Blog » March 2008

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.