CAS plays video clips of dance, symphony, documentaries, and the like. I’ve seen it play an aria from an opera, the video of Linda Rondstat singing “What’s New”, ballet, modern dance, and all manner of other performances. I’ve wanted it at the house forever.

Now I have it. We got an upgrade to our Dish Network to feed HD to our new TV. CAS was included in the upgrade. I’ve had it on in the house while I was working around the house, and there has been some really good performances on already. I’ve learned some stuff. Two examples, I didn’t know that “Somewhere Out There” was from “West Side Story”. I also didn’t know that the music from the song “A Stranger In Paradise” was actually written by a Russian composer back in the 1800s. Not earth-shattering, but cool to know, for me at least.

If you like the performing arts, find CAS and watch it, it’s great! BTW, it’s provided free to cable companies and the like, get your TV provider to add it to the lineup if it’s not there already.

Wow, this was a good find! I was driving to my hotel-near-the-airport and had just filled up my rental in anticipation of turning it in tomorrow morning, and looking for a light dinner. As I drove along, getting ready to head to a Chipotle, I saw Jimbo’s, and just turning in to the parking lot. Light dinner? That’s not even close to what I got, but it was very good.

I got there around 1830 and left at 1922. It was uncrowded the entire time, but about 40% full when I left.

I ordered a three-meat dinner, chicken, beef, and ribs. All – great! It came with two sides, I got baked beans (OK) and mac and cheese (very good). The chicken was wonderful, a light quarter bird that was smoked to perfection. It wasn’t dry in the middle, but not greasy either. Excellent. The beek was thin-sliced beef brisket. A wonderful smoky flavor, and tender. The ribs has that red crust on them, were tender, had outstanding good flavor. I rated the ribs as 9.5 on a scale of 1 to JTs. They were great. The meal came with three hush puppies, which were nice and light and not greasy.

The iced tea was excellent. Service was casual but prompt.

Did I mention that there was a heck of a lot of food? There was enough to feed me, Raegan and Erin. Ian would have to get his own.

My check was $16.74. For the amount of food I got, that’s excellent value. If I hadn’t been flying out in the morning, I would have brought it back to the room for dinner tomorrow. Instead, I brought the beef and chicken to the hotel and left it for the kitties that live outside.

I would gladly go back to Jimbo’s. Great stuff.

Today, we were running a bit behind in our meeting, and so we were looking at shortening lunch a bit. I fired up Google Maps and looked for a Chipotle, but the nearest one was about eight miles away. I commented on that to one of our hosts, who suggested Mo’ Ziki, as being a “greek Chipotle”. OK… I thought.

So we went to Mo’s. The serving style is like Chipotle, you get a burrito or bowl, rice, meat, and veg stuff. I got a bowl, with grilled steak, rice, chopped lettuce, tomatoes, and traditional sauce, which is a variation of yogurt sauce. The meal was OK. I thought it was a little small for a meal. There was little meat in the bowl, and the beef didn’t have a lot of flavor.

So would I go back? I think I would. The meal wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t that good. I would try the chicken or the gyros meat next time.

The iced tea was Gold Coast. It wasn’t horrible, but again, it wasn’t good. As a general note, I have to say again that I really wish that all restaurants would put fresh brewed iced tea out. None of the concentratres are very good, and most are downright nasty.

We were there around 1210, and left around 1250. The place was fairly crowded. My check was $9.21. One note: Urban Spoon as Mo’ Ziki in Seminole, but it’s in Largo.

Widow Brown’s is one of the dozens of family restaurants in the St. Petersburg area. I pass by it several times on each trip to this area, it seems. I decided to try it for dinner this evening, and liked it.

I got there about 1800, the place was about 1/3 full, and left 1845, and it was getting full.

I ordered the Yankee Pot Roast. On the menu, the Yankee Pot Roast was right above the Pot Roast. I asked my server what the difference was, and she said that the plain Pot Roast was more traditional. Well, I’ll get that next time.

The Yankee Pot Roast was pretty darn good! It was a good-sized chunk of roast, a smallish amount of gravy, and it was smothered with veg stuff. The roast had decent flavor and was pretty tender. The stuff on the top was carrot strings, potatoes, onions, a couple small broccoli crowns, and some other veg strips. The only thing I didn’t like was some largish slices of green pepper. Like stew, roast does not need or want green or red peppers. I fished them out, and still tasted pepper a couple of times. The meal was a decent size, not too huge to overload my stomach.

The meal came with a trip to the salad bar. It was a smallish bar, but the lettuce was good, the applesauce was a nice addition, and the ranch dressing was excellent.

The meal also came with dessert. I got rice pudding with whipped cream on top, good stuff.

The tea was excellent and kept refilled. Service was super nice and prompt. In fact, everyone at the restaurant was very nice, and there were obvious regulars in there.

My check was $11.32, a really good value. I will be back.

I support protection of IP. I produce IP in this blog. I don’t mind if my views are read and adopted by others, or adapted into other views, but I wouldn’t like it if someone took my views and put their own names on those views.

But PIPA was the functional equivalent of carpet bombing. It’s way easy to grab stuff off the Internet and use it. Rachel Maddow had four examples of people who support SOPA/PIPA, all US Senators or Representatives, who had images from the web being used for their Twitter feeds or websites. None had permission given, or attribution made. If the staff of a Senator can’t get it right, how would the rest of the country?

Making sites, like Google, or Facebook, or the like police for IP violations is not reasonable. It’s like expecting AT&T to listen to the content of every phone call, and make a judgement as to whether the content involves illegal activity.

Better to have targeted investigations of the worst offenders. I think that the issue isn’t things like photos anyway, it’s people selling or sharing music and videos. Let the content owners or their representatives (MPAA, for example) do the legwork, and then get the police involved. Just make sure that due process is followed, and that the punishments fit the offense.

I try to not be paranoid, but I wonder sometimes if the people who write these laws have an ulterior motive. The “Internet kill switch” I think has appeal to Those In Power. Legislation like SOPA and PIPA might be the slippery slope that gets us headed that direction.

The Internet has been very liberating in a lot of ways. It is designed to make sharing easy. If sharing is easy, then things will shared. A government should not be in the business of trying to stop the sharing of legal stuff, whether it be data or ideas.

I think he should have vetoed the bill. I think that the Congress should have stripped out the parts dealing with detention.

I understand the need to keep enemy combatants from going back to battle. We captured Germans, Italians, Japanese, and others in WWII. But the difference is that we returned those prisoners at the end of the war.

It is not arguable that we were in a war in Iraq (the legality and ethics challenge of that war are another other discussion altogether). We invaded the country, and then occupied it. But we are gone now. The prisoners we took out of Iraq should either be charged with a crime, tried, and convicted or not, in a civilian court. Or they should be released back to Iraq.

The same should happen in Afghanistan when we are done there.

I’ve seen the argument that we are in a “global war on terror”. I don’t buy that; just because we call it a war does not make it one. War is between nations, not nations and terrorists. Terrorists are criminals not bound by the conventions of war. If they are killed during operations, that’s OK. But if they are captured, then they need to be charged and tried.

And once charged, since they are charged with crimes under USC, not the UCMJ, they need to be tried in civilian courts.

And in no way should they be held without charges and trial indefinately.

It amazes me that terrorists put so much terror into some people. Some, like McCain apparently, think that some people are “too dangerous to try”. What a load of crap. It’s political posturing.

One of the reasons this country was founded was that the King of England was trampling on individual liberties here. It’s no difference between King George and the Congress and the President; both are trampling on individual liberties.

The detention provisions should never have been introduced in Congress. The Congress (both the House and the Senate) should never have allowed the provisions to be included in the NDAA. The NDAA should have been rejected, and should have been vetoed. The detention provisions should have been stripped out post-veto.

The detention provisions are contrary to American liberty and tradition, and should not be in law.

President Obama had a signing statement that vowed he will not follow that part of the NDAA. That’s fine, but he should have vetoed the bill and had the detention provisions removed.

What happens after Obama’s term ends? The next President is not bound by Obama’s signing statement. The mere fact that the law allows indefinite detention means that some President, someday, will use it.

There is an analysis of the provisions of the bill (Part 1 and Part 2) here.

Fight back against this, people. It’s the future of the country that is at stake.

“They came for xxxxx, and I did nothing”…

The biggest thing was a remodel of the kids/guest bathroom. I got the tub refinished from some sort of awful brownish color to white, got water leak damage repaired, and got the tub alcove prepped for a new fiberglass surround, which will be installed this weekend along with new brushed nickle fixtures. The old wallpaper was removed, some drywall damage repaired, and the biggest thing, removal of the carpet from the sink area and the 4″ tile from the tub area. Then I put down 12″ tiles over that entire area. It looks great!

I also put down tile in the kitchen (to repair a badly-laid carpet there) and pantry (to cover the unattractive concrete slab).

The biggest thing was buying enough wood flooring to cover the dining room, living room, and entryway. I got the flooring down in the dining room (well, most of it, I still have about two feet to go).

Finally was a lot of cleaning and collecting that we all did. The house is a little less crowded now; there is still a lot of work to go.

A couple of random observations:

We ate a Jason’s Deli over the holiday; I had a seasonal item, beef stew. It was EXCELLENT! I was a little worried when I saw tha the stew had bell peppers in it (no beef stew should have bell peppers). The stuff had beef cubes and lots of veggies, was perfectly cooked, and was in a tomato-based gravy. Loved it! I had some stew at another Jason’s location a couple days later, and the taste of bell peppers was distinct. An email to Jason’s corporate brought a reply that each location made their stew locally (surprising to me). So the good stew was at the location on NW Expressway, and the less good stew was in Edmond.

We did a bit of traveling. One thing I noticed was a relaxation of speed limits north and south of Oklahoma. First, the Kansas Turnpike (a very nice road to travel on) has raised their speed limits from 70 to 75 mph. This is a good thing. The Turnpike also takes credit cards now, in addition to cash. In Texas, it has long bugged me that the interstate highways speed limit would drop to 60 from 70 after dark; that dumb restriction is removed now (at least for cars). So the long haul across the Texas Panhandle is a little faster now. It’s even better in New Mexico, where it goes to 75.

We ate at Braum’s at one point over the break. I decided that I would like to try their chicken sandwich. My evaluation: DON’T. It was terrible. Really. No flavor, unattractive texture, it was not good at all. I didn’t finish mine.

That’s it for now.

Over the summer, our neighborhood association sent out a newsletter that talked about how we might be getting curbside recycling, then over the fall we got another that said that we wouldn’t be getting it.

Then, weekend before last, blue recycling bins were distributed throughout the neighborhood. Cool, I thought!

So now we down to two recycling actions. We put everything but paper in the recycling bin, and it gets picked up and taken to wherever recycle stuff goes in OKC. We keep the paper, and take it off to St. John’s since the school gets a tiny bit of money for the paper we recycle there.

So I’m happy about this. I didn’t mind hauling our stuff to the city of Nichols Hills, but having OKC do it for us means one less side trip ever couple of weeks.

Now, if we can just get fire hydrants…

The Extreme 15 patrol of Troop 15 is working up to a serious high adventure backpacking trip, and decided to go to Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas to backpack the Butterfield Trail. Another leader and I accompanied them. Unfortunately, one of our Scouts got quite ill with some stomach crud overnight, and could not keep food down, so the next morning we decided to do some low-intensity day hiking and then head back a day early. The Butterfield will still be there.

We headed out from Oklahoma City about 1740 and got to Devil’s Den around 2200, after a couple short stops along the way. It was chilly (around 40F) when we got there. Everyone got tents up quickly, and racked out. We shook everyone out around 0730 then next morning. Our first view of the park in the daylight revealed a beautiful area. We were in Area B, above the river, which was burbling happily. It had been down to about 22F, so all of the tents had frost on them.

We had brought a Coleman stove, and quickly got water hot for cocoa and breakfast. Breakfast was the famous eggs and sausage in a ziplock, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, since nothing was left… After Glen and I checked with our less-than-happy ill Scout, we decided to bag the original plan to backpack the Butterfield, and instead left the tents to dry off, loaded up our backpacks, and headed off to day hike.

Almost forgot, the cost to camp was $14 per night. The Visitor Center was closed when we got there, but before hiking I headed over and paid the fee the next morning.

We chose to head up the Yellow Rock trail. It winds around and touches other trails, goes under and around large rock outcroppings, and skirts the top of bluffs that have excellent views down into the valley that the Park is in.

The trail crosses water at many points. Several of these streams had a series of tumbling waterfalls. If the water situation on the Butterfield is similar (no reason to think otherwise), then getting water on that hike will not be an issue. There didn’t seem to be any agriculture to speak of around the Park either, so no worries about fertilizer or pesticide in the water.

One thing about hiking in December – you can see a good, long ways through the trees. I think that the green oaks during the spring and summer are really pretty, but the starkness of the winter, with the leaves on the ground, has it’s own beauty.

When we started out, the temps were in the low 30s. The high got to around 50F after noon.

We took our first break at a spectacular bluff. The ridge in the background is the structure that the Butterfield loops around. The ridge also has a trail along it’s spine.

This was a particularly beautiful stream we crossed. It had a series of small falls above and below the trail.

The hike to the overlook ran along a number of ridges. This was a typical view. The trail was well defined, but I must note that the trail map the Park uses doesn’t show all of the interconnections. The blazes were easy to follow, though.

This hike was 4 miles long, with a maximum altitude gain of over 400 feet.

We had lunch at the Overlook, and then headed back down to camp. We were looking for a trail that paralled a road, but instead just followed the road to camp. Once there, we took the tents down, a couple of the guys took short naps, and then we headed to our next hike.

Before we broke camp, I walked up to some overhanging bluffs that were above our camp. The bluffs had hundreds of steady streams of water coming over them.

The next hike was the short Devil’s Den Trail. It starts and ends at the Visitor Center. This trail leads by some spectacular terrain features! We first came up to some rock formations that lead down into caves. None of the caves were open, due to concerns about protecting the bat populations from White Nose Syndrome.

As you can tell from the pictures, some of the cracks were very deep.

The rock outcroppings were pretty amazing.

There is an amazing waterfall along the trail.

This is near the end of the trail.

This hike was 1.4 miles long.

Here are our hike maps. The first hike to the overlook is in yellow, and the Devil’s Den trail is in blue.

This was a wonderful, if short, experience. The Park is stunning. There is no cell service in the Park proper (it’s in a deep valley), but we got occasional service on the ridges above the Park. I’m going to bring the family here to stay in one of the cabins, and certainly come back with the Scouts to backpack the Butterfield.

About ten years ago, the pump that pumps water out of our well to the house failed. Coincidentally, I had just been at Lowe’s, and saw that a replacement pump was $500. I called a couple places to get the pump replaced, and got bids from three that ranged from $1500 to $2500; the middle estimate of around $2000 was from the company that initially installed the well. The process was for three guys to come out, pull the pump out of the well, replace it, drop it down the well, and turn the darn thing on again. I watched the entire process, and realized that there was no reason I could not do the same thing.

Sunday, we came home from running errands and found that the house water pressure was 0 PSI; not good. I did some troubleshooting; the pressure switch was good, except for the dead Oklahoma Brownsnake that was curled up on top of the pressure relay switch under the cover, quite fried. Well, that was interesting.

I tested the motor resistance using my VTM; all three readings were in spec. I figured that it was the controller. I ran out to Lowe’s and bought one (they used to cost $100, but now are $70), installed it (it takes about 10 seconds), and… nothing.

So I figured I had a dead pump. I went out to the wellhead, and checked the wiring, and had 230VAC, so the controller was in fact working. Then I felt the water pipe coming up; the pump motor was running! You can feel the vibration running up the plastic pipe. Curious.

I decided that I needed to have a look at the pump. That means it needed to pulled out of the ground. Our well is about 180 ft deep.

Now, the water gets into the house through the well casing (pipe) through a fitting that attaches to the casing. The fitting is called a pitless adapter, and it’s essentially a sliding joint. I tied a stout climbing rope around the fitting, tied the other end to a nearby tree (this was my backup in case I let go of the pipe to keep it from falling all the way to the bottom of the well), got Ian to back me up, and pulled the piping and the piping part of the adapter straight up; it came out easily, and we pulled it up the 18 or so inches.

The adapter fitting is attached to a short iron pipe segment that is connected to another adapter that connects to 1″ PVC pipe. Each PVC pipe segment is 20′ long, and has a female threaded adapter at the “top” of the pipe, and a male threaded adapter at the bottom. The male fitting goes into the female fitting on the next pipe to make a single long string of pipes.

Now one thing I learned from my watching the crew the last time was a nifty tool to save back strain. There’s was made from a steel plate about 18″x6″x1/8″ thick. I made the same thing out of a 2×4. I drilled a 1-1/4″ hole in the middle of the board, and then used a jigsaw to cut a notch out of the 2×4 to the hole. Since the hole is the same diameter (1-1/4″) as the outside diameter of the pipe, and the PVC fittings are about 1/8″ wider, the well can hang from the board while you work on unscrewing the joint.

This is what the board looks like, clean and with an example of how it holds the pipe.

It took about five minutes to make this. The tools were a 1-1/4″ hole drill, the 2×4, my drill motor, and my jigsaw.

I noticed that the top of the pitless adapter fitting was threaded. An iron pipe with a thread on both sides could have a “T” and a couple short pieces of pipe to make a handle could be screwed down into that pitless adapter and be used to hoist the thing up instead of the rope I used.

So I pulled up the first 20′ segment of pipe. It was heavy, but not excessively so. Ian and I alternated pulling the pipe. The process was pull the pipe until the next fitting came up, set the board on the well head, and put the fitting and pipe into the board to support the rest of the piping and pump. I was being very paranoid, and was also adding another rope tied around the pipe at the bottom of the fitting as a don’t-drop-the-thing-into-the-well-casing backup. Note that as you lift, you also need your helper to pull up the wiring that leads down to the pump to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the pipe and such as it comes up. On ours, the wiring was electrical taped to the PVC pipe, and I had to cut it off for each segment. More on the tape later…

The top pipe unscrews from the bottom pipe. We used one set of channel lock pliers to hold the lower fitting in place, and another to unscrew the upper fitting. The detached pipe was set on the ground.

As with most projects, it wasn’t really that easy. One problem was finding tools – if you have seen my garage, you would know that that is a large problem. The 20 ft pipes also got hung up in overhanging tree limbs, so the project stopped for a while so I could hunt up my bowsaw and do some trimming. We also got a ladder set up next to the well so one of us could climb up and help steady the pipe, which waved around quite a bit.

So this process was repeated about eight times. The pump showed up! We put it on a piece of cardboard and I started checking it out. The intakes were completely clogged with electrical tape pieces! I cleaned them all out, then wiped down and cleaned the exterior of the pump. I figured that now the thing would work, since if the intake was clogged it made sense you got no water.

Putting the pump back down was the opposite. We lowered the pump and wiring, stopped at the upper fitting, and screwed on the next pipe section with the two channel lock pliers, repeating this until the pump was down. I didn’t connect the pitless adapters, but rather aimed the outflow downhill, and fired up the pump. NOTHING. There was a little air moving out of the pipe, but that was about it.

So I had a defective pump for some reason that was not obvious. The motor was running, but no water was moving. It was about 1700 on Sunday at this point. We headed out to a much needed dinner and bathroom break (no water in the house, so the toilets were not working either), and then headed by Home Depot and bought a new pump. This one was $400, and included a control box (so I ended up returning the control box I bought earlier that day).

We got back home around 1900, and pulled the clearly defective pump back up. The pump has a threaded female receptacle on top to connect to the PVC pipe, using an adapter… which I DIDN’T HAVE! And both Lowe’s and Home Depot were five minutes from closing. We quickly used some of my frequent traveler points to get a hotel room near school so we could shower and use the bathroom, packed, and headed out to spend the rest of Sunday night at the hotel.

We had another problem during the pipe pulling process, which lead to a second problem. PVC is somewhat flexible, but it does not like sharp bends and torsion force. As Ian was pulling a section, he stepped back a couple steps, and one of the male threaded adapters failed. The pipe headed down the hole (OH CRAP!) but I dove and grabbed it. So one of the pipes was ruined. We tried to unscrew the remains of the male adapter, but we just could not get it off. I tried drilling a hole through it to use a cheater bar, but the thing shattered, and now we had *two* unuseable pipes. I muttered dark words, but figured it didn’t make any difference, we could get the thing down the well, it would be in the water, and if it wouldn’t have enough water to run the sprinkler system, we could worry about that in the spring. One other thing I did was try to pull pipe without disconnecting everything, which lead to a lot of pipe up in the trees.

The next morning, after everyone was at school, and after I went to work for a bit, I went and got the adapter, and went home to install it. I got it installed. I hooked up the three electrical wires using the supplied butt crimp connectors and heat shrink tubing, and then attached the first piece of pipe, got the electrical wires attached to the pipe using zip ties (the clogging electric tape had me bothered), and THEN noticed that I had picked up one of the PVC pipes with the broken connectors. Grrrr… I took it all apart again, got a good pipe, and re-did the work.

When Ian got home from school, we went to drop the new pump in the well. We had a LOT of trouble getting the long pipe string to connect to and screw onto the top of the pump (remember the pipes in the trees that I mentioned?). So I told Ian we were going go ahead and take the pipes apart, and while we were doing that, I told him to turn the pipe one way, and what we managed to do was tighten the pipe to the point that the fitting broke; I had screwed up the “righty-tightly lefty-loosey” rule. So now we had four pipes out of commission. We went ahead and dropped the pump the rest of the way, and turned it on, but no water – the pump was not in the water with 80′ of pipe missing.

So I needed to repair the pipes. This is pretty easy, but the cure time is 2+ hours, and it was already 2000, so time was not on our side. So we did the hotel thing again. I got the family settled in at the hotel, then headed back to Lowe’s. I use the medium grade cement for my sprinkler system, but for this, since the piping had to support 60 lbs of pump, pipe, and water in the pipe, I used heavy grade. Heavy grade wants *six* hours to cure. I headed to the house, cut the bad fittings off, primed the pipes and the new fittings, and glued them up. I left the pipes in the warm garage to cure and headed to the hotel. This was about 2200, so the fittings had until about 1500 the next day to cure.

The next afternoon after Ian got home from school, we pulled the top section (with the pitless adapter) up again, removed it, and then put the four repaired section back on, and finally the top section again. We set the adapter on the edge of the well casing again, turned the pump on, and saw a gush of water. Yea! I turned the pump off after the water was running clear.

Next, we very carefully lowered the pump so the pitless adapters mated. When I was sure they were together, I used a 2×4 to gently tap them completely together. I turned the pump back on, and the tank filled up, and then I turned the valve to let the house pipes fill, and we were back in business.

The tools I used in this project:

Two sets of 12″ channel lock pliers
Propane torch for the heat shrink tubing
Dykes to cut the wire (and compress the butt connectors)
Zip ties
PVC heavy cement
Purple PVC primer
Hacksaw to cut PVC pipe
Well pump
Four replacement fittings
Ladder, flashlights, rope, etc.

The total cost of materials here was about $415. $405 of that was the pump and tax, the rest was a couple fittings and cement. The project took essentially 48 hours, of which about five was actual project, and the rest going to work, running errands, sleeping, etc. I saved about $1600 or more. We did burn some of my accumulated hotel points, but only about 10% of what I have. The weather was not the best, chilly and raining for much of the work. But it got done, was not dangerous, and I fully expect the pump to last another 10 years.

I would not recommend this for everyone. I’m very good with tools, incomprehensibly cheap in some ways, and preternaturally confident (some would say arrogant, but I think that’s a bit strong!), and I did this without screwing the well up (which would have been very expensive). I was very paranoid about dropping stuff in the well and jamming it so I could not pull the pump up). I would almost rather have a cable or something (like a 1/8″ stainless steel cable) attached to the pump so I could use a manual winch (like on a boat trailer) to raise and lower the pump and pipes (curiously, the old pump had a place for such an attachment, the new one did not).

I am going to take apart the failed pump and try to figure out why it will not move water. I’ll report on that later.