Mushrooms

Look what I found growing in my backyard over the weekend. That mass of mushrooms is about 30 inches wide.

A friend says they are edible. I say anything is edible once.

Whitney Houston Haunts My iPod

Whitney Houston died last weekend. I own her greatest hits CD containing 36 tracks, which I uploaded to my iPod years ago.  (My iPod is a sixth generation “Classic” with 160 GB capacity.)

With a total of 14,121 tracks stored on my iPod, Whitney's tracks represents a mere 0.25% of the iPod's contents.

I play my iPod during my 35-minute commute between home and work everyday and I usually listen in "shuffle" mode, which means the iPod randomly selects the tracks that it plays. In shuffle mode, the odds are 1 in 392 that the iPod will play a Whitney Houston song .

Believe it or not, my iPod played a Whitney Houston song every day last week during my morning commute. This morning, the first song my iPod played was a Whitney Houston song.

Weird!

It is still nuts!

It is the first day of February and the temperature reached 58.5° F early this afternoon on Compounce Mountain. Some locales in the state were in the 60s.

But cooler temps will prevail on Groundhog Day.

This is nuts!

It is the last day of January in west central Connecticut and the temperature reached 53.5° F early this afternoon. It is 9:50 PM as I type this and the temperature is 44°.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer.

Go figure!

Valentine Day

Driving home from work today playing my iPod in random shuffle mode, a song comes on just as I turned on to the street where my house is located. The song is an instrumental that I don't recognize.

As I drive up to the driveway, I glance at the iPod to see what it is playing. It was a Paul McCartney tune from his first solo LP, McCartney. The name of the song was Valentine Day.

With 12,355 songs on my iPod, what are the odds?

White Stuff

It snowed this morning, which represents the first frozen precipitation of the season. There was no accumulation, but in my opinion, it is too early for the white stuff to start falling from the sky.

Number 49

I assume it was the black bear tagged 49 that visited us on Saturday evening.

I was watching the news, then the screen went blank, and we lost the signal from the Dish Network satellite. That had never happened before, so I went outside to see if the dish had fallen off the roof.

It was in place, but as I was going back indoors, I hear my neighbors shouting to other neighbors, “There’s a bear in your yard!”

I did not see a bear, but the bird bath was knocked over and I didn’t do it.

By the way, I stopped feeding the birds after the last bear visit two weeks ago. I will resume feeding them when the snow flies.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Late Sunday afternoon, I joined my harmonic and her boyfriend on a hike through the woods around our premises. We went on a trek that they had done before, but some of it was new to me.

About 30 minutes into the hike, they showed me a huge outcropping of quartz. I have seen small outcroppings in our neck of the woods before, but nothing like this.

In addition to the mountain of quartz, there were shards of loose quartz in a variety of sizes scattered throughout the area. Some of the pieces were sharp (I have a small puncture wound on my hand to prove it). Some of it looked like rock candy. I had never seen anything like it before.

The photo shows me on the side of “big rock candy mountain” taking it all in.

5.72 inches

Since the early morning hours of Sunday until now, the WA1LOU weather station has recorded 5.72 inches of rain!

A Bear Sits In My Yard

In the early spring, evidence (a mangled suet holder and a pulled-down bird feeder) indicated that a bear had dined in my yard.

As I was getting ready to take a shower yesterday morning, Pumpkin Pie started barking while peering out the bedroom window that overlooks the bird feeder. I went to the window to see what was the matter and sitting on the ground in between my antenna tower and the bird feeder was a black bear.

He had already mangled and eaten the contents of the suet feeder, but the bird feeder is of the heavy metal variety, so he could not mangle it and had to snatch sunflower seeds out of the feeder with his tongue.

The bear had tags on his ears that indicated he was Number 49, who has been seen all over town this spring and summer. The local newspaper had an article about him just last week, which claimed he weighed about 200 pounds (he looked bigger than that to me).

He did not seem at all bothered by me or my family watching him for over 20 minutes. I stood about six feet away from him shooting photos and videos through the family room window and he could care less.

After he finished off all the sunflower seeds, he drank water out of the bird bath and ambled off into the woods heading in a northeasterly direction.

snow diary

Yesterday's predicted "blizzard" never made it to our latitude, so we only received four inches of snow.

Total snowfall this month is 5 inches; total snowfall for the winter season is 25 inches; still not much for a winter in these parts.

more snow lies

I woke up at 5:15 AM after the garbage men were finished rattling our garbage cans. I figured I should get up and go out to rescue the cans and recycling bucket before they get lost in the blizzard. I was surprised that nary a drop of precipitation had fallen yet despite the predictions that the snow should start around 3 AM.

Last night, K1GF was saying that the air was very dry and that the air would have to be saturated before snow would begin falling, so that is why the radar shows precipitation, but none was hitting the ground because it was evaporating in the dry air. When he said that last night, I thought that (1) the snow is going to start later and (2) the accumulation will be on the low side. So far, I am half-right.

It started snowing here at 7 AM and it is a very light snow. Gil Simmons, the morning weather guy on WTNH, is now calling for 8 to 12 inches vs K1GF's 8- to 14-inch prediction last night. Scott Haney over on WTIC is calling for 6 to 12 inches.

snow lies

The local talking heads are making much to do about tomorrow's snowstorm. You would think it never snowed in Connecticut before and that we are all just a bunch of bozos who just got off the bus and don't know how to handle the white stuff.

NWS and K1GF are predicting 8 to 14 inches of snow. If I had to bet on it, I would go with the low side of the prediction. I'll let you know who is right after the fact.

weird weather

Just like the rest of the U.S., we have experienced unusual weather.

Yesterday, the temperature reached 54 degrees Fahrenheit with high winds and heavy rain (2.81 inches recorded at my weather station). The winds and precipitation amounts are not unusual, but the temperature is sure way out of whack for Southern New England in late January.

Even at the top of the mountain, most of the snow is gone, which is very odd for midwinter. Most winters, once it snows, it just keeps piling up and we don't see dirt until the spring thaw.

Definitely weird!

red snow

It began snowing at 3:45 PM today. About an hour later, I noticed that everything outdoors had a red orange hue. Sunset was at 4:48 and the red orange light of the sunset must have been reflected by the snow. I have never seen anything like it before.

I shot the above photo about two minutes after the red orange hue had peaked.

disposable printers

We create and print our own cards for the Holidays. Time is running out and I planned to print the cards today.

Yesterday, I went to the local big box store to buy a black ink cartridge for the old Epson printer that is our printer these days. I had a spare color cartridge, but no spare black and I was concerned that I would run out of black ink in the middle of printing the cards today.

Problem is that the Epson is so old that the local big box store did not have the black ink cartridge that the Epson uses.

There was no time to mail order a black cartridge, so I bought a brand new Canon printer for $30, which is cheaper than a set of black and color cartridges.

Considering the price of ink cartridges, printers are now disposable. Next time I need ink, I may buy new printer again.

UPDATE: I printed all the cards we needed with whatever ink I had left for the old printer. I never even cracked open the carton of the new printer and I am tempted to return it for a refund.

Perseids: called on account of weather

Last night was the predicted peak of the Perseids meteor shower, so around 10:30 PM, I went outside, lied flat on the driveway, and stared up at the Milky Way for 20 minutes waiting for meteors.

About ten minutes into my outing, I spotted a very dim satellite pass directly overhead on a south-to-north path. I never saw a dim satellite before. All the ones I've seen in the past were bright, points of light, but last night's was dim. Maybe there are others that are dim and I just never noticed them before because they are dim. Go figure.

A few minutes later, I saw a meteor fly out of Cassiopeia on a southwest track.

Then the clouds began to roll in, so I gave up the quest, went inside, turned on the television, watched K1GF's weather forecast, and then Letterman until the decidedly unattractive Paula Abdul convinced me to shut off the television and go to bed.

mystery of the iPod

I am on my third iPod. I outgrew my first two because I had more music then they could hold.

My new iPod is a 160-Gbyte Classic, which I bought refurbished from Apple as a Christmas present to myself. I believe that 160 Gigabytes should hold all my music for a long time.

Although, I have added a few new tunes to my new iPod, it basically contains the same collection of tunes that I had stored on my old iPod.

Normally, I let the iPod randomly select the tunes it plays. What is interesting (my iPod “mystery”) is that I am hearing tunes on my new iPod that my old iPod never played.

Seems to me that my old iPod would randomly play a subset of the tunes it had in storage. Although the subset was probably immense, I did hear the same tunes repeated over time, but it obviously did not randomize everything because almost everything I hear on my new iPod is stuff I never heard on my old iPod.

Is my new iPod randomly playing a new subset of tunes or is it doing a better job of randomizing the collection?

By the way, for what it’s worth (or BTW FWIW), I have over 8,700 tunes stored on my new iPod. Also, my old iPod was a 30-Gbyte model.

a Groundhog Day moment

The Pies: Pumpkin Pie and Q.T. Pie

About 8 AM yesterday, I walked The Pies on the one-mile loop that we’ve walked every weekend morning (weather permitting) ever since The Pies were old enough to walk.

As we cleared the top of the hill at the half-way point, I saw a blue Subaru wagon parked at the end of the road. It belongs to a retired gent, who hikes with his dog through the woods every morning. Next, I saw the gent and his dog exit the woods. The gent opened the back hatch of his wagon to let the dog in the car and as the gent got in the car, he waved to us, then got in the car and drove away just as The Pies and I reached the location where he was parked. Just as he pulled away, a low-flying, single-engine prop airplane flew overhead in a southerly direction.

This morning, I walked The Pies again at about the same time and the exact same things happened, i.e., saw Subaru parked at the end of the road, saw gent and dog exit woods, gent lifted hatch for dog to get in car, get waved, then got in car and drove away as a low-flying, single-engine prop airplane flew overhead in a southerly direction.

Weird!