Good morning!!!!

[wngsprd]

73 and rain....rained all night. Only expect it to get to 79.

LS, Happy Anniversary!

Don, Whipper is an interesting mix of breeds...a real versatile dog. I met a couple on the trail yesterday that had two dogs...a Rottweiler pup, and the biggest black Lab with the longest hair I've ever seen...must have been 120 lbs...I asked him the breed to be sure, but didn't ask if it was crossed with something bigger so as not to offend.

Been doing some mowing and work around the house. Mostly, the weeds I sprayed that got rained on less than an hour later are beginning to show tinges of yellow, so hopefully it worked.

No bees seen in the tree hole for the last 3 days.

We watched a 5 foot blacksnake climb straight up one of our front yard trees yesterday...at about 20 ft up it stretched out on a limb for a while...I went back to work and my wife called me over a little while later...it had gone into a hole in a small horizontal dead branch and water was steadily running out of the hole. I guess it was displacing some trapped rain water. We often get fascinated by the little things.

 

[Eric Salop]

Good morning, not so many bear sightings around here.

Our heat pump has been having to do an unusual amount of work this week to keep us supplied with hot water. It will be the same again today, the solar panels are on the west side of the roof and will have missed out on the delightful sunshine that we were able to enjoy before being covered by another bank of cloud.

Picked up the repaired tyre yesterday, good to have the Iseki back rolling along on 4 wheels - even if no Cherokees are likely to be chasing.

In farmed fish heavy metals are not the problem but PCBs are

Don, thanks for all the info. Am I the only one who thought PCB was an abbreviation for Printed Circuit Board ? Oh, it seems something fishy going on there too

 

[daugen]

PCBs have made the Delaware River unhealthy for a long time. Upriver manufacturing, particularly anything dealing with solvents used to clean metal, well those solvents apparently had
a lot of nasty PCB's in them and it was all dumped into the River up stream over many decades. And I'm sure the good city of Trenton NJ has added its own share of
nasties over the years. Now the nastiness is settled down deep in the silt on the river bottom.
The real problem comes with bottom feeder fish, like catfish. The mostly poor folks in Northern Philly fish in that river and if they are catching cat fish, talk about unhealthy.
Fish and Game says maximum allowable number of portions of fish eaten in one month: one portion. One a month and not sure even then it's worth the risk.

my understanding of electrical transformers is that for many years, maybe most of the years in the beginning, the coolant oil in transformers was full of PCBs. Pretty sure they have found
an alternative safer chemical now.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

my understanding of electrical transformers is that for many years, maybe most of the years in the beginning, the coolant oil in transformers was full of PCBs. Pretty sure they have found
an alternative safer chemical now.

I had a project in the 80s to replace a bunch of PCB transformers with air cooled ones.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Friend of mine got a new old toy. He was always a JD guy, then surprised me about 20 yrs ago with an orange one. Now he’s switched colors again on me.

 

[LouNY]

A 200 row crop with front weights isn't real common and then the long axles haven't been bobbed off either.
Also looks like it's got the fast hitch on it. Good looking little old tractor from the mid 50's.

 

[RedNeckGeek]

RNG, so when grid power is off and your batteries are full you can use it or loose it?

Bingo!

A big item on the "Punch List" I've been pursuing with the contractor is finding some way to determine the State of Charge (SoC) of the battery bank. If I can look at the battery voltage and know the battery is full, I can feel comfortable running the A/C and other large loads when the sun is shining. And if I can look at the battery voltage and know the battery is 80% full, I can back down the loads to protect enough capacity to run the well pumps for at least two hours in the event of a wildfire. But I can't get the contractor to tell me what those numbers are, and the battery manufacture isn't talking, either. And the contractor has purposly disabled measuring devices in both the solar power system and the battery bank that would provide that information. This would be a good place to insert the old pulling-my-hair-out emoticon...

 

[Popgadget]

Good Morning.
72 and not going to hit 80 today.
Cloudy with no more than 25% chance of rain throughout the day.

Yesterday was spent in the shop, making good progress, but little cleaning or organizing. Wednesday night’s storms (the one that woke Drew up) had a tornado touch down not far from me. The damage was very localized, tore the roof off a house, but didn’t touch the barn next to it.

Today will be in the shop, but if it dries up outside, I’ll put the 3PT finish mower on and mow inside the small pastures. Maybe even take the sting trimmer for a walk while glue cures. Last thing on the agenda is band rehearsal.

 

[txdon]

Good morning! 79˚F heading to the mid 90s lots of sun.

Had a friend ask me about the effectiveness of the vaccine now against the "D", and frankly it's all over the board and changing weekly. Since the original study did not include any variants, we are the study now.

Mayo Clinic, for example, reported high effectiveness at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection during the Alpha variant period by the Moderna vaccine, at 86%, and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, at 76%. In contrast, with the more recent predominance of the Delta variant, the effectiveness of the Moderna vaccine dropped to 76% and that of the Pfizer vaccine dropped to 42%.
But protection against hospitalization with the Delta variant in circulation remained high for both vaccines, ranging from 75% to 81%.

A full course of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was just 39% effective at preventing infections and 41% effective at preventing symptomatic infections caused by the Delta Covid-19 variant, according to Israel’s health ministry, down from early estimates of 64% two weeks ago.

Data so far suggests efficacy rates of more than 67 percent for the J&J vaccine, 72 to 95 percent for the Moderna vaccine, and 42 to 96 percent for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Buckeye that is a good looking Farmall, did he restore it or did he buy it restored?

Wngsprd, interesting observations on the black snake.

I had lizard in the garden and a baby Mocking bird on the porch.
(pics on next post)

 

[txdon]