Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

The North Puffin Poo Chronicles

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My Saturday was going really well until I realized it’s Monday.

Halloween is far enough past that it is (probably) safe to relate the tale of the “outhouse races” up here in farming country. Oh, we’ve had indoor plumbing as long as anyone (you may recall my Day of Poop two summers ago) so we all pretend that only our cows go in the barn. My friends Jim and Fred Baillargeon have a 200-head dairy farm up near the border in North Puffin. They have a two-holer about 40 steps off the back porch, not too far from the the calf sheds and on the other side of the manure digester.

Great sport as the temperature drops on Mischief Night is not cow tipping but outhouse tipping.

Two-Holer OuthouseOuthouse tipping has some rules. The most important is to tip the outhouse onto its door. See, that way the tippee has no way out other than through the small hole in what has become the sidewall of a very low room. And the pit is now a viable moat to cross.

The tippee is usually annoyed.

Extra points for a two-holer. Year-long bragging rights for a doubly occupied two-holer.

See, most folks retain an outhouse because that chance to be alone with ones thoughts and a good book is almost the best part of a day on the farm. When Jim and Fred both have to go, though, it was either a race or a building project. They chose to build.

Unfortunately, Jim and Fred both had to go around midnight on Mischief Night. They knew better but sometimes the urge is just too great. The high school football team had hosted a fundraising dinner that very evening in an effort to keep the pranksters tied up for a good cause. Nobody thought twice when the menu had Boston Baked Beans. Lots of beans. A troop of commandos went over to the farm and lay in wait in the calf shed for the inevitable. I don’t know Jim and Fred didn’t hear the giggling over the calves bawling but they both went quietly to their fate.

The boys didn’t know that Jim had loaded his bird gun with rock salt and Fred had a pair of million candlepower torches. The boys gave them a minute to get settled and ran out.

“Everybody push!”

Outhouses are strong little buildings and weighted at the bottom. This tipping op turned out to be harder than expected. Finally, it started rocking and went over. The left tackle’s foot slipped and he almost fell in the hole when Fred lit ’em up. Jim took careful aim and…

Let’s just say the latrine wasn’t the only slippery place on the farm.

Fortunately North Puffin poop don’t stink.

Speaking of cows, Green Mountain Power met with dairy farmers, selectboard members, and the actual public last week. The Quebec energy company Gaz Metro owns Vermont Gas, Green Mountain Power, and Central Vermont Public Service. Fred and Jim were there. As far as I know, the football team wasn’t.

They discussed constructing a manure digester near the St. Albans Bay. St. Albans Town has about 10,000 cows. That’s a fair dinkum lot of manure.

GMP is Vermont’s heaviest investor in alternate energy and, since they need to make a profit with it, they aren’t just flinging poo at the wall.

The front end of a digester is in essence a cow-power septic tank. A large concrete holding tank collects the manure. The tank sits at 101°F for 21 days while methane gas rises naturally to the top. A collection system syphons off the biogas fuel which feeds a natural gas engine, which in turn spins an electric generator to create electricity. The electricity goes onto the GMP grid.

Nothing goes to waste. The tank empties into a separator to divide out the liquids from the solids. The liquids get spread or, better, injected as fertilizer. The solids can be composted into soil amendments or can be used as bedding for the cows.

I think my friend Bill Rowell built the first digester in Franklin County (Foster Brothers Farm in Middlebury has had an active digester since 1982, the first in Vermont).

“The digester process greatly reduces pathogens, fly and insect larvae, weed seeds, and odor,” Mr. Rowell said of his million gallon plant. Particularly odor.

GMP has at least 13 farms in the program; this would be the fifth digester on farms in Franklin County. The others are in Bakersfield, Berkshire, St. Albans Town, and Sheldon.

Farm digester projects in Vermont tap a utility-funded grant program created by the settlement when Entergy Nuclear bought the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The Renewable Development Fund started in 2004; it provides technical assistance funds for digester projects. Cow Power program customers can also opt in to pay a premium of $.04/kWh on renewably-produced power. Green Mountain Power pays farms that same premium for each kilowatt hour they deliver to the grid. By the end of 2012, energy produced by the farms exceeded demand by 35%.

Headline: Nuke Money Pays for Poo!

So our poop not only don’t smell, it glows in the dark!

 

BIFFED

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eBay delivered another auction for “the legendary Canon 400mm” lens this morning.

I’m looking for a prime lens in this range, so I’ve signed up for an email notification whenever one comes up on that site. Actually, I’d like a prime lens with a even more reach* but I can’t justify buying a piece of glass that costs more than my first five cars. Combined.

This lightweight, compact 400mm super telephoto lens is highly portable, enabling the photographer to keep pace with even the most rapidly moving subjects in constantly changing shooting conditions. One Super UD lens element and one UD element combine to effectively control secondary spectrum. A double focus ring facilitates a variety of grips to suit various shooting situations. A pull-out hood, switchable focus range, and detachable ring-type tripod mount contribute to outstanding operability.

The listing says, “Very quick focus, allowing for BIF photos.”

BIF?

Not grokking BIF photos, I Googled.

I had never heard of Bif Naked before which is what makes this another in the “You Ain’t Gonna Believe This” series.


Bombshell Magee v. Bif Naked

She’s the one on the right.

The 44-year old, heavily tattooed, Canadian singer-songwriter is also an actress and motivational speaker with a bio that sounds like something I would make up: “Bif Naked was born in New Delhi to teenaged parents attending private school. She was subsequently adopted by American missionaries” who moved her to Kentucky, then Dauphin in Manitoba, and Winnipeg. Before launching her solo career, she played with the punk bands Gorilla Gorilla and Chrome Dog. Not bands I had heard of, either (sorry, Bif). Her nickname, Bif, started as a mispronunciation of her real name, Beth Torbert.

Of course, the seller meant Birds In Flight.

I.Am.Not.A.Birder.

Birds do fascinate me. I’m interested in the mechanics of flight and in the grace of these killing machines in a stoop. It turns out I can sit on the beach for hours, just waiting for one of our resident osprey to fly through with dinner. Or for dinner.

Some wags might say I qualified that too much. It turns out I can sit for hours on the beach, period.

I find myself drawn more and more to long lens shots which means I’m cropping more than I like.
Peek-a-Boo


Great Egret and Little Red Egret
 

High Cover

With that nice 400mm lens I’d be able to reach the other end of the Blue Hole. I’d be twice as close to Mars. And, of course, I still hold out hope of seeing Bif on the beach. Or Bombshell McGee, seen on the left (Google likes to juxtapose Ms. McGee and Ms. Bif). It turns out a 400mm makes a good portrait lens, too.

* The EF 600mm F/4L IS II USM or even better the EF 800mm F/5.6L IS USM Supertelephoto. And imagine that with a 2x teleconverter and a high ISO!

 

Wimp

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“I can see my breath!” I complained during walkies Friday morning.

“Wimp,” a passing resident said almost sotto voce.

It was 15°F colder in Southwest Puffin than in North Puffin on Friday.

Some Solar Deniers would have you believe that Global Warming caused this dip in temperature.

I’m an engineer in real life but I also have a 98% useless undergrad degree in Math.

Today is the last day of the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane season. I took my hurricane shutters down last week.

Terminology: A “hurricane” is a tropical cyclone. In the western North Pacific, these storms are called “typhoons” but similar storms in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans are known as “cyclones.”

Hurricane modeling fascinates me. As the season ends in the Tropics, we relied on computer projections that gave our forecasters the results we see as a colored “cone of uncertainty” on the weather maps. Generally speaking, the models can narrow down a north Atlantic tropical cyclone to a path that falls in the … North Atlantic.

Spaghetti Model of Atlantic Hurricane TracksThere are four or five excellent global hurricane forecasting models. Those models solve the equations describing the behavior of the atmosphere over the entire globe. Remember that. These numeric (or “dynamical”) models — called ECMWF, GFDL, GFS, and UKMET — each take hours to run on supercomputers. I was surprised to learn that the U.S. National Weather Service uses the less useful NAM model for only North America and the surrounding waters. There are also statistical models as well as simple trajectory models and hybrid statistical/dynamical models. The National Hurricane Center maintains a list of all of the tropical cyclone track and intensity models.

Here’s one percent of the two percent use that I get from my useless Math degree: I know enough math to know I absolutely could not write the equations for one of these models.

I also know enough math to know the four best hurricane models blither off into uncertainty in a few short days.

“The global warming scam … is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen I have seen.”
–Harold Lewis

The IPCC’s man-made Global Warming model simulations cover the period to the year 2100 and beyond. Not five days. Not 500 days. Not even 5,000 days. The IPCC says their model of man-made Global Warming is fixed out to 31,000 days.

Wow.

We can’t predict whether it will rain on South Puffin today (there’s a 10-20% chance) with any certainty but we can predict the temperature there on November 30, 2100.

Wow.

Global Warming models solve the equations describing the behavior of the atmosphere over the entire globe. Sound familiar?

Let’s consider the hurricane models we count on.

Tropical Storm Kate formed out around the Bahamas on a Monday morning just three weeks ago today, an occurrence unexpected by forecasters in the November of an El Niño year. That pries another nail out of climate models, too.

By Veterans’ Day, Hurricane Kate had become the fourth hurricane of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season. Kate tracked north away from the Bahamas, passed well north of Bermuda, and pretty much bothered only the fishies.

Strong El Niño events typically bring the Atlantic season to an earlier-than-usual close because the subtropical jet stream gets an increasing boost toward late autumn. Despite that, Kate did become a hurricane but was tamed a couple of days later. Dr. Jeff Masters noted that the “only” Atlantic hurricanes observed since 1950 during El Niño Novembers are Ida (2009), Florence and Gordon (both 1994), the “Perfect Storm” (Grace in 1991 which was actually a Halloween storm), Frances (1986), and Martha (1969).

“Only”? Six seems like a lot of “onlies,” since there were November hurricanes in only three non-El Niño years — 1998, 2001, and 2005. (There was also a Cat 1 hurricane in the Azores in December 1951, plus Alice in the Antilles in December-January, 1952, and Lili in December, 1984. 1951-2 was an El Niño year.) I think there have been 21 el Niño years since 1950.

What have we learned?

  • I’m thinking Dr. Jeff Masters is as good at hurricane reporting as at global warming prediction.
  • If we aren’t good enough at math to predict an atmospheric event as big as a hurricane over a summer, we aren’t good enough at math to predict a 4.3°C temperature change over a century.
  • We don’t know how to terraform a planet.
  • I hate outdoor walkies when the temperature is 4°C.

Maybe the science ain’t as “fixed” as the Far Green would have us believe, hmmm?

Hmmm, indeed. British public schools used to “cane” students for performance as poor as these predicters keep turning in.

 

Giving Thanks

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Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the “official” beginning of the Christmas Shopping season.

Pilgrims, Progressing SouthI’ll come back to the sandwiches.

Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.

Thanksgiving at Stanbridge Station, PQHere in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier on Canada’s by-then barren fields. We saw one of those neighbors across the canal again the other day. She was still pleased to get two thanksgiving meals; she was less pleased to cook two thanksgiving meals.

Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that

Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims or older immigrants. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.

SWMBO will have a houseful of girlfriends in my little house today. Likewise, I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year as Nancy and I wander over to celebrate and over eat with all of Dagne’s children. I reckon we’ll all have a turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, smashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.

I don’t care. I shall have pah.

I AM™ a lucky boy lucky. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other. I didn’t get skunked by the Russian used car dealer from whom I escaped without buying a truck and I did not get four inches of snow yesterday. Citizens “Insurance” says they will cut my premium in half if I can just prove my storm shutters meet code. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by friends.

I am thankful my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren are happy, healthy, and will be well fed again today.

I am thankful Anne is finally in South Puffin and will be here all winter.

I am thankful for Anne and for Nancy, two loving, caring, beautiful ladies. I am blessed.

People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas but Thanksgiving, not so much. Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week.

And I have pah!


ahh, supper

This column has mostly appeared before because being thankful goes on year round.

 

Dog Through the Window

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Changes and Coinkydinks.

South Puffin is a city. A very small city. This is a “before” photo of sand and water, before a single road was was graded or a single house was built.

South Puffin BeforeOur small residential community is one of the smallest in the country and may be the only city that entirely encompasses a single island. The city has a total area of under 450 acres. About 320 acres (half a square mile) of that is land and the rest is water. We have just over 800 residents in 422 households, and 253 families here in the city. The population peaks to about 4,000 in mid-winter. That means we’re a lot smaller than North Puffin except when we almost catch up thanks to winter or summer visitors who maybe flow back and forth. Our parallel streets start with Abundance Street and Bacchus Street and run up the alphabet to Magnificence Street (which the locals call Mysterious Street) and the extra, Napoleon Avenue. I live on Kittywhopper Street.

Florida has some 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger and some uncounted number that ebb and flow in smaller sizes. Only Alaska has more. Our major island chains include the Keys, the Ten Thousand Islands, the Sea Islands, and the barrier islands of the Intracoastal Waterway.

I like living on an island I can drive to but sometimes driving here is full of danger.

My friend Evangeline threw a dog in the window of my truck one day. She and “Gussie” were out for a walk when I stopped to chat. SWMBO and I ended up dogsitting for a week or so until Gussie’s owners returned from a cruise. Gussie is a pound pup who is used to change so she fit right in at my little house and fit right in later when her own people reclaimed her.

Change is the very nature of island life. My beach eroded this fall as we lost a foot of sand; that’s a foot of depth. Most of that sand settled as a beach-sized shoal out by the breakwater so it will eventually come back but for now it’s a long step down to the beach and the water is shallower than usual.

A new couple bought a house on Last Street. It’s not the actual last street on the island; that honor goes to Napoleon which is beyond Magnificence. Turns out they have a farm near Rolph’s Wharf in Chestertown, Maryland, a short hop down the river from Kibler’s Marina where we kept the boat. Chestertown is my favorite city on the Chesapeake. It’s as old and as interesting as Annapolis but without the congested harbor or crowded streets. Kibler’s is now the city-owned Chestertown Marina and a lot more upmarket than it was 50 years ago when we were there. Joe Strong’s WWII 6×6 chassis cab that he used to haul boats is long gone. As is Joe who died a couple of months after my dad did in 2005. Devils Reach, the final bend in the river before C-Town is still there. I don’t think I knew the people our new friends bought from. Those folks are gone now, too.

Change.

Another newcomer owns a business in Connecticut across the street from my neighbor’s childhood home. They shared stories at a beach party the other day.

Speaking of homes, a new beach buddy lived right on the corner across the creek from the railroad station my grandparents lived in. My dad grew up there, just a quarter mile from the house I grew up in. The school bus turned that corner every morning and every night when I went to elementary school.

Very few other people are here from Vermont but I did run into a retired city employee I know from St. Albans at the Winn-Dixie the other day.

New people built a grand new house at the end of Kittywhopper Street where their seawall stretches around two sides of the lawn from canal to Bay. I chat with them as they walk their Labradoodle most mornings. Nice people. Great dog. And I noticed this morning that the new owners of Luis’ house are digging up the driveway pavers to change them.

Lots of changes here in South Puffin. It amazes my grandkids that I have met all these new people without once friending them on Facebook or tweeting at them.

Gussie’s people have listed their house. They’re moving up to north Florida to be nearer to family and to a good vet. I guess we’ll have to stay in touch by email.

Gussie’s dad took her back to Evangeline of the pitching arm so the kids could play with her the other day. I carefully avoided driving that day.

We won’t tell SWMBO about that one.