Morning all. Its been a busy few days. Till yesterday afternoon when the office network went down. IT says its nation wide and caused by some cut fiber some place. What fun.

We had issues yesterday as well. All WFH people were cut off.

It always seems weird to me that large hunks of the internet can go down.

We have another cool and rainy day. Two thumbs up!

Tomorrow I will be riding along with the pilot to fly a project. The client wants the standard NADIR image but also lots of obliques of different areas as well. So I will shoot the obliques with our Canon 5DsR. It is an amazing camera and shoots large images It is 51 megapixels (8688 x 5792) full size sensor camera.

Back in the days when we had a film recorder the finest grain sharpest 35 mm film was usually recorded at 4K (4096 x 2732) and going to 8K (8192 x 5464) was pretty much a waste of time. The digital image is sharper than any film at the time.

Canon keeps promising a 100 mega pixel 35 mm SLR format soon. That will be great.

Phew, having fun now. The boss's wife rousted me out of bed early, and we went to breakfast. It was in the low 60s and there was actually fog on the way to the restaurant.

Then she made me get the wheelbarrow out, and we went to one of the front flowerbeds. It too is an area where I used to mow, but now the flower bed has been extended to have room for more flowers. So I was digging holes, and playing pack mule and hauling soil and mulch and planting crap. Got that done and the yard was just covered in dew. I had to wait until after noon to get to go mow.

That is all done.

We are supposed to have rain most of next week.

Morning all. Woke up to liquid sunshine here. Supposed to be on and off all week.

We got the project flown Saturday afternoon. It sucks when a project has a time and date they what it flown, regardless of weather or clouds.

Once again, lots of cloud shadows. I rode along to run the laptop as we mowed the yard in the sky. ATC twice made us do a 360 turn and wait to continue the flight line so the commercial airlines could take off. I shot the obliques with the Canon 5Dsr and the 70 to 200 mm zoom lens with autofocus and image stabilization. It is a challenge holding that camera and lens finding the area of interest as we fly past at 120 MPH. It is almost a full square mile, and they want the many different parking lots, every large building, the different attractions, and then overall when the cloud shadows and beams of light hit the ground.

It shoots in RAW mode, and that captures all the data from the sensor, so that after the fact I can adjust the exposure, white balance, color and exposure and pretty much every aspect of the image. It saves a 150 MB tif file per image. I had gone through several computers before I ever had a hard drive that was 150 MB.

Morning all. One down four to go. Should be a light day but now that I have said it...............

Last night my wife asked if Reuben was in my room as she had not seen him in a while, and like a two year old, if he is out of sight, and quiet, something is not right.

She looked in the back yard and did not see him, so we both went out and I used a flashlight. Sure enough, he had a prize. He had caught and killed a squirrel. It was not a baby, but it was not full grown, so a young almost adult. I kept him on the porch and my wife went in and got two dog treats and placed them on the ground in front of him. We could tell he was torn, but decided to put down the squirrel, and go for the treats. I picked up the tree rat by the tail and put it in the trash can that was already at the curb for pickup this morning. The trash was picked up, so problem solved.

Tree rat, trash panda what other terms are there for yard pests?

Pole cat?

We had a skunk hit Reuben two different times. That was a real stinky mess.

We found the skunk den, and called a skunk removal guy to "take them to the farm" for us.

Yeah that would be one to let someone else handle.

Yea, it was a momma skunk, with several "kits" that he trapped, and took to his place to use nitrogen to euthanize them, and bury them.

Reuben has caught several mice, a young rabbit, and now the squirrel. He wanted the skunk, but it had too good of a defense. His favorite quarry is the cicadas. They are like the best dog treat ever to him. They get chewed up and swallowed in seconds.

Sounds like he is a handful.

He is my early warning system to go to Defcon 1 when he starts circling the storage building. I know to put out mouse traps. He often gets a mouse before I do, but with thumbs, peanut butter, and the snap traps I have eliminated more mice than he has.

He is a hunter for sure. He has chased away all the polar bears and elephants from the neighborhood. Any dog on a walk with their owners is told in no uncertain terms they are close to his yard, and no trespassing allowed.

He is sleeping a lot more now that he is 10.

Morning all. Another rainy day here. Went to bed with a forecast of 65% rain and got up to 100% getting wet from the car to the building.

We received a whopping .12 inches of rain yesterday. The wonderful news is ZERO hail. Some parts of the metro area had golf ball size hail.

Golf? Time to buy some clubs.

Morning all. Below 50 here looks like the first signs of fall are in the air.

We start with cool morning, but it still gets to the hight 80s or low 90s but afternoon. It is really amazing to me the difference in the car AC settings from 90 to 100+ temps. In the 90s, just a low setting is plenty, yet 10 degrees hotter is a huge difference and takes max cold settings.

I just set the temp in the CRV and let the system decide how to keep it there.