Peer down towards the end of the street there past that red truck and you’ll see just how hazy it has been here today. That isn’t fog or normal haze, that’s smoke. Thick, reeking smoke from wild fires raging up near the Canadian border with Minnesota. So not only are we putting up with temperatures in the mid 90s (it hit 99F in Milwaukee yesterday and 98 here at the house south of Green bay) but the heat dome is pushing the smoke down right on top of us. We’re under a severe air quality alert until tomorrow afternoon and that might be extended farther unless conditions change. They’re saying children and elderly shouldn’t even go outside unless necessary.
We’ve had the house buttoned up tight with the AC going for days now already because of the heat, plus we have the three big HEPA filters going full time so i the house here we can’t even smell it. But as soon as I step outside it… Wow… Just the smell is enough to make my eyes start to water.
This is getting to be a regular thing every summer now. Because of the changes in wind patterns and the increase in wildfires because of droughts, both caused by climate change, we’ve been enduring this every summer for the last three or four years now.
We’d been running the house completely on solar for about 5 days now but I’ve had to switch back to grid power by 5 this afternoon because we just aren’t getting enough power from the panels to keep things going. I could just run the house off batteries but we’re supposed to get thunderstorms tomorrow so I want to keep the batteries topped up in case the storms take down the grid.
MrsGF finished up the last of the welcome signs the other day with about three coats of all weather polyurethane. We did four all together. We’re keeping one and these three are already spoken for. They turned out pretty nice I think.
We hit a milestone with the new EG4-12000XP inverter. We hit half a megawatt of production earlier today! We’re going to need every watt we can get out of that system because the big central AC unit is still on the grid and it’s been going for something like 3 weeks straight now since we shifted into this hot weather pattern. We decided to leave it on the grid because while the 12000XP would have enough oomph to handle it, I suspect it would would discharge our batteries to a point where I would become uncomfortable overnight. It’s the old style AC system, but it’s only a few years old so replacing it isn’t in the cards at the moment. If we’d known better at the time we would have gone for a heat pump system which is much more energy efficient but at the time we weren’t even dreaming of putting in whole house solar. I looked into it but a heat pump system would have been around twice the cost so I never seriously considered it. Oh, well. Live and learn, as they say.
Our electric rate here isn’t bad, about 20¢/KWh, which is cheap when compared to what those poor buggers out in California are getting hit with thanks to Newsome and the California legislature being owned lock, stock and barrel by the utility companies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes… (cough cough), I mean “campaign donations” and lobbying $$ they pay out every year. But the handwriting is one the wall, as they say. Thanks to the huge amounts of power the massive data centers being built here in the state are gulping down now and will gulp down in the future, the utilities are going to have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new generating facilities, substations and high tension power lines to feed them, and you can be damned sure that if Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and the others building those facilities have anything to say about it, it’s going to be us consumers who are going to foot the bill, not them.
But on to a more pleasant subject. Laser engraving.
I had no idea but apparently Zippo lighters are still a thing with some people? I thought that with the rate of smoking going down every year the market for lighters would have shrunk as well but I guess I forgot about the people who smoke “recreational substances”, shall we call it? That’s still illegal here in Wisconsin but all you have to do is nip across the border to Illinois, Minnesota or Michigan if you want to light up.
I did the first one with the brewery logo on it to give to Kyle, one of the owners. And then I started playing around using the Lumos Flex from Wecreat and the fiber laser and wow, it does a nice job engraving stainless steel! Doesn’t take long, either. With the IR laser in my old Lumos it would have probably taken half an hour to do something like this. With the fiber laser it takes about 4 minutes. It actually eteches right into the metal so that design isn’t just discoloration, it’s actually etched in there and will never wear off. I’ve done about four of these for various people to give as gifts and they keep telling me I should put these up on Etsy or somewhere, but no thanks. I do not want to get into that rat race. Plain, genuine Zippo lighters cost me about $18 each. In order to make it worth my while I’d probably have to charge $35 – $40 for one and I don’t think anyone would be silly enough to pay that.
And then we got flowers! Wow, do we have flowers! Here are a couple.
As for the rest of the gardens I’m too lazy at the moment to go out and get pictures so you’ll have to settle for a description. The tomatoes are going gangbusters. They’re already loaded with green fruit. We have 6 plants this year. We were only going to put in 3 but we had 3 or 4 volunteers pop up and MrsGf didn’t have the heart to just pull them so she transplanted them to a better location and they’re looking just as good as the ones we grew from seed ourselves.
The carrots are thriving and we really need to thin them out. The beets? We’ve already been picking some and eating them. They’re doing fantastic. The celery is looking beautiful this year. When I’m mowing the lawn I can’t help but snip off a stalk to nibble on when I’m riding on the mower. If you’ve never grown celery yourself, please give it a try. You won’t believe how intensely flavored the home grown varieties are when compared to the commercial varieties they sell in the grocery store.
The onions are getting to the point where we’re thinking of starting to pull some and curing them off and putting them in storage.
We have a few zucchini plants as well and they’re producing beautifully. The nice thing about zucchini is that it has almost no flavor so you can slip it into anything and nobody will notice they’re eating something healthy. Tonight I’m going to do a zucchini-mushroom stir fry with lots of garlic and onions and parmesan cheese.
I’m eagerly awaiting the tomatoes. Absolutely nothing compares to the flavor of a ripe tomato fresh off the plant from the garden.
Let’s see, what else?
Oh, the hip! Almost forgot about that. I suffered for something like 3 weeks with pain in my right hip that was almost excruciating at times when I bent my leg the wrong way. It started to oh so slowly get better over time. But then the other day I woke up and got out of bed and suddenly realized that the hip didn’t hurt. At all. It was like someone just threw a switch. There’s a bit of soreness there but that’s because the muscles in the leg are stiff from not being used normally for so long.
So what happened? I have no idea. MrsGF thinks it might have been a pinched nerve and I suppose that’s possible?
Anyway, I’m still taking it easy because I’m terrified of doing something that might bring it back. But otherwise things are back to almost normal. I’m even back on the bike again but I’m keeping the riding limited to just a few miles and at a relatively slow pace for the time being.
Let’s see… Oh, almost forgot! Silly cats, right?
That’s Charlie over there in her new favorite stot to sit. If I scoot forward to type on the computer and there is any space at all between me and the back of the chair, she’ll squeeze in there. She is an absolute sweetie. I’ve never seen a cat that loves people as much as she does. She belonged to our daughter in law’s aunt but she had to move into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so we volunteered to take her in and we’re so happy we did. She’s getting up there, about 14 or 15 years old now, and she has a heart murmur and a benign cyst on her neck that puts some people off but doesn’t seem to bother her at all. The cyst is inoperable because she can’t tolerate anesthesia. They tried once and her heart stopped and she almost died so unless it’s a genuine emergency neither we nor her vet are willing to try it again.
And that’s about it for now!
Hm? Oh, oh, wait… Oh no… That’s not a 3D printer on a truck heading this way, is it? No, it couldn’t be. I swore I’d never buy another one, didn’t I? I seem to distinctly remember saying that, didn’t I?
Do I really need to mention how hot it’s been here the last few days? We’re under one of those “heat domes” and it’s been sweltering. Daytime highs have been in the mid to high 90s with the heat index topping out at around 107. So far the AC has been holding up (he said keeping his fingers and toes crossed)
Meanwhile life goes on. MrsGF and I have been cooperating on a “Welcome” sign project. We finished up the first one and have two more to go. Here’s what the first looks like.
We still have to put a few coats of polyurethane on it to seal and weather proof it but we’re rather pleased with how this one turned out.
We finally had some clear skies again and I had the scope out and got a few decent images.
IC 1318B, Butterfly Nebula. I did some post processing to improve the contrast.
This was the best of the lot, IC 1318B, sometimes called the Butterfly Nebula. It’s about 4,000 light years away and is an emission nebula. Emission nebula are caused by intense ultraviolet radiation from a dying star that ionizes the interstellar gas around the star.
It’s been a rather dull time around here with me more or less laid up because of first my hip and then my back. But my back is almost normal and while the hip is still giving me some issues it’s getting to the point where I might be able to get back on the bicycle in a week or so. Damn that’s been frustrating.
But meanwhile life goes on, right?
I got bored and was fiddling with Photoshop and came up with this black and white image of a stag standing in the woods and then found a plack with a sort of illuminated frame around it that I picked up for the heck of it at Walmart or Hobby Lobby and hadn’t used, and thought engraving that image on the plack might be interesting so I tried it using the Vision Pro and that’s the result over there on the left with the frame lighted up.
Bad lighting but you can get the basic idea. I though it didn’t turn out too bad. I sent that photo to Kyle and Sarah down at the pub and they claimed it so it has a home already.
I do wish there was some kind of retail market for stuff like this locally, some shop that would market arts and crafts from local crafts persons on a consignment basis or something like that. If I were about 10 years younger and had a bit more ambition I’d be tempted to do something like that myself.
Meanwhile the gardens are growing like crazy.
We’re already harvesting onions and small beets and MrsGF just thinned out the carrots and we have a whole dish full of baby carrots we’re going to be having for supper tonight.
The celery up there is looking amazing and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I can resist snipping off a few stalks for snacking or salads.
Even the “Stump Garden” is looking good.
The weather has been clear today so I’m hoping we’ll have clear skies tonight so I can get the telescope out.
One of our kitties, Charlie, loves to go outside. We put a harness and leash on her and she has great fun exploring the gardens. But one of the local cardinals took exception to her presence the other day and actually flew down into the lilac to yell at us.
Ooo, he was upset! How dare I bring a cat out into his territory! He kept giving me an earful until finally Charlie had enough and we went back inside.
I’m still not entirely sure how all of this post processing stuff works because the results I get after processing are often much, much different than what I’m seeing in the original images. For example, here’s what the original image looked like before processing.
M 101 before cropping and processing
I’m still very, very impressed with the results from this scope even before processing the images. I’m getting better images with this little scope than I ever saw with my huge 11″ Celestron
… at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. I somehow managed to entirely mess up my right hip and only now am I getting back to normal. I could stand or sit, but transitioning between those two situations caused such excruciating pain I could hardly stand it. The consensus was I severely strained or perhaps even tore some muscles in there somehow. Going to the bathroom was pure torture because sitting down on the commode or standing up after sent a pain through my hip that made me want to weep. And I could forget completely about getting out on the bike.
So even though it’s now early summer and absolutely beautiful out there and the gardens are thriving, I’ve been more or less cooped up in the house being more grouchy than usual and not having enough ambition to do much of anything.
Anyway I’m about 80% back to normal now. I’m at the point where I might try taking the bike out for a run around the block in the next day or two just to see how it goes.
Another thing that had me grumpy is that except for the first night I had the new Sestar 30 Pro telescope, every single freaking night we’ve had has been overcast. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating it is to have a brand new telescope and having cloudy weather every single night? Arrggghh!
But now, finally! We had clear skies early last evening and I was able to get the scope out…
Well I say able to get the scope out. And it was out, but I was sitting inside comfortably at the kitchen table having a snack while running the scope from my iPad. If you’ve ever had to endure dealing with clouds of mosquitoes, freezing temperatures and the other inconveniences of using a visual telescope, you can imagine just how amazing it felt to be running the scope comfortably from inside the house. It almost felt like, well, cheating, somehow. And I suppose some amateur astronomers will claim that it is. Spending hours outside in the dark, having your blood sucked dry by mosquitoes in the summer, or trying to keep your fingers and toes from freezing in the fall and winter, is, according to some of them, part of the “joys” of amateur astronomy.
Yeah, sure it is…
I got some neat images despite the fact that it wasn’t even fully dark yet when I started this. Last night was the shortest night of the year so at about 10 PM or so when I started it wasn’t even completely fully dark yet.
Let’s start off with this.
M 13
That’s a globular star cluster designated as M 13. It’s the great globular star cluster in the Hercules constellation and it is an astonishing thing when you discover what it actually is. Globular clusters are groups of hundreds, even tens of thousands of stars tightly packed into a tiny, spherical group. In this case several hundreds of thousands of stars packed into an area less than 145 light years across. Exactly how many stars are in there isn’t known but it could be as many as a half million.
M 51
Above is M 51, the Whirlpool galaxy and its companion. That this one turned out this good surprised me a bit because even though it was high in the sky, near the zenith, my conditions here at the house are horrible with light pollution so bad you can almost read a large print book sitting in the backyard at midnight, plus it wasn’t fully dark yet. All things considered I’m pleased that it turned out this good.
The one that really surprised me was this one, though:
NGC 6888
That’s NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Nebulas like this can be a pain in the neck to image in light polluted locations like mine so I was surprised I was able to capture anything at all. That this not only showed up but even shows some color was a bit amazing to me.
Now let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to take that same image of M51 up there and run it through some AI filtering and see what happens. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to turn out because this is the first time I’ve tried this.
The same image as above but “enhanced” with AI
Hmm… I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I don’t believe for a moment that there was enough information in that original image of mine for the AI to come up with what looks suspiciously like an image that was taken with the Hubble from NASA. I’m suspecting that instead of enhancing the image it’s sucking up data from NASA’s telescope database and adding it in.
Let’s see what it does with that nebula
NGC 6888
Hmm, again, I’m not sure where it’s getting the data from to do this because I don’t believe there was enough information in the original image to get these kinds of results.
Anway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share the new images from the scope.
OMG the horror… Every single person involved in the production of this abomination should be locked up before they can commit further atrocities. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening to this — this thing. It sort of resembles, well, the nearest comparison I can come up with is Alvin and the Chipmunks on a particularly bad batch of acid singing lyrics written by someone with a smaller vocabulary that my cat and who was told by a cynical marketing agency to “Just write whatever crap you can come up with” and was about 3 martinis into a 4 martini lunch. About halfway through the first track I wanted to wash my ears out with bleach.
Yes, you too can experience the horror of the Smurf’s All Star Show for just $1 at the Hilbert St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I mess around with laser engravers/cutters and my two machines are both from a company called Wecreat, the Vision Pro and the Lumos. Wecreat recently came out with some very significant new galvo style lasers under the Lumos model name, the Lumos Flex and the Lumos Ultra. The Ultra is way outside my price range, about $3,500. But considering it’s a UV and MOPA laser all included in one package, that’s an extremely good price.
The Lumos. Both my standard unit and the Flex use this same chassis. The only difference is the laser head itself.
It was the Flex I was interested in. It’s a significant upgrade from my mine. I had a 3W infrared laser and a 10W blue diode laser in mine. The Flex looked like it was exactly the same as mine but with a new laser head that replaces the IR laser with a 15W fiber laser and upgrades the blue laser to 15W.
The blue laser upgrade is significant, but it’s not so much more powerful that I’d really be tempted by that. It was the fiber laser that made things interesting. Fiber lasers generally produce enough energy to cut metal. And they’re capable of doing some very interesting tricks like 3D embossing. They’re pretty slick stuff. And yes, I wanted one but fiber lasers have always been way outside of a price I was comfortable with. Wecreat wants about $2,000 for the thing and I’d already dropped way too much money this year on laser equipment.
This is the laser head, the unit that includes the lasers. Just undo a single bolt, pull it out, and pop the Flex laser head in, tighten the bolt, and away you go.
But then I was reading the fine print at the end of the hype/advertising for the Flex and noticed a brief mention of the fact that my original Lumos could be upgraded to the Flex by simply replacing the laser head module, and for half the cost of the complete Flex. Now I was interested again.
I sent an email to the company and said “Hey, how can I get one of these upgrade modules?” And they wrote back and said “send us some money and give us about 2 weeks to build one and we’ll get it to you in about 3 weeks.”
And well here we are, 3 weeks later and it is now in my hot little hands. It took all of about 3 minutes to replace the old laser head with the new one, download a new version of their Makeit software, and away we go.
I haven’t had much of a chance to do more than fiddle with it a bit because I’ve been busy with the old unit making a batch of humorous drinks coasters that need to get finished up. But I’m going to have time to put it through its paces this weekend and I’ll let you know how it goes. The bit of fiddling I’ve had a chance to do indicates that it has a heck of a lot of potential. I entertained myself for some time cutting holes in thin sheet metal and engraving things on various bits of metal I had laying around before I had to get back to work. Long enough to see this thing is going to be a hoot to play with.
It’s going to take some time to figure out the exact setting I’ll need in order to get it to do what I want. But once I figure that out this thing is going to be very useful indeed.
Roses
Every year we think this dopey rose bush in the front yard by the sidewalk has finally died, and every year it surprises us and somehow manages to come back. This year I was sure it was dead. When MrsGF pulled on one of the branches something like 3/4 ths of the rootball came out, completely rotted away. I was sure it was dead. Only no, it isn’t, somehow.
I have no idea how this thing manages to survive. Amazing plant. Just saw the first flower of the season and it’s absolutely loaded with buds.
Cats and Backpacks
MrsGF got me a new backpack to carry stuff when I’m out on the bike, but the cat seems to have fallen in love with it. If I put it anywhere where she can get at it, she’s immediately sitting on it. Cats are weird.
I got this photo entirely by accident the other day when I happened to be holding my cell phone when this little guy turned up. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten a halfway decent photo of one of beautiful little birds.
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