Looking For A Suitable Mount

The turn from the single lane road into the narrow driveway was too sharp to make with the horse trailer, but there was supposed to be a big parking lot ahead where I could turn around & come back at a better angle.  The church was there, but the big lot was blocked by construction debris.  I managed to snake through the roundabout with only a slight scratch.  Heading back, I turned into the driveway which was steep enough that the tires were tossing gravel even in 4WD with an empty trailer.  (What do they do in the winter?)  At the top, there was a tiny flat area with a house.  I had to use the lawn to turn the rig around.  No real surprises so far thanks to Google's satellite view.

The barn was about a hundred feet below us.  We slipped down there (Literally, since the hill was steeper than the lane we drove up.) to find Preacher, the horse we'd come to look at.  He's a 9 year old Missouri Fox Trotter gelding, a breed I'd never heard of much less ridden before.  I don't know anything about gaited horses, but he seemed like a possible replacement for Chip, my last pony.

I'm looking for a mellow gelding around 14h (56" or 142cm) without a pronounced backbone or withers since I ride without stirrups due to a chronic sesamoid fracture in the ball of my foot.  For the most part, I just ride around the farm bareback when the mood strikes for half an hour & occasionally in a bareback pad when we go on trail rides for an hour or two.  I don't really want to jump anything over two feet or so any more, either.  That's not a lot to ask for.

It shouldn't be too difficult to find such a horse under $3000...

Finding Preacher meant my wife weeded through dozens of crazy ads.  What do you make of "this mare was gelded last year" or "15 years old & has some growing to do"?  The humor is quickly lost & there's a temptation to skip to the next, unless you're looking for an inexpensive (none are 'cheap') horse.  It's surprising how often the sellers can't seem to get such 'minor' details right.  Pictures should help, but too often the horse is saddled, standing with one hoof in a hole, &/or twisted around like a pretzel so we can't see their conformation or other details at all.  Many are half feral & are being sold because they're starving in awful fields or they're lame.  Sellers are often slow to respond & don't answer the questions when they do - if they do.

Eventually Marg found Preacher & spoke to his owner, Sally.  She lives nearby (one of the reasons Marg contacted her) but he is at her friend's house which is, of course, an hour away in the wild hills of Kentucky.  Still, she answered the rest of the questions my wife had well enough.  He seemed like a good enough prospect that we brought the trailer in case we decided to buy him.

Unsurprisingly, we found more details wrong.  Preacher is 15h or possibly 15.1h, not 14.2h which was already taller than I wanted.  The pictures didn't show just how high his withers are, either.  Bareback rides would be very short indeed, but he might work out with the pad.  He wasn't terribly happy as I looked him over, but he seemed sound, fairly quiet, & generally in good shape.  Close enough to at least try him after the long drive.

He didn't seem to like it when I put my bareback pad on him.  Is he a little girthy?  My daughter, Erin, tightened up the girth a bit more & he seemed OK with it.  Something wasn't quite right, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was...

Where's the bridle?  Sally forgot to bring hers.  We found one that fit, but Sally muttered something about the bit just being a snaffle.  It took some prodding, but eventually I found out that she normally uses a twisted wire.  That's a much harsher bit than a snaffle.  Hmmm...

Erin wanted to ride him first & he went pretty well for her.  She had some trouble rating him, but Sally told us it's the first time he's been ridden in weeks & the area was fairly small.  It was really interesting watching him do the fox trot, his ambling gait, for the short times he kept it.  I've never seen it before, but it looked smooth.  I was anxious to try.

I hopped on & we walked around for a while feeling each other out.  He held his head higher & felt tense, so I kept walking him, but he never really relaxed.  Eventually I asked for a bit more speed.  We went into a fox trot for about 3 strides & then burst into a gallop.  I pulled him back, but he didn't want to slow down.  Eventually, I had to saw at the reins & he slowed down just enough to put in a series of bucks with his head held high.

As we flew by the girls, I heard Sally exclaim, "I've never seen him buck before."  Really?  I've rarely had a horse buck so well with their head up this high, either.  It's just a day for wonders, isn't it?

On the plus side, his footwork was quite adept.  He never slipped or felt as if he might go down even as we approached race track speeds while describing tub-sized circles with his nose tucked into my knee.  He always felt solid & balanced even when I landed on his neck after a series of bucks & a sudden halt.  That's quite a trick, but we seemed determined to show each other everything we knew.  Unfortunately, neither of us liked what we found.

I managed to calm him down & we walked around some more.  I tried a few other things, but it was obvious that we weren't going to enjoy riding together.  He didn't want to do a thing I asked & I wasn't going to put up with his nonsense, so it was a constant battle.  Why?  It turns out that I'm the only man Sally knew who has tried to ride him.  That could be it.  I've known other animals that were wary of one sex or the other; usually men due to previous abuse.  We couldn't come up with a better reason, but it doesn't really matter.  He & I were not cut out for each other.

I haven't ridden much since we had to put Chip down & I got quite a workout with all Preacher's gyrations.  I never came off, but my legs knew what was required of them to stay on & they've been complaining about that abuse for days.  I hope I'm all over it by this Sunday.  My wife has made an appointment to try a Halflinger mare...

Convenient Animals

Animals are usually convenient devices in novels where the horses & hounds are always in great shape & ready to go.  In reality, they get sick & pick up injuries as often as people.  There's certainly nothing convenient about it & it's expensive both in time & money.

My daughter, Erin, & her husband, Josh, own the property that adjoins ours & their backyard opens into our south field.  They lived with us for most of a year while waiting to buy the house, so our animals often have issues figuring out where they belong.  Between us, we have 5 dogs, 3 cats, a rabbit, 2 goats, & 3 horses.  That's not a lot of animals for a farm, even a lazy gentleman's farm, but we've simplified as we've aged & prices have climbed.

We generally use one veterinary office staffed by four vets.  Two specialize in small animals, the other two in large animals.  We deal with the latter most of the time since they come out to the farm, but we know the small animal vets at the office all too well.  (Most others stand in line, they usually just hand us the meds & bill us later.)

Last Wednesday, Orion, one of the kids' cats, was hunting around our house when he had a tiff with our cat, Raven.  Fur flew & Orion went back home while Raven picked up a nasty bite in his cheek; a puncture that got infected despite our best doctoring & his protests.

Friday, Molly, Erin's 13 year old Australian Shepard mix, needed a tumor removed from her elbow.  Erin took her & Raven in to the vets' office.  She got them home only to find Topaz, her old Thoroughbred, had popped an abscess in his hoof & didn't want to put any weight on it.  It was expected & not unusual, but meant she had to spend an hour soaking his hoof twice a day.

Saturday morning, Erin fed Molly with a pill in peanut butter mixed into the kibble, the only way she'll eat it.  After Molly started to eat, Erin started her own breakfast only to realize Molly had walked away.  Erin went to get her & came back to find Orion eating Molly's breakfast.  Why?  That cat has never eaten dog kibble before, so maybe it was the peanut butter?  There was no pill in Molly's food.  Who ate it?  The pill would be really bad for Orion & the vet said to get it out of him.  The kids tried, but couldn't get him to throw it up, so Josh took Orion to the vets' office.

Erin walked up to the barn since she & my wife, Marg, had a riding lesson.  They met only to find Tango, our young Thoroughbred, shivering in the barn not putting any weight on his near (left) hind leg.  They checked him all over, but could only find a really sore stifle.  He'd probably run around, slipped, & pulled something the night before or early in the morning.  He was so uncomfortable that the vet was called & he promised to stop by about lunch time, so Marg took Pumpkin to the lesson alone while Erin waited for the vet.

In the meantime, Josh got back with a very sick cat.  The vet had a lot of trouble getting him to throw up.  Eventually he did & no pill was found, but the cat was sick the rest of the day - disgustingly sick several times.  Not his fault, but one more thing to deal with.

Marg & Pumpkin got back from their lesson about the vet showed up.  He went over Tango thoroughly & finally decided the same thing the girls had.  It was just muscle soreness, so Tango just needed some stall rest & hand walking until he healed up.  Liberal applications of Bigeloil (It's pronounced 'beagle oil' & is a liniment something similar to Bengay or Icy-Hot, although it is a liquid, not a paste.) should be applied to the leg from the hock up.  Just what they'd decided, but at a premium price for an emergency farm visit.

That evening, Erin was putting the Bigeloil on Tango's leg when she found a huge hematoma inside his upper thigh, almost by the groin.  It was HUGE (half the size of an American football) & had a light pink scratch on it.  She took pictures & sent them to the vet.  The vet was quite upset at missing it, but they all agreed they'd looked there & hadn't seen anything, so it must have swelled up hours later.  They decided to let it go over night & see if it swelled more (which would require the vet to come out to drain it on a Sunday) or see if it went down on its own.  It is going down, but Tango is miserable & likely will be for a week or so.

The girls seemed to spend half of Sunday out in the barn since both Topaz & Tango require about an hour of medical attention twice a day in addition to cleaning their stalls, extra work since our horses are generally turn-outs.  And they still had all the normal barn chores to do.

So two-thirds of our horses can't be ridden & are requiring about four times as much time as normal.  Orion needed extensive clean up, Raven may need another vet visit, & Molly keeps trying to do too much with the stitches in her elbow, so needs to be watched very carefully.  Next month's vet bill will be astronomical.

It's not convenient or abnormal, just time consuming & expensive.  I sometimes wished I lived in a fantasy world...

Best 100 Songs of the Rock Era

"Best Of" lists aren't.  They're impossibly limiting & usually poorly defined, but it's the journey, not the destination, that is worthwhile. They lead to interesting explorations & fun arguments.  They're also a great way to make a book memorable.

In "Broken Prey", the 16th of the Lucas Davenport Prey series by John Sandford, Lucas gets an iPod & a gift card for 100 songs.  He takes this as a challenge to make a list for the "Best 100 Songs of the Rock Era".  Go ahead & look at the list.  Who is missing? Jot down a few.

The list gets mentioned a dozen or more times.  There's no long recitation, just various characters mentioning songs that need to be included, arguments over them or versions, & fun remarks.  My youngest kids (late 20s) had fun arguing the list with me & Sandford is in his mid 70s, so it engages a wide age range.  I certainly paid attention every time the subject came up because of my own tastes.  ("We Will Rock You" instead of "Bohemian Rhapsody"?  Please!) 

The list is terribly flawed, of course.  It's far too broad & yet a few artists are on the list multiple times.  It even has one song on it twice.  Some of the missing ones are practically criminal, but it's still a great device & got me thinking...

Rock has been around since the 50s & is still going strong almost 70 years later.  I can't pick just 1 or 2 top songs per year, especially not in the 60s & 70s.  I'm not sure I could limit my picks to 100 for some years around 1970 much less those decades.  Expanding to cover other genres is just crazy.

Have you written down the missing bands yet?  If not, do it now.

I'm a Stones guy, but leaving out The Beatles entirely is wrong.  There's nothing by Alice Cooper, America, Allman Brothers, Badfinger, The Band, Beach Boys, Bon Jovi, Booker T, Blondie, Blind Faith, Box Tops, Bread, BTO, or Buffalo Springfield?  Sheesh!  I'm sure I missed some & I didn't even get to the Cars.  I'll get carpal tunnel before I make it to The Zombies & I'm sticking to pure rock. 

It's obvious that we can't make even a top 100 rock songs without limiting it a lot more.  What about 1 song each by the top 100 rock bands?

I immediately got sidetracked by Eric Clapton.  He's been inducted into the Music Hall of Fame three times as part of Cream, the Yardbirds, & as a solo artist.  He had some fantastic short stints playing with other super groups like Blind Faith & Dirty Mac, although Wikipedia considers the latter a project. That's OK, even though it means I don't even know what constitutes a band.  I might be able to make a list of Clapton's best 100 songs.

Looking through the Wikipedia entry for musical super groups is an education.  They list each band & the band members with the other bands they've played in.  I haven't heard of a lot of them & every time I look at the list I wind up spending too long listening to YouTube.  My list is growing!

Musicians always seem to be teaming up with others for projects & great one-off songs. David Bowie singing "Under Pressure" with Queen or "All The Young Dudes" with Mott the Hoople are two of my favorites.  He sange "Dancing In The Street" with Mick Jagger, too.  Drat, I can't leave off Martha Reeves & the Vandellas version!  It's practically impossible not to duplicate a few songs.  Years ago, I collected as many versions of "Louie, Louie" as I could find quickly.  I have over 60 & apparently there are hundreds.

What about rock muscials?  "Hair", "Jesus Christ Superstar", "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", "Tommy", & "Another Brick In The Wall".  I could easily make a great 100 top songs list just out of them.

How about one-hit wonders?  I noticed only one of those in Lucas' list - "Rock On" by David Essex.  It definitely belongs on the list, but so does "Bang A Gong" by T. Rex, "Couldn't Get It Right" by the Climax Blues Band, "Play That Funky Music White Boy" by Wild Cherry, "Spirit In The Sky" by Norman Greenbaum, & "Porn Star Dancing" by My Darkest Days.  "Signs" by Five Man Electrical Band, Dokken's "Alone Again", Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" & "Wildflower" by Skylark... Yes, I could make a top one-hit wonder list easily, although we'll argue who belongs on it.  Nazareth is NOT a one-hit wonder no matter what Wikipedia says.  They did "Black Betty" & that's a hit no matter what some stupid list says.

I might cheat with Donovan since I like both "Sunshine Superman" & "Mellow Yellow", but they could also go on a list with other quirky, fun songs like "Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road" by Loudon Wainwright III.  I wonder if I could make a top 100 of them?  "In The Summertime" by Mungo Jerry, "Ding-A-Ling" by Chuck Berry, & "A Brand New Key" by Melanie are great & they're guaranteed to bring a smile to my face every time. 

Some songs are great, but I only want to listen to them once a year.  I don't just mean Christmas carols by rock artists, either.  Thanksgiving demands the original rendition of "Alice's Restaurant" at our house.  (We used to get on the radio by calling in to request it.)  "American Pie" & "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" are great songs, but once a year is plenty.  Is that a list even worth making?

Our Internet connection at home is feeble, so I don't stream Pandora or anything.  Instead, I listen to a about 1000 songs regularly.  It's a limit set by my shop stereo system which consists of one of my early MP3 players played through a cheap amp & speakers that are as old as I am.  What it lacks in quality, it makes up for in volume.  (I can still hear it through ear protectors over the power tools & dust collection system.)  I change a few songs occasionally, but keep about the same list playing randomly on my PCs at home & work as well as on my phone.  It's as close to a 'best of' list as I can get.  The songs are pretty much limited to the rock era, although not just to rock. Bing Crosby, John Prine, Brad Paisley, Charlie Pride, Johnny Cash, Billy Holiday & others are on it.  A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

It's been One of THOSE Weeks

I spent the weekend doing what I could with my pony, Chip.  We battled Navicular Syndrome with him for several years & I knew the end was coming.  My wife, Marg, scheduled the vet & knacker for Monday.  I went to work & he was gone by the time I got home, but the new fish pond had lost half its water.  It was a tough way to start the week.

Bummed out over Chip, the fish pond problem was icing on the cake.  I spent weeks & $200 building it just a couple of months ago.  After an hour of searching, I might have fixed a tiny leak in one place & corralled some splash as the water rolled down the front of the fairy princess, but I wasn't sure I'd found the problem.  Frustrating!

Tuesday was better; I found my wife's Aunt Irene.  Yeah, we'd lost her.

Irene is 85 years old & lives in Wisconsin.  She has no family save for her 2 nephews & her niece, my wife.  Since Irene lives so far away, I've only met her a few times & the boys haven't kept in touch at all.  We called & wrote back & forth half a dozen times a year, but we're not really close.  We thought we knew who her 'friend' (social worker) was, but found out that we didn't when our last letter came back as undeliverable.

How do you find an old relative?  Social Services & Jane, the manager of her independent living apartment building, couldn't give us any information due to HIPA.  It insures our privacy - too well in this case.  Apparently we're not on the right list.  Jane swore she passed a couple of messages along for us, but we never heard from Irene.  Adult Protection Services, the ombudsman, & even the police wouldn't help.  It's not their job.  They suggested hiring a private detective. Instead, I googled all the nursing & assisted living homes in the area.  There are 30 & I called each in turn as if I expected them to put her on the phone.

Number 25 told me she was at lunch!  I asked the nurse to have Irene call us.  When I got home, I found that the fish pond was still full!  Things were looking up.

Wednesday started with lost emails.  Email started out as a simple texting system with no security & is now an immense kludge.  I filter out 90% of the emails & users still complain about getting too much spam.  Users expect email to work perfectly every time, but I wonder why it works at all - quite a difference in expectations.  It's a small company & my boss is good at marketing.  Usually that's a plus since he leaves me alone.  When things like this come up, it can be frustrating for all concerned, though.

I didn't get a call back from Irene & tried calling her again.  She was at breakfast this time.  We were suspicious, so Marg tried a couple more times & managed to speak to Irene briefly.  We know she's alive, but she didn't know who Marg was.  Sigh.

That night, we looked at a 6 year old Halflinger, a possible replacement for Chip.  It's not a breed that I'm familiar with, but he seemed as calm as advertised from the ground.  The seller offered to let my daughter, Erin, ride him bareback.  There was no mounting block so my son-in-law gave my daughter a leg up while the seller held the reins.  Erin went up too high, the pony moved forward, & Erin came down on the pony's kidneys.  The pony bolted over top the seller with Erin flopping around on her belly as she went over his rump.  Erin bounced back up, but we didn't get a test ride since the seller was skinned up, bruised, & quite put out.  Oh well.

Thankfully, Thursday has been uneventful so far.  I hope it stays that way.  I really need a boring rest of the week.

Digital Rights Management (a.k.a., We Hate Our Customers)

The good news is that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is going away.  The music industry has proven that it isn't needed & they're making plenty of money.  So why are some ebook & audiobook producers still punishing their customers?

An author complained to me when their expensive, older CD player wouldn't play a few new CDs because they were locked by DRM.  They thought it was unfair for the recording industry to lock them out like that, but they still support DRM on their own works.  It doesn't bother them that their own customers might have to buy a new copy of a book because they changed devices or lost license files, but it bothers me.

If I purchase a book, I shouldn't have to worry about dealing with disparate, proprietary licenses every time I change my PC, phone, MP3 player, ereader, or whatever.  I have thousands of books from dozens of publishers, many now defunct.  I started reading ebooks a couple of decades ago, so I've seen many devices come & go.  Most had proprietary formats & licensing that is no longer supported.  Sony wanted me to buy ebooks for my reader from their store, but I couldn't get Adobe Digital Editions (the DRM software they used) & the Sony software to work together on my computer.  It was a well known problem & after several evenings of frustration, I quit trying & I'm fairly computer savvy.  Computers are what I do for a living.  Is that any way to treat a customer?

DRM doesn't protect the producer against pirating, just punishes the customer.  If it can be viewed or played, a DRM-free copy can be made.  If an appropriate utility isn't already on the computer, it's easy to download one.  Most are free & often easier to use than the licensing schemes.  Besides, if it is a hassle to use when & where I please, I'll buy elsewhere.

I've always had plenty of ebooks to read.  Gutenberg.org & The Internet Archive (archive.org) have over a million books for free.  Baen (www.baen.com) gives away many of their older books in multiple formats.  It's a smart move.  That's where I found the first Honor Harrington book & I wound up buying a dozen more new.  Baen & Weber made money.  There are other authors I like who have their work tied up by DRM, so I usually just buy their used, paper books.  Neither they nor their publishers see a dime.  I don't mind supporting an author, but I do mind supporting DRM.

I'm a huge audiobook fan, but I won't buy from Audible & I don't need to.  I belong to three local libraries that have about 10,000 audiobooks that are in MP3 format (no DRM) & I don't even need to go to the library.  Blackstone Audio's books are also DRM-free & I buy their books frequently through downpour.com.  Librivox.org & Archive.org have thousands of free audiobooks that are out of copyright & worth listening to.

In other words, I don't have the time to read all the available books.  There are millions of books out there with over a million new books published annually.  If a person reads 150 books per year for 65 years, they'll read about 10,000 books (1% of 1 million).  It's obvious that an author's biggest problem is getting a reader's attention.  If their books make it to a pirate site, they should consider it a badge of honor.  Most books aren't even worth stealing any more.

It's NOT A Backup Solution

YOU SHOULD BACKUP YOUR FILES!  I'll bet your eyes are already glazing over.  We all know it & some of us do it, but it's BORING.  The only exciting part is that butt-clenching moment when you realize you just lost a file you've spent hours working on or all your pictures disappeared & you don't have any good way to get them back.  Then the excitement is replaced by black despair.

Restoring is the objective.  You want a restore solution.  Backing up is just a means to an end.  I'll cover some for Windows.

If I lose that file I worked on for hours by carelessly deleting it or even its directory, it shouldn't be a problem.  The Recycle Bin should have it.  If not, there should be a previous version.  Right click on the directory that held it, left click on 'Properties', & again on the 'Previous Versions' tab.  You should see a bunch.  Check one of your document directories now.  If you don't see any previous versions, enable it.  Google how for your version of Windows.

You need a computer that is working & can read the files to restore to, of course.  You might have to rebuild a machine from scratch, patch it to a working level, & finally restore the files or you might have to buy a new one.  Either one can take a while, so keeping a working spare around isn't a bad idea.  A Windows 7 machine I rebuilt recently needed a gigabyte of patches & I needed a second PC because the network connection wouldn't work until I downloaded new drivers.  I lost count of the number of times I rebooted it.  Even with a good fiber connection & fairly constant attention, it took me 2 days, so it's worth spending some time to make sure bare metal restores are easy to do.  You can create Windows Recovery Disks & use its backup, but that's what took me 2 days.  It was all the user had & it was better than nothing.

I use Clonezilla (It's free!) to make an image of my PC once a year or so.  It's not the easiest program to use, but there's a lot of FAQs out there to help the novice.  I recommend making a disk image & an image of each partition.  If a replacement disk is even 1 byte smaller, the disk image often won't restore, but the partition images usually will.  I update only the Windows partition image every year or so.  That means at most I have a year of patches to install & changed files to copy over.

At home, I have a couple of 3tb (terrabyte) USB drives to store most of my files, including the Clonezilla images & backup files from my C:\ drive.  I backup with Allways Sync.  Selected files on the C:\ drive are copied to USB drive 1 (USB1) with all modifications & deletions every night.  Another job copies all files from USB1 to USB2 once a week, but doesn't modify or delete existing files, just creates new ones if there is any difference.  USB2 is kind of a mess & has a lot of duplication, but that's OK.  There's plenty of extra room & it's an added level of protection.  Once a week, Scandisk runs on the USB drives & I check for errors.  (A bad error will show as weird directories.)  If I see anything that looks ugly, I'll buy another drive & retire the old one.  I don't wipe it, but keep it in the closet, just in case.

You think I'm crazy, don't you?  Just remember that a new USB drive is less than $100 & I buy a new one every few years.  Allways Sync cost $25 & I buy a new copy for each computer.  You probably spent more at Starbucks today than I spend on my restore solution in a month.  I spend it because I've learned the hard way just how badly it hurts to lose files.

I've been saving various pictures, documents, & other portable files for over 30 years.  I still have a copy of the gun control topic in the Jerry Pournelle RoundTable on GEnie which I grabbed with my Atari using Aladdin & a 1200 baud modem.  (If you get that, you're a nerd. If you don't, here is a quick explanation.) I'm not trying to prove that I'm a pack rat, but that I have a lot of old, unique files that are impossible to replicate & that brings up two other issues.

The first is file integrity.  Files aren't always copied &/or stored reliably.  As a drive fails, it can corrupt a file.  That corruption can look like a modification which is then propagated to the backup files.  Drive space is cheap.  Losing a beloved photo is not, thus the messy, oversized USB2 drive.

The second is proprietary file formats.  Switching from the Atari to a PC was a good learning experience.  No programs & few file formats transferred between them.  Even Microsoft files haven't transferred over the years.  My first PC had DOS 3.1.  I doubt it had any programs in common with my Windows 10 machine & I'm not going to update the format of all my files every few years, so I store files in generic, well supported formats.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes also have limited lives, but I'll discuss that can of worms in a separate post.

The cloud is handy for quick, portable access, but it's not a restore solution nor is it completely trustworthy.  How long would it take to restore a terrabyte of data over your Internet connection?  Don't forget to factor in throttling over 10gb or whatever your monthly limit is. 

Worse,  your files may not be secure & I don't just mean from hacking, but from the service itself.  Apple wound up deleting a lot of privately owned music once & Amazon has deleted entire user accounts along with all their files.  It isn't likely to happen to you or me, but I don't want to take the chance.

Anyway, that's what 'back up' is all about - planning for future retrieval of files either singly or enmasse.  It's not hard to do, but it means regularly thinking about the process from the flip side.  How hard will it be to restore this file if I need to?  How accessible will it be in 5 or 10 years?

I've Got Wood!

My neighbor bought the house across the street about a decade ago.  His parents rented it when he was a kid & he had a lot of fond memories, especially of the big maple in the side yard.  Back then it had three trunks.  The one his swing used to hang on was gone when he moved in & shortly thereafter, a second trunk came down.  A couple of weeks ago, a storm knocked down the final trunk & he gave me 4 big pieces.  They're almost two feet in diameter, so I've been turning some nice, big bowls plus a bunch of little ones out of it.

My big lathe (I have 4.) has a 24 inch swing, but the biggest bowl I've ever turned was just under 22 inches when dry.  It's tough to cut & mount such a big piece.  They're heavy & often have voids, cracks, & other flaws that only become apparent after I've put in hours of work.  I found a 16d nail buried deep inside one of my neighbor's maple pieces.  That was quite a surprise which cost me over an hour to pry it out & put a new edge on my gouge.  Remounting & shaping the bowl cost it an inch in diameter, too.  Still, when everything works out, the results are stunning mostly due to the natural beauty of the wood.

When I first started turning, I was too cheap to buy wood to practice with, so I used chunks out of the firewood pile.  Even my clunky first attempts couldn't hide just how pretty the grain was.  It was unique & gorgeous!  Oak has a distinct grain, but it wasn't until I turned a bowl that I found how the grain could contrast to the rays within the wood to create a bullseye that draws the attention.  Osage Orange is so hard & tight grained that it almost doesn't need finishing.  I occasionally find odd coloration in the wood, too.  There's a fungus that gets in some woods like Box Elder which is a bright red, but more often there are shades of brown like ambrosia maple.

Green (just cut, wet) wood is the easiest to turn & there isn't much dust, but it takes more time to finish.  The wood roughens as it dries & every tool mark pops.  They can be difficult to scrape or sand out.  The bowls deform too, but that can be a plus.  Wood shrinks most radially, some across the tangent, & almost not at all along its length, but each piece varies a lot depending on the species, knots, heart or sap wood & even the time of year. I try to turn so the orientation, shape, & thickness of the finished piece let the wood change itself into neat shapes as it dries without cracking.  I succeed fairly often now after only 15+ years of practice.

It's amazing how many different species of wood I can find locally.  I grew up on a farm & have been a woodworker most of my life, so I thought I knew something about wood.  Then I started turning & realized I didn't know much even about those I'd used all my life.  I started collecting pieces & turn an egg out of each.  An egg shows off the grain in every orientation & shows how the wood deforms as it dries.  I have over 75 unique eggs now.

I've pretty much stuck with turning green, found wood & rarely run low.  Not only do I have a small woods on the farm, but I often turn bowls for neighbors & coworkers.  If they give me enough wood to turn a few bowls, I give them one for free which is a great keepsake & conversation piece.  Occasionally I sell them & it helps pay for my hobby, but I hate that part, so most are given away as gifts.