Rancho Crasho, Blesso, Scratcho, Melto

There I was at 20,000 feet....below the clouds. Fokkers to the left of me...not so much. Fokkers to the right of me....not sure but the neighbors are pushing their luck. Fearlessly (read, "stupidly"), the intrepid dolt dove straight ahead into the targeted okra formation. Ah, but a vile and wily enemy had planted an intercept: an evil trap with which to defeat the simpleton lawn tractor pilot....poison ivy! Think about it (you may as well; the enemy didn't require much thought at all); what better trap could you set?! How perfectly camouflaged! How nasty and effective! 

I had managed to do something that no one around here had thought possible. That was to not only find a poison ivy in this area (it's usually a bit further up the hill) but to actually abuse myself with it! The only conclusion we could come up with is that it migrated into the garden box from our compost pile. A few days later I looked for it but couldn't find it. It's there; I just need to hunt around and will do that when I clear the garden box for next season (wearing a long sleeved shirt and gloves, to be sure...I'll be armed with a flame thrower).

The effects began the next day and, boy!, did the popcorn hit the fan! My arm was on fire with the predictably fierce itching accompanying it. My lighting-fast mind began singing the '60's song,  "Poison Ivy" ("Well, late at night when you're a'sleeping poison ivy comes a'creeping' all around"...can I get a "thumbs up" from all you old people?). I wanted to slap myself but figured that "swimming in an ocean of Calamine lotion" wasn't such a bad idea after all. However, hauling around a pink arm wasn't all that appealing so I sought alleviation by other means. Aloe Vera seemed to work well in my case (I shoulda been a dahktah, eh?). 

In only a couple of weeks I'll be back to normal and my arm won't look like it had been marched across by Paulus' 6th Army. Note to self: pay attention, Ran.

"There's nothing like having a smart dog around the house", I always say. Here's Miss Abby getting her Windows 10 update training. Can't quite get her interested in MS Word but she's really into Snoopy, Scooby Doo, Clifford, and Astro. 

 For all of you former "Panthers" and "Villians", here's a shot of the new roundabout at Highway 190 and Reservation Road. Yes; that is "Success Market" in the background.   

Dash blast the gosh darn blankety heck! It’s October! Do the math on that; .5833 percent of the year has been chewed up! I still have haven’t finished spring cleaning! Reckafretcha peckaloomer (uh…you’ll probably need to confer with a Martian friend for the translation on that)!

Anyway….let’s ditch the floggenschmoggen and go straight to the Rancho update: have I mentioned that things could get “interesting” around the ranch? Thought so. I mean to tell you….it really has been an interesting month! The major issues have been contained but it has been quite a ride. Not that everything has been a mess. No, siree. We’re quite blessed around here. It’s just that, in the course of human events, mas mierda (you’ll need to confer with a Mexican friend for the translation) happens. Let’s take a look.

 On the whole, all is actually (though finally) well here at the ranch. In fact, even the weather has decided to be our friend. We’ve experienced very unseasonable coolness lately. Not a single person has complained! Imagine that! My experience has been that it doesn’t get below 95 degrees until after the third in September and even then it can shoot up a bit. We had a day in the high 70’s only a few days ago! Amazing. Today was 91 degrees but no one in this area considers that “hot”.

We have “Ol’ Swampy” to keep us cool. She’s the big evaporative cooler who dutifully blows cool air into our domicile so that the old folks don’t move to Alaska to cool off. But, even she had a problem not long ago so we had long-time friend, Darrell Blasingame, to send a man over to discover what the issue was. Come to find out, the pads were hardened by our high mineral content water (looks like the ranch will need a water softener, eh?). We replaced the pads (a mere 200 dollars since they were “special” ones…I should say!) and went about staying cool. Or, so we thought.

Something still wasn’t quite right. Though things were a bit better we weren’t staying as comfortable as what we remembered. So, we called Darrell again and he sent the same guy out to see what was happening. What he found was that same hard water than had hardened the pads had clogged the water distribution lines. He cleared those and our comfort level was restored. Staying cool is expensive but, at my age, it’s worth it. I ain’t suffering through the summer! Period!  In a few weeks, we won’t have to use it at all. That’ll be sweller for this feller.

The Ol’ Ranch Hand Report: when, in the course of human events and gardening, you do everything right, you’ll very likely encounter a load of remmelschmeissen (you’ll need your Martian friend again). I had already known that there were many loads of things that I didn’t want to encounter in this life but didn’t know until now that remmelschmeissen was one of them. This one was a painful load! I’m certainly glad that I now know yet another load to eschew.

Now…on Mars, that’s a real word and, as they say, a really floggynoggy one at that. To make it a little less plebian on Earth, you can just say, “…encountered a load of mixed animal dung, manure (with emphasis on the horse veriety), guano, and fowl droppings from a variety of species”…all in a figurative sense, of course (witty folks, those Martians). You could even shorten it to, “…a load of zoo doo” which is much softer and gentler on the ear (Ol’ Soft and Gentle Ran, they call him) and takes less time to express. My apologies to the Martians in the crowd; I’ll be working on improving my spelling.  

Boy! Did I ever encounter it, too! It, in turn, not only encountered me, it attacked me! To make a long story longer, the attacker was none other than poison ivy…in my garden box…the one that I personally planted…without ivy…poison or otherwise. Arrrrrgh!! I don’t have time for this!

How it got there is a mystery so far but I’ll ponder the matter while my red leprosy fades into a distant past. Most likely it migrated from the compost pile and flourished with the okra. Fortunately, the itching wasn’t all that bad this time. The previous infection was about 50 years ago but I remember "swimming in an ocean of Calamine Lotion" because of the severe itching (that’ll teach me not to go swimming in Tule River in the canyon above Coffee Camp, right? NOPE!). I was concerned this time about being mistaken as Groucho’s brother, Scratcho Marx.

I have it from an extremely knowledgeable source that the fading can be in only a few days if you apply an ancient Native American remedy made from the leaves of a manzanita bush. We have one here at the ranch according to Connie the Canner. Ol’ Pharma Ran will give a report when he can.

Computer Dude Update: as usual, the “Grand Exhausted ‘Puter Poobah” has managed to be blessed at all times and even when it seems they are bad times. There was a really great blessing that came our way recently. In fact, three really neat blessings (haven I mentioned that I’m really really into neat blessings?) came within a short time!

The first was from a long-time friend of Connie’s who lives down by the lake. Apparently, the folks where she works are replacing some desktops and laptops and other peripheral equipment (like a beautiful expensive wireless keyboard and mouse combo and a couple of Sony flat screen monitors!) but were just going to throw the old equipment out as e-waste. She asked if she could have it and they advised that she could. So, she gave it all to me! Zowie!!

I immediately overhauled one of the laptops and gave it back to the nice lady since she and her son needed one. The second laptop got overhauled and I gave it to my mother who, though 88 years old, is interested in “staying in touch”. My guess is that she wants it for the games, too (heheh).

Next, I overhauled one of the late-model desktops and will sell it for about 150 bucks or so. The other nice desktop needs a capacitor replaced on the motherboard but should be fine after that. I’ll do that on my…day off (uh-huh). Both desktops have nice dual-core processors and plenty of memory for Windows 7, 8, or even 10.

A second blessing came when two clients donated their inoperable desktops to me. One had a dead motherboard and the other a crashed hard drive. The one with the crashed hard drive had a superb high-performance quad-core processor so I jerked it out of the case and installed it in the other guy’s custom case. Perfect fit! I sold that little hottie to a previous client for 200 dollars.

The third blessing was from the guy from whom I purchased all of my ham radio equipment. His uncle was a friend of mine who had owned a hangar a few doors down from ours. I bought the entire station with the exception of some things that he intended to keep. Well, he decided not to keep them.

He called me and asked if I could come and pick up some stuff. Boy howdy! Was I surprised! Sitting there all nice and handsome was a like-new Icom IC-730 transceiver with its power supply! Next to it was a gorgeous like-new Drake MN-2000 antenna tuner (worth about 500 bucks!). Then, there was a like-new 23” all-in-one HP Pavilion 23 desktop! I’ve wanted one those babies for awhile but wasn’t about to spend any money for it. It may end up in my ham shack! Next, there was yet another desktop which was a newer HP with a dual-core processor and an abundant 6GB of RAM!

That brings us to the box of goodies that was tossed into the mix. It included a like-new expensive d-Link dual-band router and all kinds of other peripheral equipment. When I asked him how much “color” I needed to toss at him, he said, “Nothing. I just wanted to give it to you” and went on to explain how it made him feel good to bless others! Amen to that! Get this; the worth of the equipment he gave was beyond the value of the price I paid him for the other ham gear (from some months ago)!!  It’s a good thing he didn’t mind getting his neck hugged! We went straight home where I dug into the goodies with alacrity (after exchanging my old Huggie for a new one, natch)! 

OK…we’ve covered the “Blesso” and the “Scratcho”. It’s time for the “Crasho” part. Wanna know what happens when you use a computer? They break (trust me; I’m a professional). Oh, by the way: they break at the most inconvenient and least opportune time, too. Sure, some of you (even some of you Martians) have been lucky and had your box pick a special time to fall apart so it wouldn’t be an inconvenience. Not this time for the Computer Dude.

I was cruising along as usual getting things done when I had this ugly warning sign pop up. It advised that Windows had detected an impending hard drive failure. My first thought was, “Oh, that’s nice!”. I’ve got a ton of things to do near the end of the month and I’m going to have to re-build ‘Big Bertha’... again!”

Actually, the rebuilding part is the fun part. I do that for recreational purposes. However, the thought of losing an immense (I think a dump truck load qualifies for “immense”) amount of data (1 TB), pics (110 GB), music (100K+ songs), et. al. (misc. bunches of GB’s) could have been daunting. The good news was that I had already made a partial backup not long ago. I learned this lesson 7 or so years ago when my main rig went down hard and it cost me about 1,800 dollars to have the data retrieved. Lesson learned. I keep about 12 TB of storage around since I believe in not only backup but overkill backup.

So, I commenced a full back up knowing, that, after the notification, a hard drive failure could present itself in an hour, a day, a month, or even a year. After about four days of backing stuff up on a couple of healthy large external drives, I was confident that, should the drive fail suddenly, I would get to tinker with it. Off to bed I went. The next morning, I turned the monitor on (I leave my big rig running all of the time unless a reboot or service is required) only to find that the crash had happened that night. 

The great part about this was that I got to repair my XP installation! The box is configured to boot to either XP or Windows 10. However, the XP install had thrown out some default settings and was no longer automatically installing the normal drivers for the mouse and keyboard (which means you have zero access to the otherwise fully-functioning system). But, I  fouind no need to risk jacking up Windows 10 by trying to do a boot repair on XP. I think there would be little if any trouble at all but there was just too much on the line to experiment. And, it wasn't my day off. 

The XP repair was made then a 2TB internal hard drive was mounted.  Win 10 was installed (which automatically configures the dual-boot environment) and then the software customization process was advanced. All things are good go for now and any software needed will be installed on “as needed”. Big Bertha is now cruising right along smooth as silk. 

And, I get to run XP on a hot dual-core box with max RAM. For you tech heads (and you Martians, of course), XP can only “see” and use a little more than 3 GB of RAM. So, the other 5 GB of RAM are there but aren’t used until the reboot to Win 10. The XP install is as slick as they get and, because its lightly loaded, it’s almost like magic to use! I can’t wait to get an Internet service where the speed is at least 50mbs (my ISP just upgraded to 2.5mbs nominal). My mother in Porterville will have Internet service 20 times faster than mine! ACK! Maybe I need to visit her more often, eh?

Tech side note: XP was designed to run on (at a minimum) a Pentium II 233ghz processor and 64MB of RAM. Since XP was released about three years after the Pent. II, it was under development at the time using the Pent. II. To this day, one of the cleanest and fastest machines I’ve ever operated was an XP box with 256MB of RAM and a 750ghz Pent. III processor (lightly loaded, of course). It was a real blitz bug!

I still have access to all of the super nice software that was on there before the crash. But, times, needs, and attitudes change. All that needs to be done can be done for now. It's nice to have my old friend, XP, up and running. It's something of a comfort factor for me. The old "Puter Dude" is a bit strange...but then...you knew that. 

Chickening Report: Our chickens are on strike or something. They aren’t laying but about a fourth of their usual number of eggs. Some are molting which we found may account for some of the reduction. Not all of them are molting so I figure it must be a sympathetic molting issue, eh? I haven’t run into a “Caesar Chavez Chicken Union” yet. So, no worries there.

I don’t know. I do know that we need the regular production since our egg clients are used to getting their eggs in a timely fashion. It wouldn’t take much of an imagination to see my front yard filled with the same nice folks that covered Dr. Frankenstein’s yard outside his castle. But, they would be demanding eggs (yes….they are that good!)! 

I take really good care of them and feed them well. I speak kindly to them and encourage them to keep up the good work. Maybe I should take my guitar out there and serenade them to see if that would work. How about I hum them a hymn?  I think I’m being silly.

The Princess Abby Report: you know, you just can’t help but love a dog that’s sweeter than a bucket of cupcakes. She thinks I hung the moon and I’m not about to convince her otherwise.

I’m working on setting up the other transmitter for her electric shock collar/electric fence so we can extend her range further north but not further east. That will allow her to protect our garden boxes that the ground squirrels are digging (literally) and feasting on and our chicken coop as well. We lost one of our feral chickens the other day but Abbie’s range was limited (she’s into live chicken toys). So, she wasn’t able to apprehend the offending critter.

She still wins all of the tug-o-wars and is still lightning-fast at “fetch”. And, she still has a penchant for barking at night…late at night…most of the night. Ugh. I really do understand. We do have lots of “wild things” out there which a good coon hound like her would dearly love to chase to Texas (which, of course, is the reason she wears a shock collar).

It’s also noteworthy that she fears nothing…as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G…which is also a problem. She’s a “coon hound” not a “coon fighter”. As powerful as the little girl dog is, I am not at all comfortable turning her loose in a one-on-one with a big bandit. When coons are cornered, they don’t back down; they fight and fight hard. So, the Ol’ Rancher will to protect his pretty princess and continue to spoil her until she just can’t stand it (which should be in about 30 years or so. She is such a sponge).

Well…that about takes care of all but the Melto event. I hope that all of the sheisenbogger (sp) that has been happening will be concluded in this one month and not follow me into October, December, or into town. If it does, it needs to bring a smaller dump truck, too.

Now, the "headlines": when we came home from church the other night, I had to make a quick run to the barn. Now, imagine just how high my interest was piqued when the lights didn’t come on. OK…no worries. My technical expertise is quite high in the category of “flipping a breaker switch” (I got good marks in that, don’tcha know). When the breaker box was opened, it wasn’t a pretty sight. I switched the lights on but, uh-oh, two other breakers were off! That’s wasn’t a good thing because we have a freezer in the barn (you don’t eat all your food if you have to walk over there to get it, eh?).  

Fill in the details part: the light in the chicken coop had been off for a couple of weeks and I hadn’t had time to fix it (still waiting for a day off so I can get some of these things done!). I reckoned that the other breaker was for the coop and the other breaker was, indeed, for the coop. But…just what was the other breaker for? Uh-oh! Rancho Ran knew he was about to have an...interesting...evening.

Did you ever have one of those “Chinese Chant Revelation” moments? That’s where you whack your forehead and say, “O-wha-tay-foo-li-yam”. I had smelled something “dead” for several days but had thought it to be from someplace else; silly me. The revvy hit me like a ton of individually hand-fired Texas bricks; the other circuit breaker was for the freezer! It had been off for …gulp…two weeks! That’s just enough time for everything (as in …everything) to simply melt then dissolve into bags of wet rotting messes. 

That late at night, and my propensity to not deal with huge masses of rotting stuff (day or night) led the same quick mind to come to the rescue. I simply reset the breakers and will wait for everything to get rock hard then haul it all to the dump: no smell, no mess. 

Freezer clean up time will soon be another ranch chore. But, we need the freezer and I don’t dare leave too much food in the house where some hungry rancher would eat it! HEHEH.

So, there you have it, friends, relatives, neighbors, kith, kin, and Martians. The latest from Rancho Relaxo and Rancho Randy and his sidecook, Connie the Canner. Stay tuned 'cause things could get...interesting'er.