Meadow Musings

Meet Siren:

Many folks say that you shouldn't let baby ducks into water until they're at least a month old, lest they catch cold and/or drown.  But here at webmeadow, we throw caution to the wind and let the babies in on the first sunny day we have.  In this case, that day was a Thursday. 

Meet Headder:

Next up we have a picture of goose feet.  Bruce Goose feet, to be exact.

My friends, the time is nigh!  Meet Spruce:
Spruce Goose.  In the lower right of that picture is Spruce's future boyfriend, Bruce.  Bruce Goose.

Along with Mr and Ms Goose, we got 4 Khaki Campbells, and 3 Indian Runners.  The geese are huge (3.6 ounces each), but the ducks are very very small (only 1.5 ounces each).  You might notice in that picture above that Spruce has a strong resemblance to a pear.

That is a very Alice In Wonderland question -- how is sledding like strawberries?  The answer is:  it's rare to fill up on either.  And yet, we have managed to do both things in the past year!

When it is early summer here, strawberry season shows up and lasts (and I am not joking or exaggerating in the least here) exactly eight days.  We have a friend who has about 2 acres of PYO (that's 'pick your own') strawberries.  We go and we pick as many strawberries as we can, which last year took about 2 hours and netted us 14 pounds of tiny beautiful strawberries.  We intended to make shortcake, and strawberry pasta, and all kinds of great stuff.  In the end, though, we pretty much just ate all 14 pounds straight.  It is rare to feel like you've really had plenty of strawberries, but we managed.  (Not that we were sick of them, mind you.  Just wonderfully satiated.)

This week, we decided to make good on our vow to go sledding at the Mt Prospect Ski Area.  We learned a number of things:

1) The ski tow lives!!  There is a warming hut (a yurt, por supuesto) with a woodstove and everything.  We don't know when it runs, or for how long, or what it costs, or anything except that it is hooked up to power and there is a deep groove in the snow where it tows the skiiers up the hill.

2) The view from the top is really pretty.  This isn't even the top-top, just the middle-top where we sat down and had some hot tea.  We also brought binoculars, so we were able to scope out the cows in that field over yonder.

3) You can totally satiate yourself on sledding.  I didn't think it was possible -- I've always stopped sledding for some external reason, like my clothes were soaked, or it was getting too cold, or the snow was crappy for sledding.  But sledding here was awesome -- the snow was hard, the sun was warm, and you only had to walk up 1/4 of the hillside to get a long awesome (fast!) ride back down.  The only (minor) downside was that sometimes the sled went so fast it squirted out from underneath us and left us in the snow while it rocketed down the rest of the hill.

Whee!

According to this nifty little press release, Fat Spaniel and EnerWorks have just partnered to bring great solar-monitoring software to the world of industrial solar hot water.    Fat Spaniel is a cool company -- they make software that you can hook up to your solar installation and check on your energy production on the web.  It keeps historical data and lets you do real-time monitoring of systems that are far away.

You wouldn't think that was particularly unique -- using computers to monitor your renewable energy setup -- but it really is.  We have a little auxiliary piece of equipment (the OutBack Mate) that lets us see what our system is doing, and it's connected to our charge controller via a very long ethernet cable.  Ours is strung up to the office, so we can check our battery levels and power generation from our desks.  It even has a serial port (so 1994!) so that we can plug it into our computers, but we haven't bothered (yet).

Enerworks (the other company in the above press release) focuses on solar-hot-water systems for commercial applications -- hotels, hospitals, etc.  That is totally spiffy, because solar-hot-water systems tend to pay for themselves pretty quickly and are a lot easier to understand (sun!  it makes things hot!) than photovoltaic systems.

In other news!  Xantrex also released a solar-system monitor this week!  And it's Wi-Fi!  It's pretty odd to me that the manufacturers of solar products are so slow to realize that all of their customers are geeks -- we want to know how many kilowatt-hours we produced!  We want to see our current amperage!  We want to see them both in colorful charts and graphs!

Not that we have any amperage here.  We are in the midst of yet another snowstorm.  It is the first day of spring!  As the Yarn Harlot says, "There can only be so much more snow before the rotation of the earth on it's axis makes it impossible. Hang tough."

Spring is officially on its way.  I know this because our yard has been visited by the aforementioned Laziest Bird There Is, the mourning dove.  They left tracks.
Please note the crazy-lazy wandering path of the pair of doves.  If you go out into our yard at pretty much any point during the day, you are likely to hear that distinctive "wheep wheep wheep" sound of doves fleeing in terror.   I have read that the sound is actually their wingtips whipping through the air, but I think that is a marketing ploy designed to make us think they aren't just completely spastic.

Super X-treem Close Up:
I would also like you to notice that these tracks are, of course, the very definition of the term "pigeon-toed".

Tate objected to my term "sea cows of the lawn", arguing that there already are cow-like creatures who hang out in grass -- namely, cows.  So I submit that the doves are maybe more closely related to dugongs, the SouthEast Asian cousins of manatees, who are sometimes also known as "sea pigs" and "sea camels".  Later in the season, when there is some grass showing, picture comparisons of the doves and dugongs will surely confirm my suspicions.

Have you ever seen that Shakespeare play "As You Like It"?  Did you know that Kenneth Branagh made a version of it a few years ago set in Japan?  Well, he did.  It's pretty good, but there's that part in the middle where Oliver and Orlando are attacked by a lion...  and he didn't bother to change it.  I think I might have yelled at the screen, "A LION???  YOU MOVED THE WHOLE PLAY TO JAPAN, BUT YOU KEPT THE LION?."

Well, my friends, today's post is like a great big lion in the middle of Japan.  Which is to say, incongruous.  When we moved the whole site to solar hosting a few weeks back, we also changed blogging software, from LifeType to Movable Type.  Obviously, I didn't want to lose all the entries we had written before, so I set out to move them over to our new Movable Type installation.  Well, Google as I might, I was not able to find one bit of help out there in the wild interwebs.

Fortunately, I am apparently some sort of "programmer"!  So I wrote my own script that takes a LifeType database and converts all of the information into a format that Movable Type can digest.  I am posting it here for all the world to see, so that the next person who wants to make the same move won't have to reinvent the wheel.

Right-click and save this file.  There are instructions in it; you'll need to be a little familiar with PHP and your LifeType database to make this work, but at least you won't have to start from scratch.

Sorry for the interruption; I now return you to your regularly-scheduled duck-watching.

You're reading this blog, so you know that we build websites using solar power. Well our blazing new news is that we just upped the ante: we now we offer solar web-hosting! That means that in addition to creating websites using solar power, we can serve websites up to visitors on the web using the power of the sun.

Who was our first client for this total solar-powered web solution? Ourselves. We moved the hosting of webmeadow.com away from a conventionally-powered host to our current digs. So webmeadow.com is now powered by the sun!

Why does solar hosting matter? Serving up web pages takes a lot of energy, just like building them.

To put servers into perspective: when I worked with the Internet Archive, they had a server room chock-a-block full of computers (around 600 I think) to serve up their data. All those computers produce lots of heat, so in addition to all the server power, it took a huge amount of air conditioning power just to keep things running.

The company that we've partnered with powers their servers AND their air conditioning with solar panels. And they've even designed their server room so that it needs less air conditioning than traditional designs (complete with a living roof of drought resistant plants -- it reduces their cooling and heating requirements by over 50%).

A smart choice all around, and we're excited to be part of it!

Last night we ended up at Price Chopper (currently in the lead of the exciting new reality show, "America's Most Dismal Grocery Store"), and found someone else's shopping list in our cart.  I reprint it here for your pleasure.
This is what I saw first, which intrigued me immediately because Jensales Inc. is in Minnesota, and we were in Vermont.  Jensales sells tractor (and other heavy equipment) manuals.  Not just operation manuals, but parts and service manuals, too, so that you can go about fixin' your own machinery.  Cool.  (I don't know what the " & Toys" is about.  I think it might be something ironical.  They don't mention that on their website.)

Here is the actual shopping list:
Oh man.  It's so classic.  I love it (especially "Tums").

(It is not as good as the Best Found Object Ever, The Molting. But how can you top that?)