Author: Doug Rutherford

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Quite the storm

Last night, we had quite the storm come up. It was promised in the forecast, although after little threats all day with nothing to show for it, it was a bit of a surprise.

Stormy skyFor about an hour, there was thunder, lots of lightning, high winds and heavy rain. In fact, 1.8 mm fell during the storm. Considering it lasted less than an hour, that was a pretty huge amount of rain. Neither Clara nor I can remember it raining that heavily here.

 

We did figure out something was coming shortly before it started. I was working in the yard and saw how quickly the sky had changed.

I must admit, this was probably all my fault. When it started, I had the sprinkler going, since I had held off all day due to the forecasted rain that had never arrived. And, of course, I finished staining the deck about 30 minutes before…

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A problem solved

I have very few issues with the new motorhome, although there were a couple. My biggest one involves storage space as it relates to toast.

I know you are wondering how these link. However, the smoke detector in the new motorhome is a wee bit sensitive. The camping toaster you throw on one of the burners of the stove generates enough smoke to set it off. There’s nothing quite like trying to make breakfast to the tune of beep-beep-beep.

This would be easily remedied if I simply used a standard electric toaster. This being said, a small generator is only really good for 1000 watts, and a toaster tends to eat more than that when you fire it up and about 1000 watts after it starts to heat. I’ll throw into the mix the fact that I bought a 1250 watt peak Hyundai generator several years ago. However, the second time we used it, it starting throwing enough blue smoke to keep away every mosquito in two square miles and, of course, the warranty had expired by that point.

Last year, towards the end of the season, I went shopping for another one. Here’s where the fun kicks in. I could have bought a 1000 watt with 1300 watt peak generator at Canadian Tire for $300, and another $50 for wheels and a handle to make it easy to move around. It’s not a big issue since it’s only 60 pounds. However, on sale, I could buy a 3000 watt sustained load/4000 watt peak generator, with wheels and a handle for $300. This puppy will run a microwave oven, and other things like my sliding compound mitre saw or my table saw and my compressor. I bought it, of course.

storage rack pictureIt weighs a little over 110 pounds and is considerably larger than the smaller one. Here’s the problem. There’s no storage area in the motorhome that is big enough to take it with us.  I thought of a storage rack that goes into the carrier on the trailer hitch. This is a problem if you want to bring the boat camping.

In a fit of brilliance, the following question came to mind last week. Who says the trailer hitch has to be on the back of the truck? I bought a storage rack with a 500 pound capacity and a front trailer hitch for the camper. I installed these yesterday, and now have a way to bring the generator with us.

The trailer hitch was easy enough to install. There would have to have been a few hole modifications more than necessary if you follow the instructions. The holes aren’t big enough to work the bolts and plates into the frame to get to the inside. I did, as it was, have to expand the two front mounting holes, as the ones there already were ⅜” but the bolts are Class 10 ½”. The easy way is to remember that four bolts hold the front bumper on the truck, and taking it off took almost 5 minutes and allow you access to the inside of the frame. Easy-peazy!

Now, I just need to get another toaster…

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Fishing failure

I went to Fox Lake yesterday in hopes to get a bit of fishing in on the weekend. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there was some function going on at the picnic shelter at the campground.

There were more than 40 cars parked in the shelter area and around the boat launch. More than a dozen were actually parked in the approach to the launch itself.

Launching the boat would be difficult, although not impossible. However, there would have been no place to park the truck and trailer after getting the boat into the water.

I haven’t got the faintest idea what was going on. However, I must admit it’s a bit selfish to block off something supposed to be for a specific purpose for some other reason.

Oh, well. I suppose it was also a nice day for a drive…

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A lovely day

It’s a beautiful day, warm but not too hot, a light wind, and sunny. It’s a perfect day to do some more yard work. I did fill some of the knots in the top railing of the back deck and went down to the hardware store to pick up some sandpaper to sand and then, prime them.

I also have a few other things to do. One of those is painting the shelving unit that was on the deck so it can go somewhere else, as well as painting some of the deck chairs I have been thinking of completing and staining for a while.

With the perfect conditions, there’s only one thing to do. If you’re looking for me, I’ve gone fishing…

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Fixing the deck

The deck was built in two stages. First, I built the veranda when we built the house. This was in 2005. And, because the veranda is more than two feet above grade, there were railings required by code.

I built the deck the following year, with a step down where the back steps were. The deck was built 15 inches below the veranda. This created a bit of an issue, in that the railings on the veranda closed that section of the deck off. So, this weekend, I pulled the railings off the veranda, built a new step along the full width of the deck.

I was going to stain the full deck, using the gallon I bought a few weeks ago. However, Home Hardware is completely sold out of the base used to make the colour and won’t have any back in until later this week. This screwed up my staining plans. I was going to stain at least the veranda and the new step, but the rain and other things joined up to keep me from doing it until Thursday (yes, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.)

I also put in a new hidden screen on the back door. Now, I need a project.

deck with new step
The veranda and new step.
Screen door picture
The new screen door.

The project I’ve chosen for the new deck, even though it isn’t stained yet has been picked: maple smoked lake trout…smoker

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Some thoughts for Canada Day

With Canada Day coming up, and since this particular post has been viewed several time through search engines, I thought I might run it again.

Doug Rutherford's avatarDoug Rutherford

I’ll willingly admit that this is one of my favourite holidays. I know, nothing holds a candle to Hallowe’en but, this is close. Because, much as we are governed by idiots and often, our leaders aren’t sure of where we are going or what the handcart has to do with it, we still live in the greatest country in the world and the last 40 years of imbecilic governments at the Federal, Provincial/Territorial and Municipal levels have failed to destroy it, regardless of how hard they’ve tried.

Living in Canada:

  • I can e-mail my MP and tell him he’s an idiot and a liar.
  • I can get really pissed at my MP and run against him in the next election.
  • I can join a union.
  • I can join any political party I want to (and, when you consider how wing-y some of those parties are, that is really saying something).

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What? Another Facebook scam?

If you have a Facebook account, as many do, you may have received an e-mail similar to the one below. It claims to be from Facebook and asks you to confirm your request for deleting your account.

e-mail image

“Wait!”, you say. “I didn’t ask to delete my account,” although like most sensible Facebook users, this has crossed your mind on many occasions. You notice the instruction near the bottom, “To confirm or cancel this request, follow the link below.” Is this legitimate?

Here’s a hint. First, you’ll notice that the e-mail sender is not Facebook. It comes from an account called noticemail5490@facemail.com. That doesn’t really look like a professional e-mail address, does it?  And, while Facebook’s e-mail system is called Facemail, it does not have a separate domain name from Facebook itself. Facemail is part of the facebook.com domain.

Another hint can be seen in the fact that there is only one choice to confirm or cancel the deletion request.  Normally, this would be two separate operations, and any reasonable website developer would have two separate links, one for confirmation and one for cancellation. Also, with alterations to any profile of any type of website account, you usually receive an e-mail that states that you should ignore the e-mail if you did not initiate the change in question.

In short, this is an attempt to get you to log on to Facebook, although that’s not where you’re really logging into, and giving the perpetrators your Facebook e-mail address logon (which they already have) and your password. This allows them to either take over your Facebook account or to logon separately from you and glean any information about you and all of your Facebook friends that they can.

Suffice to say, don’t click on the link in the e-mail. Simply delete it and forget about it, after a good laugh at your superior intelligence at avoiding the fraud.

By now, you may be asking, “Why did I get this in the first place? How did they get my e-mail address?” The short answer is that one of your friends did this to you. And, they may not even be one of your Facebook friends, either. Your e-mail probably got gleaned from someone using the Facebook Friend Finder, where they basically gave complete access to their e-mail address book to Facebook. Facebook retains the information in your address book, other than the username and password which they promise not to keep, to create shadow profiles of their users. They integrate the information from e-mail address books with the information you’ve shared on Facebook itself to build a substantially more detailed profile on you than you have provided.

And, since Facebook does seem to be incredibly lax in their internal security, it appears that much of this information has been stolen in a data breach.

Here’s a few things you may want to consider if you have a Facebook account:

  • After every published data breach, regardless of whether or not you think your data was affected, change your Facebook password.
  • Never use the Facebook Friend Finder. All you’re really accomplishing is screwing over your friends.
  • Read any e-mail claiming to be from Facebook, or any other social media site for that matter, with a grain of salt.

And, whenever you use social media, keep in mind the advice they used to give the police officers at every briefing in Hill Street Blues: “And remember. Be careful out there…”

 

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Coming back

Campfire and waterfallI haven’t posted a lot lately, but this is due to us either being camping or getting ready for camping. We’ve made two trips since I last put something up on the blog.

We went back to Fox Lake for five days, although conditions were quite different. There was no more flooding, the weather was quite sunny, and there was no snow this time. We brought out the boat with the camper and I managed to get a few days of fishing in. I’ll admit, Fox Lake is not the world’s greatest place to fish for lake trout. However, I’m happy bobbing up in a down in a boat on a nice, peaceful lake, even when the fish are not cooperating.

I did get one fish, but it was quite small. It was of legal, but not moral, size. The fish was about 12″ long, and I prefer my “lakers” to be at least 16″ long before I keep them. After all, it is still a baby.

I was pleased to see that the flooded out campsites and roads had been repaired. It was a little rough, since some of the gravel in the sites wasn’t packed down as much as the old sites, but this opened another eight sites at the campground.

We were able to get a site just above the creek and you could see the little waterfall that’s about 20 yards upstream from the site. In the picture above, you can see our campfire and the little waterfall in the background.

Enjoying the weatherAs you can see, Clara is enjoying the bright sunlight in here zero gravity chair. She spent the time enjoying the campsite while I spent much of my time trolling for trout.

As mentioned, the weather was really nice. It was nice enough to go out in the boat in shorts. This had a bit of a down side, since I managed to sunburn my knees. I didn’t burn the upper parts of my legs, or the lowers. All that turned out crispy were my knees. For what it’s worth, it did look a lot worse than it actually was. They seemed warm for the first day but didn’t really end up hurting. I could have done far worse, I suppose.

We headed out to our favourite campground last Wednesday. This is Kusawa Lake, a little more than an hour west of Whitehorse (60° 35’N, 136° 9’W).

We left about 4 PM and it was almost the last trip we took. There is a turnoff from the Alaska Highway to the campground road. I signaled my left turn, started to slow down, and checked my side mirror. I learned the last part in the two Defense Driving courses I’ve taken (one in high school and one in the army). The car behind me was slowing down but the idiot behind him decided to pass both of us. He should have been able to see the turn signals so he probably knew exactly what they were doing, and did it anyway. I caught a bit of his facial expression and he seemed unhappy with what I screamed at him while waving a one-finger salute. If I didn’t have the motorhome and boat behind us, I may have followed him down and yelled at him at his first stop. I’ll admit, visions of a tire iron may also have crossed my mind. It was a dark blue Toyota or Subaru, by the way.

We spent five days at Kusawa, and in a trend, the fish weren’t biting much there either. I did catch two trout, one about 1½ lbs. and one about 2½ lbs. I froze these and will smoke them some time this week. The weather was hot, with temperatures in the high twenties, except for Thursday. There was a nice overcast and it only got up to 23°. It’s hard to argue with weather like this for a whole weekend, and we enjoyed it to the fullest.

There were three more things to the trip that were an annoyance. First, the neighbours on one side of us had the most whiny dog. He was constantly whining and the neighbours really didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. On the other side, the other neighbour was a bit of a winner, too. There was someone who moved into the site Thursday afternoon and, before that, there was nothing at that site at all. A little later Thursday, this guy shows up and says he had that site and, basically, kicked the other people out of it. If you like trends, the people at the two sites on either side of us were together.

The third problem was the road itself. I have never seen the road in such rough shape. There are 11 km of washboard, and some of the dips in the washboard are three or four inches. It is one lane in a few places and there is no evidence the government has graded it this year. Before they fixed it almost 20 years ago, it was better than it was this week. And frankly, that annoys me since, for the last three years, you see the following sign at the beginning of the road…

EAP

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New motorhome, new problem

I have to admit that we really like our new camper. The furnace works incredibly well, which was an important aspect to camping over the May long weekend. Further, the huge solar panel on the roof keeps the batteries charged and I haven’t bothered to find a way to bring the generator camping for emergency charging purposes. Not only that, it gets really decent gas mileage.

All is not completely rosy with the new motorhome, although the problem itself is quite minor. With the length of the camper behind the rear wheels, it scrapes on the way in and out of the driveway. It’s not a huge problem, although I wouldn’t want to do it often. I am actually storing it in a friend’s driveway to avoid this.

So, I have someone coming in on the weekend with a Bobcat to change the driveway slope. It climbs a little hill over a short distance as you enter. I’m going to have the slope moved so that the high point is about 15 feet further up the driveway. Should cost about $200 and gives me a good excuse to put in some decent gravel on the driveway anyway.

However, if this is the only problem we have with the new camper, it’s not that bad a thing…

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More working around the yard

Interesting. There were two jobs from yesterday that I finished. The lawn mower is off to the shop. The mechanic also thinks the carb is full of crap. However, cleaning it is part of a standard tuneup.

I did offer the comment that, if the carb in my pickup (a totally beautiful Holley 4810C) needed complete rebuilding, I would do it in and instant. Dealing with the tiny little parts in a lawn mower carb, however, was a completely different kettle of fish. He laughed and mentioned that he was quite glad I, like many, have the same opinion. I get my mower back before the weekend.

My second leftover task was the mosquito vac. I cleaned the lines, but it still wouldn’t fire up. Today, I took the Dremel tool to the ignitor, in hopes that cleaning the built up deposits would make it fire. Guess what. It actually worked. Presently, it’s running outside and there are mosquitos trapped within it.

I also got several other tasks complete. The boat is one step from being ready to put in the water. I cleaned it out, fully inflated it, and dealt with the unsavoury habit it had of having the seat bounce out of the support straps. This leaves you bouncing on the floor of the boat, which is a problem if you’re in the front and more so, if you’re trying to steer from the rear. I ran a compression strap from each side of the seat supports that prevents the seat from coming out. This should make the boat a wee bit more enjoyable for those that don’t like to be thrown off their seat, or worse yet, over side.

I also got the old  motorhome almost cleaned and ready to sell. I have advertised it, but I was a few jobs of cleaning and removing the things that don’t go with it, such as the dishes,  removed. This is almost done, and one of the local RV places is willing to sell it on consignment. This will successfully remove it from my driveway, as having two 24-foot motorhomes can take up a bit of driveway space. I take it for an oil and filter change tomorrow and it goes to the dealer immediately afterwards.

I then moved on to the next task, namely, getting the inflatable boat ready to take out and kill fish. OK, that’s not the most politically correct way to put it  but, there you go. The seats are in and it’s cleaned out. All I have to do is put the motor on it and stock the tools (safety equipment, boat hook, etc.) That should take almost 15 minutes, and is the final tasks to getting the boat ready.  I did the other little job I had to relating to the boat. Since it’s small, and boat and trailer weigh less than 800 lbs., it only has a 4-pole trailer connector for the lights. The new motor home has a trailer hitch, but the wiring hookup is a 7-pole system. I took two plugs and a bit of wire and built an adapter. No, it’s not rocket science, and the local Canadian Tire didn’t have a 7-pole to 4-pole adaptor anyway.

Productivity is good. How long can I keep this insanity up…