little island has been growing a bit each year.

I love doing this stuff.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

The apple and cherry trees are in bloom all over town. The weather's not much different, but it's Washington; the weather's never much different.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What kind of flowers are thoes?
Somehow, I feel as though I should know their name...

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If your nose runs and your feet smell, you could be upside down! O_o
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There was a man who entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in
ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win.
Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

I'll be preparing my flamethrower for the inevitable battle against airbore pollen producers...

*grumbles and sneezes*

I don't mind the flowers, so much as I mind the severe weather.
Seeing as I live in the heart of tornado alley, we get it quite often.

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"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
Stephen Hawking

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein

Bluebells! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Bluebell

Loads around here, got some coming up all over the garden now.
I know of a few places where you can go for a walk in a wood drenched in the sweet smell of them.
Pretty resticted distrubution though, IIRC we have about 80% of the world population in the British Isles.

Ah yes, charged my battery up the other day.
Best to check your helmet for unwelcome lurkers as mentioned in this thread Ah...ain't that cute? Edit:Farmer - that sounds great fun, have you considered a drawbridge?
Sounds like some railway (railroad?) track could be a useful construction material. I would imagine laws & regulations here would make such an undertaking a nightmare of bureacracy at best, if not impossible. We don't have as much space to play with though.

Woke up to another 5 cm of snow this morning. It's snowing lightly as I write this. The depth in the back yard is still almost 50 cm, and the banks along the driveway over a metre high. It's been mild recently, and lots has melted, but we won't see the end of it here until about the middle of April, just shy of 6 months after it arrived. I'm tired of it, though my son has talked me into going skiing weekend after next.

Mmm. Not only is it spring, but I've just settled down after my fourth BBQed meal of this grilling season. A little spicy chicken; a little salmon grilled/steamed in lemon; thin-sliced potato+onion sprinkled with summer savory; grilled/steamed asparagus; and two scoops of strawberry frozen yoghurt for dessert. Yum.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

In honour of the day, I've placed a sprig of cherry on my altar and am washing tons and tons of laundry, including things that don't get washed very often (the spare blankets, for example, and probably the sheet that covers the window in the bedroom because the blinds let in too much light).

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Looks almost like our state flower, the Bluebonnet.

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Scienara: A rejection of reason and evidence.

Ah....Spring! I appologize for the two snow storms. You see,...I was polishing
my golf clubs last week, in view of the comming season, and surely,it must be a curse. I got whacked with two decidedly nasty snow falls and I'm hard pressed to get 29 ° now. But....the local meteorologists have promised a warming trend this week.
Snow ?? We don't need no Snow!!! We don't need no Steeenkeen Snow!!

One thing I am looking forward to is fiddleheads (they are ferns that a picked before the unfrill, then you boil in water or steam and eat with butter). What I am not looking forward to a the birds perched just outside my window at 6:30 am singing away (I work 6:30pm to 3 am).

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If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

Here in the high desert we're lookin' forward to the annual Death of the Fruit Blossoms.We water & fertilize the fruit trees & they burst out in blossoms,the bees are busy pollinating,the hummingbirds are flitting around & it's warm & sunny.
Then about the 3rd week of May it drops down to 25F one night & kills 1/2 the blossoms.Then a week or 2 later it hails,clearing off the rest of the flowers.
Ah,spring.

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"An armed man is a citizen
An unarmed man is a subject"

Robert A. Heinlein

That would be something wouldn't it? The drawbridge that is. I've thought about a paddle wheel. It'd be quite complicated though, due to the challenges of ice and the spring rush of water. It would require a special channel, or removal at certain times of the year. Maybe a simple one just for cosmetics.

I actually did think about steel, but I'd have to find some substantial stuff that was real cheap or free. Rails (train tracks) can be had, but getting them to the site and working with them would be darn near impossible. I've had the honor of moving sections of rail, and the stuff is incredibly heavy. IIRC, even a 3' piece is beyond most people's lifting capacity. (I worked for a company named Thrall that manufactured and repaired rolling stock. Spent a lot of time around trains. We used chunks of rail for everything from benches to doorstops. VERY heavy stuff).

It's a longshot, but if anyone lives within an hour of my coordinates, and happens to know of telephone poles coming down and being disposed of at no charge, let me know. My neighbor has a big tandem trailer and has volunteered to haul for me. They need to be in decent shape, but it'll just be a footbridge, so leached out but not yet rotting is fine.

There are some pretty restrictive rules about doing this stuff, because the stream is a designated trout habitat. Within a certain number of feet of the high water mark, we are not supposed to do anything - not even mow. But almost everybody who lives on it has a bridge of some type. I think as long as we are not obstructing the flow the DNR just looks the other way.

I'm serious about the poles though. I'm asking everywhere I go, everybody I know. I priced debarked pine logs and they are outrageous. Menards wants $12/linear foot. I don't get that because cut up into 2X4's the same amount of wood would be half the price, at the most. Go figure.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

30' wide eh? How deep does it run? Good fishing or no? I'd love to have something like that on my property (well, assuming I had more than the 1/2 acre lot I have now ). Fortuneatly my parents have a pond on thier land so it provides me with a seculded fishing spot any time I want one.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

It looks like this winter has been quite mild in North Amercia, am I right?

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

I can't speak for everyone but here in ohio it was fairly mild. We had *some* really nasty weather for a few weeks, probably a solid month's worth, but can't complain as the "wintery" weather didn't start until almost febuaray. Jan was cold but not bad. December was more like october weather. and today it's 75 and sunny and hopefully we're done with any kind of snow/sleet for the year. Time to break out the old tacklebox and oil up my reels. I'm excited!

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

I don't know about the rest of North America, but the lack of snow to keep the local rivers up past the end of July is going to make life somewhat more difficult for our salmon and trout this year.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.