All this week when I got out of my car I heard a Robin make its little squawk and fly away. When I looked in the Holly bush I found a nest which contained 4 blue eggs.
Four Robin Eggs in my Holly Bush
Today on June 9, they had hatched.
Some Baby Robins Hatched Today
June 10
June 10 Robin Nest
June 11
June 11
June 12
June 12 Robin Babies
June 13
June 13 Robin Nest
June 14
June 14 Robin Nest
June 15
June 15 Robin Nest
June 16
June 16 Robin Nest
June 17
June 17 Robin Nest
June 18
June 18 Robin Nest
The Trout in front of the Cabin were hungry, so I grabbed a handful of the Trout food pellets from the bucket in the cabin. My plan was to throw them to the Trout a little bit at a time. I would take some from the pile in my left hand and toss them for the Piranna Trout to consume. I had a lot of fun making the Trout run from one side of the creek to the other as they chased after the food pellets. A noise from the woods distracted me from my pellet tossing and I looked around for it. I did not find anything and went back to the creek. One piece of my mind was aware that I had yummy food in my hand, so I tossed the stuff in my hand into the back of my mouth. Once I started to taste them, I realized my mistake. I decided it would be a good idea to give them all to the fishes. They were thankful even though they were pre-moistened.
1st Place for Show
Eddie designed a new Pinewood Derby car for his Webelos II competition. It used 3 different colors and a lego driver with an X-wing canopy. Eddie and I cut it to his chosen shape and we sanded it down to 600 Grit. Laura and Eddie Laid down 3 layers of a base coat using Lawn Care Green. Sanded the green to 600 grit. Laura taped the parts of the car that were supposed to stay green, got the can of Red Gloss paint and shot it at the car. The first squirts out of the can must have included a lot of solvent because there was a bunch of big bubbly red streaks on the car that would not dry properly. Laura was sad. I had to scrape and sand the gooey red stuff down to the wood since it had dissolved some of our pretty green paint. I shook up the paint can real good and went at the car again. It did a little better. We bought a new can of red paint. When we had sanded the red paint to 600 grit, Laura taped off the car sections that were to remain Red when the next color was added. The Blue paint went on much better. When Laura pulled off all the tape, we had a Red, Green and Blue car. Then a layer of Clear Gloss. Then all the decals. Then More Gloss.
Meanwhile, Laura had also polished the axles and the wheel hubs. It was then my turn. I had to install the wheels and the weights to bring the car up to 5 oz. This time I decided to use my drill press to pre-drill the axle holes, therefore guaranteeing that the tire axles will go in straight. Wrong. Two of them still went in cockeyed and I had to whap on the axle nails with a screwdriver so that all 4 wheels touched when it was rolled.
I weighed all the parts together before I assembled it and trimmed off the Lead until all the separate parts were exactly 5 oz. I then put all the parts on the car and then weighed it. The car somehow was up to 5.2 oz thus proving that things weigh more than the sum of their parts once assembled. So I started trimming the lead again to get it back down to 5 oz.
I had volunteered to run the Pinewood derby software for the Pack using my Laptop which was connected to the electronic speed equipment on the Pinewood derby racing track. There are 107 kids in our pack. Each with a car. Each car was to have 6 races running on 3 tracks at a time. If you do the math that is a total of 214 races. This would be from 8 in the morning till 3:30 in the afternoon. From my previous years experience, I had learned all the tricks to make everything work together because it would mess up after about 15 races. I would reset power to the timer, unplug and re-plug cables and restart the software. Last year, it always worked. Not this year. This year the special software updated itself over the internet. After the update, it still seemed to work fine. But, after about 40 races, nothing would work and the software would not get the race times from the timing equipment. This would also really really mess up my computer. On a reboot, it once gave me the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD). I would have to shutdown and reboot 2 or 3 times before it came up cleanly enough to run the Racing Software again. All this would be occurring while a room full of about 60 parents and kids are ALL looking at me attempting to fix things and they were not smiling at me. For the little stuff, I would stop the race and signal to the helpers to push things while I did stuff to the computer to verify everything was working again before starting the next race. Luckily the big crashes would wait until the end of the races which would end the competitions. Then I would reboot and give the results to the leaders. BUT, for the last set of races for the Bears, a hard crash happened after the 4th heat with 2 more to go. I stopped the race, fidgeted with things. Nothing worked. Everybody is watching me. I go to the Pack leader and tell him that I need to reboot the computer and it will probably take about 15 minutes before we can restart the races. He makes the announcement and takes the Bears out to play outside. Meanwhile, I am waiting for my Laptop to reboot. Various techies stop by to offer me unhelpful advice on what I should be doing. Eventually, I get rebooted and verify that the hardware seems to be working. I give the signal and all the Bears trudge back in. We finish the last 2 heats with no problems. Afterwords, a couple of parents stop by and tell me that I had the worst job and they felt sorry for me. I thanked them.
For the Webelos II races. Eddie won 1st place for show and came in 4th place for speed. Yay! We go to the District finals on Feb 20.
I left my tent up after OctoberFest. It turns out to have been a bad decision. We got a lot of snow in December, about a foot an an half. Since I had left my tent up, it failed to support that much snow. It snapped a number of my tentpoles and got a little flat.
18 Inches of Snow is bad for a tent
After Laura changed the shower head in the Master Bathroom, she noticed that water was coming thru the ceiling on the stairs under the shower when I was taking a shower. So I set up our funky folding ladder on the curving stairs so that I could cut a hole in the dry wall behind the shower.
Drywall Hole to see the back of the Shower
I discovered that there is about a 3 foot gap from the drywall to the back of the shower. Not very useful for attempting to find and fix the leak. So I cut a hole in the guest room to get closer to the back of the shower.
Guest Room Hole To access the back of the Shower
This worked. So I fired up the shower and spent the next 20 minutes watching for a leak. No leak. Bummer. I put a different shower head that I could turn off in order to put the maximum pressure on the pipes and still no leak. I now have 2 big holes in my drywall and no leaks. It is good thing we didn’t call an expensive plumber to find this out. And now that Laura has seen all the wasted space behind the shower, she wants me to put in a new closet or some kind of storage space in there.
My current plan is to go back to using the master bathroom shower until it leaks again. I will leave the holes in the guest room drywall and try to fix the stair’s drywall hole.
If it leaks, then I will know where it is leaking. And I will try to figure out how to use the wasted space in my walls.
Monday Update: It leaked this morning, but not from the pipes to the shower. We discovered a path that water could splash out of the shower stall and leak thru the floor. So…. I poked holes in my Drywall for nothing. I just need to seal the floor better and to keep the splash out to a minimum.
Since my lawn maintenance worker decided to stop mowing my lawn, I had to get Nick to fix the walk behind mower that I bought from him about 10 years ago. After Nick played with the carborator, it started on the second pull. I decided to mow my lawn today. So I chased the mower around the yard and when I got about 3/4 thru, the mower started surging and then died. I called Nick, who remotely diagnosed that I had water in my tank. I drained some gas into a bottle and could not tell if there was any water in there. I had to syphon the gas out of the tank and I now remember vividly what gas tastes like. I then practiced spitting a lot. I tore things apart and figured that there was a bunch of dirt at the bottom of the new tank that Nick had put on the mower. The new gas filter he had put on, was full of junk. I was jamming Q-Tips into the drain thing to try to clear out the clog but nothing worked. I eventually put a hose on the drain thing and blew air back into the tank. At first it was hard to blow and then it blew clear. I once again remembered what gas tasted like. When I hooked things back up, the gas was flowing freely. I finished mowing the lawn. Later I decided to chop down a maple tree that was putting too much shade in my back yard with my Axe. It was only about 6 inches in diameter, so I figured I did not need to get out the ChainSaw. After about 3 minutes of chopping the tree went Thump, Thump and was leaning against another tree with a very long 3 inch diametor branch sticking out over the back yard. It was about a foot over my head and I tried to swing at it to start cutting it off. I missed. It was a very hard swing. I had not expected to miss it. My arms continued to move in an arc past the branch and then down straight in front of me. Next thing I knew, it had stopped by hitting my left ankle. I had sharpened my Axe very well. I looked down at my foot, expecting the worst, but found that I had put my hiking boots on in order to mow the lawn. There was no blood. I went inside and took the boot off. I had a 3 inch line of scraped skin starting at my ankle that was beginning to swell. Like Ouchie. I had thought about wearing my Teva sandles to mow the lawn, but in retrospect, I made the right decision.
I have a Brita water filter in my office space which I use to make my coffee each morning. After I made my coffee today, I noticed that there appeared to be a green sticky stuck to the bottom of the flask. I could see it since the container was clear an it was a pretty green blobby color on the bottom. So I went ahead and brewed my coffee. While I was drinking it, I stared at the blob and decided it was not a sticky but it looked like someone had used a green highlighter on the bottom of the container. This seemed like a silly thing for someone to do and I realzed that the green was on the inside of the container. So I stuck my hand in the water and rubbed some green slime off of the bottom. Ah Ha! I thought, I have algae in my filtered water. How did it get there? My fancy filter should remove anything the algae might want to eat. My next thought was that I was drinking chlorophilliated flavored Coffee. I wondered if the brewing process would kill any algae poisons that might exist. Possibly it might actually be healthy. Some sort of macroBiotic NewAge drink. Maybe I have just started a trend. I decided to clean my filter.
Well we tried again to make a fast car. We failed. We got 6th place out of 12. But Eddie’s new car design still won 2nd place for show. If the 1st place winner does not want to go to the Reginals then we get to go. We will find out later.
I got to run the software for the pinewood derby race for all 124 scouts in our pack and each scout ran 6 races 3 at a time for for a total of 248 races. The software would time how long each car took to run each race. It was a cool mix of Hardware and Software with a lazer being triggered at the starting gate and another lazer at the finish which would be used to identify the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners of each race. Everything went smoothly except for the couple of times that it failed to work. The fun part about that is you get 30-40 parents who are giving you the evil eye while they are wondering if the whole event has just been ruined and they are going to have to go home with their disappointed crying child It made things more interesting. I was able to clear up each of the problems and nobody succeeded in killing me.
Mom has a new kitten which jumped onto my lap and fell asleep. I had to go look at something, so I picked it up and placed its limp sleeping body in the chair. When I was done I came back and sat down. After about 10 seconds I felt something move under me. I looked down and saw a little black paw sticking out from between my legs. It wasn’t making any noise or struggling in any way. I got up and the cat was just laying there on its back with its legs all kinda splayed out. When I picked up the kitten, it was all limp in my hands. I couldn’t tell if the cat was just still asleep or that I had killed it. I shook it some to see if I could just wake it up, but I was worried that if something in the cat was broke, that I would make the cat’s problem worse if I shook it too hard. So after some gentle wiggling of the cat, it seemed to move its legs a little. Eventually after much poking, I woke the cat up and it walked slowly away from me. Now I don’t know if I knocked the cat out or just had a hard time waking it up, or both. But the good thing is that I didn’t kill mom’s cat.
At least for today, when I search for “Stanley Turner” on Google. I appear at the top of the Google list. At least my LinkedIn page does. My blog isn’t doing so well in the google list. Oh well.
When we discovered the Hornet nest next to our Camp Site last month I only thought I had to get rid of one Nest.
Stan's Nest
HAH!! I went to the cabin today and sent Faye to go look at our hornet nest. When she came back, she had found another nest on the other side of our Camp site. It was directly over where Laura’s brother Bill camps. Right here.
Later when I sat on the George Pavillion looking over the Field. I saw the following
So anyway. Three nests at the cabin. 2 of them my problem. I think I will need to find a new camp site for Octoberfest this year.
Bummer
Can be purchased pre-scented Laura accidentally bought a box of scented trash bags. Since I am sensitive to perfume, it felt really funny to be repulsed as I replaced a stinky trash bag with a smelly one that made me want to sneeze. When Laura came in the kitchen, she accused me of spraying bug killer around So now we have a box of smelly trash bags that we do not want to use. Maybe we will take them to the Cabin.
Spotted the Following in my back yard. I gotta get Paul to take them out.
Saw some deer in my back yard
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture Sept. 18, 2007
It is on YouTube at Randy Paush last Lecture . It is Over an hour long but it is worth watching. He had cancer with only 6 months to live and wanted to leave a message to the people who knew him.
When I got home from work today. There was about 17 messages on my answering machine. 16 of them were just a long series of beeping sounds. I got a call later and when I answered it, I got a loud beeping in my ear. The call was from some orthopedic place. When I called the number, I got fax sounds. Nobody answered. I figured that the Ortho place had tried to send a fax to my home number and since it was unsuccessful, it would keep trying it every 10 minutes. I was bummed. I didn’t want this to go on all nite. I remembered that the printer I just bought had a fax option so I hooked it up to the phone line and waited. When I got the call, I received a fax from the ortho company asking that some lady named Ruth to pay a late bill. It was only $83. There was a contact number which I called and told them to get rid of my phone number from Ruth’s account. We will see if I get any more faxes from them.
About 2 months ago we found a brown snake in our front yard. After I let it poop on Eddie he decided that we needed to keep it. So we set it up in our terrarium and Laura and Eddie have been feeding it worms, but the snake stopped eating a week ago. Laura was sad because she thought the snake was sick. But it turns out that it was only morning sickness. This morning Laura found at least 3 more baby snakes in the terrarium. They are about 3 inches long and they like to hide under their mother.
7/23/08 Update… There are at least 6 Babie Snakes in the Terrarium now. They are about as thick as a pencil lead and Don’t make any noise.
Baby Brown Snake
For Spring Break the TurnerClan went to the Lake house. Many Lizards were caught. We lasso’d a snake and I pulled it out of its hidie place. Then I let it poop all over Ryan. Anna helped to lasso a different snake the next day but failed to get it to come out of its hole.
One day, Nick took Brenda for a ride in his jet boat. While they were using the Electric trolling motor, the steering mechanism for it went out. Once they came in, Eddie and Zack got Nick to agree to take them for a boat ride. Nick decided that I had to go along to help. As we were launching, I got Laura to hop on for the ride. As we are heading for the No Wake zone, Nick informs us that he does not have much gas so we have to keep the ride short. His gage is showing empty as we head out into the lake. So Nick does a couple of high speed circles and then shoves the throttle forward. The boat starts to accellerate then BAM!! The boat stops accelerating and the engine revs. Nick plays with the shifting system but the boat does not want to go anywhere. Nick mumbles something about a Shear Pen snapping. After about 30 seconds of playing with things, the Overheat alarm starts to go off and Nick Kills the engine. I inform Laura that this is bad. I dig out a Paddle and start waving at a boat that is about 500 yards away. It ignores me and speeds away. We are about a half mile away from the dock with a very light wind blowing us towards the dock.
Nick goes to the front of the boat and drops the electric trolling motor. He lays on his stomache on the bow and reaches down to grab the trolling motor. He tells me to sit on the front seat and push the trolling motor throttle button. It starts up and we move. Nick adjusts the motor with his hands so that we are sort of heading for the dock. Eddie and Zack keep asking when we will make it back to the Lake House. I notice that our course is drifting away from the dock. The drifting keeps getting worse and Nick seems to be just lying there staring at the water. I let him know and he looks up and re-adjusts the motor with his hands and we start heading back to the dock. After a while we start drifting again and I let him know once we start heading back into the lake. A couple more repetitions of this and the trolling motor suddenly stops. Nick pulls it out of the water and starts disassembling it using his Leatherman. We are about 200 yards outside of the No Wake poles and the water is WAY too cold for Laura to get out and start pulling us towards shore. We dug up 4 paddles and Zack, Laura, Eddie and I start paddling for the Dock while Nick tries to get the Electric Trolling motor working. The wind helps a little while I worry that Zack or Eddie are going to drop a paddle and we will have to go after it. Nick eventually gives up and takes a paddle and tries to order us around to make us paddle properly. I ignore him and paddle the way that I want to. We make it back to the Dock and celebrate that our ordeal is over. Yeah!
Even though he did not get to race his car in the finals he still got 3rd place for Show (For some reason the Scouts call it Concourse). The reason we probably did so well was that you get a couple extra points if you have a Scout theme on the car. So we had glued an old patch to it. Otherwise it was totally an Eddie design from how it was cut to the color scheme. Next year Eddie wants to make a car that will win both the Race and the Show prizes.
In our back yard, there was a pine tree that grew ThisClose to another tree. It died about 10 years ago and for the last 4 years has been leaning over more and more. So I decided that I needed to cut it down. I got my electric Chain saw plugged in and was working on cutting the wedge of wood from the tree so the tree would fall in the right spot. After some cutting, I saw the wedge break free from the tree, and I pulled the chainsaw out. The tree cracked and leaned over and pinched the wedge into its slot. The tree did not fall down. The wedge would not come out. I was bummed. I tried a crowbar on the wedge. I tried to knock it out with a sledge hammer and a long bar. The wedge was wedged. My tree felling instructions really wanted the wedge removed so that the tree would fall in the right direction when I did the cut on the back of the tree. So I started to cut at the wedge with the chainsaw. As I cut at it, the tree would make a little crack, I would step back with the chainsaw and the tree would not fall. This happened a couple of times so I cut at the wedge a little deeper. This time the tree did not warn me with a little crack noise when it shifted. It also pinched my chainsaw in the the slot with the wedge wedged on top of it with the whole tree on top of that. I was bummed. I yanked at it, wiggled it. It would not budge. If the tree fell now it might fold my chansaw bar right over. Which is why I did not go get my brand new Christmas chainsaw to try and rescue it. I went to my wood shop and got some long wood chisels and started chipping away the wedge above the chainsaw. I discovered that trying to watch the tree, the end of the chisel, the base of the chisel, the hammer and planning my escape route was too many things to watch and think about simultaneously. The end result of which was the hammer striking my hand a number of times. Like ouchie. After about 15 minutes of this. I was able to pull the chainsaw out. I decided to forget about the wedge and go for the backside cut. The tree fell right where I wanted it to. Yay! This little 3 minute adventure only took me about an hour and a half to complete along with a sore hand. I hope that all my future trees are much simpler.
I was having a wonderful time playing Battlefield 2142 against other people on the Internet with my computer when I heard Laura start screaming from down stairs. I wasn’t sure what was up so I decided to go check it out. She kept screaming so I started moving a little faster. When I got to the stairs, she was still going strong and I heard the word “Fire”. I started moving a lot faster and almost fell down the stairs as I tried to figure out where she was. When I got to the kitchen, she said the Dryer was on fire and she handed me the fire extinguisher which was still in the box. I looked at the dryer and saw light coming from a crack in the front panel. I finished opening the box, took it out and pulled the pin. I could see the flames flickering from the crack and tried to pull the dryers front panel off. It would not come off. I stuck the nozzle of the extinguisher in the crack and discovered that the little lever on the back of the extinguisher does not make it do its thing. You have to push the lever on the top of it. After two shots into the crack, the flames went out and the laundry room was filled with smoke and fire extinguishing powder. It tastes funny. I ran downstairs, got my crowbar and tried to get the panel off. It wouldn’t come off. I had to dig up the instruction manual and finally got it off. The bottom of the inside of the dryer was covered with lint about 3/4 inch deep. The top layer was black from burning and there were spots where the flames had burned in much deeper. Insulation had melted from some wires underneath. We were lucky. When I went back to my computer game, the punkbuster part of the game had kicked me out of the game because I had stopped moving my character. I forgave the game.
