The unexpected can be a good thing.....

 7:24 am - Friday - October 30th - TWW - 52° F, humidity 82%, cloud cover 92%, wind 15 mph out of the south by southeast.....heavy cloud cover today with rain on the way, and a forecast high of 54° F.  On this date in 2015 TLE and I were in John Day, OR....

....at the fairgrounds.  We've been through John Day twice over the years, and it has always been in October when the leaves are changing.  The view this morning....

.....supposed to be raining by now, but it's not, and that's okay by me.  More rain equals more weeds, and we've got enough.

We're not usually outside working before 10 am, but Thursday we were out by 9 am.  We wanted to be sure we were able to complete the installation of the new bank of solar panels by the end of the day Thursday as we were pretty sure it would be raining Friday.  TLE was on hand every step of the way first helping me carry the solar panel rack we had assembled Wednesday over to the site we had chosen.  Then we moved the four 195 watt Eco-Worthy solar panels over so we could begin to attach them.  Frankly, I thought this was where the 'Hockwald Way' would intervene, but it did not.  Within an hour we had the panels attached, and wired together in 'series'....

.....next I ran the 100 feet of solar cable from the solar panels over to the Newell.  It's only about 65'  between the two, so at some point I will shorten them.  I had to install MC4 connectors to the solar cables coming out of the house battery compartment to complete the connection with the 100' solar cables, which came with MC4 connectors already installed.  The spot we chose for this solar installation gets the morning sun about 30-40 minutes sooner than where the solar tracker is placed, so we think it it is optimal location.  Only time will tell.

About the time we were finishing the installation Charles and Phyllis arrived, unexpectedly with a trailer full of shelving, cabinets, etc. they had been gifted by a food bank which was closing down.  We weren't expecting them until Friday morning.  We have needed more shelving in the garage, so we spent the next couple of hours unloading everything, moving around stuff in the garage, and inserting the new shelving and cabinets.....

We moved all of our emergency food supply to the new shelving unit (far right).  You can also see the new to us cabinet between the shelving unit and the yellow shelving

It used to be there in the corner where the gas cans are now sitting on two new to us tables

We moved a lot of stuff off the yellow steel racks and now have more room to store stuff

....all of the pieces they brought up from Phoenix fit perfectly the spaces available, and what a difference they make!  By the time the four of us finished it was early afternoon, but our day was not done.  

It's been over 6 months since we visited Dawn and Matt's place, which is a little over 2.5 miles away.  We've been buying free range, unwashed eggs from Dawn for the past two winters, and we were just about out of eggs, so around 12:30 pm TLE and I headed over in the Yamaha to buy 5 dozen.  Since we were last there in early April she and Matt have completed the new goat pen they began building last December.  We visited for a short while, then headed back to TWW.

By this time I was totally ready for a snack, and a nap.  After a brief rest I headed outside to finish putting away the tools we had used to finish the new solar rack, moved the Jeep back into the garage, put away the Yamaha, and then called it a day.

Around 4 pm we headed over to the house for scrambled eggs and hash browns with gravy courtesy Phyllis, and one of the 5 dozen eggs we had just bought.  Phyllis scrambled the eggs, and Charles fried the hash browns.  We talked and ate for over an hour before heading home for the evening.

For the first time since we returned to TWW almost two weeks ago our house battery bank reached 100% charge rate late afternoon, which can be attributed 100% to the extra 780 watts of solar power we installed.  Combined with the 620 watts on the roof we now have 1,400 watts of solar panels charging our house battery bank.  Combine that with the 600 watts on the Eco-Worthy dual axis solar tracker, and the two 330 watt panels charging the trailer we now have 2,660 watts of solar power.

As I write Friday morning around 8:15 am, the forecast rain has arrived....thanks for stopping by!

There 'he' is again......

 7:41 am - Thursday - October 29th - TWW - 41° F, humidity 47%, cloud cover 51%, wind 15 mph out of the south by southeast.....cloudy today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2013 TLE and I were in West Jordan, UT.....

....courtesy parking in front of my brother and sister-in-law's home.  Took a little effort to shoehorn the Newell and American trailer into that cul-de-sac.

TLE and I dedicated Wednesday to finishing the assembly of the solar panel rack, which will hold the four new 195 watt, bifacial solar panels.  It's been a while since 'the Hockwald way' reared its homely head, but Wednesday there 'he' was.  What should have taken an hour at best, took TLE and I working together, combining our two brains, two hours, but we got it done....

....for the base we used 4' x 4" pressure treated wood.  They, in turn, will be attached to 5 concrete piers....

.....which will add extra weight to keep them from being flipped over by the wind, which has happened, on occasion, here.....

....once that was done I removed the four solar panels from their packaging and leaned them against the new solar rack to wire them together to see if we had to wire them together in parallel, or could wire them together in series, which is preferred.  The voltage limit of our Victron charge controller is 100 volts, and the voltage generated by the panels in parallel was around 57, which is way under 100 volts, obviously.  Next I wired them together in series, which generated 87 volts, still way under 100 volts, so that is what we will do when we move the new rack to its location just to the north of our Newell.

We took a break right after finishing the assembly of the solar rack, then I, mostly by myself, ran the voltage experiment.  Once I was satisfied with the results I began putting all of the tools we had employed away, and cleaned up the mess created by unpackaging the four solar panels.  By the time I finished it was around 2 pm, and time for a nap.

The current weather forecast shows rain this Friday (62% chance tomorrow, in the morning) and a lot of rain Sunday (89% chance with the possibility of up to 1/2" of rain), so we should get a long ways toward filling our new IBC water totes.  A half inch of rain is a lot of rain for this area....

.....TLE had me grill two Mahi Mahi steaks for dinner, to which she added boiled spinach and rice....

....while we ate we watched game 5 of the World Series.  By the end of the 6th inning the Brewers had built a 4-0 lead, and their relief pitchers were almost unhittable, but the Rays did managed to get one run across the plate in the bottom of the 9th inning, but that was it, and that was the end of the 2026 World Series.  Not as exciting as the 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays, which went to 7 games, and could have gone either way.

Thanks for stopping by!

Water catchment upgrade.....

 7:26 am - Wednesday - October 28th - TWW - 38° F, humidity 38%, cloud cover 34%, wind 13 mph out of the south......partially cloudy today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2014 TLE and I were near Port Orford, OR.....

You can see the light at the lighthouse in the distance

....at the Cape Blanco Lighthouse walking in stormy weather on South Beach.

As you will recall, Charles and Phyllis bought 6 more 275 gallon IBC totes to double our water catchment abilities.  Once they were in place it was clear we would have to modify the length of the down spouts on two or three of them so we could reach the fill point on each of those totes.  Initially we had only made them long enough to reach the single tote.  On two of the other three the down spouts were already long enough to reach either tote.  On the final one all we had to do was move the new tote from one side of the original tote to the other for the down spout to reach each of them.  I spent about 3 hours making the changes necessary to fill the new totes....

Northwest corner of the greenhouse

Southeast corner of the greehouse

Northeast corner of the barn

Southeast corner of the house

Northeast corner of the house

Southwest corner of the house

.....which should get some water this weekend when it is forecast we will get at least a 1/4" of rain.  While I was thus engaged TLE was straightening up the greenhouse interior.  Right now all we have in there are the plants we brought south from LPG&RVR, but due to recent big wind events some damage had occurred to the visqueen, and there was general chaos inside....

.....you can see the missing panels of visqueen in the picture above on the east and south facing sides.  TLE and I will repair those sections in the next couple of days prior to the new weather front arriving here on the weekend.  I also use dour ECHO string trimmer to knock down all of the weeds choking the walking paths to the greenhouse, and around the growing beds themselves.....

.....they were about 3 feet tall in places, and it seemed like I was cutting alfalfa....lol!  I am slowly, but surely cutting down all of the weeds around the house, but it will take a few more sessions before that is finished.

By the time we finished we had worked almost 4 hours, and we were both ready for a snack, and a nap.  We are finding as we work each day that we are are recovering more quickly each time, and have a little more endurance the next day, so we are working our way to being 'work hardened' as they say at Amazon.  

Later in the afternoon I spent more time assembling the steel rack which will hold the four new 195 watt, bi-facial solar panels we purchased....

.....I have a little to do before I can begin the final assembly of the rack, but by 3 pm I was ready to be done, so I'll finish it up Wednesday, then put all the pieces together, and attach the solar panels.

We had chili, cornbread and Margaritas for dinner, and watched the 4th game of the World Series in which the Rays got out to an early lead, 1-0, which the Brewers tied one inning later.  Then the Rays went up again 2-1 late in the game, but the Brewers tied it again on a homerun.  It remained a tie game until the top of the 12th when the Brewers hit another homerun to go up 3-2.  It looked like the Rays would be swept as the bottom of the 12th began, but after an error, and then 3 more hits they won 4-3 to extend the World Series to a game 5.  It was a very good game!

Thanks for stopping by!

Town and country.....

 7:57 am - Tuesday - October 27th - TWW - 41° F, humidity 39%, cloud cover 1%, wind 14 mph out of the south.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2013 TLE and I were in Ogden, UT....

....having morning coffee at "Grounds for Coffee, a legal brew".  That smile!  The view this morning.....

.....first totally cloudless day we've had in a while, and the temp will be over 65° F today!

The Post Office notified us a few days ago that the package containing the 100 feet of solar cable I ordered from Amazon had arrived, so we headed into town around 10:30 am to retrieve said package, and pickup a few groceries.  The north/south arterial was graded over 3 weeks ago, and it is still very smooth, so we're able to drive the Explorer comfortably at 25-30 mph and get to US-66 within 10 minutes.  

The drive into town was uneventful, and by 11 am we were pulling into the USPS parking lot to get our package, and while I did that TLE walked over to the Family Dollar to buy a few things for the pantry.  Within 20 minutes we were at the Seligman Market to buy some freshly made bread, some produce, and a few other sundries, then we were back in the Explorer headed back to TWW arriving there around 12:15 pm.

We spent the afternoon figuring out how to configure, and then attach two 'sail' sunshades between the trailer and Newell patio awning.   After many failed attempts at the perfect configuration we finally settled on this arrangement using only two of the three 'sail shades'....

Afternoon shot....

Morning shots

....we don't mind the morning sun hitting the 'lido deck', but really want to provide a larger area of shade in the afternoon, and this configuration achieves that goal.  The bottom two pictures were taken this morning.  Now we can sit anywhere we want on the artificial turf between the Newell and the trailer.

I also spent about 20 minutes repairing another faulty fuel line in the Yamaha....

See the split at the end of the line?

There were literally dozens of cracks in the hose, too

.....and I believe, fingers crossed, that is the final bad section of fuel line.  When we left for town I noticed a gas smell coming from the Yamaha, which was parked near the 'lido deck', so upon return I got right on it, found the problem, and replaced it.  It's always something, right?

By the time we finished with our afternoon activities it was 3 pm, and another day at TWW was quickly moving into the rearview mirror.  We watched game number three of the World Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Rays, which quickly became a blowout with the Brewers jumping out to a 10-0 lead after 4.5 innings when the Brewers scored 8 runs with two outs, and that is how it ended.  On the NFL front the hapless Dallas Cowboys managed to defeat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-21 in Philadelphia on Monday Night Football.  Apparently the star quarterback for the Eagles, Jalen Hurts is out for the season due to blood clots in his lungs.

Thanks for stopping by!

We passed 6 million all time views last night.......

 7:46 am - Monday - October 26th - TWW - 40° F, humidity 47%, cloud cover 24%, wind 8 mph out of the south.....partially cloudy skies today with a forecast high of 65° F.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I were at Lone Rock, UT.....

Lone Rock

.....on the shores of Lake Powell boondocking.  One of our top four, or five boondocking sites ever!  The view this morning.....

....beginning to get dryer after the rain.

Charles and Phyllis were on they're way back to Phoenix before 9 am Sunday.  TLE and I had planned to do a little work Sunday, but it was such a nice day we decided to take a walk, then mostly take the rest of the day off from work.....

....we covered one mile averaging just under 3 mph.

I say 'mostly, because we did do a couple of things like lay out the three 'sail' shades we've used in the past to create more shade on the 'lido deck', which will become really important this summer....

....they will be attached to the trailer, and to the patio awning to create a shady area over the artificial turf between the trailer and Newell.  Additionally, we took one of our small tables out to the garage on which to set the 4Patriots solar charger battery, so it is now off the ground, and one is no longer required to stand upon one's head to read the display.....

Much, much handier

.....and with that we were done working for the day.  There were many good NFL games being televised in our area on Sunday beginning with a 6:15 am game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Orleans Saints in Paris, France, which was won by the Steelers 16-10.  In other games the Denver Broncos defeated the Arizona Cardinals handily 30-16 to win their 18th game in the last 21 going back to last season.  In the Sunday Night finale the Seahawks throttled the Kansas City Chiefs 20-3, and it wasn't really that close.  At any rate, most of the teams for which I was rooting won.....Rams, Falcons, Browns, Dolphins, Buccaneers, Bengals, and Giants.  I think only two of the teams for which I rooted lost.

Yesterday I posted a picture of our all time views counter showing we would pass 6 million viewers sometime yesterday, and it happened....

....sometime last night.  Just a year ago we had just passed 4 million views, so it has been quite a 12 months!  Oh, I took a video of the 1969 Jeep CJ-5 idling....it is so quiet....

Around 4:30 pm I lit the Sea-B-Que to grill a couple of filet mignons TLE had been aging in the refrigerator, and grilled them to a fine medium rare....

....to which TLE added a side salad....YUM!  Shortly after finishing dinner I noted the moon was rising to the east, and took a shots......

.....that's how big it looked to the naked eye.  We pretty much lazed around all day, and that is the first day we have really done no work since we returned a week earlier.

Thanks for stopping by!