Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Our Chia Pet turtle.



We rediscovered this buried in a heap of junk in the back yard.

This now is the best of all the YouTube videos of time-lapse Chia Pets.

Happy Centennial, Cash!

One Tuesday back in 2009 I showed you some little turtles in the drawer of my cash register. In that post I promised more about the cash register in three years time. Now is the time!

Today my cash register is 100 years old!

In August 1994, Jerry and I visited New Mexico. We took a day trip over to Las Vegas. I don't really remember why we went over there. Maybe it was a play day with Peggy. I have no real connection with the town. My parents and older sisters all went to New Mexico Highlands University. I was spared. The only thing I really remember of our trips to Las Vegas to see Jack's Aunt Gladie was our excursions to the nearby Dairy Queen where I'd get a Dilly Bar.

One of our stops on our visit was an antique store on the plaza. They had a bronze National cash register for sale. I was working for NCR at the time and had been wanting to get a cash register. I admired it but decided that it would be too difficult to get it back to California.

Here it is in the antique store.

We went back to Los Alamos without a cash register. The cash register kept calling to me so I decided that we probably could have it shipped. We went back the next day and bought it.

We took it to a business in Los Alamos that ships things. They built a crate with 5/8" plywood, removed the "Amount Purchased" top sign and glass, reinforced the purchase price that was showing (I don't know how to have nothing showing in the amount purchased window) and packed it in foam and styrofoam peanuts. They knew what they were doing. The cash register got here in the same condition we left it.

Its condition isn't perfect but it's pretty good. Its locks are missing their keys. Its Finish C "should be highly polished and clear lacquered with a car quality lacquer, to protect the polished finish" but it's not very shiny.

The people at the antique store told us that they were about its third owners. Its first owner was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. I think they told me that the son of the first owner used it in a shop in Las Vegas. It then went to the antique store. Now I have it.

I can't find the receipt but the price tag you see in the picture survives.

Ignore the "c 1912"! We know it's actual age!

On the underside of the cash drawer is the guarantee that the cash register will be mechanically correct for two years after it was delivered. It shows that it was built for A. A. Witherspoon of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It was delivered April 3, 1912.

You'll notice that the Register No. and Size recorded on the guarantee are the same as on the front of the cash register.

This means that this is the original drawer. The cash register isn't cobbled together from pieces!

There is a modification that probably voided the guarantee. The spring that pushes the cash drawer out broke. There is another spring tied to what's left of the original one.

To celebrate my cash register's 100th birthday, here it is making its cheerful Ding! when it registers a sale:

My 100-year-old cash register!

Copyright Magic

Today we're protesting the House's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate's PROTECT IP Act.

Who among us hasn't posted some material that we don't own the copyright of?

I've been living in fear of the lawyers because of one of my YouTube videos.

I uploaded the Magic Meryle segment of the Rosie O'Donnell show to YouTube. I worried that I'd be hearing from Oprah's lawyers about that. I thought about making the Privacy setting of the video so that only people with the link to it could see the video. If I did that it could be seen from my blog but it wouldn't show up in searches of YouTube. Maybe Oprah wouldn't notice it and would leave me alone. But with that setting Magic Meryle wouldn't get the exposure that she deserves.

So I got brave and made it Public so people searching for her would be able to enjoy it. I figured that at worst I'd be asked to remove it.

It appears I didn't need to be worried.

I recently got an email from Meryle. She had no luck watching videos on Rosie's web site. So she sent a message to Oprah's company telling them that the videos weren't working for her at either the Carlsbad or the Oceanside libraries. She also pointed out that they had misspelled her name. She told them that she was looking forward to watching the videos.

She forwarded their reply to me.

They told her that they had corrected the spelling of her name. They said that they had tested the videos on different computers and that they work for them and that the problem might be with her connection.

They then told her that she can watch her episode on YouTube and linked her to the video that I had uploaded!

It looks like I can sleep at night now.

Until SOPA/PIPA passes. Then I'll be off to jail.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

So, these aren't tchotchkes in our house. They're not even tchotchkes. But they are chelonian. And they live nearby. So they count!

Watch it in HD if your Internet connection is fast enough. You'll be glad you did.



Read more about it at The Barista's Cut.

Geminids

I spent much of last night watching another meteor shower. This time it was the Geminids. I went to my usual spot and set up shop. This time I managed to turn off the interior light of the car so it wouldn't light up to greet me as I went to its rolled-down window to get supplies. (A lot of good that did...many of the people who came to that view point thought nothing of leaving their headlights on for many minutes while they got their chairs and whatnot set up.)

I set the camera to look up into the sky rather than include the horizon as I did for the Persieds. I set the camera to take 16 second exposures and my intervalometer to take a picture every 17 seconds. I made a movie from these pictures (imagine!).

Along the way I caught a fair number of meteors in these pictures. There was a period of about six minutes when I got six meteors in the camera's field of view. So, if six showed up in this part of the sky, imagine how many were visible in the rest of the sky! It was a good night for meteors. Till the clouds moved in.

I used Photoshop to merge the six pictures from this period into one image. You get to see how the meteors do appear to stream out of Gemini. The twins' shoulders are near the top of the image and their feet are above the image.

Six Geminid meteors
December 14, 2010, 12:40-12:
46am

The bright meteor going off the right side of the image doesn't really split along the way. It seems to be a result of Photoshop's rotating the image to align it with the other images that have moved because of the Earth's rotation. I'll learn more about Photoshop to fix that...my attempts were an utter failure.

In the center there are two short streaks passing by the Beehive Cluster in Cancer.

There were a lot of bright meteors visible before midnight while the quarter moon was still shining.

I'm getting too old for staying up past my bedtime. I got comfortable on my portable reclining chair with my heavy wool blanket and kept coming close to falling asleep. So I spent much of the time standing so I wouldn't sleep. But that is a pain in the neck.

Then the wispy clouds moved in. For a while there was just the area around Orion and Canis Major that didn't have clouds. Bright meteors could be seen through the clouds but I was getting discouraged and decided that I'd just go home. So I packed up and left at 2:30.

It turns out that the clouds weren't all that noticeable to my camera. We get to see the clouds near the end and we can see the stars clearly through them. I should have stayed an let the camera get more of the stars, meteors and clouds. The motion of the stars against the motion of the clouds is fascinating and at was just getting underway when I stopped the show.

I had the camera focused better this time. In August I think I didn't have anything bright to focus on and I just cranked the lens to its extreme distance setting. Well, it can focus to infinity and beyond. So the stars in my Perseid movie are somewhat fuzzy. This time they're sharper.

There are airplanes again but not as many as in August. There was a strange searchlight or something shining through the sky. Its range and focus amaze me. I want to know what it is. It shows up at around 0:50.

Be sure to watch in HD. And full screen.

---

---

One more day at the Grand Canyon

After breakfast with the ravens, I went out on Desert View Drive in search of a new spot for a movie. I ended up at Moran Point. I got my camera set up at 8:20 and had it click away until 10:30. I was alone for much of the first hour and the car was parked right by the camera. I was able to sit on something more comfortable than a rock, stump or wall now and then.

A couple from Michigan asked about my automatically clicking camera. I explained what was going on and dragged out my laptop and made them see a movie I had shot the day before. They were politely impressed and took off.

Later, I was sitting on the wall near the camera and I heard a voice behind me saying something like "Well, here's Charles!" I turned around and there was John from Encinitas.

John has a print hanging in his living room of the painting that Thomas Moran made from Moran Point. I had no knowledge of who the point had been named for. I think he said that the print was produced by Moran himself and isn't a modern, mass-produced reproduction.

I showed John the movie I was making when we visited the day before. He was more impressed with the result than the Michigan couple.

Now you have the opportunity to be impressed with watching two hours of the view from Moran Point in just over one minute. (Remember, you can press buttons on the player to show it in HD and full screen. I recommend both!)



Later, as I was turning onto the road to Lipan Point, there was John from Encinitas at the stop sign leaving the point. I didn't make a movie there. I had run out of patience for standing around for long periods. Besides, the camera's batteries were running low and it takes a long time being plugged in to get them recharged.

More clouds

I left Grandview Point and continued east. The last viewpoint on the rim (or first if you start at the east entrance) is Desert View. This has the Desert View Watchtower.

Watchtower (undergoing renovations)

The inside of the watchtower has murals on the ceiling.

Watchtower ceiling

And murals on the walls.

Watchtower wall

And views of the canyon.

Desert View view

I made a short video here. It was shot in only half an hour starting around 2:15, October 23, 2010. It was getting very cold and windy and I was getting discouraged with all the thick clouds. I wanted scattered, puffy clouds but had to deal with thick ones. You might be able to see the landscape shaking from all the wind. I need a sturdier tripod. And I need to check that the camera is horizontal.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

I left Yavapai Point where I had recorded the three hours of thick, morning clouds and headed east. I stopped at Grandview Point.

The clouds were finally breaking up so sunshine reached the canyon floor. This time we see not only clouds moving but their shadows as well.

This video captured the canyon and clouds from 11:20 till 1:00 Saturday, October 23, 2010.

Oh, What a Beautiful Gray Morning!

I set up an alarm on my iPod to wake me up at 6:00 Saturday morning with the hopes that the clouds might disappear overnight. I wanted to have a glorious sunrise to record.

I didn't get the greatest quality sleep that night because there was rain that beat on the tent and the pad wasn't fully inflated. But I was sound asleep when a very loud phone rang. It was the iPod doing what I had asked. It must have roused everyone in the campground who weren't already awake. I turned off the alarm and lay there for a while. The iPod rang again. I guess I just hit the snooze button.

I dragged myself out of the sleeping bag into the cold, damp world. The clouds were still there, thicker than before. A beautiful sunrise was not to be seen.

I took a little Sterno-burning "stove" to heat water for portable Starbucks coffee. But this first morning I didn't have time to heat water. Even though there were thick clouds I wanted to get to the rim and be set up for the time the sun was rising. So I just poured a packet of the coffee into cold water and drank it.

That's not the best way to prepare Starbucks Via. It didn't dissolve. But I figured that the clumps of coffee powder would digest and I'd get my caffeine dose. I ate my bagel with Jif peanut butter (if you can call it that).

How can a product that has more than just fresh peanuts taste "more like fresh peanuts" than peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt? Anyway, it doesn't need refrigeration. I suppose I could have taken a natural product and just stirred it well but it would have been a bit messier than Jif.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had filmed the rain moving through the canyon the evening before.

There were a lot of low clouds. There was no sunrise to be seen that morning. But clouds breaking up and the sun coming out is a good subject for a time-lapse movie. And there's the Grand Canyon behind all those clouds!

So I set up the camera right at the edge of the canyon. There was a 300-foot drop just a couple of feet beyond the camera. The camera was pointed over the edge so I thought that there was going to be no chance that anyone would get between the camera and the canyon. But I was wrong. There are two frames with a Japanese tourist getting a picture of the canyon from the very edge of the canyon. If you blink, you'll miss her.

While I was standing there (I couldn't just wander around and leave the camera unattended), someone asked about what I was doing. We discussed our photography hobbies. He had just started taking landscape pictures. He has a very sturdy looking tripod. I need to get one myself. We introduced ourselves. John is from Encinitas. (Hey, the REI where I got the camping gear is in Encinitas...what a small world.)

I stood there from 7:00 to 10:00. The sun made only a few, very brief, appearances.

Here is what clouds moving through the Grand Canyon the morning of October 23, 2010, looked like. The three hours are reduced to a minute and 11 seconds. It starts out slow with just clouds visible. But the canyon eventually makes an appearance. Give it time to develop.

It was a Grand time

Jerry and a friend of his made their annual trip to Phoenix last weekend. I thought that since I was going to be alone for four days that I might as well get out of town myself. Ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget, I had been thinking that clouds and shadows in the Grand Canyon might be interesting subjects for time-lapse movies.

I checked the lodges in the Grand Canyon Village but they were all completely booked for that weekend.

Then I checked the hotels in Tusayan, the smallest incorporated town in Arizona, that is just to the south of the park. There were some rooms available but I didn't really want have to travel all that distance every day.

I looked into other alternatives.

Home away from home

I thought that camping might be the way to go. I figured that I might be able to spend what I'd have had to spend for a hotel room on camping gear and end up with accommodations for future outings. Jerry and I headed over to REI to see what this gear would cost.

It turns out that they rent gear. What a deal, for less than what it costs to spend a night in a hotel room 20 miles from the canyon I could rent a tent, a sleeping bag and a pad for three nights! I could see if I enjoy camping before making the full investment. I reserved the gear and a campsite.

I went camping for the first time since the road trip from hell. (Actually, I think I never spent a night in the tent on that trip. I think I always slept on the coffin at the back of the Carryall.)

We went over to REI Thursday evening to pick up the equipment.

The week before my trip the weather here at home turned wintry. Lots of rain and gloominess. That weather headed to northern Arizona.  I drove up to the Grand Canyon on Friday and for much of the drive there was rain but it quit when I left I-40 at Williams. There was hope that the weekend would be dry!

I got to the campground at around 4:00pm. I pitched the tent between the channel that drains the campground and a shallower channel that looked like rain had recently run through. I then drove to Yavapai Point with my camera.

I got my camera and intervalometer set up around 5:20. Sunset was around 5:40 but there was no sun shining. The thick clouds hid it and were dropping rain in the canyon. But there was enough light for the camera. I had it take pictures of the canyon and the rain for a half hour.

Over the weekend I made several time-lapse movies. Mostly of the heavy cloud cover. There wasn't a lot of sunshine.

Here is the movie I shot that first evening. It shows a rain shower moving through the canyon.

I didn't have the best night's sleep the first night at the campground. I think that I didn't give the self-inflating pad enough time to puff up so it wasn't the softest possible bed. And it rained. The tent kept the water out but the rain beating on the tent was a noise I wasn't used to so it kept me awake much of the time. The sleeping bag kept me warm.

Camping might be a fun way to experience nature. At least in warmer and drier weather.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Here's a little time-lapse movie I made this evening. No music to this one.



If you want to hear John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, here's a YouTube video of a performance.

I'm not going to blog every video I post to YouTube. You can subscribe to my channel if you want to be notified when I post new movies that don't show up here. Or just see them show up on your Facebook News Feed (if you're my friend there).

---

Time flies when you roast coffee

When I recently posted a video of my new Hottop Coffee Roaster doing its job, Izzy wondered how long it took to roast. I guessed around 15 minutes. I was wrong. It takes a bit longer. Colleen suggested that I reshoot the video with some old-time movie cliché showing the passage of time.

Your wish is my command!

Here is the coffee roaster with a clock ticking the seconds off!



I'll get around to telling you more about the movie in the next few days (if you ask for more).

---

Taking the Roadster for a spin

As I promised when I introduced you to the Roadster, here (finally!) is a video of it in action.

See der waxwing?

This morning I was mixing up a can of orange juice. As I was filling the can with water I happened to notice that the birdbath was completely filled with some very handsome birds I had never seen before. Suddenly, the birds all took off and there was an empty birdbath. Then, just as suddenly, it was filled again with another batch of birds.

The birds turned out to be cedar waxwings. Their diet is supposed to be mainly berries so I don't know why they're hanging around these parts.

They just kept coming and going. I got out my trusty Kodak EasyShare Z740 and made a movie.

The movie isn't terribly clear but you get an idea of what we saw.


Here's a picture of them at another birdbath.

Our birdbaths give us a lot of entertainment.

Autumn is Icumen in

Here we go again.

This year's pomegranate harvest was much better than last year's. Last year I didn't grow quite enough pomegranates to make one batch of jelly. This year I got a lot of pomegranates. I made three batches of jelly and one of syrup. Pancakes like pomegranates, too.

That took a gallon of juice. That took getting a lot of little arils out of the tough rinds.

I made a movie of the process.

Thrills ahead!

Fire!

I check the traffic map before I leave work. Today there were some yellow diamonds right by home.  The details of the incidents said that there was a fire in the field in the northeast corner of the intersection of Bear Valley Parkway and San Pasqual Valley Road. We live in the southwest corner of that intersection.

Before I left work I saw the details up to about 4:34 PM.

Jerry called to say that I ought to take a different route home since traffic on Bear Valley Parkway was very slow.

Before I got home, Jerry and a neighbor got to watch a palm tree go up in flames.

I got home and went down to the field at the end of the road with my camera to watch the goings on. Of course, I took a movie. It's pretty dull. We get to see helicopters fly around and drop water on the fire. I missed the fixed-wing plane dropping the pretty pink water.

Here's the dull movie. The most interesting thing about it is the strobing of the helicopter blades that makes it look like they spin very slowly.


This is a map of the area. We live in the house toward the bottom. We watched from the person standing in the field. The helicopter landed at the helicopter. The fire was somewhere around the fire. And there's another marker under the buttons just to keep the fire in the picture.

View Neighborhood Fire in a larger map


The fire is out. Its origin is suspicious.

It hasta be pasta!

One of our stops on our little trip to Orange and Los Angeles Counties was Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. One of the stores there is Williams-Sonoma. We had been to one of their stores earlier in the week on our San Diego-area shopping day. But we thought we had time so why not browse here.

Good thing we did. There is a new KitchenAid mixer attachment! A Williams-Sonoma exclusive!

We picked up the KitchenAid Pasta Press.

It makes your spaghetti. It makes your bucatini. You want fusilli? You got fusilli. It extrudes your macaroni (both large and small). And it makes rigatoni.

We made rigatoni for supper last night. Jerry made tomato cream pesto sauce from Betty Crocker's Pasta Cookbook that came in one of the more successful General Mills Christmas C.A.R.E packages.

Everything turned out very nice.

I've created yet another YouTube video in the How To & Style category that shows the extrusion process. I didn't bother with the mixing of the dough. Jerry makes a cameo appearance.

Here it is!

And here is supper with its sauce.

Mmmmmmmmm!

Eggs suck!

Yesterday, I made butter. I used Straus Family Creamery cream. They put their cream in an old-fashioned bottles. They want their bottles back so I had to pay a $1.25 deposit on each one.

(By the way, I said that Trader Joe's cream has carageenan in it. That's their cream in the plastic bottle. Their cream in the cardboard cartons is just cream. I've found a convenient source for future butter making!)

As long as I had a milk bottle that is a lot like the ones we all grew up with, just smaller, I thought I ought to use it to do an updated experiment from my childhood. You remember the project, putting a hard-boiled egg in a milk bottle.

I could have done it the way I did it back then but I'll save my pyromania stories for another day.

No, today I did it with the help of one of my modern kitchen appliances, my Tilia FoodSaver Vacuum Sealing System.

I made my second YouTube video in two days! (I've already gotten a comment on my butter-making video from one of my subscribers. He said essentially "meh." I'm crushed!)

Here is how you get a hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle. You just have to find a milk bottle.

If you want a better explanation of what's going on, you can watch this video.

Making Butter

I recently expressed regret at not trying the butter my first grade class churned. I was such a picky eater. In a comment, Poss suggested that a KitchenAid mixer might be used to make butter.

Well, duh!

I did a simple Google search and found many web sites that explain how to use a mixer to make butter. You essentially make whipped cream and don't stop when you reach the proper stiffness for whipped cream.

Jerry and I went to Trader Joe's for some cream. Their whipping cream wasn't just cream. It has carrageenan to do something like stabilize the finished whipped cream or something. We didn't want stable whipped cream, we wanted butter.

So we headed over to Jimbo's. They had whipping cream that is simply cream. We got a couple of pints and came home and put them on the counter. Apparently you want your cream at room temperature. Ideally, you want it to have gone sour for more flavor but we were in a hurry. Maybe the sour version will happen some day.

I made my first batch of butter today.

I whipped the cream beyond stiff peaks. Moments after the cream reaches the stiff peaks stage, the foam suddenly disappears. You've got a bowl full of butter and buttermilk.

This will come a no surprise to most of you: I made a YouTube video of the process. My subscribers are hungry for new content from me. Here it is:

I forgot to add salt. I like salted butter on my toast. But our first slice of toast was tasty.

We got almost a pound of butter out of that quart of cream. Yum!

I'm drying, man.

Time for another YouTube experience!

I've shown you photographs of bananas. I've shown you our dehydrator.

Now you get to see the dehydrator in action! Yes, you heard right, you're going to see how bananas are peeled and prepped for dehydrating. Oh, I hope you can watch this without having your minds blown.




Were you blown away?