Kelsey Bacon

So, I have finally put a 1TB drive in where the C: drive is, and installed Windows 8 on my primary PC.  This is a good thing, because just as I had adapted my netbook PC with a 750 GB C: Drive, and Windows 8, guess what?  The power supply seems to have died!  Typical, eh? 

Of course, none of this matches to the fun of yesterday!  There were four horses running all around the road by the far end of the field, and they had our two really worked up, which I would not care too much about apart from the fact that I know there is bad fencing down that end.  So I grabbed Jordan and hurried down there, in my grandmother’s van.  The horses started to run off, but not knowing where they lived, I supposed that they belonged to the people across the road from that end of the field.  So I pressed on with the intent of guiding them back to their home.  The four horses were running alongside the road, a little ways off, and I was of course driving on the road.  Suddenly they veered up onto the road, and one of them kicked the right front quarter-panel of the van, denting it in and cracking the paint.

Total cost of the repair, $1,127.97.  Luckily the deductible is only $100!

I think that the result was the lesser of the two possible evils too, because if our horses had tried to run through where the fencing was bad, they would have cost us a whole lot more in vet bills!  I also discovered that the part of the fence that was bad is now much worse, and all that remains there is a single electric fence wire.  Clearly, we have got some repairs to do!  Ad it to a long, long list! 

This year, today marks the day id finally got cold enough to endanger our home’s water supply.  I found it out at 3:30 in the morning.  Khallarnie woke up and cried for a bottle, which is rare as of late, but I needed the toilette, so I volunteered to go get her a bottle.  I flushed and did not hear the water running to fill the tank, and when I went to wash my hands only got enough cold water to do just that, just barely. 

When I went to the kitchen after to get the bottle, I double checked there just to be sure, and there was no water at all.  So that confirmed in my mind that there was a freeze on the water line.  I went back up with the bottle and fed the baby.  After she fell back to sleep, I got up, much to the surprise of my missus.  “Can’t it wait till morning?” she asked.

“In the morning we will have people wanting showers, or coffee, or lean dishes or flushed toilettes and so on, so I’d rather just sort it out now, and hopefully before we end up with a busted water line.”  That was not entirely true because I knew that when my cousin had put in the new water line from the main to the house, he used a flex line that allowed for expansion, and would not bust when it freezes.  I also knew that he ran it through a basement window rather than use a masonry bit on the wall, so why ever he did that, it would likely be there that it is frozen. 

I gathered my wife’s industrial heat gun that she bought for embossing, and dressed very warm and with two pairs of socks because I knew there was going to be water in the basement.  The first stop was out front with the kettle in hand, and a visit to the frost free hydrant by the garage.  That worked just fine, and I filled the kettle up for a coffee.  That confirmed my suspicions that it was us, not the city, who had the water problem, and isolated that problem to roughly the basement window, as suspected. 

After a hot drink, I climbed into the basement and retrieved the electrical cord from the sump pump, which was running but not pumping water out because the outlet pipe is frozen solid.  Okay, I won’t be plugging that back in, and that is also likely how my grandparents have burned out numerous pumps in the past on this house.  I brought the cord over to the location where the water main came through the basement window and plugged in the super hot heat gun.  A couple of flexes of the main and I could hear the ice inside breaking apart.  I applied heat, and warmed about three feet of pipe to the Styrofoam in the window.  The window well is crammed full of Styrofoam to insulate, but I cut about an inch of it away from the pipe in order to get heat to it going outside.  I only had to warm into that hole for a minute and I heard a loud banging in the pipe as the water began to rush through. Just like that, and for today, the problem is almost solved. 

The last trick was to turn on a tap in the bathroom to a little less tan a quarter of an inch wide flow.  That flow should generally prevent any more freezing till I can come up with a more permanent solution, such as rerouting the water line through a basement wall below the window by at least two and a half or three feet.  Relatively speaking, that would likely be one of the easiest things to do to fix the problem, and the best.  I genuinely have no idea why it was not done in the first place. 

This is the first year that anyone has spent the winter in the house since my grandparent bought it 12 years ago, and they claim nobody did when the last owners had it before them.  So we have maybe twenty years or so of the house sitting vacant in the winters, and no history telling us what to expect.  As problems present themselves, we have got to come up with solutions that will work for many years to come in the bitter cold here.  I am told that I can expect winter days to stay as cold as –20 F  That being the case, I have to get sump water out of the basement without the benefit of a location below the pump line to drop the water into, which would allow me to keep the drain pipe below ground, or even on a down hill slant in order to keep it empty and frost free.  I also have this freezing water main problem, a busted drain I cannot access from the kitchen into the basement which is likely broken because of freezing also, and a diesel truck that will not start below 10 F unless we can get a block heater installed.  We also have windows that need further insulating to prevent heat loss.  We are currently spending more than $400 per month for heating on the house!  Draught-proofing also needs to be put around the back door, and a cold pantry sorted out as the room was only at 34 F when I went into it this morning to get to the basement door. 

It is all part of the fun and is perfectly acceptable!  I am more than happy to sort all of these problems out! 

There is a total of eight inches of snow on the ground at our place right now, and now that night has fallen here, the fog has crept in too.  The environment is more than I could have expected for winters!  The summer already proved to be warm and wonderful.

The “drawing” above is the house as it looked this afternoon at sunset.

What I want to do is come up with a better header for The Prospering Peasant as I am getting myself ready for some serious blogging on that site.  I’d like more of a woodcut engraving appearance to it.  This is clearly not the image for it, but a good practice image.

So, Christmas has come and gone, and I am busy spending this weeks allowance on a new power supply for my Netbook, which I am not happy about, and a few other things such as Windows 8 for the desktop in the hopes that it will address all of the RAM and give me more power in Photoshop and the like.  I also finally ordered my first spare for the KitchenAid mixer; a flat beater.  The next to come will be either a dough hook or a mixing bowl, though I think the bowl would be most useful!

After getting the computers all up to speed for the New Year, I want to work on a couple of things, including saving for a decent little Table Saw, and getting some fencing sorted out here.  I shot a photo of a tree today and got some of that stupid orange fencing in the background that granny put up in the summer to keep the chickens in.  Come summer, I want the chickens contained and the flower beds up to date.  I’d like some of the fencing set for horses, cows, goats, and sheep too, so that we can start getting some of each of these animals.  I would like to get started on remodeling the utility room into a prep pantry by summer!  That’s one room that is going to need some serious work!

I expect a lot of changes come the New Year, and will post them as they come, as always!

Kelsey J Bacon

Well, I cannot believe it!  I am actually posting this blog post from my Netbook again, after two years of it either not running, or running on Ubuntu, which does not support an even half decent local blog editor!  I have been awaiting this day since the license on my copy of Windows 7 decided that it was not a valid copy, even though it came loaded on my TOSHIBA Netbook PC. 

Impression of Windows 8 so far?  Well, I cannot start anything from the menu except for the desktop because the screen resolution is too low.  So, basically I am buggered from the start screen!  I will admit, that does not hold the highest importance to me, but I cannot even start an e-mail client at this point!  We’ll see what else does not work! 

Today I found a nice paisley to put in for the background of my Blog, and use for the color scheme.  After some editing in the backend of the blog, and getting the background to show up as if it were a single piece of paisley fabric, I found something that I am happy with for now! 

I also showed Kiry her Blog, the other day, really.  Anyhow, today I showed her a little about how to edit it.  Rather than dictating to me, she insisted on writing her entry herself, though I was able to put up a translation after each line.  It is the first time she has actually helped me with her Blog, which is designed to be her Childhood Journal!

It has been snowing quite lightly here today.  That’s good stuff as I am really eager to get some measurable snow on the ground!  I have really missed the seasons over the past decade!  This is only the second attempt at weather this season, and here it is already the 10th of December.  It just has not been feelin’ a lot like Christmas!

Our little Umber seems to be adapting well to the almost cold weather.  Here she is in the bottom of our field, where I would like to put a duck and goose pond for the coming summer. 

Jordan’s horse, Precious, is also doing well with her field full of ice cream.  Both horses are holding their weight on just fine. 

I actually caught Jordan at some manual labor!  This is a sight!  There just isn’t much snow on the ground to shovel!  Still, grandma thanked him for his efforts! 

Just off the front step was the only sign of Dylan doing anything outside for the day.  He is not much up for working outside at all, and when he does go outside, it is usually to accomplish some task that requires a sort of diminished mental capacity. 

We are lucky here that we are almost completely surrounded by mountains in every direction.  Can you spot the two goats in this picture?

The house has a roof that quickly clears the snow off of it. 

Well, I have finally ordered the hard drive! 750 GB of space spinning at 7,200 RPM, hopefully giving the speed I need to watch a video on my netbook without the continuous skipping! Also, I am getting rid of Ubuntu and switching up to Windows 8. a few week or so after we moved to America, the Windows 7 license declared itself invalid, and stopped booting. Thank you Toshiba! But with Windows 8 System Builder available from Amazon for $85, all I can say is Thank You Microsoft!

The switch back to Windows is an important one for me, as a blogger, because of the needed support for Windows Live Writer. WLW allows local writing and layout design that cannot be done on the web based blog editor that’s built into the blog’s back end.

I obviously will benefit from the greater storage for my photography too! But with Windows on the netbook, I will also be able to load Photoshop, and do some editing there as well!

I also found my software for my color calibration device. This means I will be able to get these monitors back in line, as soon as I find the device itself!

Two years post move, and I am finally getting my computing situation back to where it was just before we left England!

By this time next week, if all goes well, I will be blogging from any location again via my netbook, and shooting and loading photos as I go!

Kelsey J Bacon

Data migration and organization, deleting duplicates and making space on hard drives while planning out a new workflow is time consuming and dull.  But I have got to get all this done if I am going to get back on top of my intended hobby!  Over the last few days I have moved a 1TB drive off a RAID enabled NAS, which is to say in lay terms that I took out a duplicate drive from a Netgear Stora, and put it into my PC tower, formatted it, and started moving files from the Stora to the drive in the PC.  File migration had to e done this way because a drive from a Stora is not readable on a PC.  Once the files were moved, it was time to move the second hard drive into the computer and format it.  Then I started moving all my files around so that they are more or less organized, though there is still a lot to do.  As Network Attached Servers go, I would not use a Stora again just for the fact that I am required to “log-in” and Netgear set the maximum number of users to 3 unless I pay for a yearly upgrade.  They wanted me to pay to access my own data on my own machines.  Forget that!  What’s more, the log-in software seldom worked correctly in making a local connection, and required a “Remote Connection.”  Who knows just what that means, and how much logging is being done by Netgear during such a connection!

So, Netgear’s Stora is falling away from our network, and I am waiting for some items to upgrade my Netbook computer to Windows 8, on a 750 GB Hard Drive.  Snazzy! 

Okay, that’s all boring stuff, but I needed to document it in my little journal here!  What all of this means is that my blogging and photographic workflow will be improved by Christmas!