I can see clearly now

The following is really MrBears's project but he seems to have gotten out of the blogging business. So I get to share the news.

Today we lit up the house. We had some Solatubes installed. They're basically skylights that bring the light into the house through a mirrored cylinder.

There were parts of the house that weren't lit very well. The hall, even with its light turned on, was rather bleak. That has all changed. Here are some pictures taken after the installer got finished. The whole project took only about four hours to install.

Mind you, these pictures were taken with only the light from the new Solatubes.

Here's the hall lit up all pretty and nice. The Solatube replaced the former, very inadequate light fixture. There is a light in the tube so that we can light up the hall at night.

The family room has a lot of lights in its ceiling. We had to turn them on in the middle of the day if we wanted to see on the side of the room away from the windows. We now can see without using electricity! We can even read in our red recliners without turning on lights.
We were planning to have a dimmer sort of thing inside the family room's Solatube. But that would have involved engaging an electrician to run a wire through the rafters, down a wall and to a new switch. The installer supposed that it was going to be unlikely that we'd find an electrician who is willing to do that work in a space that is very inconvenient to get to. So we scrapped that and the light will always come in when the sun is shining. We don't watch many movies in the daytime so it probably won't ever be a problem that the light is always there.

And Jerry is always thinking of others. It would never have occurred to me to add such a light to the garage where I do the laundry. He thought that I might like to be able to work in the laundry room without having to turn on the fluorescent lights. It will be great laundering in natural light. Saturday is the day I usually do laundry but I couldn't do it today since the ceiling was going to be torn up. I can hardly wait to do laundry tomorrow!

If you thought that all that was enough, you're not thinking as well as Jerry. The Solatube folks have a solar-powered attic fan. Our attic space gets hot. And that keeps the house hot through the night. The dormer vents we have probably help to cool things off up there but they're passive. We had two of these fans installed. One is over the family room and one is over the main part of the house. The two parts are pretty much separate spaces with just a tiny hole in the wall between them that electricians probably don't want to shimmy through to run a wire.

Here's a view of the project from the roof. The attic fan is the black thing near the weather station. The Solatubes' tops are the domes beyond the dormer vent. (The disintegrating ridge caps are shoddy materials used when we had the family room and garage added. We need to get our roofer to replace them.)

Here's a close-up of the Solatube collector.

And here's a close-up of the inside. This picture used the flash to show the ceiling and lens's frame. We got the OptiView diffusers. The light coming from them is sharper than the other diffuser and is somewhat prismatic. We get pretty rainbows on the walls.

Here's one of the attic fans.

All of these improvements aren't using any electricity from the grid. We're Green! (Now if only we had insulation in the walls...)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Baccarat and Waterford crystal from Mom.

See here for a handmade present from Mom (posted earlier by MrBears).

I Love Labor Day Weekend

2013 edition is here.

The best thing about Labor Day Weekend isn't that it's a day longer than most. No, it's because of the "Celebrations" section of the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune. This is where people pay to announce engagements, weddings, anniversaries, new babies, graduations from kindergarten, and the likes.

If you can pay for it, you can celebrate it.

Every year we get to share in the celebration of Ms. Magic Meryle Cohen's birthday! She hasn't aged a day since I first noticed the celebration of her birthday many years ago. The picture and type have gotten smaller (the column is only 3 ½ inches wide this year) but the information is pretty much what I remember.

(click it to read it)

She sounds like a hoot.

(But for all her accomplishments mentioned in the piece the only thing I can find on the Internet about her is her hint for Heloise.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAGIC MERYLE!

Grendel makes peanut butter

We love peanut butter. And we're not talking that Skippy and Jif crap. We want real peanut butter. You know, peanuts and salt. Our Thursday evening pancakes wouldn't be the same without peanut butter.

Grendel, our Blendtec blender, can make peanut butter. I tried it out with peanuts from Trader Joe's. It was good. But a pound bag of peanuts costs more than a pound jar of Trader Joe's peanut butter. That just didn't make a lot of sense somehow.

I took a vacation day yesterday (I've accumulated all the vacation I can so I had to use some lest I lose some that I would have otherwise earned) and spent some of the day shopping at Costco. They had a five pound bag of unsalted peanuts in their shells for $5.49. I decided to try my hand at making peanut butter from peanuts I shell myself.

I started out with two pounds of peanuts in their shells.
Two pounds of peanuts plus an hour and five minutes equals one pound, eight and a half ounces of shelled peanuts. If you do your arithmetic, you'll discover that this comes out to be $1.44/pound of shelled peanuts (don't consider the time it took me to shell them, time is not money!). If this turns out to be good peanut butter this will be a good value!

A pound and a half of peanuts.

I took out six ounces of the peanuts and had Grendel coarsly chop them so I could add chunks to the peanut butter so we could have crunchy peanut butter.


Here is the finished product.This is good peanut butter. We have achieved good peanut butter value! And we don't have jars that we have to recycle. We have the bag the peanuts came in that isn't recyclable. But I think that amount of petrochemicals in the bag might be less than what would be used to make another jar and to transport the jar from place to place. So I think this might be a little better for the environment than store bought stuff.

Here's my latest YouTube masterpiece: Grendel Makes Peanut Butter!



I ended up with almost eight ounces of peanut shells.
Nothing goes to waste, the shells are in the compost bin.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Metal family (with colorful molten metal splashed on their backs) from Karen.

Case Resolved

Yesterday, we were told to report to the courtroom as usual at 9:00 this morning. We were all waiting in the hallway at 9:00. And we were still waiting around 9:30. The bailiff came out and told us that there were things going on and that we could leave the area but to be back at 9:45. Some time after 10:00 we were told to hang in there. We finally got taken into the courtroom after 10:30 (our usual midmorning break time).

After we all got seated, the judge explained that the case had been resolved and that we were being dismissed. We are free to discuss the case now.

Jury Selection
I covered this earlier. After they thoroughly questioned, thanked, and excused dozens of other potential jurors my name was called to fill the empty seat in the jury box. They had had enough of the jury selection process and they didn't ask me any questions. The just wanted to get started after I was seated in the jury box so I was in.

Opening Statements
The Deputy District Attorney ("D.A." for short) told us that the defendant was on trial for a series of robberies. She told us that he and some other people would go to places where day laborers would gather and offer them work. He'd get his victims in the car and he'd take them to an isolated place, threaten them with a knife and demand their money.

In the opening statement, she played us a phone call he made to his girlfriend or sister. (I think it was the "one phone call" you're allowed when you're arrested. Apparently this one phone call is recorded.) In it he said he "did it" and that she shouldn't take any of the blame.

She told us that the trial was going to take a long time because there were 17 counts of robbery and kidnapping that we were going to have to decide. And that the victims would be needing an interpreter since they don't speak English.

The Defense Attorney seemed to say that this was a case of victims wanting somebody, well, anybody, to be punished and that the victims aren't to be believed when they say that it was his client who committed the crimes.

Testimony
Just like the D.A. said, testimony was slow. There were 15 victims of the 17 crimes and each of them needed an interpreter. I'm not sure if we heard from all 15 victims. I think there were a few who hadn't yet testified. But we heard from most of them. The attorneys would ask a question, the interpreter would ask it in Spanish, the witness replied, and the interpreter would reply in English. Most of the times the witness would not understand the question and would give an answer that was what they wanted to say but not a response to the question. So questions were usually asked many times. Sometimes they'd just give up and move on when it was clear that the witness couldn't figure out what was being asked.

Everybody in the courtroom except for the jurors had heard many of the questions and answers before. There was a preliminary hearing earlier in the year where all of them had given testimony about the case. The trial seemed to be a replay of that. (There were probably more questions at the trial since the preliminary hearing establishes that there probably is a case to be made against the defendant and doesn't have to have the whole case argued.) At times it literally was a replay of that hearing. When a witness gave an answer in the trial that wasn't quite the same as what came out in the preliminary hearing, the defense attorney would read from the transcript of the hearing and ask the witness if what he said back then was the truth or to ask about the discrepancy. These exchanges made my head swirl since there were interpreters and transcribers involved both times. He'd read a question asked in the preliminary hearing that was translated into Spanish, the reply was translated into English and all this was taken down by the court reporter. In the trial he'd read the question from the transcript, that would be translated by the interpreter of the day who would then translate the reply. Somewhere in these four interpretations (five if you count the court reporter) there must be something whose meaning changes. These rehashings of the preliminary hearing usually seemed to be splitting some very fine hairs.

One of the victims apparently was pretty good with English but gave his testimony through the interpreter. The D.A. started out by reminding him that even though he might understand what she's saying that he needs to wait for the question to be translated and to answer the translated question. That didn't always happen. She'd be asking a question and he'd jump in before she had finished asking (and long before the interpreter had a chance to finish asking the question since the question wasn't finished). He had to be reminded over and over again that he's to wait for the interpreter's version of the question.

It takes a fantastic memory to be an interpreter. There were times that the witness would go on and on and never pause so the interpreter had to store up the long response before giving it to us in English. She'd take a few notes along the way in some sort of shorthand, it looked like. She'd include pauses and shrugs. I'm sure that they told the witnesses how the interpreting worked but it got very confusing for them sometimes when the attorney would ask something like "what color is my hair?" and the interpreter would ask that question. The witness would usually answer as if the interpreter had asked the question.

The question "what color is my hair?" was asked of many of the victims. The D.A. has dark brown hair (and we were told that it is her natural color). The answer sometimes was "blond" (once they got it through to the witness that it was the D.A.'s hair, not the interpreter's, that was being asked about). Apparently the women who were with the defendant during the robberies were described as having blond hair. This apparently was to establish that some people from these foreign cultures say any hair lighter than black is blond.

We got to hear testimony from Deputy Sheriffs who had investigated some of the robberies. We heard from a deputy who had found some of the victims by going to the "stops" where they wait for people to come to offer work. We heard from a Spanish-speaking deputy who was assisting the first one. And we started hearing the testimony of the detective who was in charge of these cases. The D.A. had finished her questioning of him yesterday when we got our evening recess. We had expected to hear the cross examination this morning.

But there was a problem with the testimony of one of the victims yesterday afternoon. He had said that the robber was wearing a jacket with long sleeves. Later he said that the robber had a tattoo on his arm and pointed to his forearm just below the fold of the elbow. The defense attorney was all over him about how he could see tattoos when they would have been covered by long sleeves. The defendant does have tattoos where this witness said they were but couldn't have known that without hearing about it from someone else.

The People's case apparently broke an axle running into this pothole. If one witness could give testimony that obviously was not his own, how many of the others were similarly not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Resolution
So The People decided to settle for guilty pleas for the three counts they basically had a recording where he confesses to the crimes and to drop the rest.

The creep is going to jail for 15 years. I forget whether we were told he has to serve 10 or 12 years of that since he's had prior a conviction. One of the counts (kidnapping) he pleaded guilty to could have resulted in a life sentence so he's getting off easy.

His girlfriend and the other woman pleaded guilty to some sorts of charges in this case. There was another man involved that we hadn't yet heard much about.

Here are some news reports about this case through the preliminary hearing (nobody was ever in the audience part of the courtroom so I doubt that this resolution will make it to the papers):

• Trio arrested on suspicion of robbing migrant workers
• Man accused of robbing day laborers faces trial
• Arrests Made In Connection With Day Laborer Assaults (this one, being a television station's site, has a video segment interviewing some of the victims)
  

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Stained glass by Fran Stovall from Bobbie.


(The link above sometimes has other pieces by Ms. Stovall as the first results. Sometimes nothing related to her appears. Good luck, Fran.)