Simply amazing technology

Today I downloaded the current update to Picasa - version 3.5 The amazing new feature that prompted me to download it is the ability to recognize faces. Ever since the download it has been

Site 82 - 16 West

chugging through my pictures looking for faces and it is remarkably good. Evidently it sees similiarities that I can't notice. It doesn't always get the faces right but there is usually a family connection when it does screw up. It had trouble with mother & auntie Anne but other than that when it made a mistake it was usually mixing up sisters or offspring. Its about half done now and so far has found over 24,000 faces. That's not hard to believe when you realize that it looks at absolutely every face in every picture. It even identifies the faces in the pictures on the wall in the background.

You know that technology is becoming ubiquitous when you get frustrated with how slow it is. You know -- your computer is copying a couple dozen photos onto the internet and each photo is maybe half a meg -- you get pissed off because it takes a couple of minutes. Well the same thing is happening with the facial recognition thing - here it is going through literally a lifetime of photo images and I find myself getting impatient because it doesn't go faster.

Jorgito in the Cat-Cave

We're back at 16 West, north of the Saskatoon airport. We got here on the 30th. Marilyn flew back in the evening on the 29th and we spent that night on the Flying J lot. This place closes on the 15th of October so we'll have to get out by them but by then Marilyn will have been back up north and I will know how my latest project is progressing. With any luck the weather won't get too bad between now and then although it is certainly trying its hardest to go to hell. I tried to do some work outside today but finally gave up because it was too wet and too cold.

The saints that walk among us

I drafted this post about two months ago and never got around to publishing it. Today I realized that it was still sitting here unpublished so I have added a paragraph or two and here it is.

When mother was in the hospital dying she said something that stuck with me “I can see the face of God in the people around me.” She had a Faith that I will never have but I have some understanding of what she saw.

Shortly after mom & dad moved out of the house to their Broadway apartment we convinced them that they needed a companion / assistant. It wasn’t easy to convince mother for a couple of reasons. I think the primary reason for her was always that she didn’t want to spend money on frills. She also didn’t want some stranger in her home. We were lucky to find Diane Neale’s Neale Elder Care service and she very fortunately had someone working for her who had a vague family connection to one of mother’s nieces. That helped ease the transition and over time mother came to depend on Diane’s service.

Initially it was one of Diane’s employees that handled mom & dad’s service. She would come in maybe every other week and do a bit of ironing or go get a few groceries and sometimes went with father to an appointment when mother wasn’t up to the trip. I’m not sure when it changed from being an employee to being Diane that handled mom & dad’s account but by the time mother died last fall Diane was the contact. She has been an absolute angel since then.

I can’t imagine doing what she does but we are so fortunate that there are caring, loving souls like her who devote their time to the elderly and infirm. When I stopped in at Dove House yesterday there was Diane bent over father’s bed chattering away cheerfully to him. Having a conversation with father has become a pretty solitary affair lately but that doesn’t seem to faze Diane and I always have to remind myself that father is just one of her many clients. She has to maintain that cheery disposition in the face of daily deterioration in the lives of her clients.

During father's recent hospitalization Diane has been the only constant presence in his life. She sits quietly watching him sleep, peppers his nurses with questions about his care, provides updates to Chris & me, feeds him, brings his mail and a host of other little aids to life that we have come to depend on.

Diane is not the only angel in father’s current life. The staff at Dove House are exceptional. The place could use a coat of paint and there’s a cracked window here and there but what it has in abundance is loving care for the residents. Father is about the middle of the pack – there are people who are physically worse off than he is and there are people who are in better shape. All of them get individual care whether they are confined to bed or aimlessly wandering the hallway dementedly asking when they can go home.

Father used to quote Ted Eide, a retired farmer from the Kenaston hills who said “there’s only one way out of this place” when he found himself in a similar home in Saskatoon. Unfortunately the Dove House residents are all likely at their last residence on earth but they have been fortunate to land in a place where the staff are cheerful and clearly focused on doing the best for their clients.

Some members of the so-called healthcare system spoke disparagingly about Dove House before we moved father there and it’s not hard to understand why. In a system that focuses on cutting corners, pushing paper and following the rules, Diane Neale and the Dove House staff go against the grain by actually caring and giving of themselves. We are all the better for their existence.

The saints that walk among us

When mother was in the hospital dying she said something that stuck with me “I can see the face of God in the people around me.” She had a Faith that I will never have but I have some understanding of what she saw.

Shortly after mom & dad moved out of the house to their Broadway apartment we convinced them that they needed a companion / assistant. It wasn’t easy to convince mother for a couple of reasons. I think the primary reason for her was always that she didn’t want to spend money on frills. She also didn’t want some stranger in her home. We were lucky to find Diane Neale’s Neale Elder Care service and she very fortunately had someone working for her who had a vague family connection to one of mother’s nieces. That helped ease the transition and over time mother came to depend on Diane’s service.

Initially it was one of Diane’s employees that handled mom & dad’s service. She would come in maybe every other week and do a bit of ironing or go get a few groceries and sometimes went with father to an appointment when mother wasn’t up to the trip. I’m not sure when it changed from being an employee to being Diane that handled mom & dad’s account but by the time mother died last fall Diane was the contact. She has been an absolute angel since then.

I can’t imagine doing what she does but we are so fortunate that there are caring, loving souls like her who devote their time to the elderly and infirm. When I stopped in at Dove House yesterday there was Diane bent over father’s bed chattering away cheerfully to him. Having a conversation with father has become a pretty solitary affair lately but that doesn’t seem to faze Diane and I always have to remind myself that father is just one of her many clients. She has to maintain that cheery disposition in the face of daily deterioration in the lives of her clients.

Diane is not the only angel in father’s current life. The staff at Dove House are exceptional. The place could use a coat of paint and there’s a cracked window here and there but what it has in abundance is loving care for the residents. Father is about the middle of the pack – there are people who are physically worse off than he is and there are people who are in better shape. All of them get individual care whether they are confined to bed or aimlessly wandering the hallway dementedly asking when they can go home.

Father used to quote Ted Eide, a retired farmer from the Kenaston hills who said “there’s only one way out of this place” when he found himself in a similar home in Saskatoon. Unfortunately the Dove House residents are all likely at their last residence on earth but they have been fortunate to land in a place where the staff are cheerful and clearly focused on doing the best for their clients.

Some members of the so-called healthcare system spoke disparagingly about Dove House before we moved father there and it’s not hard to understand why. In a system that focuses on cutting corners, pushing paper and following the rules Diane Neale and the Dove House staff go against the grain by actually caring and giving of themselves. We are all the better for their existence.

Idiots and assholes

... and we're paying their salaries. Incredible.

I stopped in at Dove House this afternoon to visit father. He was asleep, woke up briefly and then promptly went back to sleep. It doesn't make much difference to the course of the visit now whether he is awake or not so I let him sleep while I tried to read his Western Producer. All I could really see was the headlines because I had neglected to bring my reading glasses so that got old pretty quick. I could hear one of the staff chattering to Natasha so I followed the voices until I found the two of them.

It turned out that the reason father was still in bed was that he had a visit from what is charitably known as Home Care. They do come to the home but I haven't seen much evidence of caring. Their big concern today was the sores that father has developed. Natasha has been beside herself for the last two weeks trying to get these sores cleared up. She has purchased special silver impregnated dressing material on her own account, she has been leaving his legs exposed to the air to hasten the healing, she has arranged for special mattress pads and covers and she has found him a much improved (and ridiculously expensive) wheelchair that takes away the pressure points that ultimately lead to sores. In short she has been caring for her patient but that fact apparently is completely lost on the mindless minions of the government. I expect that these bureaucratic stooges likely harass all of the private care facilities with equal abandon. Perhaps at some level they realize the futility of their own existence and resent the fact that people like Natasha are actually providing patient care. Whatever the reason the whole works of them should be tarred and feathered daily.

They actually had the gall to threaten her with a formal investigation about father's sores. I told her she should tell them to "bring it on" as long as they agreed to start the investigation by interviewing me. The frustrating part for any thinking, caring person is that these useless leeches are draining funds from the healthcare system that could be going into patient care. Bureaucracies look out for themselves so we are all doomed. There's no chance that the system can ever fix itself, in fact it is likely to only get worse.

Big things

I didn't get a particularly early start from Saskatoon today so by noon I was only at Davidson. The citizens of Davidson have bought into the "big thing" concept with a coffee pot and cup. Vegreville has the big egg and its kind of cute but come on - a big coffee pot? Some of you may have seen the episode of Corner Gas where the residents of Dog River decided they needed their own big thing to promote tourism. After a lengthy townhall meeting they came up with the world's biggest hoe. Which inevitably led to all sorts of innuendos about Dog River's big dirty hoe. I couldn't help thinking about that as I looked (briefly) at Davidson's big coffee pot which is next to what is painfully obviously a plastic water tank turned upside down. If you look closely you can even see the flat spot for the valves on the bottom of the tank (which is now the top of the coffee cup). Oh well.

I was more attracted to the dump wagon which is located under a shelter behind the coffee pot. It brought back memories of the one that sat on the hill behind Grandpa's barn. I whiled away many hours between the age of six and probably ten playing with that dump wagon. Grandpa's hadn't been restored the way the one in Davidson has but the dump mechanism still worked. I would pump away on the lever until the chains were wound up tight and then trip the floor release to let the doors fly open. The one in Davidson has a lever release for the dump but I'm sure Grandpa's had a foot pedal to release the doors. Its hard to imagine building any amount of road with such small equipment and the wagon would have had to be loaded entirely by hand.

Tonight I'm once again listening to the music of a hundred idling diesels in the parking lot at the Husky on the east side of Regina. They must all have broken starters. It was 31 or 32 degrees in Regina today but its extremely pleasant now so they can't be idling them to run air conditioners. I think its just trucker habit.

Solar powered internet

This morning I connected the last of the wiring for the solar panels that Camiel gave me. I had planned to do that in the dusk last evening because I was warned that I might get zapped if I did it in daylight. Maybe with more watts but it certainly wasn't a problem with my array and I have to think it likely wouldn't be a problem at 12 volts no matter how big the array. Possibly if I was wiring the panels in series so that I had higher voltages to deal with but not at the 20 or 21 open circuit volts I was dealing with this morning.

The panels may have been free but the installation certainly wasn't. I don't think I have hit $300 but I am well north of $200 and counting. The problem is that you need to use such big wires in order to avoid voltage losses along the way. Copper is expensive. And its a major pain in the ass to drag it through the crowded bowels of the bus to get the power to where it needs to be got to. That was the project for last night. I needed to get it done while I still had my helper - she's gone off to the Arctic now. At least that's where father says she is.

By the time I got everything hooked up it was getting on for noon so I thought "we should be making some serious power by now". WRONG. We were making somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5 amps at 14.1 volts. It kept flickering back and forth between 0.4 & 0.5 while I stood there thinking "I spent close to $300 for this???" Of course eventually I realized that my batteries were full thanks to being plugged in for two days and all the panels were really doing was powering the phantom loads on the batteries after the charger kicks into float mode.

Now its 7:30 and I've been off the power pedestal for about 6 hours. My batteries are still at 96% charge. I haven't tried to run them down but I haven't restricted my activities either. Time will tell but I think we need one more 100+ watt panel to enable us to live on a restricted power usage pattern. I think what we have now will likely extend the time we can run without starting the generator but we will still need to run the generator more or less every day. Maybe not for quite as long as we would use it otherwise but we'll still have to listen to it every day.

Tonight I'm parked on the Flying J lot in Saskatoon listening to the music of a hundred idling diesel engines. I think the last time we were here was when the place caught on fire. I'm parked far enough away from the restaurant that I should be safe if that happens again. If you look at the Google map you'll see that it is a couple of years out of date - Google knows that there is a Flying J here but the photograph is obviously taken during the construction of the Flying J.

A bad week that turned out well

Last weekend I was crawling around under the frenchy-bus with a grease gun and a 9/16 wrench. I got the rear brakes set but while I was back there I noticed the green drop in the picture. NOT GOOD thought I. Really not good. I had visions of $5000 and up repair bills to open up that side of the engine and repair whatever was causing the coolant leak which appeared to me to be coming from along the line between the head and deck. That's the side of the engine that got the new head last winter but I couldn't see how it could be related to that. It didn't much matter what it was related to - there was obviously coolant coming out of that head. There wasn't a whole bunch coming out because the level in the expansion tank hadn't changed noticeably but I could see the drops forming and the cross member above the hitch was wet where the coolant was dripping on it. In fact what I first noticed was three green drops on the bottom of that cross member.




I got busy and sent some emails to 3 trusted mechanic friends and then I spent a night worrying - that always helps - wake up at 3:00 in the AM and think about all the bad things that it could be. The next morning I got a reply to one of the emails and didn't like the suggestions that the reply contained so I spent another night worrying about it. On Monday morning I got a call from Luke who owns the shop that rebuilt the engine. He pointed out that the stud immediately above the green drop actually goes into the water jacket. He and "Oscar" were of the opinion that likely what was happening was that the coolant was leaking out around the stud. I liked that idea - mainly because it wasn't going to cost me much to fix it but also because it made good sense. So I pulled the stud, got a bath in coolant, wrapped the end of the stud with teflon tape while the coolant pissed out and then ran the stud back in tight. So far it appears to be working. Sometimes you get lucky and Luke said it was my turn.



We spent a leisurely week there while Marilyn visited her sister from Tokyo who was in town for a few days. Alison and I looked at boat porn in the evenings and during the days I mounted two surplus solar panels that Camiel gave me. I haven't got them hooked up yet but I do have a plan. They won't be enough to liberate us from Sask Power or any other power utility but they are a start. We've now got the ability to generate roughly 200 watts of our own power. If we had that much again I'd feel like we were semi-independent from the power companies. We don't entertain any notion of never paying for power but we would like to be able to live our life for a week or so off the grid without having to run the (noisy) generator every single day and I think 400 watts of solar power would get us pretty close to that point. We have done a good job of cutting back our consumption thanks to the great LED light project. Our Trimetric monitor lets me keep close track of our consumption and the state of our battery bank. By this time next week I will have the initial two solar panels hooked up and I will test our ability to live off the grid while Marilyn is up at the mine.

Today we hooked up and got a late departure from Al & Camiel's. We headed generally west out of Airdrie eventually hitting the Saskatchewan border at Alsask. There's a scary amount of crop left out through central Alberta. Typically by this time of year the crop would be 90% cleaned up but I saw lots of swathing and I saw green canola that won't be ready to swath for at least 10 days.

Tonight we are parked in the campground at Alsask. "Campground" is a generous term in this case. It is more accurate to say we are parked in the area known locally as the campground. It consists of tufts of crested wheat grass, broken down picnic tables and the occasional barbeque stand. But its free. We're far enough away from the highway that we aren't completely bothered by the truck noise but we certainly do hear it. After supper we drove into the village for a visit with one of father's oldest and dearest friends, Tony Steiert. He is either 91 or 92 now - at that age he can easily be forgiven for losing track of a year or two. His mind is as sharp as ever and his body is treating him pretty well too.

We first started visiting Tony here when the boys were young. Alsask was a good stopping point on our endless journeys from Nipawin to Medicine Hat. Tony was involved with a community project to try to make us of the old Canadian Forces base buildings on the edge of town. One of the projects was a fish rearing enterprise. They hatched fish and grew them out to fingerlings which they then sold to farmers or to the provincial government. The community involvement quickly deteriorated to where Tony was doing all the work - he was in his late 70's and early 80's at that time. One memorable time I remember we stopped and he showed the boys how he picked the dead eggs out of masses of eggs that he was hatching. He had the eggs in trays in some kind of a box with water running through it. He could tell which eggs had died by their colour and he would painstakingly pick them out with a pair of tweezers so that they didn't rot and infect the rest of the tray. He would always keep back some of the fish and feed them out to market size so we could count on buying some fresh rainbow trout pretty well every time we came through.

Tony was always inventing something. Some of his inventions had to do with the fish like his fish toilet which flushed the collected fish poop out of the big tanks that he reared them in. Other inventions had nothing to do with fish like his apartment deck garden in what looked like a big plastic horsetrough or his various exercise machines. He was also always full of stories about Liberal prime ministers. The only Conservative that I ever recall him mentioning was Diefenbaker but he talked non-stop about the Liberals, starting with his hero, Louis St. Laurent.

Tonight was no different - Tony was in fine form with stories about St. Laurent, "Mike" (Pearson) and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His latest projects are wooden boxes with wheels under them which apparently he is able to sell to old ladies to put wool in. They looked more like a file box to me so I pointed that out. That may lead to a whole new area of potential sales.