In spite of it being only 19º today we ventured out for a drive in the countryside towards Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It’s a pretty drive on any given day but most days you want to get out and check things out. Not today really. It was sort of nice to stay in the heated car. But we got out anyway.
Helen at the frozen rivers edge.Olivia cozy in a thick jacket on the C&O Canal path.I think we’ll stay out of the water today.
We had brunch at The Mellow Moods Cafe in town. I’d never been there before. They had a egg and cheese sandwich on sour dough bread that was pretty darned good! And a black iced tea to go along with it. The girls had some chips and guacamole and we were off to the next place.
The girls went in to “The Good Shop” to see what kind of things they couldn’t do without in there. We came out of the mostly unscathed. There are a few shops in Shepherdstown that are fun to visit, have some pretty cool stuff in them but I rarely buy things except for food. One of my favorite restaurants there is Betty’s. I think it’s appropriate they don’t have a web site and still get 4 stars. I like eating there. The service is good and people are always nice to me. Typical “home” cooking.
Helen and Olivia doing digital stuff.HelenChatting at lunch
We came back home via the Shenandoah River bank on the West Virginia side of things. It’s a pretty drive and there are some cool places to get out and visit but no one was really into that because of the cold.
The air temperature is headed down to single digits tonight so we’ll be close by the fire together. Two of these guys are off on airplanes tomorrow to be in other parts of the United States. It’s a bummer to see them leave but so glad we got this time together as a family.
Santa came sometime last night. He must have been in a hurry because this is the entirety of my stocking contents:
Stocking contents
At least Santa still has a sense of humor. And this is WAY better than the coal I’ve gotten in years past. Things are looking up!
It’s nice to share the holiday with our entire family. Our girls were both able to come back to their childhood home and spend a week with us together.
The best gifts are hand made.Plucking gifts from the treeI wanna go outside … but it’s too windy.Hand made comfort.
It’s been at least 2 years since we were all together as a family during the holiday. That’s all I needed for Christmas.
I hope your Christmas day was all you wanted it to be!
I never get tired of the sunrises and sunsets around here. It’s pretty amazing watching the cloud layers going in opposite direction because of the coriolis effect. After getting my license to fly I’ve never looked up at the sky quite the same. There’s a lot going on up there.
Everyone should be home at midnight tonight. I checked the winds aloft forecast for Olivia’s flight home from Denver where it looks like, in places, the winds will be over 175 miles an hour.
That the winter jet stream playing in our favor. Oh, and in Santa’s favor too. Presuming he uses the jet stream. That’s a complicated situation. Flying in winter at high altitudes is for the pros. If you are interested here are some Santa tracker sites:
Only 1 more day until winter arrives on December 21, 2017.
I like this day for a number of reasons:
a) We can get on with winter.
b) The sun stops sinking further in the sky.
c) Every day gets longer between then and summer.
Pastel skies at sun set – a common scene in winter.
Below is what that sunset looked like over time. I do a little RC flying in the time lapse as well.
Recently I have noticed that a small family of deer (doe and two young post fawn types) have started to come to the house at night to eat the bird seed that the birds don’t eat during the day. At this point they have become a fixture around here. They don’t have the normal flee instinct when we come outside any longer. At night the sleep in the front yard where I can capture them easily on infrared cameras in complete darkness.
Deer in the front yard as seen in infrared. – We are all ready for winter to begin.
As we ease into night time here everyone is finding a place to lounge.
Sock; leaning on one of us while watching the other.
I hope you have had a restful night and a great day ahead.
Lately I’ve been flying my new “delta wing” aircraft called “Recruit” and made by Ready Made RC (RMRC). I’ve put this video together to show my shenanigans trying to get some video of what it’s like to fly one as well as video from the aircraft itself.
Flying a small RC plane is really no different than flying a big one. Unless you want to crash there is a lot of preparations and testing of systems. The different being if you do crash generally it’s only pride that is damaged and something a little glue and spare parts can fix pretty quick. But when you do crash it happens very quickly and sometimes quite dramatically.
There are some outtakes from other sessions at the end of that video so watch to the end if you want to see it all.
2017 may be the year we have a white Christmas. It’s been bitter cold with highs in the 20’s lately. The sun goes down a little after 4pm so the nights are also much longer.
Today is about finishing up work so I can help Gloria get ready for her Christmas party here as well as the party we will have tomorrow night. We’ve been working in our spare time to get the house ready for all of the folks that will be here during the holidays.
I haven’t been home much but when I am I try to fly my RC planes and such when the wind dies down in the evenings. It’s absolutely freezing cold when you are out in the open with gloveless hands trying to control one of these things. I don’t have the best circulation in my fingers so I seem to get colder faster than I used to. But I fly anyway. If you look closely in the video (towards the end) you’ll see me flying a couple of my planes.
When I was up in NYC this week I bought an older typewriter. It’s a 1965 model Smith Corona with 10 point pica font. I learned to type on a machine similar to this. It’s been fun getting to learn how to use it again.
1965 Smith Corona
It’s totally old school and fun to do again.
Yesterday we went to the radio observatory at Green Bank. Back in the summer I went through the process to get a clearance to go “behind the scenes” to see how things are run, talk to scientists and other technical people at the facility.
There is a 10 mile radio exclusion zone where there are no cell towers or the like anywhere near the facility. It’s nice at times to no get any notifications at all from anyone. If that is what you would like definitely go here. Your cell phone will stop working as you approach from the mountains and will stop working the entire time you are there. It’s kinda nice.
Green bank observatory GBT scope (100 meters)
But they also don’t let you use digital cameras there so you can’t get close up shots of the scope unless you have a film camera. I don’t have those anymore. Luckily there are a ton of pictures available out on the Internet of the facility.
It’s largest scope is the “GBT”, or “Green Bank Telescope”. It’s ~100 meters in size and is essentially the size of a football field suspended in the air. It’s enormous. And it rotates 360º as well as tilts it’s elevation with precision only found at this location. There is not a larger scope of this type anywhere else on this planet. If you are near here it’s worth a drive to go see what’s going on there.
I haven’t taken too many photos lately so not much more to post here. I hope you all have a great week and upcoming holiday.
It’s cool, not so cold. But you can tell winter is on it’s way. Evenings like tonight look very much like winter with the sun so low in the sky and the wispy high cirrus clouds.
Tonight I finished up a project on my #2 tower. On my way out there I set up a time lapse sequence to capture the sunset as I worked out there before the sun set. I’ll never get used to the sun going down at 4:30 pm. By 5pm it’s dark and we are inside. I have to remind myself that in 22 days the sun will be headed back up north a few minutes each day.
I’ve mostly been posting on Instagram lately but I don’t like how it renders my photographs at all. It’s very hard to fit a 16:9 ratio image into a 1:1 hole. I have no idea why they make it so hard to put a picture on a picture platform. Ha. I also heard they are thinking about a “Re-Gramming” option. This would allow people to take someone else’s content and, like Facebook, “re-post” it on to your own timeline. If they do that, it’ll likely be the last time I use the platform. At least now people have to make the effort to take their own pictures.
Helen was home from school last week so we took the opportunity to go get the Christmas tree for the season. We’ve been going to the same place for many years. Each year the picking gets a little slimmer. This year was no different.
We did manage to find a nice tree to fit into our home but it took some time. We also created a bunch of video but the first cut of the video was quite long and the file very large so I’m not going to post it here.
Christmas tree hunt 2017
I’ve been building a new flying wing lately. This is my first wing. I’ve covered mine in laminate so it will survive a few crashes and fly a little faster. This guy is set up for FPV (First Person View) and has a spot for a video camera like a GoPro to record the flights.
RMRC Recruit Flying Wing
My plan is to mostly fly it visually until I can get comfortable flying it with my FPV goggles like I do with my drone. This guy is super fast and will do aerobatics with ease. But I’ll leave the cameras off of it until I can reliably fly it without putting it into the trees. It has three gyro modes so I can fly this with an autopilot of sorts to keep it stable. It’s amazing what you can put in such a small package.
After I finish this guy the next plane I’ll be refurbishing a gas powered biplane that I bought in the summer at an auction. It’ll be my first gas powered plane for about 20 years. The last one I famously crashed in China (no video). But back then the avionics were horrible. I’m going to gut the device and put in all new electronics inside that I’ll use to control the plane from the ground.
Remember that I mentioned at some point the wind would come and blow the leaves into the neighbor(s) yard(s)? Well, that day was last Sunday morning!
I apologize for the wind noise in advance. I did this on my iPhone which makes no attempt at compensating for windy conditions.
I love that part of nature. I no longer have to have a leaf blower. We enjoy the leaves and color until the first major wind storm and then they are all gone!!
They don’t make much of a mess … but they’re still gone!
During the time I took the video above I also took a time lapse from the front yard. At the beginning of the video above Mongrel and I move in and out of the frame. Here’s what the day looked like all sped up:
The winds have died down some. That leaves us with autumn with the color gone and we seemed to be moving very hard towards full blown winter. We’ve had fires in the fireplace pretty much every hour of the day for a few weeks now. At least it’s warm inside.
But no more leaves …
Since the wind wasn’t so bad tonight I was able to get out and do some flying. We spent some time today trying to figure out if we can get a cat in a plane and fly him around. After a careful pre-flight inspection we’ve decided to work on that a while longer.
Mongrel pre-flighting the Extra.
He seemed to be up for it, though.
This plane has a symmetrical wing which means that it flies upside down as easily as right side up. Definitely an acrobatic bird. I’ll be doing some repairs on this guy as well as replacing all of the electronics related to telemetry and flight control with new, updated avionics. This plane was built long ago with some very old electronics but by a person with wicked engineering skill.
You may recall, I bought this at auction a few months ago. Along with 3 more planes. This one is the largest and heaviest of them all. It’ll be the last one I get flying if things go like I planned. Hopefully by the end of winter or maybe spring I’ll be flying this guy regularly. Of the four I bought I have one of them back in the air and it’s a hoot to fly. It’s previous life was a glider that was launched in to the air with a rubber band. I’ve added a small motor, electronic speed controller, new servos and a flight control receiver. Now I hand launch it, fly it up high and then just glide around after that. Pretty cool.
But before the Extra comes off the earth I’ll pre-flight the crap out of it. I built one of these in the 90’s when I lived overseas where I crashed it on it’s first flight. I have better skill now. And a great place to practice and fly them.
Thanksgiving is in a couple of days. I hope you all are with friends and family or where ever it is that you find happiness this time of year.
I haven’t posted in a while. No excuse except that I’ve been traveling a ton. First a motorcycle trip with my dad and brother and then travel for a week for my work. I’m going to try to fit a lot of that in to a post soon. I don’t have anything, I don’t think, from my work travel but do have some from my motorcycle trip that I can share.
But before that, I got news this morning that my radio club, Loudoun Amateur Radio Group, came in first in class for ARRL Field Day 2017 this year. We had 5 operating positions running simultaneously which put us in class 5A. The “A” means we did not use commercial power and kept our transmitters under 100 watts for the 24 hour event.
2017 Field Day results. We came in 1st in our 5A class in the nation.
On top of those results we were also:
– #2 in Virginia behind a very large 12A team in Woodbridge
– #13 in the nation overall.
The last few years have been building years as we recover from the loss of many of our core members. But it looks like we are getting back on track. We start planning for 2018 here soon.
I was gonna make this post longer but for the sake of completing this and my day simultaneously … here you go.
Up until the last few days it’s been quite a temperate October. It’s not been cold much at all so far with some days feeling more like August than October. But that all changed this week with the first hard frost happening last night. All of the plants that need to be inside have been moved in where they will spend the winter. They’ve done very well since I’ve figured out a way to automate the watering of the plants. I need to figure out the same for inside so they don’t get over/under watered and I don’t flood the basement with bad code in a computer that I program to do the job.
Persimmon fruit
I learned earlier this fall that we have a persimmon tree in our yard. This tree came here to live on it’s own over the years. It’s in an area that used to be an open field but I have stopped cutting the grass to let it go back to whatever nature comes up with it. It’s the only persimmon tree that is old enough to produce fruit that I’ve found so far.
Persimmons are crazy bitter if they are not ripened on the tree. But once they get to this point on the tree they are quite tasty! I’ve been reading that persimmons can be harvested and stored in fruit jars for the winter. Maybe next year project? In the mean time I’ll eat as many of these the deer don’t beat me to until they are gone.
Mongrel “helping” me take photos of persimmon fruit.
Mongrel is quite the tree climber now.
Speaking of fall, every time this year the silver maple trees in our yard start the process of turning from deep green to bright yellow and orange. In a week or two these trees will look like a burning bush. Hopefully there will be another clear blue sky day with the more yellow color leaves when they arrive.
Fall – A time for color contrast.
The maple trees are over 10 years old now. Maybe 15. I’ve forgotten when we planted these guys. By the time I leave this planet hopefully they will be big, tall and add color to this property for the next generation who will enjoy them as much as I do. From what I read they could get very large in their lifetime.
Mongrel and I have done a bunch of walking the last few days. He loves these walks we do every day. He would stay out with one of us walking all day long if we could actually do that.
Black fur is still a little hot in the direct sunshine.
Which we can’t, of course.
When I’m in my office working with a window open he sits below the window and meows until I either have to close the window so I can work or come outside to be with him.
When he’s inside and I can’t go outside he just doesn’t understand. So he does this:
“I wait here until you play with me.”
And protests loudly that he is not outside. Eventually he either gives up and takes a nap until we can play or we have to figure a way to get him outside so he can go find a small furry creature to “play” with.
It’s evening now where we’ve completed yet another walk. He’s asleep at my feet with a mouse on a string. No protest this time. He’ll be awake again soon and want to go back outside where all the small furry critters hide in the bush.
Tomorrow? Tomorrow we get up and do it all over again.
I hope you’ve had a good day and tomorrow is what you want it to be.
