Summer Starting to End on the Farm

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It has been good spending time on the farm. I really had forgotten how quiet and dark it is here. It can actually be a bit unnerving. The leaf doodle bug was put to work in the forest. However, it looks like the car will be going back on the road. We can say it failed field trials,but that would only be partially true. The better utility value at this point is more suited to getting a teenager back and forth from high school. The mycological aspects of the farm did not disappoint. The pics of these shrooms are not photoshopped. The coal stove (very heavy) is loaded on the truck. It will be rebuilt in Georgia if I can save it. Coal stoves are increasingly out of production. When they are gone they are gone. The small wood stove is now in its place. The pic of the red sky in morning was indeed a warning of weather. We had strong storms and tornados in Upstate NY. Although I was travelling much that day in the area, I missed the worst of it.
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Chillin' - Travlin' - Studyin' and McIntosh 2105

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This past week has been nice. I have been in Duluth; no extreme travels this week. It has been very pleasant chillin' out around home taking care of the mundane things. I am not sure why, but the mundane has been pleasant. We have a new organist at church this week. Just as I might guess, he is from Rochester NY. I meet a lot of people everywhere from Rochester. Several of my colleagues both in Duluth and Kansas are from Upstate NY. One of them from Webster/Ontario.

I finally got my McIntosh 2105 Power Amp back from the shop. They did a great job at Audio Classics. As I suspected, there was a lot more wrong with it than "just" the smoke that got out. Somehow they managed to put the smoke back in there and got it all tested and up to spec. It sounds great and really drives my Peavey PV115 Speakers. Certainly, the Peaveys are not the most efficient, but they can take really deal with what the amp gives'em. The UPS guy felt better about the 102 pound package after we talked about what was inside. I had to tell him about the magic of magnetic energy that gets stored in the iron of a transformer core.

I surprised myself a little bit of how little jet lag I had coming back from the Middle East. I guess I am just getting used to it and can compensate. I have trips planned for France and Russia in the next few weeks. The weather was below my personal minimums this weekend for flying. I need to get serious about my instrument rating. That means what serious usually means to me... studying. And with studying theme, I am going to start another set of classes for Portuguese. They say your first non-native language is the hardest. I sure hope so. It is difficult. I keep coming back to the fact that there really is not such thing as failure in personal endeavor, only quitting.

A couple more pics from last week.




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