First Day of Spring UP on the Tundra

Next time I do a video with my camera I need to do something with the lens cover so it won't make noise as I walk. Also will do a lower setting on picture quality so it won't take all day to upload.

Had to upload it to YouTube and then get the embed code from there.

Sidebar Picture

Today I finally got around to changing the picture on my sidebar.  Used to have a welcome to Georgia one (hence the Crackerland reference) and now have a welcome to Michigan one.

What the fuck does "Pure Michigan" mean???  That's some campaign from a few years back to try and entice people to visit and/or relocate to Michigan.  I guess it's better than the previous one, "Yes, Michigan", like you're going to say Fuck No, Michigan????

For Those That Like Snow

 There's smoke coming out of the chimney so the place must be warm.  So far this winter we've been nice and warm, usually in the 70s inside occasionally 80 or higher.  The stove is working very well and fairly easy on wood.  So far we've burnt about 3 tier of wood.  This winter will determine how much firewood I'll have to cut for next winter.

Like I said in the previous post, the snowbanks are a lot higher now than in the picture with the Jeep.

This is a large pulley off some belt-driven machinery.  It's a least 3ft in diameter maybe bigger.

Here I am playing in  the snow.  These pictures were taken on the 14th of Jan.  The Old Lady was trying to get a picture of the frost in my beard.

There are many jokes about the seasons UP on the Tundra.  The one I like is this: What do they do UP on the Tundra when it's Summer.  Ans. If it falls on a Saturday, they have a picnic!!

Addendum:  What I call a tier some call a cord, but it is actually a face cord or 1/3 of a cord.  It is a pile 4ft high by 8ft long and 16 inches deep.  Put three of those together and you have a full cord which is 4ftX4ftX8ft.  Unless you are buying a logtruck load of firewood, when they say so much a cord, it is really a face cord or a tier.  So I guess I've burnt a full cord of wood so far.

Maintaining a comfortable temp with a wood-burning stove can be tricky.  Either you freeze or roast unless you can control the burn, usually by regulating the air.  The more air the hotter it burns if you have good dry wood.  Right now it's mid-70s inside and 14 outside, so we are doing OK.

Back Home Again

Video showing me arriving UP on the Tundra.

Any day now the scene in the video could look like the picture in the header of this blog.

Back UP on the Tundra

 This is a sure sign that I'm back UP on the Tundra.  Did you know moose will eat blackberry brambles??  They pretty well wiped out a patch on the "Ranch".

 Part of my entertainment UP on the Tundra.  I refill this feeder everyday.  I only fill it from half full to 3/4s and  they drain it each day.  I have another feeder like this one on the other side of the house and it will last a week with the same amount of liquid.

In the evenings there will be twice as many Hummers at this feeder.  I tried to get a picture with more Hummers in it, but they move so fast, it's hard to get them all in the shot.

Added Photo at Bottom of Blog

This is basically the same view as the picture(cropped) behind the header on my blog, only taken at a different time of the year UP on the Tundra.

A week from now I should be looking at this scene in person, only not quite so colorful as this picture was taken last fall when the leaves were changing color.

Pasty(rhymes with nasty not hasty)

Looking forward to being able to go to the store and buy a pasty (rhymes with nasty not hasty as those are nipple coverings and usually not edible).  Anywho, in two weeks I'll be UP on the Tundra where pasties are available in abundance. 

For the past 35yrs if I wanted a pasty, I either had to buy one or make them myself because my first attempt at making pasties turned out better than The Old Lady's and she has refused to make them ever since!!  Talk about "No good deed goes unpunished!!"

A Project from Last Summer waiting to be finished


This is one of the projects I worked on last summer UP on the Tundra. I decided I needed a better set-up for the water pump. The point in the ground seemed to be plugged as the pump would run as long as the water was running, instead of cycling on and off as is normal. Also thought I'd make a better pump house than the one I had made out of metal and foam panels. When I pulled it apart, I found an ant's nest in the foam core of the wall panels


Water pump after I removed the box around it.

  I tried to pull up the pipe and point to see if the point was plugged or what the problem was with the water supply. After several days of working on it with make-shift rigs to pull the pipe, I finally got the pipe up, but the point remained in the ground. So I went down the road to a town large enough to have several home improvement stores to get supplies. At Menard's(a Mid-West chain) I got a 2" point( the old one was 1 1/4" and I thought bigger would be better) and four 5' lengths of drive pipe, but they didn't have any drive couplings. Then started the search for drive couplings as the pipe was useless if I couldn't connect them together. After checking all the other places that might have drive couplings with no luck, I stopped back in at Menard's to see when they expected to get some in. While asking about the drive couplings, one of the guys said they were on the truck that came in that day and another guy said he thought he could find them. A little while later he came back with the required couplings and I was on my way. Then I stopped at a tool rental place and rented an electric jackhammer and the tool for driving pipe.


Ants had made a home in the foam core of the walls of the old box.


After getting home and having something to eat we started on the project. A friend of mine had made the trip with me to get the supplies and he offered to help with driving the pipe and point down. It wasn't easy as after adding the five foot length of pipe, you had to lift the jackhammer up on top of the pipe to drive it down so it was a good thing I had help lifting that heavy jackhammer while standing on a step-ladder. One of the tricks they told us about at the tool rental place was to turn the pipe in a tightening direction while driving and it will go down easier. In a couple of hours we had the pipe and point down in the ground and when I put my tape measure down, it came back with nine feet of it wet.





The pad I poured for the new pump house.

 After pouring the pad and letting it set up, I rigged up the pump. I used a 3/4" plastic pipe with a foot valve down inside the 2" pipe. I made it long enough that the foot valve would be a foot or so above the bottom of the point. This worked good and during all the time that I ran the water to flush it out to get the water to clear up, the pump would cycle on and off and it didn't run out of water.


The pump on the new concrete pad.

 Once I had running water again in the cabin, I worked on making a new pump house. I had a bunch of cement blocks that used to be holding up a mobile home I tore down several years ago. I used them to make the walls of the pump house. For my first attempt at laying block, I think I did pretty good.

The block walls for the new pump house.



I need to make a cover for the pump house and insulate it. That will be one of my projects this summer UP on the Tundra. For the winter I laid some 2x6s across the top and put a piece of sheetmetal from the roof of the mobile home over it.

The pump in the new pump house.

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New TV

For the better part of last year we talked about getting a new flat screen TV.  We wanted a flat screen TV so we could hang it on the wall in the cabin UP on the Tundra.  The place is small and by hanging the TV on the wall it would take up less space than the old style TV.  I was all set to wait until we went back UP on the Tundra around Memorial Day, but before Xmas The Old Lady started talking about us getting a new TV after the beginning of the year.  So I decided if we are going to get one here, I may as well get one in time for something worth watching on a widescreen HDTV(32" isn't really widescreen, but both the apartment here and the cabin are small), I got one the day before the Super Bowl.

While setting it up, I noticed something, it came with a hole in the base and a screw to fasten it to what it was sitting on to keep it from falling over because the tall skinny TV if not all that stable.

At first it looked a little better than the old 20" TV, but not the spectacular picture all the HDTV ads promised.  The picture was a little sharper and could see all of the picture without the sides being cut off (16x9 picture size vs 4x3).  Then the other week while wandering around on my daily walk, I saw a good deal on a HDMI cable.  I've read in the paper and seen stuff on-line about having to get new cables for the new HDTVs, but I thought why do you need the new cables when you already have the RF (coax) hookups??  After hooking up the HDMI cable from the cable box to the TV, I found out there is a difference.  The cable box puts out different signals, the coax signal is only 480i, the same whether on the regular channels or the HD channels.  With the HDMI cable the signal for HD channels is 720p and that makes a big difference in picture quality.  Live and learn!!

Just for the hell of it, a couple weeks ago I hooked up a set of rabbit ears to the new TV.  The channel search found over 60 channels, a handful of duplicates (a half dozen or so broadcasting the same stuff on two different channels) and a couple with a signal but no programming.  Some of the over-the-air channels are broadcasting in 1080i.  When I tried a channel search with a converter box the other year, I only found about a dozen channels and half of those were BibleBangers.  It may be there have been more channels added since then or the tuner in the new TV is more sensitive than the one in the converter box.  I'm looking forward to taking the new TV UP on the Tundra and see if it works better than the boxes.  There is one channel that I wasn't able to get with the converter box and I would like to be able to get it for their local news & weather.