Category: Various

Well here it is, xmas eve, finally! The big day, Santas birthday, is tomorrow. I really hope he gets that Samsung 4K flatscreen he’s been hankering for! I think we should start a gofundme to buy the old fat boy a birthday present. The money could go straight into an Amazon gift card with his email address.

Sarcastic facetiousness, still dripping, one mark at a time…

Sometimes photos don’t need words attached to them…

In between coding convulsions while creating my new app Scwelch, I got a little sewing time in today. I was inspired by Steph’s previous cool puff quilt thing so I whipped my pink chops into a frenzy, and puffed up this:

Ok, maybe I didn’t create it, but I shot it…

One of my favorite songs is Stevie Ray’s Life by the Drop and it’s the way I try to live my life (i.e. mindfulness). When things get weird I pull a Swift and shake it off. Lately, I’ve noticed a higher level of consciousness evolving that I call living Life by the Mark.

Marks are continually occurring events of significance that I look forward to completing. The end of the work day, hump day, Friday, payday and big holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Last Thursday evening as I settled into my warm office to compose a post, I gave myself a silent little fistbump, another big mark down!

The ultimate mark every year is the last day of school around here, when I can take a deep breath and start planning my summer vacation. As the Fall approaches, I start the process all over again…

Here’s a snippet from Life By The Drop by Stevie Ray Vaughan:

Telomeres are the caps at the ends of our chromosomes that protect the DNA code of the genome. Telomeres shorten each time a cell divides and at a certain point when they reach a critical length, the cell can no longer divide and will die.

This is the human aging process and scientists are working on techniques to lengthen telomeres as a means of delaying the process, but there are things you can do to protect telomeres from shortening prematurely, such as eating a diet rich in antioxidants.

Cayenne pepper is antioxidant rich. Just saying…

My morning drink is a small can of 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)

It’s delicious! (Ok, maybe not…)

I’ve connected the top of the line RS-800Mz antenna to my state of the art BCD436HP scanner, and the result is radio frequency serendipity! My next addition to this bad boy setup is the Uniden BC-GPSK which is a GPS unit that gathers up all the action frequencies based on your current location.

Which means, as I travel around next summer, the scanner will automatically present the local frequencies to me as I drive through small town America. There’s no need to get it now since I’m hunkered down for the winter, but it will definitely be sitting next to my Garmin next Spring.

I created this image tonight, btw… Here’s the BC-GPSK below:

I’ve added a new tool to my digital life, the Uniden BCD436HP handheld scanner. As Amazon puts it: "The first scanner to incorporate the HomePatrol-1's ease of use in a traditional handheld scanner. Plus, Uniden's exclusive Close Call RF Capture feature, GPS Connectivity, Extra-Large Display, Radio System Analysis and Discover Modes put the most advanced scanner features ever right in the palm of your hand".

It feels pretty good in my hand actually but won’t spend much time there. I’ll stick it up on my bus console during the workday and on my desk at night, keeping tabs on the happenings around me. Already this morning I’ve been following the adventure of a 4-wheeler rollover up in the foothills with injuries. The inter-county search and rescue operations are pretty impressive.

…and here’s a live view of our neighbor Jackson Wyoming, for the heck of it:

…and as Saturday night unfolds I’m hunkered down in my man cave listening to the world around me while Alexa serenades.

It is truly good to be alive in 2015 and to be able to work and afford the amazing toys our generation provides… (me)

Did you know that Popeye had a bulging eye?

…and the animation preview of the upcoming Popeye movie has the wrong eye!

Maybe it was the memories resurrected by the seagull shot in the previous post, but I remember Alki Beach. I used to supervise the bus end of the Water Taxi service there and it was always a fun summertime adventure. There is no prettier town to be in than Seattle on a warm clear day! My neighbors might contest that as we roll into another postcard winter, high up here in the Rockies but, what evv err…

There’s a new study just released by the Bacon Eaters Against Vegans council which claims that eating raw carrots causes Cancer. They also state that the risk can be reduced significantly by boiling the carrots for several hours and the only really safe way to consume them is to eat them when they turn to mush.

Then I hear that Boehner and his GOP goons are pushing through a two-year budget deal that would fully fund Obama’s rogue operations through 2017. How are they going to pay for it? With cuts to Social Security and Medicare of course.

And finally, the Mormon Church in Driggs has constructed a battery powered antenna in the corner of their parking lot, to talk with God, I assume.

I don’t know what this world is coming to but in the meantime I’m going to go make myself a bacon lettuce and carrot mush sandwich…

Yellowstone had a record number of visitors this year and the nice weather brought a few more people up to the park this last weekend. The wait was a bit long, trying to get fifty lanes down to twenty can be a challenge, but the park staff handled it well.

I just unloaded my camera containing a couple shots from yesterday evening and some more from this morning’s drive up to North Leigh Creek. Click on Steph’s stuff below to see all nine of them.

Here’s a video I shot of both sides of North Leigh Creek from the little bridge:

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!

— Mike Tyson

The Driggs Farmers Market is winding down, one more Friday left next week. Whenever I can give our local organic farmers my business over Broulims imported produce, I do with pleasure. Today I picked up some fresh spinach (we make our salads with it now, over lettuce), some green onion things (she called them something else) and a greenhouse tomato.

When I stopped at the liquor store across the street, Larry had a box by the door full of excess tomatoes from his greenhouse, that he was giving away. I snagged the biggest one and he told me it’s called a Mortgage Lifter because of the size and saleability. It’s the one on the left. I’ll slice them both up this weekend and determine which one I like.

While on the subject of organic, Steph wants to rake up leaves again, before the snow.

I present this:

Earth, among other things, is fantastic at recycling. Whether through the water cycle, or the slow process of decomposing plants and trees back in to rich soil, the Earth wastes very little.

When leaves fall to the ground, they begin to break down and eventually create a rich humus on the forest floor that absorbs dew and rainfall. This nutrient rich ‘sponge’ acts as a continual source of nutrients and water for trees and plants, helping to promote life and plant health in the next spring season.

It is not difficult to conclude that while the falling of the leaves protects the trees through winter, it’s likely that trees would not survive as well without the rich layer of dead leaves through the warm spring and summer months. In this way, trees natural cycle provides health and sustainability for itself year after year.

Saturday update: I just sampled both tomatoes and the market tomato won. Larry’s was delicious, but the market tomato was amazing! The lady that sold it to me said it was grown down by Swan Valley with Miracle Grow, so it wasn’t organic. Who cares!

Sometimes you come across an image that wraps your current existence into a weird tight little ball and spits it right back at you. In my case: groveling for work hours from my employer now that I’m back driving, with a hip going south down to Lake Havasu.