Potpurri

It's been a while during which several ideas for a post came and went. None could be fleshed out to a full post or were just too weak to be of much interest. In addition, I just didn't have the urge to write -- something which mysteriously popped up this afternoon.

A week ago while dressing for the day my thumb triggered! Ouch! and dammit! It took a minute or so to get it to reset only to have it trigger a few moments later when I picked up something between finger and thumb. The pain wasn't as bad the second (or third fourth fifth...) time that day but was still a strong reminder not to use fingers and thumb to grasp things. That lesson took a few days to learn but learned it is and the triggering has mostly gone away. Trigger thumb is a pain in the...

Now that the work on the Aurora water pipeline is complete I've resumed walking the creek at least once a week. One thing I've noted is that the deer have pretty much abandoned that area of the wetlands. I've seen a couple singles the last two weeks but no herds even though we're near the rut. The beaver have disappeared too, probably due to tularemia. We haven't had any disastrous rains this summer so the dam near the Cherry Creek Bike Path still stands. If it is hit with a flood I don't expect it to be rebuilt. The creek in the area of the dam has rerouted itself about a quarter mile upstream. It now cuts across a once popular walking path and flows through a couple swampy areas before entering an old beaver pond near the 12 Mile picnic area. Should that divert enough water, the aforementioned pond near the bike path will wither away. Sad, as it has been a fun place to walk the bank and scare the frogs.

Friend Dave had the itch to drive the Peak to Peak highway last week. He said he'd never done that in spite of being a life-long resident of Denver. I went along because it allowed us a lunch at the smokehouse/brewery in Nederland Fran and I visited two weeks earlier. Before eating we stopped off at Nature's Own rock shop on the corner -- Dave wanted to pick up some fossils to show his classes. He got lots, trilobites, ammonites, fish and leaves. There were several rock/mineral samples that had me drooling. One which especially interested me was a huge half-polished hunk of orbicular jasper -- it was stunning enough to be in a museum. Orbicular stone has interested me since my rock cutting days in high school -- Morgan Hill jasper was my favorite. I found a few years ago that orbicular jasper is now called poppy jasper. I guess orbicular was just too much for some people.

Lunch at the Wild Mountain Smokehouse and Brewery was href="http://www.wildmountainsb.com/" was once again above average in quality. The thing which got Dave and me excited was the display of psychedelic posters from San Francisco embedded in the table's plastic top. We amused ourselves checking them all out (and those in the two adjacent tables too). Our waitress (a real cutie!) said the owners lived there back in the day, and lead us to a table near the bar which was covered with ticket stubs in a similar fashion as the posters. Oh, the bands they saw -- all the big ones from SF, many of which are on my MP3 player, and the visiting bands. Above that table was an 8x10 of B. B. King and Lucille. The cute chick got a good tip when we left.

My vinyl digitization project has been in the pits with the hood up since May. I ripped a Tom Waits album and was taken aback, way back, by just how dirty the disk was. I started my clean-up and was before long overwhelmed. Did I want to continue and get something listenable or simply give up and chunk the album. I stalled. And stalled. A couple weeks ago I started cleaning the waveforms again. Sometimes I'd only get a couple minutes de-clicked in two hours of work. I just got into the groove of spending an hour or two every afternoon working it. I finished it Monday and saved the MP3's down yesterday. Done at last! Now on to rip the next album in the pile.

While exercising yesterday, I notices that one Beach Boys song (Lonely Sea) was dreadfully noisy. I no longer have that album so thought I'd see what cleaning an MP3 would do to the overall sound. The first thing I noticed was that as an MP3 the clicks and pops were changed in visual form from the noise I'd gotten used to in a straight rip form -- they were harder to see, rounded in many cases to look like a normal waveform. I finished the cleanup this afternoon after spending a total of three hours on a two minute thirty second tune. The results are acceptable though ever so slightly different than the original MP3, caused by second-generation compression losses. So it goes.

It's not news that I'm now very recently a year older. Many thanks to all who remembered, and more to those to turned up at the house to enjoy some birthday pie.


The obligatory picture, a spike white tail buck seen this weekend.