This morning I decided to stay home and finish the van maintenance and do some puttering around the yard.
Drying prunes
I started the day uncovering the prunes I’m drying in the sun. I like the smell of them as they are drying, especially when it gets real hot.
Prunes drying on a tarp. There’s some leaves mixed in there, but they will blow away as things dry out.
Finished checking the van fluids
After that, I crawled under the van and checked my transmission and transfer case oils. I have some seal leaks, so they were a little low, so I filled them up. I was surprised to find the rear differential a little low on oil as I don’t see any leaks anywhere. I filled that one up too.
Mosquito netting for the van
Next I wanted to transfer my magnets to the new bigger mosquito netting I just received. I cut out some netting and took the magnets off the old netting. I used staples from a stapler to attach the magnets to the netting. I just made a fold in the edge and put staples in to hold it and the magnets together. I used six magnets I bought at Harbor Freight on this side door piece. I think it could use a couple more magnets, but what I have should work out ok.
Here’s the new bigger mosquito netting installed with magnets on the van’s side doors.
I also made nets for the vans front side windows so I can open them for air when I need to.
Loaf of bread
I made some dough and baked a loaf of bread and ate about a quarter of it. Yum. I’ve been experimenting with a home made yeast, no kneed method that is starting to show some promise.
Wild Blackberry vines taking over the yard
Of course all that eating deserved a nap. After the nap I went outside and mostly puttered around the yard, doing some watering and some pruning of brush. I worked on cutting some of the wild blackberry vines back that were taking over my paths. They put up quite a battle and tried to get me with their thorns. They did get me a little, but I won the battle until I got tired and quit. I know the blackberry’s will win the battle in the long run and someone else will have to battle them when I’m gone. :O)
Sitting around and doing some trip planning
And after that, I just sat around in my chairs and enjoyed the evening giving some thought to my upcoming trip. I’m headed back to the high desert in Nevada again. This should be an interesting trip if I can pull it off.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
