On Sunday I went to Highland Valley Christmas Tree Farm in Ramona, CA, and bought a tree. Here we see it on the shaker machine, which helps to remove most of the dead needles from within the tree. There it is, strapped to the top of the Land Cruiser after the ride home.
The Palomar Mountain webcam is back online, running brand new software at both ends, but still looking about the same. As with all brand-new software, don’t be too surprised if there are some problems to fix before it works reliably.
Part of the recent renovation of my San Diego house was the addition of a short length of rain gutter, to protect the front door (and people approaching said door) from excessive splashing. I didn’t do this last time because there is no good place for a downspout for this gutter. Since then, I’ve learned about rain chains. A decorative chain hangs down from the gutter to the ground, and rainwater runs down the chain.
This works, as I’ve seen at my Palomar Mountain house. But it wasn’t really working in San Diego, as I found out when we finally had a rainy day. The rain wasn’t clinging to the chain, and the ground at the base of the chain was eroding away because I hadn’t protected it.
So, today I installed two enhancements. At the top, I installed a sort of funnel to further encourage the water to hook up with the chain instead of free-falling to the ground. At the bottom, I put down some rocks.
Now I just need another rainy day to find out whether it worked.
Here are the rocks:
And here is a look up into the spout at the end of the rain gutter. You can see a sort of star-shaped opening — that’s the bottom of the new funnel.
Now that the living room is back in shape, the old dictionary stand was looking pretty ratty, with its peeling contact paper. I decided to strip it down and repaint it to match the column.
I now have a weather station installed on Palomar Mountain, so you no longer need to squint at the fuzzy dial thermometer on the webcam image. The webcam reports to Weather Underground as a personal weather station, and they keep track of history and provide graphs. They also provide the weather badge seen here and on the webcam page.
… arrgh, I spoke too soon. The weather station only worked for a couple of hours before flaking out, and I seem to be unable to repair it by remote control. This may have to stay broken until after the holidays.
Over the last few days, the house has been sandblasted and fumigated for termites, and the first of the new windows installed.
Yesterday Chad came and measured the windows. Found termites.
Today I stripped all the antennas off the back porch and removed all
the antenna feedlines to prepare for sandblasting and porch demolition.
Anybody care to place a bet as to when (or if) I get all those antennas
back up?
