Brian's Morning Newsletter

January 28th 2010

Brian is climbing, climbing, climbing, scrambling right up this 45 foot tower for Desertgate.

Good  Morning
This morning I'm proud to post pictures of my day in the mountains working with Eric from Desertgate. We started off working on a tower  nearby  in Las Dispensas.  This is the tower our tower connects to and is a critical link in the route back to town for us. When we arrived, Eric asked if I wanted to climb this the smaller of the two towers we were to work on? "Absolutely, I said!"  I hadn't thought about it, not really, which was a good thing, because thinking about something like this would make me anxious. I was totally relaxed.

Almost there, wait for it…

Trying the harness for the first time is a matter of convincing the  brain that it is okay to let go.

 It took only a couple of minutes to convince my brain the harness was safe. In fact the Desertgate tower climbing-rig has a second safety line.   The Crestone (ridge) which runs north – south is actually two ridges with a very small valley between. The side where we are working is the Eastern ridge, our property reaches the top of the Western side, and slightly to the North. Both towers are a spitting distance from Las Dispensas road.   The trees up there on the Western side are not as tall as ours, nevertheless, at 45 feet, it is well above the treetops.

 Even though I posted this photo last it was one of the first I shot.  Truth was, besides being more comfortable having my vehicle full of tools and supplies, it also gives me a place to smoke.

The tower Jackson and I built for our Crestone is only twenty feet tall, which is why we had to cut a lot of trees out of the way. We could have built a taller tower, but that happened a long time ago, and frankly, we never built a tower and we did good to do it the way we did.  You can see the ground a flat on top of this section of the Crestone, very much unlike our  side, which is a classic ridge shape.

The above photo taken three years ago of our tower, 20 feet doesn't get the tower-top above the trees.

So all the weather-guessers are saying snow, snow, and more snow, for today. So far it looks true enough, As it gets light outside we see a inch perhaps two and it is snowing. I parked the Trooper in the shop last night, becasue I need to replace a couple of lamps today, but also I wanted to be able to stick the magnetic block heater under the engine if it got cold as well as snowy. Nell is warming the Blazer, readying it for the trip to town and work. Did I mention she has a new job? We are very excited that the hospital management saw the amazing job Nell did in Doctor Green's office while Stella the office manager was on maternity-leave. 

It is encouraging that they didn't make Nell go back and be the receptionist after doing both the office manager job and receptionist job. Right now she is interim office manager at Duran's and Gallegoes' office  in the Rio Vista medical complex over by the river walk on Mills Avenue.  With her surgery behind her and this new job ahead everything is looking up for her, well except for that whole "End of the world as we knew it," thing.

Sincerely,
Brian Rodgers

Letters

Satellite Internet.

Ed Littleton wrote:

I must be missing something.  Why don't you tell me what most folks find wrong with satellite Internet.

 

Ed

Compared to wired (DSL) and wireless, satellite Internet is very slow. Upload speed which David Old  needs for his business (When he was with us, he used to have a live web cam for showing customers a particular wood finish) doing bidirectional video is impossible becasue the upload speed is little better than 56k modem speed.
Download speed is acceptable but has a discernible lag becasue of the great distance the signal travels from user to user.  The Netflix router would work speed-wise except that Wildblue has a limit on the megabytes any one can download per month. 
There it is
any way, Hi Ed

say howdy to Patsy from both of us
Brian

———       

Thawed pipes!

brian

If you make a tube aut of paper and fill it with chopped up paper treated with boric acid and borax soap and some food grade diatomaceous earth your frozen pipe will no longer a problem
.   weldon

————-      
Maybe I didn't make it clear about the water being frozen somewhere between mom's well and our house roughly five hundred feet of under ground water-line. Digging up our hand-dug waterline isn't an option in Winter, the best choice has been to wait, Mother Earth always thaws the line for us. Maybe during the Summer we could dig it, but I don't think it'll be necessary, we need to build up the ground where the underground pipe crosses the road. It was already supposed to be done, but the guy with the truck did not put the full two loads there where I asked him to.  Really, in my finest hopes and dreams world, I will have the hydraulics installed on the Dodge Dually  making it a dump-bed, and the front end loader installed on my tractor and then I can bring a couple of yards of River sand and gravel up at my leisure, fixing that trouble spot. Both of these jobs are a little big for our new shop.
————–

Re: Feeling old

Brian, do I have to come over there and make you deep breath again to get rid of that friggin gout?????? Prissy
——–  
(meekly —  "Yes."
Brian
————-   

Heard Jackson got burnt out

and just wanted to know if there might be anything we can send or bring to the table, however belatedly, to return the many favors done, or simply be of service in our turn, or to (re)coin a pfavorite prankster phrase "to put our good where it will do the most."Boots, blankets, pots and pans, or just tobacco and elbow grease?sorry for the prolonged silence and sullen truculence , but that really is almost it for the other one…and this time we really mean it (for real this time)…evolove(and chicken grease, no peace.)
Jim Benson
——————            
Hi Jim, thanks for writing in
On Saturday we are installing new Douglas Fir flooring in Jack's house, we could use a hand then
Brian

————

Mike Kitts sent in:

THIS IS THE BEST LAWYER STORY OF THE YEAR, DECADE AND PROBABLY THE CENTURY.

A Charlotte, NC lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire, among other things.

Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires." The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued… And WON!

(Stay with me.)

In delivering the ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer "held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire" and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires."

NOW FOR THE BEST PART…

After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

This is a true story and was the First Place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest.

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