Shallow Thoughts : : misc

Appreciation for Running Water

We were visiting relatives in Colorado when Dave's phone rang. Someone from county utilities, letting us know we had a major water leak at the house, it had been happening for more than a month, and this month's water bill was going to be over $700. Yikes! And ... gee, thanks, for waiting a month to let us know about it.

(Aside: the county recently force-upgraded everyone to new "smart meters" which are supposed to send alerts for problems like this. However, that only works if you can log in and set up an email address — and we'd been going back and forth with the county for months about why the system wouldn't let us set up an account, but nobody in the utilities department seemed to know much about how the online access worked.)

We had them send someone to turn off the water to the house. When we returned home a few days later, we called again to have the water turned back on briefly so we could see what was going on. The leak was somewhere between the meter and the house, making it our responsibility (natch). The county said they had no way of telling precisely where: it could be somewhere under the driveway, or under the garage (ouch!)

It was Friday, so of course there was no chance of persuading anyone to come out and take a look.

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Painting the Water Tower

I saw a notice in the paper that they're planning to paint the Barranca school water tower, something it has badly needed for some years. It made me wonder, though, how they did that.

Today I happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the preparations. It's quite an elaborate rig, with a crown of long poles from which hang separate lines that go all the way to the ground. Do the painters rappel down the lines and paint while hanging? What do they do once they get below the "golf ball" and need to paint the ball's underside or the stem?

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White Rock Kite Festival

The weather is great for this year's Kite Festival, going on right now at Overlook Park. It's a little hazy, but there's a good wind, plenty to keep the kids' small kits aloft, though the big, fancy kites were struggling a little.

Continuing through Sunday night; if you're in the area, go take a look!

A few photos: White Rock Kite Festival 2023.

Fun with InstaMorph Plastic

Like many cyclists, I always carry a small tire pump on my mountain bike. I've had the pump for many years, and it still works, but the plastic holder that screws into the water bottle cage holder has gotten brittle over the years, and broke a few months ago.

As a stopgap, I lashed the pump to the bike frame with velcro strips, but I was never very happy with that. But you can't buy just the mount for a bike pump; you're supposed to buy a whole new pump.

But you know me: I hate throwing things away, especially plastic things, if I don't have to. And I found the perfect solution.

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Best Books Read in 2022

It's the last day of 2022, so I guess it's time for a "Best Books" list for 2022.

Note that these are books I read in 2022, not books published in 2022.

2022 was actually a disappointing year, book-wise. I only finished 36 books, about half of my usual number (though only one was a re-read). I'm not sure why the number came out so low. Worse, none of them really excited me or was in the running for an all-time best list. But there were a few worth recommending, plus a couple I want to mention for other reasons, even if they don't really deserve a "best" label.

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Countywide Internet Outage

Yesterday we had an event that really brought the community together: the entire county lost internet.

When we woke to discover our internet was out, the first step was to pull out a phone and try to load the CenturyLink outage page. But it wasn't loading ; nor was anything else. Apparently both CenturyLink and the Verizon cell network were down, though the phone showed one to two bars, as good as we ever get here at the house without going upstairs to the north deck where we can see the tower directly.

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Shoveling in Paradise

Shoveling our long driveways and multiple decks and patios is a lot of work, still novel and unfamiliar to a couple of refugees from California. Especially when, like yesterday, the snow keeps coming down so you have to do it repeatedly.

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My Favorite Plane(s)

On most Sundays, you can find me at Overlook Park where the Los Alamos Aeromodelers fly radio controlled model airplanes at the big soccer field. The Los Alamos Aeromodelers used to be an official flying club, but now it's just a group of friends who fly together.

I first got into R/C flying in the 1980s. Back then, model planes were made of balsa wood. They took forever to build. The planes were heavy (five or six pounds) and flew fast, and so when they crashed — which they did a LOT — you had a lot of fastidious rebuilding to do.

They were powered with internal combustion 2-stroke motors. They were SO LOUD. You couldn't fly them in local parks; you had to drive to a remote flying field where the noise wouldn't disturb anyone.

Plus the motors were finicky and messy: they spewed oil everywhere, so you had to clean the plane off with paper towels and a degreaser after every flight. Ick.

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