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.
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.
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.
It was a busy day of work that started very early but an otherwise quiet day.
There wasn’t much interesting to talk about or take a picture of while I was working and nothing interesting to report there. After working more when I got home it finally stopped around 6pm. Mongrel, Gloria and I went for a walk for a few minutes to enjoy the sunset and quiet evening in the country.
Sunset yoga at home.
One of my video cameras caught us during a time lapse.
You can see in the video how calm the weather is but what you can’t see is how humid and hot it is. At sundown the temperature is still in the 80’s and the humidity is above 90%.
The trees are starting to change ever so slightly all over the county. They must be confused by the warmer weather we’ve had. I think that the lack of sunshine during the day is what triggers all that. The colors may not be as bright as they’ve been in years past with all the rain and warmer weather. But I’m just guessing on that.
I flew one of my RC planes before the sun went completely down. The wind was calm and air smooth which makes for good weather to do aerobatics. So I did a ton of aerobatics. By the time I landed I could barely see the plane if it weren’t for the strobe lights I have on it. That’s always good fun.
Fall (autumn equinox) was Friday, September 22 (today)at 4:02 PM. Happy fall, y’all.
It doesn’t feel much like fall yet outside while it’s still 90º during the day at some point. We haven’t had rain in a while so things are drying out pretty good but that is totally normal. Frankly surprised it didn’t dry up a bit in August but August was cool and wet for us here.
I took a lunch break and saw the bees actively getting all the honey they could. I think this is a golden rod plant which I masked to black and white to show the bee a little better. The sun was wicked bright today so the light was quite harsh.
Bee on Golden Rod
When I look at this photo on the blog it looks “fake”. But it’s really not. here is the unmasked photo:
It’s so interesting what you can do with a computer and photography these days. I often wonder how one would go about doing something like this if all we had to work with was a negative and dark room. I suspect it would be quite difficult if not impossible.
This is easy to do with Photoshop. Just create a black and white layer mask and “unmask” where you want to color to come through. A few “scribbles” with a mouse or Wacom pencil will complete the work.
I flew my drone about ¾ mile away from home to check out the pavement on 287 near our home. I didn’t make it off the property today so I have no idea of their progress. Turns out the road is still not paved.
While I was up there I took a few photos of the farm. Here’s one above the back fields after a hay harvest today. The drone was about 100 meters in the air at the time.
Fall hay harvest complete
With no clouds in the sky it’s easy to take some high contrast black and white images. When I was looking at the images I was trying to figure out why my camera had these dots on the image. When I zoomed in it was clear that these are spiders building their night webs in the tall grass. If I posted this on Facebook all that detail would be erased. But if you click on the picture below you’ll see them.
Sunset and spiders in the grass
Another fall day begins early tomorrow morning. All critters here have found their safe spot, box or both. I hope you’ve found yours too.
As you know, I don’t get up early enough to see most of these.
As summer moves into fall the sun rises more to the right of my window each morning. As we get closer to October it seems like it goes much faster each day than the day before.
When the air temperature is different than the ground temperature we experience the low lying fog every morning that blows about in the light wind. This happens pretty much every spring and fall morning when the sky is clear or mostly clear. Today was no exception.
It’s nice here today. Barely a whisper of wind under a mostly clear sky.
Tonight we start planning for the Lovettsville Oktoberfest event in the small city near our home. I volunteer at this event with the Loudoun Amateur Radio Group. It’s a fun few days if you have time and are near here.
Tomorrow is the first night of the festival and then Saturday is the crazy day when 10-15,000 people show up between 6am and 6pm in this dinky town of Lovettsville. It’s a fun time at a great time of year around here. The weather is supposed to be basically perfect this weekend and on into next week.
These flowers grow as weeds in our yard. The other day I had to weed eat around this rock and thankfully they came back a few weeks later. When they all get together and grow all at the same time they are pretty flowers that look like they’ve been planted there.
Snap dragons
And, of course, what a normal day would be without a climbing exercise on our walk together?
It was a quiet but very full day. I spent most of the day on the phone on work related projects that I needed to complete today. I don’t normally talk about work but that’s what I do during the week from the time I wake until the time I sleep. I may play in between but I think about work all the time.
Speaking of playing, I was able to fly both my drone and RC plane today. It was one of those super harsh sunny days where there is no clouds in the sky. On these days it’s super hard to take a good picture that is not all washed out. It’s hard to look up at what you are controlling from the ground and for the same to look down and take a decent photo.
Of all the photos I took during the day this the one I liked the most.
Sunny day in Virginia, September 19, 2017
I post in Facebook as well but Facebook will down sample the image and make it look like junk. If you touch the one here you’ll get a full photo that you can fill your screen with and really see what it looks like. Even this one is downsampled a bit. It’s only a JPEG image out of a GOPRO 3 camera. It’s amazing what that little camera will do. When it’s hung under a drone and lifted into the air I just think it changes everything about photography.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a picture from the bottom of a drone. It was way, way before it was the cool thing to do. I was mesmerized. I mentioned to Gloria that this is going to be a big thing when it catches on. And it did catch on. People like Casey Neistat became quite famous flying drones and publishing videos.
One of the things I did today was work on my weather station. The Raspberry Pi computer had a disk failure and won’t boot. A year ago I bought some “cheap” microSD cards to use as disks. They have all failed so that didn’t pay off. Name brands for me from now on. I’ll pay a little extra for those things now. None of the SanDisk brands have failed even after years of use. They are not hard to fix but it takes too much time. I’ll have my weather station back working again tomorrow.
Mongrel and I didn’t go for our normal walk today. Instead we played in the grass. Well, he played in the grass while I troubleshot my weather station some during one of my breaks from work. Watch it to the end if you want to see what it looks like for a cat to run through grass like a deer … but he’s only a cat.
We won’t tell him he’s any different.
It’s quiet here. Everyone is sleeping. Tomorrow is on the horizon and should be similar to today.
I hope you’ve had a nice day today. If not, I hope you have a better day tomorrow.
This weekend was about goofing off. Goofing off as much as possible. It all started like this:
… sunrise September 17, 2017
Officially I had to do some volunteer work for my radio club but that was over before 10am Saturday which left the rest of the day to do something I’ve had in my calendar for a while now: The Flying Circus.
We didn’t stay long but we made a day of getting there and back like we tend to do now and again. Typical trip down I-81 where you have to be crazy to be with crazy. But it was OK with both of us in the car together to stay distracted. Although I think my driving drives Gloria crazy. She has to listen to me postulate about statistics of queuing and crowding; the mathematical advantage of being in a small car in a big car world. 210 horse power helps but not as much as being small.
The venue for the RC event is atop a hill south of Covington, VA where people are flying all kinds of different aircraft from fixed wing to drones and even some cars and the like. But it’s mostly about flying something. It’s put on by Jeremiah at Stone Blue Airlines. Jeremiah owns the place there in Lynchburg two hours away from Covington. He’s helped me outfit some of my RC gear here that I fly. It’s cool that he’s made a living out of his passion. It’s really hard to tell when he is working and when he is playing. Which is I think the point to life.
After looking through my FPV goggles at other people flying we took back off for home in hopes of getting back at a decent hour. We lumbered along the back way home up SR220 through some really pretty West Virginia and Virginia back roads. After a dinner at the Fireside Cafe it was slabbing it back home as fast as we could once the sun went down and both of us grew tired.
Gloria had a big morning on Sunday and presentation in the afternoon so we needed to get her back and rested. She had a good, productive presentation on how to make Kombucha. She makes really good Kombucha!
Not me. I took the day (Sunday) mostly off. Besides a 5 mile run at sundown I really didn’t do much but goof off with electronics, some photography, RC flying of various types, radio. Some people have said that my goofing off looks a lot like work. I resemble those remarks.
Oh, radio. I chatted with a “DXpedition” station from the Czech Republic operating in Mauritania using call sign 5T5OK. I was parked on a 14 mhz frequency when I noticed the activity on the spectrum scope. Turns out these guys were testing their station and I was able to snag them in a “pile up” on the first call once I figured out how they were set up on the split frequency. We really didn’t chat long and they went on to making more contacts. It’s about 4,200 miles from here to there. I’m always amazed that I can just “key up” and talk to a totally different country on the planet. Makes the world seem really small. I was on and off the radios all day today which was particularly fun.
I’m working on an adjustable square wave generator circuit with a 555 timer chip. I’m not terribly good with electronics so this is half learning and half doing. I want to create a string of LEDs that use a transistor to switch between on and off at a rate that I can control with the timer chip. The circuit is gonna look something like this:
555 timer circuit
I got my bench power supply back from the shop so I can start building stuff again. Or breaking stuff, depending on how badly I mis-calculate things like voltage, current and the like. My method is less “Ohms Law” and more “Poke-n-Prod” until the blue smoke comes out. When I see blue smoke it’s generally back to the drawing board. It’s a good way to learn but leads to a lot of dead parts.
I’m sure I could buy the circuit from China for a buck but what’s the fun in that? I have this idea on making an LED string look like it’s pumping electricity like water through a tube. I want to vary the alternating lights at a rate and amplitude I can control. Yea, boring.
Mongrel and I got to walk together some today. When we weren’t moving he was chasing his tail. I can’t tell if he is goofing off like cats can do or if he’s frustrated that he can’t control it. One thing’s for sure is that he is very transparent because of that tail which exposes his current mood. The little biting flies were bugging the crap out of us both too.
We were also still a lot today. It’s interesting to watch Mongrel. He generally sits facing opposite of me. If I were to lay down he sits on top of me. Must be some weird instinct thing going on there. Seems to watch out after me when we are together. Anything out of the ordinary while he is on watch will render a “growl”. Could be a dog ½ mile away or a person riding a horse. He just lets me know it’s out there.
Watching everything that is moving.
When all that is done and we are back in the quiet, cool of the house where his guard comes down he starts to slow down after some dinner. Quietly protesting that he doesn’t want to be inside he climbs in his box next to my desk. He starts off looking at me. Then falls asleep.
“In the safety of my box”
Soon he is on his back with his feet in the air. This cat can sleep like none other I’ve ever met. And will sleep like that all night long.
I hope you’ve had a day that was fun like ours. And that you are back in your safe place where ever that may be.
I’m done goofing off. Work tomorrow. Headed to my box.
Today we decided not to follow our normal path on a road less traveled. Instead, we got on a set of roads we’ve never traveled not knowing for sure exactly how to get to where we wanted to go.
To start we were looking for some lunch in Charles Town, WV at a place we’ve eaten before. We didn’t understand why it was so hard to find until we go there and saw that it was closed. It was Mediterranean food where we’ve only eaten once but it was one of the best meals I’ve had in some time. It’s a bummer to see it go.
We ended up across the street at a diner run by Grandma. All of the comfort foods you could want were under that roof. Even an egg salad sandwich on white toast with fries and a sweet tea. I’m definitely going back there!
We set out for “Sleepy Creek Lake” in West Virginia to see what is there. Maybe a place to camp, take some photos, scope out some new motorcycle roads. It’s not far from home. The roads between home and Charlestown are well traveled for us. Beyond that it was all new to us.
Yesterday I put a 50mm lens on my camera to play with depth of field. This is something I haven’t done in some time and want to relearn. The lens I have is super nice and lets ton of light in to play with. Unfortunately, it taught me some lessons that I’m going to have to pay closer attention to. In this panoramic view of the small lake you can see the focal point is in the center of the lake but I had it so tight nothing beyond that in the background or foreground is in focus. Oh well, next time I’ll be more careful.
Playing with depth of field
On the way to the lake we randomly came upon a grass air strip that was also home to the local RC flying club. We turned in to find two gentlemen taking a break from flying their gas powered scale aircraft. It’s a ton of well groomed land and apparently a very active club. Something to check out It’s called the PropBusters RC Airplan Club.
I was headed out to take pictures of the sun going down tonight and saw this plant on the table reaching for the last rays of the day. I really don’t know what kind of plant this is but it has very long arms reaching as far out as it can to soak up all of the sun’s rays.
Solar power
Speaking of sunsets, the sun was very harsh today in a mostly clear sky. In order not to get a totally washed out image I had to pull the “stand behind a tree for shade” trick. Even still, there was a ton of light to deal with.
Sunset
I was about to rotate the wheels on my car when I saw the moon rise in the eastern sky. You can’t do much with a 50mm non-zoom lens so this is all I can do to show the moon today.
Moonrise
Sock joined me for some of my picture taking. Sockies is getting older these days. Not moving as fast as she used to. Here eyes are getting a bit cloudy, she’s missing a tooth or two but otherwise doing OK for a cat her age.
Socks
In that photo you can see the effect of strong depth of field. Her eye are super focused and detailed but everything else is out of focus. That was taken at f2.5 at 1/800th of a second with an ISO of 80. Clearly it’s letting a ton of light end to be able to use these settings. And it’s an f1.4 lens so the focal point can be even that much more narrow. It’s very, very hard to shoot a moving target with this kind of a narrow depth of field.
It was a fun Labor Day holiday. We did as much as we could with the time we were given. We’ve found a new place to get some grub and a few new roads to explore more. Maybe even a place to pitch a tent for the night.
