Carbon Monoxide!?

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Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...
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I watched a great show last night on PBS, "The Sidewalk Astronomer". It was basically a biographical piece on John Dobson, the extraordinary amateur astronomer. He is very well known in astronomy circles. The "Dobsonian Mount" is named after him. His specialty is building very inexpensive powerful telescopes. A Dobson construction will typically include the base mount (2-axis swivel) of his name sake and a concrete construction tube known as a sonotube (perhaps 10 or 12 inches) for the body of a reflector telescope. He is known for setting up a one of these great scopes on a sidewalk in a city and inviting people to look thru it to a celestial body. What a great thing.

He has a great philosophy. I caught a great tidbit in the program last night where he said something like, "People only know the food they eat, the tree, the monkey, the grass, the cat and the dog. People only think in the extents of biology. If we could only get people thinking outside their own gonads that would be really something." Wow. John Dobson has been to Antarctica! Looking at planets and understanding them is like the experience of spending time in Antarctica. There is no biology. There is only ice and rock. In fact when I was out in the field a few times you can't help but fill in the unimaginable (life without life). You will look a scape and see colors of different rocks and think it is a shrubs or scrub... something living. Self-actualization may be just that... understanding life without life. Great stuff.

The plane is back together after its annual inspection. I didn't end up doing much work, but I was there. I was checking out the details inside and out of the plane. My instructor and mentor took the plane out for the check ride just after its reassembly as shown in the picture below as the plane just about to lift off.

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Carbon Monoxide!?

-
Image
Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...
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DJ and I climbed Stone Mountain today. Stone Mountain is an "impordent" part of Atlanta life. In any culture high places often have spiritual significance. No different in the modern-day growth-region of Central/Northern Georgia. It is an interesting walk. Stone mountain is a largely monolithic mass of granite. I had become familiar with the obvious out-crop just like the skyline of downtown Atlanta. I see it from the cockpit of my C-172 as well as the very-top overpass of "Spaghetti Junction". The walk gets steeper as you get nearer to the top. My altimeter watch indicated that we scaled a 70 story building, albeit in nature. I saw no one turn back. That also seems to be part of the culture. People as everywhere around here are openly conversive with strangers. It is a regular walk for exercisers and urbanites that need to do something different. It is close to Duluth and Atlanta. It took about 30 minutes by car to get there from Duluth. We spent about 2 hours on t...
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Brain "warshing"

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