Marty came by for a visit around noon. After a brief session of shooting the bull we loaded a ladder on the golf cart and went over to my brother’s chickens to collect the eggs.
Wrong ladder
From there we rode on up to our water tanks with the ladder. After trying the ladder on the tank I decided it wasn’t safe and was too short for the job, so we took it back home. I’ll be back with my big one later this evening.
Ride up into the forest
I got the rigs out to go for a ride. Earlier in the day, I checked the dirt bikes tire pressures and found them real low. Like the back one had three pounds in it and the front one wasn’t much better. Watching how to change tires on YouTube the other day, the guy said the magic number is 13 pounds, so I added the air in both tires. The lower tire pressure wasn’t too bad when the ground was wet, but when the ground dried out, the tires were slipping all over the place.
What a different the right tire pressure made. I wasn’t checking them with a tire gauge earlier, just looked at them and felt them which obviously wasn’t good enough.
Redwood spring
We rode on up to this spring where we got a drink of water and I collected the memory card from the game cam.
Crows
These critters were the only things on the cam, so far. They came back for water several times and knocked over the game cam too.
The pond
We rode around some and stopped to look for tracks at the pond. No tracks. There’s two springs coming out of the hill here. Don’t laugh. It’s the only pond we have. I guess it’s more of a water hole for the animals.
Peaceful spot
We stopped at this trail and walked out to were the chairs were to take a good break and shoot the bull some. It’s a nice peaceful spot so we stayed for a good while.
Another break spot
This is another good rest spot on the Talking Trees Trail. We sat on the cut logs for a spell.
We headed on back to my house from there and Marty took off for home.
Fixing the Pink Ribbon gauge
After a good rest, I got the big ladder loaded up on my Toyota and drove on up to the tanks with it.
Up with the ladder
It’s a much better ladder for this job, especially since I don’t like heights much.
Up the ladder
I went on up to see how the old ball was attached to the cable so I knew what I needed to fasten the new larger ball onto the cable. This is the pulley system to get the steel cable over the side of the tank to the gauge indicator below.
I had to drive back home to get some stainless steel wire to hook the new ball up and rode my dirt bike back up to the tank.
Adding the new ball
Then I hauled the new ball up to the top of the tank and installed it after removing the smaller black ball on the left. The new ball is much larger and much heavier so the system should work better with the extra weight.
All fixed up
I’ve got the new ball attached and will put it back into the tank to flout on top of the water. I lubed up the pulleys before coming down the ladder.
This is the weighted indicator that shows how much water is in the tank. The tank is full when the indicator is on the ground. I call this the Pink Ribbon Gauge. The ribbon is so I can see it from further away easily.
All done. I left the ladder there until I know the changes are working properly.
Tom’s chickens
From there, I rode down to Tom’s chickens to put them away for the night. I did that and collected the eggs.
Then I went back home and put my chickens away for the night.
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.
