June 4 – 10
Surprise! I’m a week early for my two week post cadence. Or is that 3 weeks early for my monthly post cadence? 🙂
Let me start by sharing that I’ve worked today a bit on the blog’s web page. Given it was incredibly painful to scroll to the bottom of the blogs to read from the beginning or find something in the middle, I’ve added a “Table of Contents” menu item on the front page which you can navigate to various web pages that have links to the related blog entries. For those of you reading this via email, here is the link if you are so inclined to take a gander: https://seekingsimplicity.blog/table-of-contents
I know there are tons of improvements that could be made to the site, but there are only so many hours in the day and making the blog “pretty” isn’t on the to-do list. Maybe in 3 years.
Still making progress on wrapping up the solar system project. The last bit to do before I consider it complete (enough) is finish filling the holes. The ground rods are now all buried. I just have to finish filling in the monster hole I made when connecting the trenches for the power conduit between the solar panels and the shed and 2 of the 4 ground rods I buried for the project. I’ve got it about half filled in and should have it done this week. I estimate another 2 – 4 hours of work left to do on it.
As with most things I do, I’m filling in the holes the hard way – by hand with my operational tractor sitting idly by laughing at me. Why??? you ask. See the first sentence of this paragraph – I have a tendency to do things the hard way. Okay, seriously, there is a reason for my madness other than a new exercise routine. Here is my thinking. The ground is very dry out here, even at 4-5 feet down. I would think ground rods would operate more effectively with moist ground, so I devised a way to help with that. First, cover the rods with 2.5 – 5 cubic feet of peat moss. Wet the peat moss down for immediate improvement in conduction. Second, separate the dirt from the rock. This is where all the manual labor comes in. Not because I don’t want them mixed, but rather because I want to have nothing but a layer of rock on the top 6-12″ The space between the rocks in the rock layer will give water a place to collect when it rains and it will sink mostly straight down through the dirt to the peat moss which will hold moisture and share some with the surrounding dirt for the duration of the monsoon season and beyond. That is the intent anyway. During the monsoon season this year, I’ll make sure some of the water running down the landscape is directed to these trenches and that one over flows to the next and to the next.
I’ll do a blog post dedicated to the solar system later sometime after I get it all done.
I might have had the hole completely filled this week but I lost a day due to a nearby wild fire.
Yep. You read it right. Wild fire near by. VERY near by. I had cleaned up and walked out of the trailer to head to Douglas for some shopping and dinner given the forecast called for a chance of rain (it had been sprinkling on and off in the afternoon). For what ever reason I looked up and to the right at the mountains and said: “OH SHIT. FIRE!” I called it in but seems that I was late to the party as others had already called it in as well.
It was started by a lightning strike on the mountainside to the south west of me. No I didn’t evacuate. It was on a mountainside that had very little fuel to burn and was toward the top of the mountain. Fire will burn up a mountainside very quickly, but burning down a mountainside is a slower process. Initially the winds were out of the south driving the fire along the top third of the mountain in my direction (north), but thankfully the wind shifted direction and started blowing from the north which slowed the fire’s progression northward. Did I mention that winds change direction around here in the summer and you never know which way it will be blowing from. I suppose you could check the weather forecast and memorize the wind speed and direction in relation to time of day for each day. I digress. Back to the fire. The fire where it was didn’t worry me too much but I knew there was a risk that the winds could shift and blow embers toward the base of the mountain or a burning branch or cactus could roll down the mountainside igniting a fire at the base of the mountain which would be far more worrisome.
The Arizona Forestry wild fire fighters showed up about 15 minutes after I called it in (presuming they were already in route from the earlier calls). They spent a while assessing the situation. I went and provided them my contact information and offered them water from my tank should the need arise. Shortly there after a plane showed up and started circling the area. Probably 30 minutes after that a smaller twin engine plane arrived and also started circling the area at a much lower altitude than the original. Some time later a taker arrived. The twin engine got in front of it, they circled a couple of time. With the twin engine plane showing the tanker the path and location of where to dump, the tanker finally dumped its load. Then another tanker. And another and another. I lost count around 7 because I got a call from work to help with a problem, but I think there had to be more than 10. At one point I think there were 4 planes circling the area – the one higher elevation, the twin engine, and two tankers (might have been three tankers at once). I took video of a the first few. There was one I wish I had video of though. The tanker was diving to dump it’s load and it’s path after the dump was right over my trailer as it was powering up to climb after the dive and dump. Sadly that was while I was pounding away at the keyboard troubleshooting the issue at work while sitting in my lawn chair outside monitoring the fire fighting activity.
As they were dumping it was clear to me that the fire was also on the far (south) side of the mountain (might have even started over there) and that fire was far worse than the fire I was looking at on the north east side of the mountain. They dumped a lot of fire retardant over there compared to the side of the mountain facing me.
Regardless, by the time they wrapped up aerial operations, from what I could see the fire appeared to be down to just smoldering with small pockets of flame here and there. The firefighting crews that had showed up while the aerial assault was progressing ended up leaving for the night to return and begin their work the next morning. They posted a lookout at the end of my road and I imagine there were also overnight lookouts posted at other locations that had good visibility of the other side of the mountain which faces Tom and Alicia’s place.
The ground crew worked on the fire for two days to make sure it was completely out.
And now for the pictures.
I also have a fair bit of video that I took of them dumping retardant. Sometime I’ll sit down and piece the videos together into one video and upload it to youtube.
And with that, I bid you good night.
Cary
Seeking Simplicity 