Overdue post

Geez, my last post has icicles? Since then we've cruised the inside passage, had two weeks of crazy-hot weather, and I went to Colorado for a week.

So, I have to post this picture from a week or two ago:

Double rainbow

Also, I've been sucked into the knitting design contests at the Fiber Factor. Here is what I submitted for the second challenge:

 

 

 

Fish sweater

You can see it here too. It earned me a trophy knitting needle! It's an Addi Art in size 10 mm with crystals inside the tips. Crazy. I've got my yarn and a swatch and parts of an idea for the third challenge. The swatch is telling odd stories with the washing - I'm not sure how the gauge can match and yet the angle of the stitches changed. More on that later I guess.

More pictures from yesterday

We have a giant icicle:

Icicle (and drift) outside the computer/tai chi room.

Here's Rob pushing snow over the edge:

Rob pulling from a drift.

Over the edge it goes.

There are places where the edge is hard to get to - that hole near the root is where the driveway ends.

Foot hole past the driveway.

Mayday

It's been ages since I posted here. In the meantime, I had a wonderful trip to visit a friend in Victoria, BC and to Madrona (a knitting convention). Then I went on a great trip, spending a week in New Jersey (work) and a week in Florida (Tai Chi).

I took this picture yesterday to show how annoying the continued snow is:

Snow on the driveway - still.

 Little did I know that it would be worse today:

Even more snow.

Wind-blown clear patch, looking down.

Next in "Snow Drift Designs" images.

"Knit your life" cowl.

In knitting news, I've been sucked into the Fiber Factor's knitting challenges, at least the first one. This is a grid representing my favorite grid generation activities at work. It was so much fun to knit that I want to knit another with the other half of this Noro colorway, plus make a vest using a different but similar chart.

Rough weekend

Remember all that electrical work so that we could run off a spare generator if push comes to shove? We had a good week of strong winds, so none of it got tested - until Saturday morning. Saturday morning the Kubota generator tried to run - and shut itself off. Murphy's law of generators is that this sort of thing only happens on a Saturday at 40 below. It's almost never 40 below this high up, but it happened this past weekend.

Rob tried a few more times, got a few readings. He reported that there's nothing wrong with the generator, but it was somehow giving us 20-30 Hz, dipping so low the controller shut it off. Then we dragged out the backup generators and got them hooked up. They were a bear to start, especially when in the "off" position, but start they did - and then they shut off. Each would run for 5-10 minutes, then just quit.

Rob shut off most electric loads, including the heater and we went to town. While there, we went by the generator store and were talked out of buying yet another generator. The guy also gave us the name of his favorite electrician, a guy who promised to come out on a Sunday(!)

Sunday morning we rushed to town before the electric appointment, in search of kerosene heaters and a shower. The shower we got at the Tai Chi center, but our first choice of where to get the heaters didn't pan out. Fred Meyer's sells the kerosene, but not the heaters - they have an aisle full of electric heaters. Running out of time, we went home, with a promise that I would go to town if we found some place selling heaters if none of the generators could be made to work.

Rob recalled that he has yet another generator, but this one has an incompatible plug for our system.

The electrician came, making some crack about us living way out there. He and Rob moved some wires further from the controller and got the Kubota running - and the furnace on before the garage froze. The guy also told us what was wrong with the Hondas. Not only is there a main on-off switch, but there's also a toggle for letting air into the gas tank when it's running. If that is set wrong, they create a vacuum and can't keep enough gas flowing into the engine. It's something he learned about the hard way himself.

Anyway, the house is warm again and the wind is back. Life is good.

A new transfer switch

A transfer switch is a handy item.  We can now switch from our main generator to a backup generator in case we have problems with the big Kubota.  Unless we have a bit of wind, we at most have 48 hours of battery power starting from a full charge.

Square-D 60 amp transfer switch with service cable to connect to a generator with a twist lock connector.  The Kubota is rated to 50 amps (6000 watts).  There are a couple 1/2 HP motors that need a burst of 1800 watts (15 amps) to get started.  The charger is set to 20 amps leaving 30 amps to the house for general use.  There is a decent amount of wiggle room for the Kubota.  When we are in backup generator mode, we will need to take care not to let any of the 1/2 HP motors kick in unless the backup generator is a good size.  We did a small test with one of the Honda 2000's and it promptly shutdown when a motor tried to kick in.

Here is the guts of the power generator side of the Kubota.  It is a Stamford generator.  The main lines into the house were split between the Kubota and the transfer switch.  There is a bit more beefy wires in there now.  The Kubota has yet to be tested in this new configuration -- the wiring job looks solid.  We have had a bit of wind in the past few days to keep us in good standing.

A little gimp hack

I know there are at least three knitters who might read this, so I thought I'd get this out here. A few months back I had need of a panda pattern for Team Unity in Nerd Wars. I opted to make up my own and I based it on this image. I used gimp:

1. started from one photo.
2. cropped the image to just the panda.
3. drew lines where the front leg is since it’s all basically black/shadow.
4. scaled the image to be only 20 pixels wide while shrinking it less vertically for a stitch aspect ratio of 5/7.
5. played with the posterize function a bit, then canceled it.
6. got out pencil mode with a one-pixel paintbrush and started picking my colors.

The resulting image looked like:

Tiny panda

I scaled it up (using interpolation mode "none" in gimp) and made these mittens using mostly mom's leftovers:

Mittens!

 I knit them top-down without rotating the pattern... you can see the result.

 Last week I was mulling on the problem of automatically putting black lines around each stitch. I finally got a Python-fu program working within gimp to make:

Printable pattern

I'm happy! Code is at github. This project shows that one nice feature would be to figure out how to make the grid be something other than black. I'm not quite sure how - maybe another day.

By the way, we're home today while someone works on the generator system, making it so we can run the house from a backup generator.

More weather photos

Rob has rigged things so that if the weather service puts out a special weather alert, he gets email on the next hour. He got one today at 11 AM. By then I had contributed what was needed on yet another colleague's proposal and was going to dive into some debugging. Anyway, I was talked into going home while the getting was good. Here's are some views:

The sun came out while we were in the grocery store. Then we saw this low cloud beneath the dark cloud deck.

Pretty trees in the sun.

Then it started raining and we got a hint of a rainbow.

The view from home, back towards town. By then it was snowing.

We heard a big thump and Rob went out to shovel roof snow off the deck - but most is still up on the roof.

View of snow still to go - but maybe not today.