Spring snows

This morning we woke up to an inch or so of delightful snow. It was chilly in the house, and the wind was blowing, gently.

Thanks to our climbers from Los Alamos, NM, we had some beers for the sauna. (Sauna day had to move from Friday to Saturday due to work and the Friday night concert in Buena Vista). We had a nice time chatting with them. They were camped in Pentitente Canyon last night. I'm betting it was a chilly morning in camp. They're here again today, and I see that they have a pop up camper so it might have had the heater kick on last night. We told 'em they're welcome to set up here if they wish.

The sauna was good, started out at 140 degrees F. and went down as we enjoyed sitting in the wet, lovely heat. We've really enjoyed that thing, it's a nice addition to the mix of stuff to do around here. It's also helping me work through the slab wood we bought several years ago and never really used for the wood stove. It's kinda cool having a ready bunk of well sized wood for the fire box. I just have to chainsaw it to length a little bit. And who doesn't love getting to use the chainsaw?

Last weekend we set up for our summer visitors. It's nice to have that all set.

We'll probably get moving around before too long, but there's no rush. It's chilly and windy out. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Last night we went here. It's The Loft Theater in Buena Vista, Colorado. Their web page is here: http://www.loftmusicvenue.com/the-loft-theater-at-bv
We went to see a musician we follow (Crys introduced me to his music), Trace Bundy. His website is here: http://www.tracebundy.com/
It was a fabulous show. We met a couple new musicians. Jonah Werner, who's website is: http://jonahwerner.com/
and liked him as well. I think they're both worth a visit. Also playing were Tim and Laurie Thompson. They don't seem to have a webpage. :D They played Irish tunes and some other great stuff, the vocals were great and Tims giant electric Mandolin is worth a listen.

It was kind of a long day for me, starting at 2:30 AM with work in Alamosa and Ft. Garland fixing powerlines in the wind and snow and ending at home at about 2 AM the next day when we got back from Buena Vista.

We had the best time, starting out at Eddyline Brewery in Buena Vista. Their website is here:
http://eddylinebrewing.com/
We had naughty dinner complete with spicy tater tots and a delicious, giant plate of nachos. They had a bourbon barrel stout on tap that was delightful. (I had 2). Then we walked over to the Loft, which only took about 10 minutes. On the way we passed the in-town tasting room for one of my two favorite Colorado whiskeys: Deerhammer. Their website is here:
http://www.deerhammer.com/
and we'll trip up there one day just to take the tour and do a bit of tasting.
After the show, town was really quiet and we walked back to our car with the dark and the stars and drove the 100 miles home. There's not much that we can get to quickly, and I always need to remember that a trip out of town can be this fun.

Planning for summer

Blended families make for an interesting prospect as concerns summer travel.

We're trying to work out travel, kids (not ours), brothers, sisters, weddings, education weeks, and a host of other stuff.

Champagne problems.

We're figuring on a week to go buy my mom's car and rolling picking up our niece Autum into that with a road trip back here for her summer vacation. Then there's the week I have to take to go to a solar class in Paonia, CO. That'll be fun, but it's another thing to schedule. And there's my nephews (my mini me)'s wedding in the Fall. We'll have to fly back for that, and that's another week off because mom and pop wanna drive back here with us to spend some time. That's another week. That pretty much eats up my vacation for the year. All good stuff, but also......

champagne problems.

I'm sure it'll all be fun. Here goes.......

Windy season

It's the windy season at work and at home.

So that means I didn't get to my solar class work until this weekend, after working all day Saturday and several hours early this (Sunday) morning. At least I'm caught up now, and with any luck at all the coming week won't be so crazy. At least I don't have to go to Denver this week, that kind of takes all day and eliminates the possibility of doing anything else.

The climbers are out here today and they left us a couple of beers on the back deck. Those folks are awesome. The fun thing about the beers are they're a token of appreciation, and they seem to try pretty hard to find things we haven't sampled yet.

Due to the winds today, we're chilling inside. Yesterday Crystal surprised me by keeping the sauna going throughout the day and we had a nice warm time visiting in there just after the sun set last night. I had started it up early in the morning while I was adding distilled water to the batteries, then I got called to work until sunset. That sure was nice to come home to. We've enjoyed the addition of the sauna a great deal.

The fun part of my battery based solar class from SEI is going through the math and magic of the load analysis for a given property. I'm using ours (of course) because I really did just guess when we set the thing up. That's probably why we rebuilt it 6 years later to twice the inverter size and 3 times the array size. I wanted to do a load analysis first, the problem was we had no idea what we'd buy so there wasn't much way to accurately predict things.

Speaking of our off grid solar system........ I'm currently trying to come up with the cash for the Magnum Energy wireless monitoring system. That comes with software tie in so that you can monitor and adjust your system from anywhere.

I think that'll be pretty cool when I get old. Turning on the generator without having to get up? Priceless. :D

'Tis the season for the winds to blow

We were going to start putting the sheeting up on the greenhouse. The wind came up. It does that here in the spring. Somehow it's just not the best idea in the world to get out in a high wind with 4' X 12' sheet goods. They tend to lift you off the ground and then beat you all the way back down to the dirt. Then you have to hold on to the damned thing while you're bleeding so it doesn't fly away.

Sure it's good for videos, but tends to deplete the bandage supply.

So we have the barrel sauna fired up, we're internetting in bed with kitties and a warm fire in the house, and we'll do our P90X stretch today. If it's not too blowy out there, I'll get out and settle the frame to the knee wall on the greenhouse and screw it down. That and perhaps I'll move the scaffolding into place and tie it off for when we do get a good day to haul out the sheet goods. That and we'll do a bit of dreaming about where to start using that shiny new yellow rototiller.

Getting ready for spring

So yesterday I was bopping through Tractor Supply. Someone had bought this lovely tiller, used it for their job and returned it. The Tractor Supply folks went through it, tuned it etc. and put it out on the floor at $150 off. We'll bust that thing out come spring and get some delicious stuff growing in the yard. It should also make it much easier to dig trenches and such, as the first 8" or so is the hardest digging. It's gonna be pretty fun seeing this new thingy make the earth easier for us to work with. And it's time to start working on that dome greenhouse as soon as the wind quits blowing.