July 2010

Tuesday July 20th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

I have been having trouble making my deadline lately, so today I am starting the day with my update before anything else. I try to post Tuesday and Thursday at 1pm. Lately I have been as much as a day and a half late, and that is not acceptable.

This coming weekend is arguably the biggest event weekend of the summer around here. It is Hog Wrestling weekend at the Caldron Falls Bar. Hog wrestling weekend is always big. This is nothing but a wild guess, but I’d guess at about 5,000-8,000 people that come to see the spectacle annually.

The premise is simple. Start with a pig in a ring full of mud, and add people that try to catch it and set it on a barrel in less time than the other teams. The hogs are clearly at the advantage with the mud and all, and it ends up pretty wild.

The event is huge, with live music, vendors, food & drink, and tons and tons of people. It is a really wild time and really fun, but is not family rated.

Along with the masses of people this weekend there is always a very significant law enforcement presence to keep the order. It is not just arond high Falls Flowage, but the whole area.

As always I am going to urge you to use designated drivers, shuttle buses, or to stay put once you start with the happy hour. If you are driving within 30 miles of the place and have even a minor infraction you will probably get pulled over. Use some common sense while having a good time and it isn’t a problem. It is always a very fun weekend with all of the people around, but don’t go getting an OWI about it.

Beyond the Hog Wrestling we have the Doty Firefighter’s Picnic Saturday 7-24 Doty Town Hall ( T & Star Lake Rd 1 mile north of 64). If my memory serves me it is just north of 64 and just west of 32.

The hot topic recently has been the rain. We are a good bit above normal for the last 6 weeks. In July alone Rhinelander saw a little over 4″ (4.11″), about double normal. Crivitz came in a little higher at 4.84″.

Green Bay since June 1 has tallied 12.76″, 7.34″ above normal. I am going to guess that we are a little ahead of that, I recall June bringing us over 9″ of rain according to the NWS. The TV just showed Rhinelander with 15.5″ of precip since January 1, and Green Bay with, get this, 21+ inches.

We needed it, it was a D-3 heading into D-4 drought, and it was a 6 year spell. Swamps that never got dry were sedge meadows. I have willows growing where the pond used to be 3-4′ deep. Personally I don’t think that we are all of the way back yet, though 12 or 14″ of rain in 6 weeks is a fine start.

Looking ahead, I am seeing flashbacks of the Silver Cliff Split.. That is where it rains everywhere but here and Forest County. Yesterday’s rain pounded north, south, east and formed right over us, sparing us and Forest Co the heavy rains that other nearby areas saw. We did get some, just not the inch or two that came with some of the bigger cells.

Looking at the NAM and GFS there will be rain in the area this week, but a lot of it somewhere else. As the various waves come, they have it shown north or south, around us, but not here. I am not sure if the models learned from the last 6 years and it’s a habit, if the Silver Cliff Split is back, maybe I’m just paranoid about it returning, or  (D) All of the above…

Anyway there is rain possible almost daily this week, except Wednesday night, which might be partly cloudy. The weekend looks great with partly cloudy skies and highs around 80 and maybe just a touch above.

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Something that has come up lately is the area code thing. They are running out of 715 phone numbers so they are doing an area code overlay. Now when you dial for example, Rapids Resort, you need to dial 715-757-3358, and with a 1 first only if you are out of the area code.

Here is the interesting part… Those unfortunate enough to still be on dial-up will need to change their access number so that it dials the 715 number first. We have had a few calls about that from our computer service customers.

I received my wide angle 18-55mm camera lens this week, and usually there is a tradition of breaking them in on a sunset or wildlife tour. We might have a slow loading page in a few days with some new pictures.

–OT__

E-cigs.. I have been pretty excited about my e-cigs the past few weeks. The number one reason? They have my smoking in half and declining fast. This isn’t about going through the hell of quitting for the 100th time, it is about looking up and going wow, I haven’t had a cig in 4 hours. That doesn’t happen! Yes, now it does.

The cigarettes are killin me slow, and to get off of ’em I’d give a toe up. This is the only thing that works so far. It is better, cheaper, and healthier, so I’m pretty excited about ’em. I even bought a treadmill and use it regularly.

Go read the comments on the petition here or here. If that is not compelling, check the obits for your name.

So I got this wild hair that since I spent a lot of time and money researching what works the best,  and that they save lives, I am going to make these e-cigs and the juice for them available up here. I am still sorting through just how that is going to happen.

In the meantime be aware that I can get them. As far as juice,  I have 9  flavors in stock and when my flavorings come later this week, there will be something like another 15 in development.  At some point I plan on a tasting where people can check them out.  I switch between two, and today’s flavors are apple pie with a touch of caramel, and orange cream. It sure beats Winston.

This is way way off topic, and I have a lot to share,  so I am going to set up a different page for it. Look for it where the Ubuntu Linux page was.

Well, I had better scamper on. I skipped cutting grass last week and now it is halfway to my knees. The raspberries are starting to come in, and I’d like to see what is up with those too. If I work real hard today I can do that and a sunset too. First the work, or it will never get done.

Have a good Tuesday and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday July 15th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

We had a pretty good storm come through yesterday afternoon and last night. My sources are saying about an inch of rain, I am guessing it was about double that. There were a lot of big puddles.

The storm brought heavy rains, off and on lightning, and occasional wind. In my travels it was not destructive. I saw one tree down, and I have a dead branch about 2″ across down in the back yard. Rumor has it that Wabeno was out of power for a while last night, maybe it hit a little harder that way.

It was an impressive storm on radar, and it brought a lot of rain. Thankfully all of that red and yellow was heavy rain and was not something more severe. I am sure that other areas got hit harder. I saw thunderstorm and tornado warnings farther south from Southern Oconto Co over to the always active area west of Lake Winnebago.

The storm was perfectly timed to bring the rivers up for weekend rafting. The Peshtigo already came up 3″ from the local rain to +2″, and should come up more or at least stay steady for Saturday and Sunday. The median flow of the Peshtigo on this date over the past 11 years is 191cfs. Today it is at 360cfs. Very nice. The Menominee River is turning in similar results with the 17 year mean of 1,470cfs running 2,100 today.

While we are talking abut the rivers being up I would like to suggest that this weekend would be a great one for a waterfalls tour. Like the rafting, with all of the rain the waterfall rivers are way above normal.  Personally I am a fan of the 141 tour.. Dave’s Falls, 12 Foot & 18 Foot, Smalley and Long Slide and on up to Pier’s Gorge. Here is a waterfall page from the county.

The weather for the weekend looks OK. Today, Friday, and Saturday look nice with temps in the mid to upper 80s. Saturday night and Sunday the NWS introduces  a 40% chance of rain. The HPC is looking for 0.1-0.25″ by Sunday morning. The NAM is showing similar totals with the storm going south and being clear of here by Sunday mid-morning. The GFS shows it hitting us Saturday night and Sunday morning with 0.5-0.75″ of rain and again only a minor chance of rain after mid-morning Sunday.

That is about it from here. My apologies for being late yet again. It has been one of those weeks.  Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Tuesday July 13th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

It is another crazy week in Rayland, my apologies for being late and disorganized.

First up last weekend was really fun. A lot of nice people were around and we had a great time. Saturday afternoon threatened with some surprise thunderstorms. We had a lot of high top thunder clouds passing through and it eventually got pretty dark. I checked the TV and apparently there were severe T-storm warnigs for Forest, Florence and Marinette Counties.

As it turned out the storm was just north of us. The TV said that the big cell was 9 miles south of Goodman (we are 20) and headed for Pembine. We never saw rain, but we had some dark skies, some big clouds and some rumbles to the north and west. Eventually it all cleared up before sunset, with us dodging the rain.

We are expecting some rain Wednesday night into Thursday. That one could go either way as far as light or heavy, depending on where it tracks. Right now it looks like 1/4-3/4″ for QPF.

The rain is a leading edge of a storm up in Canada with a second system shown to the south. As they pass by us we should have a good weekend, but I want to keep an eye on it. They have some rain coming in a big way and just evaporating about at Lakewood. Between that and the proximity of the other rain north and south, I would be inclined to not be pinned to any forecast just yet. The current one looks ok, but it could change.

I recall a month or two ago taking about how I hadn’t used bug spray but once all summer. The rains of June changed that and put the world back the way that it was. I did met a few gators in the past week, and some left me a welt. They are still not as bad as the can be, but they are certainly present in places.

Here are some weekend events..

One that I caught yesterday in the paper to add is the Crandon Lion’s Club Summerfest and Boat Sinking Saturday July 17th an the City Beach on the north end of Lake Metonga.

We had a big change this week in Northern WI. The 715 area code is getting an overlay area code. At that point now you need to dial 715 in front of local calls. Like they say in the movie Twister, It isn’t coming, it’s already here.

Whitewater rafting continues to be great. The rivers dropped after the weekend, but are still above normal. In the case of the Peshtigo, it is running at 277cfs, well up from the medan of 200CFS, and the fall has leveled off a little. Between the slope of the graph and the Thursday rain, we should still be at least a little above normal for the weekend.

Well, I am off to jump back onto a busy day. I will return soon. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday July 8th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

After a long break and big weekend there is always stuff to catch up on that didn’t make the first report. First on my mind is the two site visitors who slipped me a donation over the weekend. Thank you very much. It was a rough week, and it really helped.

Second is to emphasize the poker run and swap meet this weekend. It is a big deal. There are ten local trail stops, six that offer free camping, and even road service by the local custom bike guy, Super Dave. Check it out here.

Item three is whitewater. We are looking at a good weekend for rafting this weekend. We have had a good bit of rain in both the Peshtigo  and Menominee River watersheds. Looking at the various USGS sites, the gauges are showing 1.2-1.4″ since Monday. Athelstane Weather is showing 2.13 for the month, and since it didn’t rain on the 1,2 or 3rd, that is from Monday on.

Right now both the Pesh and Menom are running just under their 80 percentile, meaning that on this date, 80% of the time the river is lower than it is today. Add in the rain today and yesterday, and there is a lot of promise for a very fun weekend on the rivers.

Someone asked a few weeks ago how the Ubuntu worked out. I never followed up that page. It works great for some stuff. The computers used in the photo concession on the Menominee River outpost of Kosir’s is 100% Ubuntu/Linux, and it works great. It is faster than the Windows and rock stable. We also use it on the slide show computer when we sell the pix at at Rapids Resort on the Peshtigo. Again it works good no problems.

As far as my goal of turning this machine into into a 64 bit Linux video editing monster, no joy. The Linux video editing programs just aren’t up to snuff with the Edius and Premiere Pro that I use now. You kind of expect that, they are very expensive programs. Those programs are too complex to emulate through Wine or a program like that.

As far as everyday use, I am all for it. I can have Ubuntu loaded and be surfing on the net on a reasonably modern computer in 24 minutes. You don’t need anti-virus (really!), and there is a mind numbing assortment of mods, plug ins, and programs. It recognizes and installs my wireless card instantly, and finds the network.

Unlike Windows, I can pull a drive from one computer and put on a totally different one and put it back in with no ill effect or driver dramas.

It works good and is FREE. Your mission.. finding which plug ins work best for you. The ones that start with K are usually top notch.

Next up on the tech to try list is an SSD, a solid state hard drive. It is a hard drive made up of memory chips. It has no moving parts, and is way faster than any hard drive. They were very expensive, but prices are dropping.  The part that I like is that it has 2-4x the sustained speed of my SCSI 320 stuff, and that is a low end SSD.

When I video edit at the raft company I have to get it done as fast as possible. This would be a huge help for me, making everything significantly faster.

It won’t be this week. I had a bad week. Maybe next week things will look up. I haven’t researched them too much recently. This is actually the second one that I clicked, but it is an example.

Anyone need a cheap Nikon lens for a D40, D60, D80, D90? I have one that will go on E-Bay if no one wants it. I had a little slippery rock incident while shooting a rafting trip Monday and splashed it. It fogged up and I figured it was shot. I ordered a new one overnight air out of NYC.

After a day in a bag of rice it cleared up. The glass is nice and clear and it works fine. It didn’t go under, and it never had water in it, but it got splashed enough to fog it up a little. In the meantime I got a heck of a deal on a much fancier lens.

While it is fine, there is a risk that it could mold up if it is stored wrong (humid), so I am selling it cheap. It is a Nikon 28-200 Nikkor ED 3.5-5.6G lens. I probably paid $300 or $350 for it in ’08, and a C note takes it. The glass is clear and it works good.   Ken Rockwell even likes it.

Sliding back on topic..

In my travels to Lakewood/Townsend/Carter I saw that the storm a while back did some damage that way too. There were trees down by roads. The paper that way, the Forest County Republican, had the front page showing a lot of damage. I kind of expected that after Lakewood’s zip code was 98% out of power at one point.

I want to thank the guy in the Fireside T shirt that gave my truck a jump up at the Carter Casino gas station Tuesday. Nice guy, offered to help, jumped the truck, wouldn’t take money. I like that about living around here. Thank you!

In the same incident, I want to thank the folks at the gas station for being understanding when the truck broke down. I was there for a little while as Chris brought me a new starter out. I was on the road in about 20 minutes once I got it, but they let me hang out for an hour plus while I waited. Again thanks!

That is it for now. I might have more to add later. If I do I will note it in the title. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB