It was showering today as I got it going so I stayed in the house for a bit. It started to let up a bit so I got on a rain jacket and rode my side by side up into the hills to visit a neighbor. I had to open this gate as I went onto their property. Lucky I wrote to combination down.
The rain showerers kept coming but with the top on the side by side I was mostly dry.
High in the hills
The neighbors live up high on the hills. I found the guy home so I said get a rain jacket on and lets go take a look at where you want to make a dirt bike track with jumps as I’d said I’d help him out with that.
Old ranch
It was showering harder as we took off and rode on up higher on their property. This is the old Jack Luttrill ranch, but he’s dead and gone a long time ago.
Dirt bike track
He showed me where he wanted to make the dirt bike track and where he wanted to put some jumps in. I don’t do jumps as I like my wheels mostly on the ground, but I have no problem making jumps with the Skiddy.
After that we took a ride around the ranch and it started to shower more heavily and then turned to big hail and everything turned white. We were shooting the bull too much and I didn’t get any pictures.
The rain showers stopped and it started to rain a lot harder. I dropped him off at his place and headed for home.
Once home, it was nap time.
Nice day.
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It showered this morning but stopped for a bit when I got it going. I was going to go out and do some welding on my fuel transfer bracket,….But.
When I was ready to go out a big shower started to pour. Each time the rain stopped and I was ready to go out, the showers started again, so I was doomed to stay in the house most of the day.
History source
About a week ago when I was visiting with a neighbor up in the hills a guy that works in the Armstrong Park was up there and he informed me about a web page that was full of history that one could look up, old news paper articles.
The page was done with grants by the University of California, so is free to use.
The written history starts in this area around 1850 as that’s when the discovery of gold in the west brought people from the Eastern United States here in numbers and also a lot of emigrants from all over the world. Before that time, there were mostly a few Indians in the area and the Russians had a settlement by the ocean around 1812 for a short spell.
My great grand father was reported at the mercury mine in 1862 at five years old with his mother that ran a boarding house at the mine. No mention of his dad. I live in my great grand father’s house and have for most of my life. My play ground was Armstrong Park, the mercury mine area and Mt. Jackson and the surrounding area of Guerneville. I played with the kids of the early guys and grow up with them. I knew most of the early guys in the area that were left, when I was a kid.
Guerneville was a tourist town in the summer for the San Francisco Bay area, but in the winter, only the locals were left so we all knew each other mostly. And most of those people’s names where the descendants of the people that made the early history of this place. Of course, those same people that I knew where also the history of this place.
Anyway, I went to the web page and started typing in stuff I knew of the area. Mt. Jackson, Armstrong park and Armstrong and such. I found that the mercury mine was actually two mines, Mt Jackson Mine and the Great Eastern Mine. I learned that at the time the mercury mine was the only mercury mine in the nation for a time and very important for war materials. I learned of Col. Armstrong whose ranch I now live on as my great grand father bought part of his ranch.
I learned that I was wrong about some of the stuff I thought I knew and learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know. The old timers names kept popping up that I knew as a kid and I learned what most of their history was that I didn’t know. I spent most of the day reading stuff and barely touched the subject.
It turns out that I’m one of the few people left that is part of that history as most of the rest have pasted on or are new to this area.
Rain stops for a bit
Late in the afternoon, the showers let up for a bit, so I went outside and let the chickens into the front yard.
Tools for the rig
I need to carry some tools on the new rig so I made this shovel holder and was working on a loopers holder but didn’t have enough clamps.
Gathering eggs
I went out to the chicken’s pen to gather the eggs and these chickens followed me thinking I’d give them something to eat. They have plenty to eat in the yard and have it better than most chickens.
With more warming weather, the chickens are starting to lay more eggs.
Rain picks back up
So, I went in and did more history stuff for the rest of the day. I barely touched the subject.
I’ve been very fortunate to have grown up and lived and played in this most wonderful spot in the world.
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.
