I got the umbrella out and went out to feed the chickens that were out in the rain. They seem not to mind it too much as long as it’s not raining real hard.
Internet’s out
I was waking up, doing my internet stuff, when the power went off. It came back on shortly but then I couldn’t get any internet, nor could I get it on my brother’s cable who lives next door. Hummm.
While I was sitting there pondering what to do, there was a knock at the door. It was my neighbor Dominique, saying a big limb fell out of the big redwood tree by their place where our phone lines and their cable comes in so that’s why no internet. She offered to report it in so it might get fixed eventually. They don’t fix stuff around here very fast like they used to.
I went over to have a look and this is where the big limb fell out of the big tree there and took our lines out.
Big redwood trees have big limbs that can do a lot of damage and this one drops one pretty often. See the patch in the fence.
My plan
Today was to get my raingear on and take a shovel up into the hills, mostly to enjoy the rain. I wanted to go up when it was going to rain the hardest which the weather guys said would be about 3PM, but as the day progressed they chanced that until after it got dark.
Oh well, get the gear on and go up there anyway, otherwise I would just be sitting around the house as it was raining outside, all day.
I stuffed my non-water proof camera in a pocket hoping it wouldn’t get wet and knowing it would be raining too hard most of the time to use it.
I used to do this all the time as it’s another world up there when it’s raining, especially if it’s raining real hard.
Headed out
Anyway I got it going about 2 and headed up there in a pretty good rain.
I first went over to our neighbors on the left side and did some ditching on his roads as he doesn’t know what or how to do it. It was raining too hard for pictures at that time. His roads needed quite a bit of work. When it’s raining, the harder the better, it’s easy to see what needs to be drained off the road. The idea is to drain water off the road as often as possible and not to collect it, but to dissipate it in small amounts to keep it from doing damage and washing the roads out.
After that, I rode around our place a bit just enjoying the day. Most the roads on our place are in pretty good shape and don’t wash out, a lot because they are what’s called out-sloping. That’s where the outer edge of the roads slope to the outer edge, so all the water runs off and doesn’t collect and do damage.
Another neighbor’s place
Eventually I ended up on our neighbor’s place on the right and stopped here to put in that ditch behind the quad to keep this water from going down the road. I did a bunch more ditching for them off to the left, out of sight, before continuing on up the road.
I didn’t go far past her place before turning around and going back and turning down Clayton’s road. The dirt bikes had made too much of a trail down the road and it was running quite a bit of water, so I ditched most of it. It’s fairly easy to ditch as most of the road is fairly soft stuff.
Headed towards home
By now, I was getting pretty wet from the waist down and my water proof shoes were full of water, so I started towards home, but no hurry as it wasn’t that cold out.
I went on down this trail through the redwood trees, just because I knew it would be a nice ride. I knew there would be nothing that needed fixed and there wasn’t.
The creek crossings on that trail were holding up well too, so I just puttzed along.
I was home shortly and replaced my wet clothing with dry stuff and took it easy the rest of the day.
Posting
Now, I need to go over to a neighbor’s place that isn’t home but has internet and sit at the back door and see if I have the name and password right and can get on to post this and check my email.
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.
Refreshing to be out in the rain if not cold.