Roof Snow Tool

Steph bought her own roof snow removal tool from Amazon recently. Today she was out there moving snow around so I figured the least I could do was un-hunker myself from the office and go video the event. Here you go:

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Categorized as House

Yurt 2016

We had a very nice family birthday sleigh ride dinner up at the Grand Targhee Yurt tonight. Today is Brian and Cats birthday, Lorelle’s tomorrow. Don, the kids dad was there, sister Liz and Cats husband Dave, Drew and Katie, Andrea, Anika with a friend, and a couple from Montana I never met.

Click the picture below to see a few shots, if you like…

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Categorized as Family

Ice Up 2

Pretty lame coverage of the ice sculptures this year. I’ve done way better in the past, but I worked today, shuttling people out to the sled dog races. It dumped on us last night, the road out to the mountain wasn’t plowed, and I’m worn out, but I did manage to grab a couple more shots. Now we’re off to the yurt at Grand Targhee for the big birthday dinner. I’ll take some photos…

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Categorized as Winterfest 5

Ice Up

There’s some nice intricate ice going up downtown:

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Categorized as Winterfest 5

Pretty Morning

Just another pretty morning in my neck of the woods.

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Categorized as The Bus

Birch Crossing

Every afternoon, Monday through Friday at precisely 15:03, I make a left hand turn off of Main Street in Victor onto Birch Street. My elementary kids are on board and I’m heading down to the Community school to pick up my next batch. There are always a couple of small groups of Com School kids who have walked up to the highway to cross at the crosswalk by the city park and often times I wait for them to cross in front of me from the left.

Yesterday, just as the kids stepped off the curb and entered the crosswalk a small white sedan came flying by me on the right. Instead of stopping behind me all they saw was a big white bus making a left turn and perhaps didn’t know that there was an intersection, much less kids crossing, and passed me (illegally) on the inside, right through the reverse parking spots.

If the kids were in front of me I may have been able to get their attention by honking, or maybe not, it could have been a major tragedy!

As I’ve pondered about it since, my first thought was that swerving my bus to the right and taking out the car by knocking it into the park might be effective, but I had kids on board, so not an option. I realized I had to be proactive so I talked to Laurel, the head of the school, about it this morning.

I know they worry about those kids crossing a busy highway with a 35 mph speed, but we need to do more. Get the city involved, move the sheriff’s school patrol from the Elementary to this intersection, get some large poles with red flags for the kids to carry, or install a crossing light! Most of those kids have ridden my bus at one time or another and my continued protectiveness has made me angry. Something must be done!

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Categorized as The Bus

Map Sense

I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with presenting information about places in the United States to the general public via my apps. I suppose it’s because I enjoy the experience of discovery and I want to share it. I also find great satisfaction from mastering the technique of extracting valuable information from publicly available API’s and presenting it to you, for your consumption however you wish.

My latest app, DahMap, is a reverse geocoder that provides information about any place that interests you. Type in a place and go. I’m also currently working on a fun little app that and gives you the official websites of every city and county in the U.S.

It’s currently functional within DahMap. Each place you select, or map position you click on, contains a county link, which opens the new app. It’s a whole lot of fun and you can discover city and county home pages you never knew existed.

Here are the links to the examples below: Los Angeles, and the related cities and California counties, are here.

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Categorized as Site Stuff

Hatches View

I rolled down my window this morning approaching Hatches Corner, actually, sliding towards the Corner and took this shot through crystal clear sub-zero air. I suspect that’s a fence-jumping moose track, but not sure about the track to the left.

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Categorized as The Bus

Roof Concerns

Steph’s been freaking out over the amount of snow on the roof, afraid that it’s going to collapse. I don’t share the same concerns but I’ll certainly put my boots on and go outside to photograph it.

She got this long tool from my sister, specifically made to bring snow off roofs, and it worked pretty good. Click the photo below for some more shots…

btw: my map app continues to improve, click refresh if you’ve been there before.

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Categorized as House

Old Coder

I wrote my first computer program in 1969, in Fortran as I recall. It was long before the PC arrived on the scene and the current environment in 1971 was the evolution of the IBM 360 to the System 3 and RPG II.

That was my world back in the seventies, a hot shot programmer making big bucks because very few people knew how to code it, and the ones that did, like me, got all of IBM’s business.

When the IBM PC came out, I bought one of the first ones from a ComputerLand store in Oakland, CA and switched gears from corporate computing to personal. Several businesses and multiple products evolved from that transition and it was an amazing run through the eighties.

In the nineties, I dropped out and moved to the Seattle area to be Riley’s dad and along the way became a bus driver and transportation supervisor.

Twelve years ago Steph and I moved here and I’ve been driving the local bus since and I have continued to be a coder through the entire process.

Perhaps this helps explain me somewhat…

btw, try out my latest code!

Or just enjoy the light ripples on the deck tonight, from our family room:

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Categorized as Various

Visitor

I opened the blinds at the kitchen window this morning and spotted this little visitor munching on one of our trees.

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Sled Dog Race

Well, here we go again with the Teton Valley Great Snow Fest! This event gets better every year and this time, I’m actually a part of it, as opposed to being just an observer with a blog and a camera.

My employer TRPTA was asked to provide a shuttle service on Saturday the 30th out to the Eukanuba dog sled race at the west end of Packsaddle. Our boss Amanda has been working with Doug Self (Driggs Community Development Director) and now Karen and I will be running the shuttle service out to the races. We’ll start at 8 am and run until 1 pm, starting from the Targhee shuttle pickup spot by the Community Center, out to Packsaddle (W 4000 N) and N 9000 W, and back. We’ll be running two busses with a half hour interval if necessary.

I used my mapping program Juhnk to determine the route and it equates to 12.6 miles (9.35 raven miles) and twenty minutes each way.

Here’s a Google map of the drop:

Here’s a Bing map:

The Eukanuba Stage Stop Sled Dog Race is a big deal and the Driggs Race is an important leg. This event is part of the Great Snow Fest, presented by the Teton Valley Foundation, and will take place over the next couple of weeks.

Here’s Doug’s press release:

Come ride with Karen and I next Saturday! The cost of the ride is on the house…

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Categorized as The Bus

Teton Driveman

I am a driver in the county, and I roam the back roads, searching in the snow for another kid to tow. And I need a long vacation, but it don’t look like sun, so bus driver jim, keeps driving around. Da da da da da da da.

Just in case this doesn't make sense, hum Wichita Lineman...

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Snow Nose

I almost dropped my prescription shades into a large pot of white bean soup at Broulims the other day when they came apart on their own and fell off my face. I took them to my eye guys and they said they were unfixable, so today I got an eye exam and ordered new shades.

It’s been four years since the last exam and my prescription has changed, for the better! The eye doctor seemed pleasantly puzzled that my vision has improved. Even the little pre-glaucoma spots he had seen previously were better, not worse. I recall that one of the side effects of a cayenne pepper regime is improved vision. How about that!

My morning drink for the last few years is a small V8 mixed with one teaspoon each of:
• Cayenne pepper (the hottest I can buy)
• Turmeric root (from the curcuma longa plant)
• Hawthorn berry (ground up in the coffee grinder)
• Lecithen (organic)

Cayenne originated in Central and South America. It’s named after the capital city of the French Guiana, Cayenne. From seeds found on the floors of caves that were ancient human dwellings and from ancient fossil feces, scientists have found that people were eating cayenne peppers as early as 7000 B.C.

On another note, I heard a deputy being dispatched to the drive-through pharmacy at Broulims around noon today. The lady pharmacist (had to be our neighbor Carla) called to report a severely intoxicated man with a child of about four and two dogs at the window. She told him to pull over and park, and he complied. As the deputy responded he asked how she knew he was intoxicated and was told that he was slurring his words and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag!

The deputy found them and called over an ambulance to deal with a severely intoxicated individual. Dispatch was asked for priors and many came back, including the most recent, for DUI. He even had a breathalyzer restrictor on his truck, maybe he had the kid blow, how pathetic.

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Audacity

I was going through my normal routine this morning: downing coffee, cayenne pepper and cereal when I took a moment to lay out my day from the schedule sitting in my inbox. There was a new customer on the list, an older gentleman (I inferred from the status codes), going to the hospital and back, around mid-morning. I have lots of mapping utilities at my disposal (all written by me) so I looked his address up.

Cayenne fueled steam began to sizzle from my ears. I recognized this road, I’d been up it before, a few years ago, during the summer. It’s a narrow, steep, winding road up into the eastern foothills from the base of 5000 S. It’s one of the most treacherous roads in the valley.

I tried to visualize taking my bus up there but my mind just stopped me cold. It wasn’t going to happen, this is the dead of winter with lots of snow down, so I called dispatch first thing. They called the client and he said the road had been plowed, but it was steep, and I could turn around in his driveway.

Excuse me! You have to drive up his steep driveway just to get to his tight circular drive. He asked dispatch if I was driving a front-wheel or a four-wheel drive. It’s a large freaking bus for gods sake!

Anyway, he backed off and canceled and said he would come down to 5000 next time if he needed a ride in the future. My position is, if you’re going to build a house on the side of a mountain, high in the Rockies, don’t expect public transportation to come to your door when you get old…

↑ I would have been coming in from the left, which I’m not…

Map link…

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Categorized as The Bus