Controlled Clutter, Computing, and Constellations

Here is a photo of the stunning passion fruit flower, from a vine near our swimming pool.  Ain't nature grand?  The fruits are not ripe yet, but the blossoms are breathtaking.  Plus, putting this photo first in the blog post prevents the next one (see below if you dare) from being the headline photo for the post.

As of Tuesday Jun 30 we are down to about 30 boxes of our US stuff left in the garage to unpack.  That is a great achievement, but it has pretty much just moved most of the stuff into piles in the house.  Pat's been finding homes for some of it, but the reckoning for the rest will soon begin.

The hot weather has returned here on Jul 2, and it is sure to get hotter.  It is cool in the morning, giving welcome relief, and the pool is ready and waiting in the afternoon so we're staying comfortable.

Our computer table is in the front room, facing the back yard through the big glass sliding door.  The view is gorgeous and it is a great place to spend time, except when the sun is bright and backlighting the screens.  We have tried a couple fixes for that and then found these atrocious huge swivel visors, apparently used by vampires to hide from the sun.  The ads showed them rotated completely down over the models' faces, which made them look like Darth Vader wearing metal death masks.  However, they are perfect for blocking glare while allowing Gerrit to adjust his head position so his glasses are in focus.  They work even better when you make the visor fully opaque with, say, a piece of paper and blue tape.  Pat thought it would be funny to sneak a picture of Gerrit in such a compromising position, testing his visor.  He begs to differ.

Tuesday, Jul 7 was a big milestone: we have unpacked all the storage boxes from the garage!  Now it's just strewn around the house, but that's actually progress.  We have found many goodies but also some duplicates of things we've bought here.  Let the triage begin, as we divide between "keep", "donate", and "throw out".

We have been testing our low-tech white tarp for protecting the solar water heater panels from overheating, and it's been working fine.  The hot water tank gets plenty hot enough, so we know we're not covering too much of the collectors, and the temperatures stay well within their safe regions completely unattended.  This is the worst case, too: on long, clear, hot days.  As the days grow shorter and the sun moves lower we can roll back more or all of the tarp and take advantage of the reduced solar input.  Easy, cheap, reliable, low tech.

Back in Seattle Gerrit was way into astrophotography, taking beautiful pictures of stars and galaxies.  It's perfect for him because you need to be extremely picky and fussy, so he was able to let his inner neurotic take the reins.  He had the whole complicated arrangement working really well, despite being in a cramped light-polluted back yard in Normandy Park.  All the telescope gear got shipped here and our rural lot is much bigger and darker, so astrophotography should be faster and better quality while more targets will be visible.  Gerrit is beginning to unpack the gear, reading over notes he can hardly believe he actually wrote those years ago, and trying to blow the dust off the equipment and his brain cells.  We'll see how that goes.

The fruit trees are much happier and better tended this year.  We had no plums last year (along with no pears), but this year there is a nice bounty.  Lots of little green oranges can be seen on the orange trees too, which will be ripe around next February.  And here's a shot of a very strange chicken egg which we bought at a farmer's market a few weeks ago.  It is bumpy, looks like a ball of twine.  It looks like it was painful for the poor hen to lay.  We'll send it to Ripley's Believe It or Not.  (Look that up in Wikipedia if you are under 50.)

Gerrit has finally screwed up his courage and contacted an online Portuguese tutor.  It's time to get serious about this language thing.  He was all set up early on Thursday Jul 9 for his first trial session with Marco, and... Marco messaged that he was in the hospital with some kind of muscle distress.  They did get a video conference going the following day (today) though, and it went well.  Gerrit signed up for a dozen lessons.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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