Winter is
definitely here. The temperature has
been down to 16° and we had up to 8 inches of snow. It has mostly
melted now but when the next batch comes it will be here till spring. The woodshed is about as full as it is going
to get. The Westfalia is stored for the
winter. The wine is pretty-much on its
own for the next 7 months. The
neighborhood power has already had a half-day outage and the house that I am
caretaking across the street had its own private power outage but didn’t
freeze. The apples froze but not bad
enough to ruin them, so we have a good supply and still hope to make some
cider.
I have a new picture album online of fall colors.
So I am
inside a lot more now and have
a pile of mapping, historical preservation and
website maintenance to do. I am managing
to weld some of my interests together by creating slide presentations for civic
groups about topics tailored to their interests. I did a slide show for the Panorama Gem and
Mineral Club on the history of mining in Stevens County. I put in several plugs for the Preserve
America project and made an Adobe PDF of it to post on our
CrossroadsArchive.org site. (It was too
big to upload from home, so it is not there just yet.) A guy from the Spokane Rock Rollers saw the presentation and liked it so much that he had me give it again in Spokane. I also extended some of the material from
that mining history for an article that promoted Preserve America in both the
rock club newsletter and a local paper about mining around Northport.
The real holy grail for communication on the Internet is not Power Point Slide Shows, Adobe Print files or anything
in HTML on the Internet, it is video.
Internet users with DSL lines and Smart Phone users (I am neither one
right now) tend to open up those YouTube videos and their ilk more often than
text and pictures. I have been working
with Bill to see how to leverage the Power Points into video. We are close but not there just yet – of
course by the time I get that together we will be wanting to build them into an
"app” that runs an appropriate video when you are near the actual place it
talks about on the ground. As my
old boss, Blanche Estep like to say "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get”.
Speaking of catching up, I have been trying to
get some trail maps from the draft stage to the finished stage so I can bill
the government for more work on the trails project. I have been slipping a little history into
those too. The Hoodoo Canyon trail may
mention the death of Bill Yake’s Great Uncle, Erwin Yake, who by some accounts
died near there.
Cheryl’s birthday
came just before Thanksgiving and we celebrated at home. She got a lot of cards including an
especially nice one from Dad. I got her
a new computer monitor so she is not sitting in front of a cathode ray tube any
more. Actually I didn’t get it installed
until Thanksgiving Day which we also celebrated at home.
The
biggest event for Thanksgiving
though was installation of our new bed. We did the shopping, bought a bed, found a
friend to help bring it back here, moved stuff out of the living room, Cheryl
cleaned it up and we put the bed together on Thanksgiving day. Every day since then we have made progress on
vacating the old bedroom, finding places for furniture we don’t have room for
right now and starting to disassemble the forms so we can remove them and use
them to make a shed for Dad. Throw in a
little time to put up Christmas decorations, to write and send
newsletter/cards, to buy, wrap and mail presents… and you have a formula for
another crazy month.