My plan today was to figure out all the loose wires that I have not hooked up yet. So one by one I figured each one out and hooked it up and crossed it off the list hoping I did it all right.
I worked here under the van and in the battery compartment to hook up all the power wires from the batteries to various places on the van.
Battery compartment hookups
I finished hooking up all the wires in the battery compartment but didn’t hook up the batteries yet as I was going to do that tomorrow.
I had all the wires taken care of earlier than I thought I would so I decided to go ahead and hook up the battery for the big test. Did I get all the wires right, would any burn up if I didn’t.
Must of hooked up stuff the right way
I hooked up the battery and there were no sparks or wires burning up, that’s good. Then I tried the key and tried turning the engine over and it worked.
So I used the starter to turn the engine over to set it up on the number one spark plug so I could time the distributor.
The distributor
The distributor goes down there in this spot.
I got the new distributor out to check it out. I need to make sure I time it to the engine but decided to do that tomorrow as the day was getting late.
I worked at a fairly slow pace today doing some chair hopping to figure out what to do before I started each task and one by one got things done.
Mulberries
Here’s what one’s hands look like after picking and eating some black mulberries. The red spots seem to get on your clothes somehow too.
I was sitting in this spot enjoying the evening with my chickens.
Sweet Pea
Whenever I sit down that’s a signal for Sweet Pea to hop up on my lap for a bit.
Eggs
Just before dark I collected the eggs from the nesting boxes.
Today seemed like a good day to go for a yak on the river. I was thinking I needed to go by Charlie’s to help him check out his old spring that needs to be improved as it’s not collecting much water right now and there’s a drought on.
Checking out Charlie’s spring
So I decided to go by Charlie’s first as he lived in the Monte Rio area so I drove down to Monte Rio and up a narrow road to his driveway here. His house is just down the driveway out of sight. And even though it doesn’t look like it his driveway is real steep.
Charlie’s home
I heard Charlie holler before I got down the driveway so at least he was home.
Charlie’s spring
We shot the bull for a bit then Charlie found the gate combination and I drove him on up higher on the hill where his spring is that he shares with a neighbor on this road.
Charlie got the gate open and we continued on up the hill about a quarter mile or so where the spring was.
When we got to the spring Charlie called his neighbor that I believe he said lives down in the bay area somewhere. He fed him a line of bull saying he had the best spring tapper with him and were looking at the spring to see how we can improve his water tap so they get more water.
Spring area
You can see the spring box on the right that is leaking and the spring ditch goes up beyond that.
What needs to be done
Charlie asked what I’d do so I told him I’d rip out the spring box all the way to the upper one digging out a ditch like what’s below his spring box all the way up which is a black pipe sticking up in the below picture so we can see where the water is coming out of the hill as he says it comes out in more than one spot.
Leaky dam
This wet spot below his spring box shows his dam is leaking and he’s losing lots of valuable water.
Charlie popped a board to show me how they did the inside and it was all plugged up with mud barely working.
My way of doing it
We talked some more about what needs to be done to improve this spring by getting rid of all the spring boxes and installing my kind of tap which doesn’t have a box but just a sink that collects all the water without trying to dam it up, so my type has no leaks as it has no dam to leak.
You do the work
I told Charlie I’d help them tap the spring my way if they did all the work while I tell them what to do, that way I can make another spring tapping video to show others how to tap a spring in a modern way on YouTube.
We drove on back to his house and shot the bull some more before I took off for the river at the Monte Rio beach.
The river at Monte Rio
There weren’t many people on the river today so I put my boat in the water and headed down the river about a mile or so.
I paddled on down through here and hit some spots where the water was so low I had to push my boat through the sandy bottom a bit before I could get going again.
I passed by these ducks who kept an eye on me but didn’t take off.
If I remember correctly this is some kind of bittern, or maybe a green night heron?
Andrew fishing
I was surprised to see a boat on the water and I knew the guy, Andrew how lives down this way.
Andrew was fishing for bass and was catching some small ones as I pulled in behind him. We shot the bull as he fished away. Just before five he said he’d told his wife he’d be back at five so he took off and I went down the river the short distance I was going today.
I sat around the Villa Grande hole for about a half hour just watching things and enjoying the day before I started back up the river at my slow pace.
This great blue heron was intent on fishing until it saw me going by so stopped to make sure I wasn’t going to mess with it before it went back to fishing in the shallows.
Back at the Monte Rio boat ramp
It wasn’t long before I was back at the Monte Rio boat ramp where I landed and loaded up my car and drove on home abut five miles or so.
Back home
Once home I chair hopped around the yard eating grapes and mulberries and even a few ripe strawberries until it started to get dark when I went in the house for the day after shutting the chickens up in their pens.
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.
