I noticed these flowers were blooming this morning as I went by them. Aloe Vera flowers.
These volunteer raspberry plants are growing better than the ones in the raspberry patch, likely because this area got mulched before the raspberry patch did as it’s right outside the blueberry patch.
The berry vines have lots of little buds on them so we’ll be in the raspberries soon.
Helping a neighbor
I had been talking with a neighbor about helping him tap one of his springs and was curious what his spring area looked like so I hopped on the dirt bike and rode on up to his place for a visit.
This is road up to his place.
And this is a view of the coastal mountain range looking west.
Neighbor’s place
I pulled up to his gate and parked the bike in the ditch. The dogs came out barking and I couldn’t rise anyone so no one was home.
His spring
I jumped back on the bike and started to head on home when I decided I’d go have a look at his spring as I knew where it was, not far from his house, just up the hill a bit.
The springs were in some big ferns which I pushed back to find the water which had a good flow to it. I would have measured the flow if I had a gallon can to do it. So at least I thought it’d be a good idea to set him up to measure the flow so I kicked up a small dam with my feet and installed some pipe that was laying around the area.
Pool of water
Here’s the little pool of water I made and installed the half inch pipe. The pipe does two things. It collects the water so I can measure the flow and it diverts the water out of the ditch, so after a time the ditch should dry up unless there is more water coming out of the ground in the ditch. If more water comes out of the ditch below, it mean another spring that could be tapped. There was enough water to fill the half inch pipe which meant it was a good flow and worth tapping.
Shed
I checked out this littlie shed near by to see what it was.
It turned out to be a pump shed. The spring he already has tapped serves a couple neighbors besides his place and with the drought there’s not enough water for them all.
One neighbor has solar panels for his electric pump. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with all the pumps but I’ll find out when I catch up with the neighbor.
Good spring
Even though the neighbor wasn’t home I found out what I wanted to know about the spring he wants to tap. There certainly is enough water there to be worth tapping it, more than enough water.
Gate out
I hopped on the bike and headed on home going through the gate on the edge of their property. There’s a hole in the fence on the left which is good as I can’t seem to remember the gate’s combination.
I headed for home going the long way just for the ride.
Downed tree
We’ve been having some strong winds the last few days which knocks over old dead trees. I ran into this one but it was too heavy for me to move so I turned around and found another road.
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.
