It’s been a weekend that could have easily supported a blog post a day. But I’m lazy and I really was hoping to get a new photo or two printed before posting…but other things happened and I still haven’t made any new prints. So here’s the updates instead!
This one will be long with a lot of photos…no teaser photo for the front though.
Yeah, I admit I like being right. Most of the time. But sometimes I really wish I wasn’t right about something. Like the prediction I made when we bought this house that “Those carport tarps won’t last a year” despite the sellers assurance that “They have a 7 year warranty and are only a year or so old.” Which of course means – it happened again.
It happened again.
Read on for more details, more photos, and something completely different.
Still no safelight so I get frustrated quickly when printing, but that should be rectified soon. Even so I scraped an hour or so out of my schedule to try and crank out another print or two last night. Results were not quite what I had hoped for:
Better exposure, but neg was damaged.
Well, with the darkroom functional for printing – though annoying to use without a safelight – this weekend Amy and I decided to work on the other half of the image and expose some film.
Laguna Dam - abandoned sluiceway
Read on for details!
Living in one of the best areas for solar power in the entire country you would think I’d have better luck with said technology. But no, that’s not the case. Shortly after Amy and I moved into our new house we bought a set of solar path lights using one of the many gift cards we got from our wedding. They were fairly cheap, made of plastic, and having just a single amber LED in each they don’t give off much light. It only took a week or two for me to replace them with a set of traditional 12v lights. But the LED lights still worked so I didn’t want to just discard them.
Over lunch we stopped in and picked up a digital converter box with one of the coupons I got us. I’m a gadget freak and the idea of possibly $80 towards a box that should only cost $20 (so realistically it ends up costing about $60 at the store was hard to pass up. Even when it became obvious that as I suspected the boxes would be in the $60-$80 price range. Politically it upsets me to see our government wasting money like this, yeah they’re making a killing auctioning off the spectrum and they could probably get a 47″ HDTV for every household in the country and still be well above what they expected to make in the auction, but I still don’t like to see the government spending money. But if they’re gonna hand it out anyway then I’m not going to refuse it. Politics aside what do I think of the converstion, read on. Continue reading →
Ok, the rest of the darkroom will have to wait. I don’t have a lot of time today but wanted to say something about the excitement here in town the past few days. Specifically the seismic activity going on south of the border that we’re catching the tail end of. The past few days there have been multiple (like 3-4) earthquakes above a 3 with 2 of them topping out over 5 down in Mexico.
It started with a 5.4 a little after midnight on Friday. Amy and I were just sitting down on the couch and I thought I felt a big rolling earthquake…but figured I was just tired and it must have been us shifting around on the couch that I felt. The next morning I found out my instinct was right and it was a little quake.
Rest of the weekend there were a couple of little ones … I thought I felt a few … but I always seem to be feeling earthquakes that no one else is so I don’t know how many were real. But this morning we got another real one. A 4.9 that hit while Amy and I were just sitting down to Lunch. She thought it was just me kicking her chair at first – but everyone in the shop was suddenly muttering “earthquake” – and about as soon as everyone was sure what was happening…it was over. Barely even enough to rattle the dishes I suspect.
And then tonight another 5.1 hit. I was making toast out of my latest batch of sourdough (the best yet!) and again it seemed to be over before it started … Heck the dog slept through it.
I guess western Kentucky where Amy comes from must be more seismically stable than northern Ohio. We only had one real good quake while I was growing up (and like so many other newsworthy events from my childhood I was home sick the day it happened) but we had little shakes all the time. Personally I enjoy them, the ones here in Yuma though are different…they feel bigger but gentler if that makes sense. In Ohio the quakes were kind of rough little shore wave…here they’re like big rolling ocean waves. Amy doesn’t seem to enjoy any of them.
Of course the biggest quakes I’ve felt were both here in Yuma. The first was shortly after moving here in summer 1999, it was big enough that I was woken by the sound of water in our pool splashing. I actually thought Matt’s cat may have fallen in at first…then I noticed how much things were swaying and remembered that I hadn’t been drinking that night! That one went on for quite awhile and since I was in a basement I was actually debating whether to jump out the window or go up the stairs for safety when it subsided.
The second biggie was in Dec 2001 I was in my garage working on my rail when it hit. At first I thought it was my friend messing with me by pushing the rail. Then I saw how white he was and realized it was a quake. It was actually big enough that my rail moved about a foot back and forth and I was having a hard time standing up! It went for quite awhile and my friend was really freaked out and ran out to the middle of the yard…I just enjoyed the swaying and hoped I wouldn’t get motion sickness.
The Yuma quakes are interesting to me. For one because of our poximity to the infamous San Andreas fault zone, and secondly because of the Cerro Prieto geothermal plant down in Mexico that sits next to a volcano, between two faults, at the very tail end of the San Andreas zone.
The San Andreas needs little introduction. One of the most well known faults in America it’s responsible for pretty much every earthquake the “average joe” can name. (Of course when the new madrid fault in the midwest finally lets loose the Cali people will get to finally sit one out while someone else gets a few pages in the history books for a change.) What most people don’t realize is just how far it stretches. The fault itself starts just north west of Yuma on the eastern shores of the Salton Sea. However the zone it’s part of extends even further.
Cerro Prieto on the other hand isn’t very well known at all, even by locals down here. Yet it’s pretty big news and something a lot of people in these parts SHOULD be paying attention to. I’ll have to come back to it another time though when I can go into more detail.