Really, Ælfred?

Jul. 4th, 2025 08:54 pm
karmicdragonfly: (Default)
[personal profile] karmicdragonfly
My partner in class is procrastinating on our current lesson. It is pretty fricken' hard to read because the spelling is all over the place. Although spelling was a "roll your own" thing in Old English, this chapter is particularly hard!

So he's translating nursery rhymes and song lyrics instead of reading Ælfred's preface to the Cura Pastoralis

Here he sent the first verse of Mary Had a Little Lamb, which I thought was fun. His rhythm was great until the last line lol --


Translating back --
"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece as white as snow,
And everywhere there Mary went,
That lamb should her follow, for sure!"

And so I answered back w/ the 2nd verse --


"It her followed to instruction one day
Which was against the rule
And the children were happy and played
To see the lamb at instruction!"

The Discord channel is turning out to be pretty decent for the class!



The music of the sixties predated me, but listening to some Jefferson Airplane tonight --

Horsetail Falls

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:57 am
yourlibrarian: Small Green Waterfall (NAT-Waterfall-niki_vakita)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] common_nature


Our last stop on the Historic 30 route was Horsetail Falls. If you look at the next photo you can see people sitting on the log stretching out into the pool for scale. .ExpandRead more... )

My first Canada Day

Jul. 1st, 2025 03:44 pm
ioplokon: Dade from the movie Hackers looks out a window (dade plane)
[personal profile] ioplokon
I really need a Canada icon...

Anyway, it's my first national holiday as a semi-Canadian. I am working because I love to get time & a half, but did still want to celebrate in some way so I am:

  • Reading Dynasties and Interludes, a gigantic history of Canadian electoral politics.

  • Registering to become an organ donor & stem cell donor and making an appointment to donate blood.

  • Watching a documentary about mining.


I may also try to go see the fireworks later, though I would rather see fireflies...

Free power!

Jun. 30th, 2025 07:42 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
We just had some more solar panels stuck on our roof, since the original set is not keeping up with our demands, now that we have two electric cars and heat pumps. Last time when we got the solar panels completed, we had to wait until they were inspected before they could be turned on, and so until that happened, on sunny days we were just sad.

This set has inverters which are smart enough to know how much power they are making and to not give any to the grid, which we are not yet allowed to do. So, we get to use the power, as long as we don't push any to the grid. This is very strange, because on a sunny day it makes more than we generally use unless using the air conditioner. Usually we are pretty conservative about when we use the air conditioner. But now, as long as the sun is shining on the new panels, "it's completely free", because the excess electricity would otherwise be wasted. So we are doing things like waiting to charge the car until it's morning, so as to use the free electricity, and keeping the house cooler. This must be how people who are fully off the grid live all the time. If your battery is full, you'd better use the power in some way.

Hopefully this silliness will come to an end shortly. One inspection is scheduled for Wednesday, and then there some other thing that we hope will be fast, because we don't actually need them to replace the electric meter with a bidirectional meter; we already have one. But, they might be stupid and decide they need to replace our current meter with a different one.

Then we will go back to our normal conservative ways, where we minimize our use and push our excess to the grid where it would offset somebody else's usage and thus delay the need for a dirty peaker plant, and bank the extra for winter cost offsets. (Net metering is kind of a scam. A nice homeowner-centric scam. Thanks, MA, you did one right.)

Nosþyrel - Nose Hole

Jun. 30th, 2025 04:59 pm
karmicdragonfly: (Default)
[personal profile] karmicdragonfly
I'm totally going to start calling my nostril, my 'nose hole' 😀

In Old English class, we are reading Ælfric's preface to his translation of Genesis (as as aside, I think he was a bit too proud of his own skills -- 'ofermod' I might even say. )

Anyways, he uses some words for body parts, so I thought I would start exploring the names for body parts.


Nose hole. Ear hole. 😃

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Oneonta Gorge

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:14 am
yourlibrarian: Small Green Waterfall (NAT-Waterfall-niki_vakita)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] common_nature


Our next stop on the trip that day was Oneonia Gorge. It has a tunnel through the rock in between the trees, though we didn't go through it. Instead, we stopped just before it to take pictures of the creek and gorge.ExpandRead more... )

1001

Jun. 29th, 2025 04:36 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Rode my 1000th mile for the year today. In fact, ended at 1001. Just about halfway through the year so that's about right; fortunately summer is longer than winter (that pesky February), so I shouldn't be concerned about making 2000, even though I'm about to have 8 days with no bicycling due to travel.

Getting ready for my trip to the International Gay Square Dance Convention in San Francisco on July 3. Which means that I will miss fireworks here. I vaguely clicked on fireworks in San Francisco and it looks like I will have to travel some distance to see them. I'll have to look at the schedule and decide whether or not I would prefer to see fireworks or dance at 9:30 on the fourth. (They don't have the caller schedule on the website yet.)

Annoyingly, I have to get some money back from Dollar rent a car; they weren't able to just add my loyalty number on the website, so they canceled my reservation and remade it with the loyalty number. And they said they would refund it. It's now been like six weeks, and I've made like three calls. It's like ridiculous but I guess I have to call them again.

today's adventure

Jun. 28th, 2025 10:00 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Today's adventure was a tour of the town's water system. Valerie had won a bid on this as a church fundraiser – a member of the town water oversight board is also a member of the church and offered such a tour.

The town's first large communal well was dug in the late 1800s as a private enterprise for people in the town center area. The operation was sold to the town some 15-20 years later and has been municipal ever since. Originally, there was no water metering; you paid based on expected usage by counting the number of people in the home and acreage and what you were doing with that acreage. Now we have metering. There are 6 different wells that the town uses in different parts of town, and they have different qualities and so some of them are only run at high summer when there's great demand, because there's a lot of iron and manganese in the earth, and that ends up giving discolored water, which people don't like. The town uses about a million gallons a day in winter and about two million gallons a day on the hottest summer days.

There is an old historic building which was used for the original pumphouse that was recently restored and is now being used as offices and labs. They did a beautiful job on the restoration, saving old rolltop desks and original blueprints and pressure meters, some for decoration, some for actual use. Then for some of the extras, like they needed a large table, so they actually built one out of wood so it would look nice with the historic desks rather than getting some Formica crap.

We then walked over to the construction site of the new PFAS removal plant so we could talk about what it was going to look like, and where the giant tanks for this and that would be. The site is also where the current pumphouse is for one of the wells, so we got to go in, and there was some handwaving of where the pipes go and how they go through a temporary PFAS removal station and then return to have chlorine etc. added. The chlorine tank was not huge, maybe three times as big as my water heater, but I guess you just don't put that much in.

I neglected to take pictures in the pumphouse or of the construction site. But I did take pictures of our next stop, which was down the road a ways, of the newest water tower. On the outside it's just a cylinder; on the inside it's also just a cylinder with a flat ceiling pretty high up. The water is above that ceiling. Hope it doesn't crash down upon us while we are standing inside it! It's fiberglass lined, and has an 18-inch concrete slab as its base. Perry was surprised that there was such a high ceiling and that the water was all the way up there; he expected more volume to be used for storage. But it's really all about water pressure and you need height for that. All of the water towers are targets for cell phone companies to put antennas; the steel ones get antenna bases welded to them, which the water guy was underwhelmed about. The new one has cell phone antenna mounts built in. Which means that they can't add any more beyond the 3-4 that they've got.

The water guy was seemingly thrilled to spend a Saturday afternoon leading people around town, answering all kinds of questions we had, volunteering all kinds of information. Apparently they are having a labor shortage problem because there's some certifications that you need to get in order to work on or supervise water systems, and people aren't getting those certifications. Hopefully they'll be able to hire some more folks soon. They have reqs out.

The big pump at the bottom of the water tower.
A machine consisting of a white cube with a 2-foot pipe coming in on the left going through it and back out on the right. On the right, the pipe splits into a shallow U shape in front of the cube and goes back into the pipe on the left. There is a 90° junction on the far right and the pipe narrows and goes straight up. There are some red things wrapped in plastic in the foreground on the left (I don't know what they're for), and some monitoring equipment mounted on the concrete wall behind.

The big pipe going up to the top of the water tower.
A curved concrete wall with a 12-15 inch diameter white pipe going up at least 50 feet to a metal ceiling with black girders. The back of a white man's bald head is visible at the bottom along with part of the pumping apparatus.

Sea Fog

Jun. 28th, 2025 01:32 pm
puddleshark: (Default)
[personal profile] puddleshark posting in [community profile] common_nature
Rooks in the Fog, St Aldhelm's Head 1

I have been playing hide-and-seek with the rooks in the sea fog up on St Alhelm's Head.

ExpandNot a glimpse of the sea )

More summer

Jun. 26th, 2025 09:57 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Now that we are in the season of sandals, we should have elegant toes!

A pair of white persons feet on a scratched hardwood floor, with dark red/maroon nail polish.
karmicdragonfly: (Default)
[personal profile] karmicdragonfly
US Declaration of Independence:
He has ... sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people....
... transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences


It has really disturbed me to see videos of ICE bounty hunters kidnapping people off the street. The latest showed bounty hunters using tear gas.

I say bounty hunters because I think that is indeed what they are -- unidentified hired thugs, masked to hide their guilt and the shame they bring to their families and ancestors.
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