A Refreshing bit of Reasonability

I was in a brew pub the other day.  I'll be giving a talk there in a month or so and needed to scope out the space.  Now there are some issues in society that could get people pretty worked up, and the last thing you want tipsy people to do is be agitated.  So I thought this sign outside the bathroom, and there are two, was extremely reasonable.  No matter what you may think on the issues of the day "wash your hands and have another beer" makes sense.  Cheers.

Treestand Graveyard

Here in Wisconsin we call 'em Thrift Sales.  In my home state of Minnesota it was usually Garage Sales.  Some places, mostly warmer weather locales, dub them Yard Sales.  In the UK, Boot Sales or Jumble Sales.  All though all these are just different names for the same grass roots capitalism the details of each sale vary widely.

Recently I stumbled across the Lost Tree Stand Graveyard.

As you can see there was also a forest of ladders.

FIRST Robotics - Reforging

 

School starts in about a week.  So also starts another FIRST robotics campaign.  Actually that's not entirely correct, we've done three outreach visits and had a work day in our new HQ.  Or our old one, it depends on your perspective.

Not counting the weird Covid year we spent one entire season working in the High School.  There were issues with storage space and shop access, and the general "mood" was less serious than one would prefer.  High School at the end of the day is a silly, silly place and some of that carried over.

So we pulled up stakes and moved.  To the middle school shop area.  Back in fact to where it all began when I started teaching Machines Behaving Badly in the middle school after school program.  I think that was 22 years ago.

In an antilogical sort of way it just makes sense.  High end equipment you are not allowed to use is worthless.  Sturdy, lower tech machines we can use, are.  We are increasingly designing the tricky stuff virtually and sending it out for laser cutting anyway.  Oh, and we found this:

This is a CNC router, an enormously helpful machine for FIRST robotics teams.  It essentially can be programmed to cut holes and shapes precisely in the very materials we use the most.  Aluminum tube, polycarbonate, sometimes acrylic.  We found it lonesome and abandoned at the Middle School.  It appears to have been bought, never used at the High School level, then handed off to just take up desk space for a year or two before we came along.  Refurbishing this is one of our early priorities.  The prototyping sub team is very happy.

Some things just don't photograph well.  So I can't show you that which made me very happy.  Oh, its just a large storage closet.  But it has a lockable door and banks of shelving reaching to the ceiling.  Much old junk has been cleared out.  More will be.  I'm normally not given to emotional outbursts but I stood there in the Promised Land of access and felt a sense of excitement that was largely absent last year.  Did my eyes tear up just a little?  I'm not sayin'.

Our biggest crew ever, most of them now seasoned veterans.  And we'll be putting better tools in their hands.

Never settle for mediocrity.

Product Review - A Cheap Deer Hunting Blind

We will be a bigger hunting party this year.  That means more locations to scout and prepare.  Last year we deployed four tree stands.  And sometimes I went with the on the ground option.  The younger generation is willing to climb quite a bit higher than I am.  In my mid 60's I think I've earned the privilege of staying attached to terra firma.

But the deer, at least those who are still around after Opening Day, get exponentially smarter and I've had occasions where they spotted me at ranges I had not expected.  So I decided a ground blind - basically just a camouflage tent - would be a worthwhile addition to our inventory.  

The local Guy Store was selling these pretty cheap.

For about 50 bucks I did not have great expectations.  It was clearly made in China and the term "spring steel" often means "breaks right away".  But up it popped.

Although billed as a two person blind any chair comfy enough to spend long patient hours in would take up more than 50% of the available space.  One option that is somewhat popular with sportspersons in our area might work....five gallon pails with insulated tops.

The camo looks different in direct and indirect light.  The grumpy looking fellow peering out looks about the same in either.

The full camo is only used during bow season, something I had considered when our prospects for antlerless tags was uncertain.  For gun season it is required, and very prudent, to have at least 144 square inches of blaze orange showing on each side.   A bit of ingenuity will be required, as I don't trust the fabric when it comes to just pinning something onto it.

Overall I was pretty happy with the unit.  It packs up nicely if you follow the specific and rather arcane instructions.  Honestly you have to twist and fold in ways that make you worry not only about the spring steel but the very fabric of time and space.

HME Spring Steel 75.  As their website has it for sale at a hundred bucks I'm feeling extra good about the price.

Dark Fishing

Out fishing with my grandson.  I looked down and saw what I thought was the discarded husk of a dragonfly larvae.  When I pointed it out my grandson, he of much sharper eyes, said "WOLF SPIDER"!

Seldom do I question his Junior Naturalist Cred, as he is already smarter than me.  But in this case he was wrong.  This is a Dark Fishing Spider.

This is a photo from somebody braver than I.  The bite of these spiders is equivalent to a wasp sting.  Usually they scamper away from humans.  But I imagine the specimen we encountered, which was guarding an egg sac, would turn and fight with little provocation.  If for some reason way beyond me you want to know more about these little horrors here's your chance.......

Deer Hunting 2022 - Opening Moves

It's been a busy summer so I have not done much hunting prep.  But it is getting to be that time again.....and the current price of groceries is nudging me to think about tasty venison stew.

My contacts in the DNR say that deer numbers overall in our county are fine, but that the distribution is spotty.  This makes sense, lots of things can have local impact.  A pack of wolves in the neighborhood for instance.  Note to my UK friends, this is no metaphor.  We do have wolves near our cabin and actually see one every now and then.  But on the other side of the equation the local gentry have started cultivating feed lots on their private estates and there is some spillover to the public lands we hunt on.  On one of my morning "deer walks" in July I counted 13 critters, some of whom were nonchalant as I strolled past at 20 yards distance.  At that range even I would have no problem with marksmanship!  (Actually I target shoot periodically and am feeling  confident up to 75 yards.  I'll stretch it out to 100 by November).

So all is in order, yes?  Well actually, no.

Wisconsin manages the deer herd carefully but not always scientifically.  Sometimes an area has quite a few deer but the citizen forums that help the DNR adjust quotas are impassioned.  There are  people who want fewer hunters in the woods to increase the odds of a small number of enthusiasts bagging really nice bucks.  Some people, example your humble correspondent, think more people hunting is more good, and that gnarly old bucks don't make for very good stew.  In our area the elitists carried the day this year and so antlerless tags (does and yearlings) are down drastically.  Given the huge preponderance of antlerless in our immediate vicinity this is a bad portent.

So we had complex game theory (pun alert!) discussions prior to the online license purchase date.  There were alternate locations and even crossbows involved.

But in the end chance came through for us.  Everyone in our party was high enough in the randomized queue to get both a buck tag (unlikely to be useful) and an anterless.  A good start to the Campaign to Fill Freezers 2022.

A New Frog

I was doing the quintessential summertime activity, playing catch with my grandson.  Suddenly he looked down and yelled FROG!  He's quite good at spotting them.  Herons would be envious.  Soon the little guy had been caught.  And remarkably it was a new amphibian species!

This little guy is a Boreal Chorus Frog.  Often heard, seldom seen.  

A small frog.  A growing lad.  A warm late summer day.

Love Among the Amish

 We have a Little Free Library in front of our house.  Its rather nice.

Little Frees are designed for the readers.  You pick up a book, you drop off a book.  Tastes vary and we don't curate much.  If something has been sitting there for six months we take it out.  Once in a while we notice something that smells too much of cigarette smoke or is a bit out there for one reason or another.  Librarian discretion there.  But recently we noticed a stack of oddities had turned up.

Amish Romance Novels.

Evidently this is a thing.  We'll leave 'em in.  They are probably not too saucy and it serves as a reminder that there are other worlds out there.  I should probably invent a new topic tag here:  The Non Modern World

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Gros Cap Michigan

We were driving along just having crossed the Mackinaw bridge into the Upper Penninsula of Michigan.  Off to one side was a small cemetery and even at highway speed a Tree Shaped Tombstone was visible.

Here's the monument, then a few words on the cemetery which proved to be more interesting than you'd expect.

A sort of white limestone instead of the customary yellow sandstone.

A member of the Woodmen Circle, the Women's Auxiliary of the Woodmen.  And a very French Canadian name in keeping with their settlement of the area.

Gros Cap cemetery is remarkably one of the oldest continuously used burial places in the US.  Starting in the late 17th century a community of Ottawa Indians lived on the adjacent lakeshore, with a population that reached 1500.  Their burial ground was much larger than the current cemetery which contains a mix of relocated indigenous graves, and both 19th century and modern European burials.  

Mouse Control Pro Tip

I spent a couple of days recently helping out an elderly family member.  House cleaning, mouse control.  Regards the latter I wanted it to be clear that the Black Flag of No Quarter had been raised.

Incidentally, Black Flag has a venerable history in pest control.  Insecticides have been sold under that name since 1833, a point in history when a few OG Pirates may have still been sailing in odd corners of the Seven Seas.....

Stealth Truck Convoy

On rare occasions I end up in the Detroit area.  On one such jaunt recently I spotted something interesting.

At first glance this just looks like a pickup truck with some odd plastic in places.  But in fact it was one of three identical trucks in a convoy.  Manufacturers plates (Texas, oddly), and all similarly decked out.

Note also the odd black and white 'dazzle paint' on the rear view mirror and below the doors.  So what gives?

Here's the deal.  New models of cars and trucks are apparently a big deal.  So much so that when they are out doing necessary road testing they don special camouflage so that you can't take detailed pictures of them.  They also travel in groups - two being more common - so that when drivers need to answer various calls of nature there is somebody always keeping an eye on the Stealth Vehicles.

Here's a bit more on the practice:  BRICK.

The loose, baggy camo that covers most of these vehicles is a bit more old school.  Here's something similar from a few years back.

Supposedly this long standing practice is not just to foil car paparazzi, but because some of these vehicles may be in an incomplete development stage and not be fully finished underneath.  Or are fitted out with special sensors for testing, and that kind of info is proprietary.  

Taking Umbrage and Casting Shade

Although generally of sunny disposition on rare occasions I do become mildly annoyed at something.  I "take umbrage".  

Umbrage is the exact opposite of sunny.  The word derives from the Latin umbraticum meaning "shade" or "shadow".  Its current English usage dates to the 1600s with the general sense being "a suspicion that one has been slighted".  Other shadowy meanings are also found in the words Penumbra and Umbrella!

It's odd how some concepts recur across many years, many cultures, many languages.  The very modern phrase "Casting Shade" is basically a way of saying that you are doing something that the slighted party may well take umbrage at.

Disclaimer, in the above photo and actually at the time of this posting I'm in a very good mood.

New Boots in the New Economy

Don't consider this a review so much as a commentary on the times.  But I will give a few suggestions towards the end.

I depend on my boots.  I spend a fair amount of time outdoors and in all weathers.  I don't care about looking stylish.  So roughly 80% of the time I'll be wearing hiking boots.  Over the years I've narrowed it down.  I like 6 inch boots, all leather, Vibram soles and of a quality sufficient to keep out water.  I wear them hiking deer trails, archaeological sites, hunting up geocaches and just up and down the hill on my daily walks.

A good pair should last four years.  Then I unceremoniously ditch them at the end of a trip.  My last pair ended up in the bin at a cheap hotel near the Newcastle airport back in May.

Good brands over the years have included QUAD, Danner and Lacrosse.  Interestingly they have all combined now into one company!

My shopping this time around began at the shoe outlet store on our main street.  Our town once made lots of shoes and boots.  But while the main company is still around everything they have now comes from factories overseas.  The combination of labor costs, perhaps the environmental issues with tanning lots of leather and the general American desire to have things cheap just made domestic manufacture impractical.

Several trips to the marked down "Back Room" and even to their main section were fruitless.  Since my last shopping experience there have been changes.  Honest leather boots are less common, with synthetics taking over.  And hard toe work boots comprise about 90% of the six inch boots.  We used to call them steel toes but you can also find aluminum and composites.  This is of no use to me as I already own a pair and don't need that extra weight/expense for daily use.

I visited several of the Big Box Guy Stores and found a similar picture.  Eventually I just went to the one with the biggest selection and tried on everything they had.  It was discouraging.

They did have a smattering of the more reputable brands.  Columbia and Thorogood make decent stuff.  But not in the styles or sizes that would be useful.  Instead there were shelves full of various "off brands".  Some are blatantly cheap looking....often the box looked sturdier than the boot.  One called AdTec was the worst.

One box I opened had a surprise.  The boots were covered with spots and droppings and a mouse had chewed a hole in one corner.  The helpful and apologetic store employee said mice like the paper stuffing that goes inside the boots.  To be a good sport I tried on another pair, one free of murine excreta.  The metal eyelet pulled clean off when I tightened the lace.

Eventually I had to compromise.  

This boot is partially synthetic.  Still mostly leather, it felt good on my feet.  I've worn them for a couple of weeks now and they seem to be breaking in well.  The "Brand Name" is Field and Forest,  but it is an import brand owned by Thorogood.  I hope I get three years out of them.

So what's going on in the boot marketplace?  

I suppose the consolidation of many of the surviving US boot makers has a tendency to reduce competition.  Most every such company now has a Chinese affiliate that makes their low end stuff, the stuff they'd not be willing to put their own name on.  Sometimes that low end is low indeed.  You read about various things going awry in the supply chain and/or in the Chinese economy, but here's some concrete evidence.

I guess the synthetics overtaking straight up leather construction makes some sense.  Sometimes technology can be both new and not total crapola.  But the weird swing to mostly safety toe work boots is hard to fathom.  It's not as if the US is suddenly rediscovering rust belt style manufacturing.

If it were we'd probably be making decent work boots on our shores again. *                                   ---------------------------------------------

* Fair is fair, some companies still are making work boots in America.  Thorogood which I've already mentioned, Redwing boots over in Minnesota, and to some extent the Lacrosse boot conglomerate all make domestic products.  So does Wolverine.  Keens are made in Portland Oregon which may or may not be part of the United States depending on your point of view.

Damp and in Mourning

Maybe it's an accident.  But every now and then I stumble across a really neat picture.

I was out geocaching.  It had been raining but for a few minutes the drizzle stopped and the sun came out.  Looking for the cache I instead noticed this:

It's a butterfly called Mourning Cloak, and it seemed a bit disconsolate.  But they must be accustomed to this sort of thing happening and I assume it was dried out and fluttering away in short order.