Dragonfly Ranch

Some may call it junk, others apparently call it art. Whatever, it’s fascinating.

This is the second tarantula we’ve seen this year. The first was in Betsy’s apartment!

Temps in the 90s, full sun, hot pavement….ahh, just the thing for a Sunday afternoon rest.

Sent from my iPad

http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a17028

I bought a lightly used design board a while ago, which is really a pull down shade, from one of the quilting guild members. Arlin mounted it over a set of the French doors in the craft house and this is really the first time I’ve had the excuse to use it. The blocks are from the latest mystery quilt: you get one set of instructions per month until you get to the finished blocks. Then you have to figure out how to put it together in a visually pleasing presentation. The design wall is mega useful for this. You can see immediately where you need to make changes in arrangement so there’s a pattern rather than a jumble. Since I went totally scrappy with this quilt it was difficult to see any pattern at all until I started putting the blocks up. Am enjoying the process and will be quite happy with the quilt once I get it right!

Sent from my iPad

We had a couple of new friends from the EMCSPCA over for pizza last night. They both volunteer at the Thrift Shop and I had been talking with Kimberly (left) about the issue of finding pizza both she and Bennie (right) liked at any of the local pizza shops. It’s a little complicated as Kimberly is a vegan and neither of them like anything too spicy. So we made pizza together from dough to fixings. Everyone decorated and fired their own individual pizza in the new grill top box Arlin got so everyone got exactly the pizza they wanted. Mine, in the middle, is the best of course.

Sent from my iPad

I finally figured out (I think) how to calculate our solar savings with reasonable accuracy. The figures below go back only nine months, because that was when PG&E started giving us enough information on our bills to be able to calculate our savings properly.

Even so, the results are only approximate, because I didn’t feel like putting in the work required to account for every wrinkle in PG&E’s byzantine pricing structure, but I think they’re close enough.

Over the nine bills (January-September), we paid PG&E $628.61. If we had had to pay PG&E for every one of the 12,700 kilowatt-hours we used, we would have paid about $3,600, so we saved $3,000.

Our average price per kilowatt-hour would have been $0.2835. (Electricity is expensive in California.) Instead we paid PG&E an average of $0.049 per kilowatt-hour.

If this pattern holds, and we save $4,000 a year, we’ll have recouped our investment in five years. That will be April 2019.

Somehow this big toad (he’s next to a corn cob) got himself into the chickens’ enclosure. I only discovered him because I heard him scrambling out of my way as I went to collect the eggs later than usual. This picture is taken with a flash.

In my experience growing up on the farm, chickens would go after toads, frogs, and small snakes. You would see a hen with her prize in her beak, running with 20 to 50 other hens forming a wake behind her.

So this toad, in my opinion, would be in grave danger when the chickens emerged from the coop in the morning.

I can’t stand handling such creatures, so I made Phil come out to rescue the critter.

Sent from my iPad

Quite a while ago I took a class through the quilting association involving tracing a photograph using a light box (which Arlin built for me) onto fabric and then trying some coloring and shading techniques with inks and crayons. I finally finished this and am quite proud of it.

Sent from my iPad

This is the fifth day in a row that the mantis has been hanging around the hummingbird feeders. I have to move it every time I fill them, and it always comes back. The hummingbirds don’t like it — they won’t drink from the feeder it’s sitting on — so it’s good that we have several feeders. We may have to relocate it ourselves if it doesn’t go away soon.