RANCHO FALL-0

 

Here's dear Abbie after a long night of barking and roaming about the ranch looking for  ne'er do wells and keeping us critter free. 

Here's dear Abbie after a long night's rest and not carousing, not treeing something, not howling, and without keeping herself, us, and the neighbors up all night long with her baying or barking. Notice that she closely identifies with her friends the chickens in that she is fresh from a dirt bath. 

Here's dear Abbie schmoozing for attention at the yard sale. She did that a lot because she probably thinks she’s the main attraction at this amusement park. 

 

Here's a batch of ripe pomegranates from Courtney Gillespie who is one of our regular yard sale participants. He was selling these beauts and then squeezing others to make juice. Pomegranate juice is really really good stuff!

Above is an early morning shot of the yard sale

prior to the crowd showing up. 

Above is Leanne Chapman's stuff. She's also one of the regulars and does quite well at the annual sale. 

To the right is a shot looking back toward the house and looking at Connie the Yard Sale'er manning the checkout counter. 

Here's one of our calabasas/zapolla 

squashes. It's bigger than a basketball!

These are native to Peru. They can 

get a lot larger than this!

This is why we call our hens, "dirty birdies". They all rejoice in bathing in the dust. They also taught Abbie this trick. Speaking of "dirty birdies", it looks like we have a winner for "name the new pullet" contest. The pretty birdie's name is now "Flower". The winning name was submitted by granddaughter, 7 year old Moira! She's a pretty intelligent little...chick (big grin)!  

This is the walnut cracker that friend and brother, Courtney Gillespie, fabricated. This thing is amazing! It cracked a 5 gallon bucket of walnuts in just a few minutes! This region grows a lot of walnuts so this is a handy gadget to have around. 

 

Nov 2020

Well…it’s November 2020 and there’s just a short time until Turkey Day and we’ve consumed another perfectly good year (which should make us hungry enough to eat a turkey at Thanksgiving, I suppose). Doesn’t that just make you want to hock your Jedi light saber? Time couldn’t be speeding by faster if we were on the “Millennium Falcon”! Moving along….

I don’t know about y’all but I’m about tired of wearing this dad-burn beak protector around all of the time. I reckon that it’s because I’m old that I still feel like folks are thinking that I’m there to rob the till. Can’t you just see it? Officer: “Can you describe the suspect, ma’am?”. Teller: “Oh, yes! He was a tall guy with brown hair, he was of an average height, had an average build and weight, he was wearing blue jeans, and was wearing a mask. Oh, he had eyes and ears, too”. *SIGH*.

Something is not quite right here; when you wear the masks, practice social distancing, don’t sneeze for fear of being shot, and ….there’s a spike in COVID cases? Can you spell H-O-R-S-E—H-O-C-K-E-Y? This Kung Flu has got to go and so do the quasi-scientists and gas-lighting fools moonlighting as politicians that actually believe that masks are helping. If they are working then why, pray tell, are we having a “second wave”?

The Big One: every big event has to start somewhere and, regarding our big annual yard sale, it means starting to load stuff up then getting it ready for display. That means we have to retrieve the boxes at the hangar and haul them back to the house and prep them for the sale. They had already been priced earlier in the year and then shipped to the hangar for storage (I would gladly trade all those boxes for a nice fast airplane).

While loading up the trailer, I happened to hear some shuffling noises of some kind coming from a few feet away and to the rear. I looked up and saw that Connie had found a black widow spider lurking on one of the boxes. Take it from me; she’s no fan of spiders but certainly not black widows. After taking careful aim, she stomped it right good. She killed that thing.....then killed it again…and killed it again…and again…and again. I’ve never really seen a spider die 12 times before. Reckon she likes her spiders really flat and really dead.

It’s a rather grueling matter to load, stack, unload, restack, rack, and unpack all day long for a week prior to the sale. Then, after three days of morning-to-dusk work at the sale, you then have to cover stuff up to keep the dew (or even rain) from damaging it. By bedtime the first night, you don’t know whether you are coming or going and are too tired to even say anything. You just crash. Then, you get to do it again for two more days.We usually groan a lot but complain very little. That's not to say that our bodies don't complain a lot because they do complain; we try not to listen. They usually quiet down some after we feed them a couple of Ibuprophen. 

Overall, it was a great time and we did manage to do fairly well even though not as much stuff was presented. Some of the boxes were not even opened due to a lack of tables on which to display their contents. Still, it was a good time and everyone who participated profited and were happy with the outcome.

After the sale on Saturday, Connie the Seller needed a shower after a long day of working. She said she also needed to wash off the defilement from all that (wonderful) “filthy lucre”. That’s called “PMA” (positive mental attitude). It's that lucre stuff that helps to assuage the muscle pains and helps the psyche feel better, don'tcha know. 

Of course, what goes up, must come down and, what gets unboxed for the yard sale (but which isn’t sold), gets re-boxed. There's usually quite a bit of unsold goods so it takes a lot more...work. Setting up for our annual yard sale is always brutal but, afterward when it's cleanup time, we remember why, after each and every yard sale event, we want to just shoo everyone away, burn everything down, go on vacation, and hope the wind blows all the ashes away before we get home again. Talk about gluttons for punishment!

We’ve been complaining for weeks how we really don’t want to massively exceed our energy budgets,strain our brains, and wreck our bodies with another huge yard sale but then we start collecting more stuff. Go figure. In fact, folks have already started giving us lots of things! It’s almost to the point where we’re thinking about just leaving Wooley Pulley hooked to the van.

 Lock’em down: you know you’re old when you can finally get out of the house (by defying the lock down) and you can’t wait to get to the “Dollar Tree”, the “99 Cent Store”, “Grocery Outlet”, and “Wal-Mart”. We can’t speak for others but we turned into Shopzillas for the day and just loaded the van up real good (see! I told you we needed a van!).

Speaking of being old, we were in Wal-Mart and needed to find some 1/8” cotton cord/line because it was needed to be used as a wick in one of our small kerosene lamps (I told you we were old! We have candles, too!). After they recently totally re-arranged the store (to confuse the old folks, I should suppose; it worked), there was no way we could even find the department in which to look for things. So, we asked a young lady wearing a blue vest where we could find the cord and explained that it would likely be with things like “clothesline”.

She was speechless for a second and looked as if her iPhone just went dead then said, “What’s clothesline”? Uuuuh…huh? It was our turn to look stupefied for a second but I smoothly recovered and defined what a clothesline was.  “Oh”, she said, with us knowing she still had no clue. I probably should have just asked her for the list of Brad Pitt’s girlfriends and wives through the years. She probably doesn’t even know anything about the “Maytag” repair man, “Motorola” TV’s, or “Rinso” laundry soap. I wasn’t about to ask her where the “Lava” or “Boraxo” was.

Ham it up: the local backhoe dude is scheduled to come and dig a hole in the ground so the old hamster can finally get his ham tower erected (that only took 4 years). This will be the first time Ol’ WA6IXI has had a real live 60’ tower to play with in his 50 years of being a ham. This will make operating a lot more interesting, to be sure. There are lots of plans as to how to configure the thing, too.

The initial idea was to mount a huge HF (high frequency) “Hy-Gain Tri-bander” beam. However, this QTH (i.e home location) has an issue with the surrounding woods (“woods” meaning large oak trees that someone forgot to saw down before I got here). Also, the barn was built without considering a beam antenna so the large oak trees near it were of no concern. Now, years later, if a beam was to be mounted, it would require a lot of tree trimming which would run the cost of fun unacceptably high (someone forgot to win the Lotto…again).

In addition, it dawned on the head operator (no; that doesn’t mean that he’s a brain surgeon) that the beam probably would be of little value given that he lives in a mountain-lined “bowl” were the RF signals would get slammed against a mountain and go no further.

Plan B: what to do? Well, that’s easy. It means using NVIS as the best option for this station. NVIS is "near vertical incidence skywave" which is a skywave radio-wave propagation path for HF signals. It basically launches your radio signal up toward the sky rather than more horizontally toward the mountains and horizon. It's efficacy is conditional upon the use and placement of particular types of antennas which are more conducive to this method of transmission (dipoles being better than beams). If the QTH was situated somewhere on flat land, the beam would be invaluable but not so much here where we’re stuck in a rock bowl.

On the other hand, the tower, itself, is invaluable. It allows you to get your antenna(s) up high and away from the RF energy absorbing surroundings. That's no small thing. Also, each frequency's resonator works best at a certain height above ground (usually a quarter wave length). So, the closer you can get to dialing that ratio in, the better your antenna's performance will be. That's where the tower shines because you can mount the antennas at different heights for greater efficiency. Sure; you can use a trapped dipole which allows for multiple band usage. However, the antenna will still only be at optimal efficiency on one band. As always, though, each ham has to live with certain compromises. The good news is that most operators manage to "get out" regardless of those compromises. All is well! 

Wire antennas are best for this mode of transmission (NVIS) but a nice 4 band trapped vertical will be added to the mix, too, since its radiation pattern is omni-directional and has a lot of its signal projected upward. Trapped antennas of any kind are an efficiency compromise. In this case, you swap your efficiency for a size convenience because traps allow for smaller/shorter antennas. 

So, you just hang wire antennas for HF and mount the VHF and UHF vertical antennas on the side of the tower. The HF trapped vertical will probably be parked on the roof of the barn. 

I’m actually flirting with the idea of mounting my 10 element 2M VHF beam (it came with the tower) on the top but I’m not convinced that the cost of a rotor is worth the extra benefits of having a beam. We’ll see. If it isn’t mounted on the tower, it may well be configured on a stationary mount so that it will be pointed toward Blue Ridge Mountain where some of the ham repeaters are. That should work well but Blue Ridge still isn't line-of-site because there is a small mountain between it and the QTH. I would hate to rely on "multi-path" but, if it works, it works. So far, it looks like I can still mount it in a fixed position on a mast located on the roof of the barn instead of the tower. Otherwise, the trapped vertical will be mounted up high.

After all that, I’ll string the horizontal dipole (a 100’ long G5RV type from MFJ) and my home brew 40/80 Meter inverted “V” from the tower (and tune it with an antenna tuner). If my calculations are correct, that will have the 40M dipole situated at the half-wave height with the 80M dipole situated at the eighth-wavelength height (but still quite usable). 

I should also be able to string a 160M dipole, too. Most hams aren’t fortunate enough to have that much room because a ½  wave dipole on 160M is 250’ long. That’s a tough stretch for most guys even with an inverted “V” configuration. It'll be a "first" for me given that I've never operated on the "Top Band" before now. 

There is a refurbished 5/8 wavelength 11 Meter (Citizen’s Band) vertical antenna that will be mounted with the trapped vertical on another tall mast on the barn. This old hamster got his start as a “Chicken Bander” and still thinks that there is a use for it for emergency communications. It does come in handy once in a while when travelling. The good news about this antenna is that it has already been tuned and tested on the 10M-11M-15M-20M-30M ham bands! It’ll work as a backup antenna if there’s an issue with the wire ones or the trapped vertical or if the wave propagation favors the vertical antenna’s radiation pattern.

Friend and brother, Jim King (KJ6KK), gave me a 6M vertical so that will needed to be given a permanent home, too. I have an MFJ-920 6M antenna tuner that will fit it perfectly.

There’s a “J-Pole” antenna for 2 Meters for the house because there will be a couple of radios in the “computer shack”. In addition to that, there will be a "discone" scanner antenna mounted somewhat near it. The discone has been silently waiting in its box for three years waiting to be let out and I'm sure that it will be grateful for being set free. Still more: I found a “Ringo” 2M vertical that needs to be rebuilt so it will likely be  mounted somewhere on the barn (that's where the antenna analyzer comes into play). I may well be accused of having an "antenna farm". It's 4' upper radiator section is missing so it will be replaced by a custom fitted aluminum replacement.

The 6 MFJ, 2 Dentron (including the “Junior” model), and Drake antenna tuners, Baofeng, Icom, and Yeasu HF, VHF, UHF transceivers, straight key and auto-keyers (for CW/Morse code), Kenwood 600 SWL receiver, 4 SWR/PWR meters, MFJ-269C PRO antenna analyzer, and jumper cables are all ready to assemble in one place. Three 100’ lengths and one 50’ length of low-loss coax will be ordered soon so that it can all be tied together. Some of the peripheral hardware will need to be located as well (guy wires and brackets et. al.). Should be fun.

No “Echo”: the motor on our “Echo” weed eater motor failed even though it has had less than average use. After having the guys at Porterville Home-Ag look at it, they advised that the cylinder was wrecked because of improper lubrication (even though the Ol’ Rancher followed the usual fuel-oil mixture instructions on using 2 stroke engines). It was going to cost more to fix it than it was worth. About the only option is to just throw it into the yard, tie a goat to it, and buy a new one. So, goes life, eh? Thankfully, we probably won’t need another one until spring. That'll give me time to save my pennies and save my dimes and buy a another one instead of that new 409 I wanted. 

An apple a day keeps the…vet away: *SIGH*. Apparently, Abbie understands that one’s diet is important. At least that’s what it seems like. On no few occasions, she’s been seen gnawing on one of our ripening apples! Now, I doubt if I would mind if the apples were falling on their own but it appears that she is pulling them off and eating them! This is the first year that the apple tree has been properly watered and fertilized and it’s producing huge beautiful apples and….my dog is eating them for me! Grrrrr. Dear Abbie. We need to talk…again.

Grub hub: the Rancho compost barrel is alive again and has a bunch of new squiggly protein wallowing around in it. So, the head chicken meister rounded up a couple of handfuls of the large grubs for his pampered pantophagous peckers. They were delighted! They were pecking my hand even after all the grubby goodies were gone. Free protein is our friend!

Free Indeed or Freebies are our friends! : the other day (when lots of things happen around here), Connie the Scullery Maid purchased a new “Hoover” hard floor cleaner and new “Hoover” carpet cleaner. She wore the other cleaners plumb out and they ceased to function properly. She was tired of fighting and pleading with them so we just divorced ourselves of them and ordered new ones. Ah, but this is Rancho Relaxo and you just know that this matter will have a real story to go with it.

A few days after she ordered them, an e-mail arrived that advised us that our items had been delivered. That was where things started to get interesting because, when we got home from church, the cleaning machines were nowhere to be found.

Since we aren’t given to worry (it works for Alfred E. Newman), Amazon was notified and they advised us that it was likely that one of the delivery people missed his guess on when he would actually be at our house and pre-advised the company that he had done his job. “Look for it tomorrow”, the agent said.

But, the items didn’t come during the next two days but the delivery man did (he delivered another hard floor scrubber that we had ordered for the church). He advised that he had delivered them to the neighbor’s house. So, Connie called Amazon and explained that we would have the neighbor bring them over and all would be well.

You can’t even guess what Amazon did! They stated that it was their issue to deal with and that they were sorry for the inconvenience. And….they were going to give us a full refund! When Connie asked where to take the other ones when we got them, the agent stated that we could keep the two (expensive) scrubbers!! Talk about being blown away! That wasn’t like giving us a couple of nice warm doggie blankets or such. This was a more-than-400 dollar deal! Zowie! Free is our friend!

Connie immediately put the hard floor scrubber to work (and we put the 400 dollars to work elsewhere) and was so impressed that she almost shouted, “We’re going to be clean people again!”. It’s great to be married to a clean cleaning woman!

There you have it: another short episode of the long happenings at Rancho Relaxo, home of Rancho Ran, the world's foremost authority (the previous one died): home of a retarded duck and home of Connie the Canner (world's greatest side-kook): where the air smells like freshly made pomegranate jelly: where alliteration reigns supreme; where things can get...interesting: where it’s all news to me: where the rubber leaves the road, and, where...you just never know.