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!
So, less than a month between updates – maybe I’m getting better at this after my downward slide. Before I get to the reason for the title though a few “Off-topic” updates. I’ve been miserable sick the past week. Summer colds are bad enough in temperate weather…but when it’s over 100 out and you’ve got sinus pressure, runny nose and an annoying cough – life is extra miserable. Thankfully after a weekend of cold meds and curling up on the couch with tissues I’m feeling much much better today.
The solar lights mentioned in my last post have gone from bad to worse…only the two I repaired are now working. The others are in my office letting their batteries drain. Though about half of those seem like it may be bad batteries and not just overcharging. I’ll give them a few more weeks of darkness before putting them back out.
The backyard grass continues to grow and I continue to watch it. Still not quite grown in well enough for me to post photos…but a HUGE improvement over the bare earth and gravel that was there when we moved in. I think one more bag of fertalizer and one more bag of seed for the remaining bare spots and it will be looking good enough for photos. And hopefully by October or so when the weather finally breaks it will be ready for backyard party season! I’m already getting the itch to start making more pizzas remembering how great the last two experimental “grilled pizzas” came out.
And while I’m bound and determined not to let this disintegrate into a “Coffee blog” that is the reason for the title and what has again inspired me to put my lazy fingers to the keys and bang out an update. The corpse in question is our local Linens N Things which is one of the stores they’re closing to try and save their hides in the tumbling economy. Since I am as always about 180 degrees out of sync with the rest of the world bad economy for everyone else means time for me to score some great deals, kind of like we did with our house!
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.
Yep, I’m slacking again. And once again it’s not that I don’t have anything to blog about, just that I haven’t had time to sit down and do it. Believe it or not it’s not even that I don’t enjoy this – I do, typing is quite cathartic for me. Which is kind of the problem. I enjoy it too much and tend to zone out while writing. As a result I end up spending more time than I planed on it and instead of feeling unburdened when I’m done I end up feeling guilty that I spent so much time at it when I have so much more I should be doing. It also doesn’t help that WordPress 2.5 broke the smugmug and lightbox plugins I was using so posting photos is a bit more arduous than I really care to deal with. The new built in gallery in WP 2.5 is excellent, but I really have little interest in using it as I prefer to keep my photos on my smugmug site, uploading them twice annoys me.
But Amy’s most recent duet of posts on her blog seem worth of mention. So read on for my thoughts about the fickleness of freebies and whatever else I manage to bang out before accepting I’ve spent enough time and need to get back to using the keyboard for something more productive!
How I never thought of this I’ll never figure out.
Yeah, the amp I made sure came out clean:
But I win zero points for style when compared to this:
http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-coconut-shell.html
Well, the green coffee beans I ordered finally arrived. Sweet Maria’s was real quick on shipping them out, but UPS messed up and misrouted the package. So it ended up making a side-trip to Mesquite TX before it found it’s way home. The original shipment was supposed to take 2 days, it ended up taking 4 additional days to correct the mistake. The package finally showed up at 6:59 PM yesterday, and by 7:30 my first batch of home roasted coffee was packed away. Read on for the full story and this mornings impression of the results. Continue reading →
Well I got some bad news and some good news about some of our appliances today. Bad news, our main fridge may be having problems. Good news, I fixed the dishwasher – for real this time. I’ve also learned quite a bit about coffee the past few days and as normal I’m getting a little obsessive about my new interest. Continue reading →
Last sunday while we were recovering from the previous nights party, Amy and I remembered about the Yuma Bargain Warehouse and decided to go see if we could find a new tarp for the carport. I had guestimated that it would be a 20′ x 20′ tarp…and after measuring the tattered rempains of the original that was looking about right. At the warehouse we found a good selection of tarps, of course the one we liked best (green mesh) they were out of in 20′ x 20′. But they had black mesh, heavy duty white and silver in that size. The black mesh was tempting…but being a mesh we weren’t sure if it would give as much shade as we wanted – and it was over double the cost of a silver or white tarp. The silver we didn’t like the looks of so at $37 the white tarp won out. We also picked up 2 – $2 bundles of nylon rope and headed home. Last night we finally put the tarp up, took a little over 30 minutes. Continue reading →