Good Morning!!!! 51F @ 9:00AM. Mostly cloudy skies. High around 60F. Winds light and variable.
Was all set to spray weeds yesterday morning when I noticed water on the driveway, and on the weeds. Never really dried out enough to spray, and we picked up another 0.05" overnight. The sun is trying to come out now, so maybe it'll dry off, but with no wind, we'll see. I switched to the RM43 when I ran out of Preen, and the Preen areas are still pretty much weed free. Tried to order more from Amazon yesterday, but for some reason they wouldn't apply the Amazon credit card credits to the order. Sounds like maybe Amazon is charging their merchants for the 5% credit instead of paying it themselves?
I've seen real, terra cotta style tile used for drainage runs, etc., and called it that. But anything steel, or even the big concrete sections, I've always heard called culvert. Must be a regional thing.
Nice sunset, Ted. The best ones have colorful clouds like that!
The snow goose celebration was held in Oroville last weekend, and a big flock of 'em just flew over. Their call is more of a whistle than the honk of the Canada goose, and louder, too. Lots of rice fields down in the valley, flooded with shallow water and just full of rice grains for 'em to feed on during their migration.
It seems that Cummins has discontinued the 22 kW generator I was going to purchase, and now the smallest size is 25 kW. Of course it costs more, and there was a price increase with the new year as well. And a new Kalifornia law somehow makes it mandatory that even out-of-state vendors collect state sales tax, so the building department's delaying tactics are going to cost me some rather significant bux. Good thing it's only money, and grows on trees, right?:confused2:
Got another update from the solar supplier, and even though the shipper is now taking financial responsibility for any added costs in completing their delivery, they're having a difficult time finding a company that delivers here. I think the real problem is they don't want to pay UPS or FedEx prices.
There was enough sunshine day before yesterday to try Don's sundial approach to finding true north. I set a rolling 20 minute alarm for a few hours, and ended up with about 10' of pebbles strung out in a line that was more perpendicular to magnetic north than true north. But also did some more poking around, and it turns out that google maps uses something very close to true north for its satellite imagery. I also figured out that when I was trying to use the iPhone compass, it was in Airplane mode, which for some reason prevented it from showing true north. Once that was corrected, I could see that the house is only a couple degrees off true north. So I'll probably use the iPhone to lay out the solar panel array, the only hitch being that it will end up running across slants both front to back and side to side. So I don't think I'll bother with trying to grade the ground smooth. I can just use the laser level to make sure that the array is level side to side, and I'll still cut the poles to the lengths indicated on the engineering drawing. But in order to stay under the above ground heights specified for the poles by the engineer, the array may not end up as far off the ground as I'd hoped.
It also looks like I'll need 47 80 pound bags of concrete to hold those posts into the ground. That's three trips just to get 'em all here, and there's no way I'm gonna get all that done in a day. It's turning out to be one of those jobs best savored in small doses.:laughing:
TGIF gang!:drink:
