Allan

inside looking out

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If I were a wild animal, I don’t think I’d want to be in an enclosed area.  But in Parkbridge, deer come in in the morning and leave at the evening.  They spend their days meandering around the park, eating what they can, and sleeping the rest of the time.

I saw this one on the back way home from shopping.  We just stood there looking at each other.  We, as people, personify various animals.  The deer is obviously thinking, “Why is that guy outside of the enclosure?  Doesn’t he know the dangers?”

Reversing that, would the deer be personifying (or, rather, deerifying) me?  The human is obviously thinking, “It’s too bad that fence is there.  I’d like to kill that deer and eat it.”

abandoned clothes

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Did someone on the way to Wal-Mart just say to themselves, “I don’t think I want pants today,”?  I mean, what the heck?  What a strange thing to see on the side of a street.

Maybe it blew off someone’s clothesline?  But people don’t have clotheslines anymore.

Apparently, they don’t need pants, either.

wind storm

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We had a wind storm yesterday.  It’s been windy for 6 or 7 weeks with maybe 2 or 3 days of calm.  Headaches abound.  No sub-zero temperatures.  Now this wind.  Hopefully it will have blown itself out.

 1/13/2021  9:08 AM     23828819 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 med.mp4
 1/13/2021  9:08 AM     23570363 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 med.wmv
 1/13/2021  9:08 AM      6792223 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836 small.mp4
 1/13/2021  9:09 AM     82211396 wind storm, Parkbridge, Lethbridge, AB 20210113_090836.mp4

CNC birdhouse #1

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This is the first CNC-cut birdhouse as well as the first 3D object created with AutoCAD Civil 3D and cut on the CNC.  Many mistakes!  But it’s a learning experience.  I know I’d likely not use AutoCAD again.

 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       965096 birdhouse 1 20210110_200729.jpg
 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       983134 birdhouse 1 20210110_200746.jpg
 1/10/2021  8:15 PM       995958 birdhouse 1 20210110_200802.jpg

garage thermostat

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It seems ‘cloud-connected’ thermostats are all the rage these days.  Google doesn’t own enough personal information – they want to dissect how we heat our homes, too.  I went to Rona, Canadian Tire, Lowe’s, & Home Depot to find a manual thermostat suitable for the garage – that is, one that goes down to zero degrees.  Finding one that goes that low is not as easy as it sounds.  They’re all made for the insides of homes and only go down to 10°C at best.  I absolutely don’t want to keep the garage at a toasty 15°C in the dead of winter – just keep it above zero.

I finally one at Home Depot.  It’s made for electric baseboard heaters, overkill for this application, but it goes down to 0°C.  Now I see that Canadian Tire has the same one, but I dismissed it at the time because I didn’t know if a baseboard heating thermostat would be compatible with a forced-air type.

Yes, you can use a baseboard heater thermostat to drive a forced-air furnace but not the other way around.  The line voltage on a baseboard heater thermostat in North America is 240VAC/60Hz or sometimes 120VAC.  A forced-air furnace thermostat line voltage is 24VDC, I think, and does not handle any significant load – just a basic on-off thing to trigger a relay switch in the furnace.

So now I have a garage that will not freeze and will be nice enough to work in during the bitter, cold months.

nature is amazing

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I get awe-struck sometimes of how amazing nature is.  There is a type of insect that has the only functional gear mechanism evolved in nature, that we have found at least, long before people designed it.  There is a bird that mimics the sounds of up to 14 other species of birds and, believe it or not, chainsaws.  Yesterday I read another article online entitled Scientists Discover a Major Lasting Benefit of Growing Up Outside the City.  I haven’t had a Netflix subscription for ages.  I do, however, have a subscription to curiositystream.com because of nature documentaries.

Here are a couple of pics taken out / by my kitchen window.  I bought this and hung it on a garden / camping hanging pole duct-taped to another long pole.

Biden vs Trump

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I thought Trump vs Clinton four years ago was huge.  Now lots of us are watching the Biden vs Trump election State-side.  So far, this is what it is (at 1pm MST).

I don’t usually tell my political view to anyone except in meaningless idle talk.  But, seriously, there are just a few presidents as controversial as Trump – beyond even George W Bush, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or even Harry S Truman.  Trump is second only to George W Bush for being a horse’s ass, in my humble view.

It’s a right race between the two, Biden & Trump.  The world is in for more rocky roads ahead if Trump gets in again.  I don’t so much like Biden as much as I dislike Trump, but I do share Biden’s green ideas.  Coming from an Albertan in a world of $35 a barrel oil, this likely won’t go over well, but if there is ever a time for change, it is now.