A Quick Trip and A Shot

I mentioned in my last post that Donna was heading to San Diego to visit her sister, Sheila. I dropped her off at the airport a week ago on Thursday morning. She had a short, enjoyable time there. Friday she went hiking with Sheila on the Los Penasquitos Canyon Trail.

This trail is in the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve – a park jointly managed by the city of San Diego and San Diego County. There’s a parking/day use fee of $3. They hiked the trail to the waterfall – a hike of about seven miles. The preserve is located north of the Mira Mesa neighborhood and straddles the city limit. It follows the Penasquitos Creek which flows from Poway Creek in the east to the Pacific Ocean near Torrey Pines. Here are some photos she took on the hike.

There’s a small gravesite along the trail with a headstone for John Eichar dating back to 1882. He’s believed to have been a cook at the ranch that once occupied this land.

Friday night Donna attended a concert that her nephew, Connor, played in. He plays saxophone in the Bishop’s School band. Bishop’s is a private college prepatory Episcopal school in La Jolla. She said the school band is very talented. Connor performed several improvised jazz solos and also wrote a piece of chamber music for two alto saxophones and a euphonium.

While Donna was away, I modified my Marshall 112 speaker cabinet. The Marshall 112MX comes equipped with a Celestion seventy/80 speaker. I favor the sound of most Celestion speakers, but the seventy/80 turned out to be not such a favorite. It is a budget speaker in the Celestion line and I found the higher frequencies to be spikey and somewhat unpleasant. I ordered a Celestion G12T-75 replacement speaker from Avatar speakers in Idaho – they have the best Celestion prices.

The 112 cabinet back plate was very tightly fastened and it took some doing to get it opened. When I removed the seventy/80 speaker, I found some excess glue hardened into a ball where the dust cap meets the speaker cone. This couldn’t have helped its performane any.

Celstion seventy/80 speaker – note ports in the front baffle to enhance bass response

Arrow poimts to the hardened glue defect in the seventy/80

New speakers can be somewhat stiff and benefit from a break-in period. Avatar offers a break-in service on some of their speakers, but not the G12T-75. Their service involves 15 hours of break-in tones. I hooked my signal generator into the input of my Marshall 18 Watt amp and ran a 1000 Hz tone through the speaker for about 12 hours. Then I played through it for a few hours and I’m very happy with the sound of the Marshall 112 cabinet now.

In my last post, I mentioned a problem in the treble bleed circuit of my Stratocaster guitar. I should have mentioned that I didn’t wire this circuit originally – I’d ordered the pickups, control pots and selector switch pre-wired. However, I may have had a hand in creating the problem. When I shielded the control cavity, I needed to add a ground lug and wire it to the pot. I used some scrap16-gauge wire that I had on hand. I don’t know what I was thinking – 16-gauge is way heavier than I needed and it was really stiff. It may have interfered with the circuit once I installed the pick guard. I rewired it with 22-gauge wire which is plenty to handle the millivolts present on the ground and it’s flexible.

Donna came back Saturday evening and I picked her up at the airport. My two nights of bachelorhood were mostly uneventful – in fact, I was down for the count Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. I had shingles vaccine (Shingrex) and pneumonia vaccine shots on Thursday and it knocked me for a loop. I ran a low-grade fever (101.5) and had a very sore arm. I’m glad that’s behind me now, but I need a follow-up shot for shingles in a couple of months.

Tuesday was Pearl Harbor Day – December 7th. Eighty years ago, Hawaii was hit with a surprise attack. Four battleships were sunk, many others damaged and 2,335 people lost their lives. I always take a few moments to honor those that were in Pearl Harbor on that date.

Sunrise over the Superstition Mountains on Pearl Harbor Day

We are 12 days short of the winter solstice – the days have noticeably shorter with the sunrise coming later and sunset earlier in the evening. After December 21st, the daylight hours will start increasing again.

Yesterday Donna hit the golf course with some of her girlfriends. I was inside, reading a book when I thought they ought to be coming up to the fifth hole soon. I went outside to the rear deck just as they came into view. I watched them play the fifth hole behind our house.

While Donna was away and I was feeling punky, I didn’t have the best meals. Now that she’s back I’m getting much better nutrition. Sometimes it’s a simple thing – like the green chile bratwurst we bought at The Pork Shop served with fire-roasted corn and grilled zucchini and peppers topped with feta cheese.

Tuesday night I manned the grill and grilled bacon wrapped petite filet mignon from Basha’s – I still have it when it comes to the barbeque grill. The filets were perfect. Donna baked potatoes and steamed green beans.

The weather has cooled here in Mesa, Arizona. We’ll be lucky to see 70 degrees on the thermometer today. Tomorrow is predicted to be downright cold with a high of 59 degrees – in this climate that qualifies as cold. We probably won’t see temperatures above the upper 60s for the rest of the month.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!

Typhoon Karen

I’ve fallen behind on posting – it’s December already! I hope you all had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. We had a great day with a Thanksgiving potluck feast with friends at Mike and Jodi Hall’s house. We watched football while Mike and I enjoyed cigars and, of course, ate lots of good food.

I received an unexpected piece of mail from my sister before Thanksgiving. It was a publication of the US Navy called Crossroads from November of 1962 – it took me back in time to another Thanksgiving. In November of 1962, I was six years old and our family lived on the island of Guam. Guam is a US territory in the western Pacific (Micronesia). The tropical island has an area of 210 square miles and great beaches with coral reefs.

I learned to snorkel inside the reefs when I was five years old and still love snorkeling in the ocean whenever I can. On November 11, 1962, Typhoon Karen hit the island dead-center. It was the most powerful tropical cyclone to ever hit the island and the 185-mph winds were devastating. The 20-page Crossroads paper my sister, Cori, sent me was entirely devoted to coverage of the typhoon and its aftermath. She had kept it for almost 60 years – I had no idea.

The island was wrecked – 95% of the homes were damaged or destroyed and more than 45,000 people were left homeless. We were lucky – we got through the storm without damage to our home after a long, scary night in total darkness. In the morning, we found twisted metal wreckage in our backyard – someone’s carport had been swept up by the wind, twisted into an unrecognizable shape and deposited in our yard.

Along the highway, we saw fishing vessels – sizable boats – along the roadside more than a quarter of mile away from the marina.

Rear Admiral John F. Coye, Jr wrote, “We in Guam have learned the true meaning of Thanksgiving Day. We have witnessed the devastating forces of nature, and our lives have been spared. Let us pause for a prayer of thanks and redouble our efforts to rebuild Guam. Guam was good and we’re going to rebuild it better.”

It was hard to believe only 11 people lost their lives amid all of the destruction. We left Guam soon after the typhoon and moved back to California. If you’re interested in reading more about the typhoon, here’s a link to a Wikipedia article.

I wrote about the oscilloscope I bought in a previous post. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. When I was younger, oscilloscopes were very expensive instruments – even a Radio SHack Heathkit model would set you back about two weeks worth of wages. Nowadays, digital technology can make them inexpensive – the Rigol model I bought was under $300. I’ve been having fun playing around with it – it’s nice to be able to visually track the electronic signal through various stages of amplification in my guitar amps. Donna thinks I’ve become a bit of a nerd watching YouTube videos to learn how to effectively utilize the oscilloscope.

One of the things I found was I had deferred maintenance for too long on a couple of my amps. I had replaced vacuum tubes in my Trainwreck and Marshall 18-Watt amps that I built nine or 10 years ago, but that’s about all I did. Time plus wear and tear from riding in the basement of our motorhome took a bit of a toll. I could see some noise in the signal path and could also hear how they were noisy compared to the Trinity OSD I recently built.

I took a little time to re-solder a few components and used a product called DeoxIT to clean the tube sockets and potentiometers. Much better! I watched a YouTube video where Mike Zaite – designer and owner of Dr. Z Amplification described his recommended annual maintenance. I’ll put that schedule in place for future maintenance of my amps. He also said why he uses vintage Russian military spec vacuum tubes in his Maz18 amps. He likes them because they sound good and are very robust – he thinks they should last at least 5,000 hours. He has a large stockpile of tubes that he bought from a retired Russian military officer – I wonder how that guy came upon a large quantity of surplus military tubes.

I saw another video where Mark from Gary’s Guitars in Portsmouth, New Hampshire went on about the old Russian military vacuum tubes. He once lived in Russia and he said every major city had radio parts swap meets at the time. Buying a transceiver in Russia wasn’t easy back then. People would scrounge parts and build them. He is a big fan of the old tubes from the Foton factory (it burned down in the early 1970s) and the Reflektor factory.

Gary said to look for a code which is OTK plus a number. That indicates the tube was inspected and passed military specification. In the old days, the quality control inspectors for the military were very thorough – passing a defective tube would result in a new assignment in Siberia. He also showed how to read the date codes. A while back, I bought some Reflektor 6V6 equivalent tubes that I thought were from the late 70s or early 80s. After checking the date code, I see they’re from 1974 – the year I graduated high school.

I found some old Russian military EL84 equivalents on eBay that are what I use in the Marshall 18 Watt. I ordered four of them and they came from the Ukraine! These are dated 1972 and are from the same Reflektor factory and have OTK codes. I read the Reflektor plant produced up 50 million tubes per year back in its heyday.

Now that I had my amps back up to snuff, I suddenly heard noise and sound dropping out while I was playing my guitar. Then it quit making sound altogether. Wouldn’t you know it, my Stratocaster-style guitar that I built last month was on the fritz.

I did some trubleshooting and found problems in the treble bleed circuit. I replaced the resistor and capacitor there – I always fix anything I find out of order when troubleshooting – but that wasn’t the problem. An open treble bleed circuit wouldn’t stop the signal from getting out of the guitar. I played around with it for a whole day and the problem was intermittent. It would work fine on the bench, but once I put it all back together, it quit working again.

Treble bleed circuit on the volume pot circled

The problem seemed to be centered around the volume potentiometer. I ordered a new pot from Amazon and got it the next day. I checked it and it was fine, so I installed it and it wasn’t fine. It seems like the wiper or carbon strip inside warped when I soldered it. This puzzled me as I know I didn’t overheat it – I’ve soldered lots of pots. I looked at the CTS branded pot more closely and I suspect it’s a Chinese counterfeit, not a genuine CTS pot. Yesterday, I drove to west Mesa and bought a volume pot at Milano’s Music. This was a CTS genuine article.

I installed the pot and replaced the wiring from the pot to the output jack. It works again! I plugged into my Dumble-style OSD and made lots of noise – I mean music. By the way, I never believed I would play or own an amplifier that I liked better than my Trainwreck-inspired amp, but the Dumble-style OSD tops it. It’s my all-time favorite.

Monday night, Donna made a new dish for dinner – it was Creole shrimp. It was bit labor-intensive with thinly sliced celery, onions and peppers, but it was so tasty.

Creole shrimp – the photo doesn’t do it justice

I won’t be eating such fancy dishes over the next few days. Donna’s flying to San Diego tomorrow morning to visit her sister, Sheila. She’ll be back on Saturday night.

The weather cooled considerably over the past week. We had highs around 70 degrees and overnight lows in the upper 40s. The week ahead calls for upper 70s to low 80s with overnight lows in the mid 50s. December in the Valley of the Sun – you gotta love it.

Queen Creek, Olives and Pork

Donna and I have fallen into fairly repetitive and predictable routines lately. After starting the day with pickleball yesterday, we changed things up a bit. We hopped in Midget-San and took a drive. It was a beautiful day – blue skies, not much wind and the temperature was a comfortable 80 degrees. Perfect for top-down driving.

We headed east to Ironwood Drive and followed it south through the desert to Queen Creek. It was a little over a 20-mile drive. Queen Creek is a town straddling the Maricopa and Pinal County line. It was mainly an agricultural town with cotton farms, cattle ranches and so on, but in the last ten years, its population has doubled as housing developments exploded. It was originally a small community at a train stop called Rittenhouse in 1919.

Our destination was the Queen Creek Olive Mill. The Queen Creek Olive Mill is a family-run olive farm encompassing 100 acres. They grow olives and press high-quality olive oil. They are the only virgin olive oil producer in Arizona. We signed up for their 11:30am Olive Oil 101 Tour.

This wasn’t really a tour, it was more of a presentation. We toured the Lucero olive oil facility in Corning, California and had seen how they operate first-hand. I posted about it here. The Queen Creek Olive Mill has an interesting story though.

Back in 1997, Perry and Brenda Rea visited Scottsdale, Arizona and were surprised to see olive trees growing in the valley. They got an idea – what if we could produce olive oil here in the Valley of the Sun? They found that olive trees flourish in this arid environment. They traveled to Italy to learn more about growing olives and pressing olive oil. Within a year, they left Detroit, Michigan and the auto industry to establish their farm on 100 acres of land in Queen Creek.

They started with 1,000 trees in 16 varieties. Now they have around 12,000 trees in those 16 varieties. Olive trees are native to the Mediterranean coast but are cultivated in many places. They are well-suited to the Arizona climate as they like heat and the dry climate prevents bacterial and fungal infections found in more humid climates. The heat in Arizona also precludes olive fruit flies – they can’t take the heat.

The older trees on the farm are grown in traditional spacing – 20 feet between trees with 20 feet between the rows allowing about 100 trees per acre. The trunks of these trees split into three to five different trunks and a canopy grows overhead after several years. Traditional trees must be harvested by hand.

The newer groves are higher density. These trees are pruned so that only one vertical trunk grows. They are spaced about nine feet apart and the rows are about 12 feet apart. These trees can be harvested with machinery.

They irrigate the trees for one week, then allow the soil to dry for three weeks before irrigating again. The trees bloom in April and produce huge numbers of flowers. Most of the flowers are blown away over time by the wind and they pollenate the remainders. Only about 4% of the flowers become fruit.

They start harvesting usually in October – a little later this year as they waited for cooler weather. The youngest olives picked become robust extra-virgin olive oil. It has the strongest flavor profile with a pungent, peppery aftertaste. Next they harvest olives for their balanced extra-virgin olive oil – this is the oil that Donna favors. Lastly, they pick the more mature olives to press their delicate extra-virgin olive oil.

There are six types of vegetable oil made from olives. The purest are extra-virgin and virgin oils. To be classified as extra-virgin, the flavor profile must display three positive sensory attributes – bitter, pungent and fruity. There are nine sensory defects that can show up and if the oil has any of these defects, it can’t be labeled as extra-virgin. Extra-virgin has 0.8% free acidity. Virgin olive oil may have up to three defects and no more than 1.5% free acidity.

The other types of olive oil are refined lampante olive oil and refined pomace olive oil. Refined olive oil is made from stocks that are unfit – they contain too many defects and require a physical refining process (lampante) or they are chemically refined (pomace). The last two types are misleading and I think many consumers are ripped off buying them. The fifth type is labeled olive oil and it’s made by blending at least 5% virgin olive oil with refined lampante oil. The sixth is the same thing but based on refined pomace oil.

Olive oil is best when it’s bottled in a dark glass container. It should be stored away from direct sunlight and heat sources. It’s best when used within 12 to 15 months of bottling and most quality olive oils have the bottling or pressing date on the label or bottle.

We had lunch at the Olive Mill – we ordered from the Italian-inspired eatery and took our lunch at an outdoor table set among olive trees. While we waited for our food order to come up, we shopped around in their market. Donna noticed something interesting – they had extra-virgin olive oil in three-liter bags like you can find in a box wine. Three liter bags sold for $60 – a good buy if you can used that much oil in 12-15 months.

After lunch, we hopped back in the Midget and drove east on Combs Road a couple of miles to another well-known Queen Creek establishment – The Pork Shop. They are a butcher shop that specializes in pork – they’ve been at this location since 1979.

The Pork Shop started when the owner, Greg Combs wanted to find a way to market the pork from his swine farm. He was a third-generation pig farmer at the Combs farm established by his grandfather in the 1940s. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Combs Road led to the old Combs farmstead. He started doing his own butchering and added a smokehouse and sausage making to his operation. It quickly grew and now he no longer raises pigs – all of his pork comes from corn-fed pigs raised in the Midwest.

We shopped a bit in this interesting little market. Donna selected a few sausages and a smoked pork shank for pea soup. I snagged a pound of pork belly to slice for uncured bacon.

That pretty much sums up a day out and about. The forecast for the coming week looks very fine – mid 70s to 80-degree highs and nighttime lows in the 50s. The forecast for Thanksgiving day is sunny with a high of 75 degrees.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!

Full Plates

Sometimes it seems like there aren’t enough hours in a day. I know that’s hard to imagine – after all, we’re retired and usually don’t have any pressing matters on our daily schedule. But, we’re active and have a number of things we like to do on a regular basis. None of it really can be regarded as work – I define work as any activity that occupies my time when I’d rather be doing something else.

My day usually involves a couple of hours on the pickleball court, a couple of hours practicing guitar, and sometimes I get on the air with my ham radio and make contacts all over. Sometimes I may have a household project to tackle. Donna is busier than I am. She plays tennis as well as pickleball, lines up a couple hours of work doing various things for others here in Viewpoint, she’s on the board for the Viewpoint Concert Band and also volunteers as a street captain. And she’s actively involved in the tennis club. Now she’s learning to play golf too.

I’ve been taking a deeper dive into electronics – particularly vacuum tube amplification. To that end, I recently bought a couple of pieces of equipment that will allow me to take a more certain approach to troubleshooting, maintaining and repairing amplifiers. I bought a signal generator – more specifically a Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) signal generator that can create various waveforms and frequencies. I also bought a Rigol DS1102 Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO).

I used the DDS signal generator to feed the input of the DSO and calibrate it. I also made a resistive, non-inductive dummy load to act as a speaker load when I test an amplifier. Amplifiers should never be operated without a load – usually a speaker. But to avoid annoying, loud tones while testing, a dummy load that doesn’t produce sound is the way to go. The signal generator can produce a consistent, known waveform to aid signal analysis. I also made an input jumper to connect the DDS signal generator to the amplifier input.

Now I can create an input of a known frequency and amplitude into the amplifier and check the signals progress through various stages of amplification with the oscilloscope.

DDS signal generator and digital storage oscilloscope

Improperly triggered waveform on the oscilloscope

100-watt resistive, non-inductive dummy load

After building and playing my Dumble-style Trinity OSD amplifier, it became apparent to me that my Trainwreck-inspired amp didn’t sound as good as it once did. I built that amp nine years ago and it rattled around in the basement compartment of our motorhome for eight years.

I pulled the Trainwreck chassis and ran a 100 kHz signal though it. It appeared as though the tubes were breaking up and distorting earlier than I expected. I’d recently replaced the preamp tubes, so I figured it was time to replace the power (output) tubes – they were the nine-year-old original tubes. I had a matched pair of EL34 tubes on hand so I changed them and reset the bias. I made a boneheaded mistake doing that. The idle current through the tube should be set with a bias potentiometer to around 42 milliamps. I couldn’t get it under 100 milliamps! This was no good. After futzing around and scratching my head, I realized I was still running a 100kHz signal through the amp. It wasn’t idling – it was powering up the signal silently into the dummy load! I disconnected the signal generator and made the bias adjustment with no issues.

The amp sounded much better after getting new power tubes, but I want to analyze the circuits further. I wanted to only make one change at a time, but I think I see a couple of things that I can improve to make this high-gain amp operate with less background hum. I’ll get busy on that soon. I may offer guitar amplifier maintenance and limited repair service for something to keep my mind active and make me feel useful.

I made myself useful last week by preparing Memphis-style dry-rubbed babyback ribs on the Traeger wood pellet-fired smoker/grill.

Rack of Memphis-style smoked babyback ribs

Donna served it with a medley of roasted vegetables and a loaded baked spud.

It looks like a small portion of ribs – it’s only two bones. But let me assure you, Donna and I had second servings of the ribs. They were outstanding!

Donna came up with an Asian-inspired flank steak recipe that also hit it out of the park!

Asian-inspired flank steak strips with brown rice and broccoli

The weather here in Mesa, Arizona keeps getting better and better. For the last week, we had highs in the mid-to upper 80s with overnight lows in the upper 50s. Today the forecast calls for a high of 82 degrees and the long-term forecast calls for highs around 80 and overnight lows in the low to mid 50s. Very pleasant!

Snowy Rooftop

My last post mentioned Bill Hansen, Owner/Operator of Sun Limited Foam, Inc. who was here with a helper to install Cool Foam roof coating on our park model home. As the work progressed on Tuesday, it became apparent that they wouldn’t get it finished in one day as they’d hoped. They ended up knocking off a little early – I imagine it was pretty hot up on the roof as the cloudless sky produced a temperature in the upper 80s.

They were back at it Wednesday morning, but this time Bill brought two helpers. It was a lot of work but they had most of the foam layer done before taking a lunch break. They had a trailer with a generator and pump that pumped the foam chemical through a hose which they used to spray the product over the roof. The foam layer is about one-inch thick and has an insulation value of about R13 to R15.

The foam coating is a tan color and it alone would insulate and seal the roof, but it isn’t UV resistant and would break down from constant exposure to sunlight. So, once they had the foam covering everything, they switched to a pure white elastomer product to spray over the foam coating. This elastomer adds some insulation value, but its real purpose is to protect the foam below and reflect sunlight from the surface. This helps keep the place cooler on sunny days – of which we have over 300 per year here in Arizona.

Bill spraying elastomer product over the foam coating

Looks like snow on the roof – when he’s finished it’ll all be white

The Cool Foam coating covers everything except for the car port roof. It extends a few feet over the car port roof to seal the edges where the car port corrugated metal roof joins the house.

We’ve kept busy with different activities here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. I play pickleball most mornings while Donna plays tennis twice a week and pickleball two or more days per week. I’ve also started 90-minute coaching sessions on Tuesday afternoons. Donna is also learning to play golf – she had her first lesson with her friend Ginny over the weekend.

Most days, Donna provides home and companion care services for a couple of hours per day. People here at Viewpoint that need help with cleaning or moving or pet sitting and various other tasks can hire Donna and she’s been in fairly high demand.

We both also practice music most days – Donna with her clarinet and me hacking away on the guitar. Donna finds time most days to come up with great dinner dishes as well. Last Tuesday, she made country style ribs in the slow cooker and served it with a baked potato and asparagus.

A couple of days later, she baked fish in parchment paper and served it with Southern fried cabbage with bacon.

Fiah baked in parchment paper and Southern fried cabbage

Last night, she made balsamic steak tips with mushrooms and served it with spaghetti squash with bacon and parmesan cheese. Delicious!

I have to rant about something. My dental insurance premium is supposed to be automatically paid through my Healthcare Reimbusement Account (HRA), but something went wrong there and Cigna billed my credit card. No big deal, right? Just submit the expense to the HRA and get reimbursed. But here’s the issue.

They sent me an e-mail stating that my credit card was billed. The e-mail had a link to the MyCigna website so I could view the details. I clicked on the link. No payment details there – no payment history (I searched all over the site). The e-mail also had a phone number for Cigna billing and enrollment services if I had any questions. I called this number and went through about a dozen menus and questions before I spoke with a person.

They told me to click on Payment History on the website. I asked them to tell me where I would find this option – there’s no search function on this lame site and no payment history option that I could find. The person told me they don’t have access to the site, so he couldn’t tell me how to find the option. Some helpdesk, right? I asked him if he could look up my account and e-mail me a payment receipt so I could submit it for reimbursement. He said he could only mail a paper copy or fax it to me – like we all have fax machines at home in 2021. Maybe 15 years ago that would’ve worked. So that’s the service from Cigna – a link to website that doesn’t show any payment detail and a phone number to a helpdesk that isn’t very helpful. I’ll have to wait 10 to 14 business days for a paper receipt in the mail!

The weather in a word has been delightful. We were pushing 90 for a few days, but it’s mostly been mid to upper 80s with comfortable evenings and overnight lows in the mid 50s. The morning temperatures are very comfortable. The swamp cooler easily handles the afternoon temperature and we haven’t had to run the air conditioning. Today’s forecast calls for a high of 85 and next week is supposed to be 5 to 10 degrees cooler.

Cool Foam Roof

We finished October with a few days in the low 90s here in Mesa, Arizona. It cooled down a bit on Sunday with a high of 88 and today we expect a high of 82 degrees. The golf course is open and golfers have come out in force. We’ve had a few golf balls strike our roof.

Yesterday, while Donna and I were walking to the pickleball courts, we saw an unusual cactus in a neighbor’s yard that’s bearing fruit. I think it’s a variety of senita cactus called totem pole. It’s not native to the Arizona desert, but it’s often planted as a landscape feature. It does well here, but is originally found in the Baja California peninsula. It’s not frost tolerant.

Some cactus fruit is edible and there are many recipes for prickly pear fruit – it’s commonly harvested. Others, such as saguaro, are edible but cannot be picked in the desert, only from cultivated plants. Cholla fruit is also edible, but you’d have to be pretty brave to pick it – I won’t go near a cholla.

We’re having our roof coated with Cool Foam today. Bill Hansen, the owner of Sun Limited Foam is here with a helper. They’ll put a foam coating over the shingle roof of our park model home and the Arizona room metal roof and they’ll lay down OSB over the corrugated metal roof on the shop/shed/ham shack and foam it. The foam dries instantly and is then coated with a reflective white elastomer coating.

The total thickness of the coating is about one inch. It will reflect heat from the sun and provide an additional insulation barrier against heat and cold. It also effectively seals the roof against water intrusion. It isn’t cheap, but I think it’s a worthwhile investment in our home.

I skipped pickleball this morning to go over the job with Bill and be available as they started work. At noon, I’ll head over to the pickleball courts to give my first lesson of the season. I’m accepting four participants at a time for a 90-minute coaching session which entails about 20 minutes of oral presentation clarifying rules that are often misinterpreted and common strategies and then we drill on a few shots before scrimmaging games where we critique each point played. It’s fun and this format was well-received last year. It also helps my game as coaching this stuff reinforces in my mind the things I should be doing on the court.

I’ve been playing my Dumble-style OSD guitar amp daily. I had an issue at first that took me a couple of days to figure out. Many guitar amplifiers have a circuit called negative feedback and a potentiometer to control it. This potentiometer is usually labeled “Presence”. It boosts high frequencies and colors the sound. Regular tone controls usually labeled bass – middle – treble, cut unwanted frequencies to shape the tone. They are subtractive, they can’t add, they only cut frequencies. Presence on the other hand adds to the original high frequencies.

In a push-pull amplifier with two or four power tubes, one half amplifies the upper part of the sine wave (positive voltage) and the other amplifies the lower part of the sine wave (negative voltage). For the feedback circuit to work, you have to apply only the negative signal. If you have positive feedback, bad sounds usually result. I had a unique problem. My bass response went all wonky only when I played the fifth fret of the sixth string ( “A” note on the low E string). It turned out I had positive feedback, not negative. I had a hard time figuring this out because I never heard of positive feedback making bad things happen on one note only – usually guys complain of squealing or horrible sounds all the time. Anyway, it’s straightened out now and I love the amp.

With Donna back from her trip to Florida, I’m back to fine dining. She made a new pork tenderloin dish called best baked pork tenderloin which is seasoned with Italian seasoning and served it with shredded Brussel sprouts – another first. We loved it.

Italian seasoned pork tenderloin with shredded Brussel sprouts

Last week I needed to retrieve some stuff from our coach at 202 RV Valet. They have great security there, but we have 24/7 access through a coded entry gate. It records the unique code used whenever anyone enters, so they have records of who came in and when. Many of the enclosed spaces hold high-end boats and a few are in the covered spaces where we keep our coach. I noticed a guy was visiting his boat and snapped a photo of his ride. He parked his Ferrari next to his boat.

Ferrari and Centurion wake boarding boat

We’re expecting another week of fine weather with highs in the low 80s and overnight lows in the mid 50s. The last half of the month should be cooler with daily temperatures in the 70s and overnight lows dipping into the 40s. No complaints here.

Home Alone – Building an Amp

Donna left for Florida on Thursday morning. She’s visiting her sister in Sarasota and they spent the weekend in Miami for her niece’s wedding celebration. I’ve stayed busy building my guitar amplifier and playing some pickleball. In my last post, I wrote about my amp project and the complicated design of Dumble-type amps. It’s been a tough build.

Thursday I completed the eyelet board to vacuum tube socket wiring.

Preamp and phase inverter tube sockets wired up

The 12AX7 preamp tube and the phase inverter tube have nine pins and are called noval tubes. The 12AX7 tube is really two tubes in one – it has an A and a B side with separate triodes. Sometimes it’s called a duo-triode. The Dumble circuit uses both sides of each preamp tube, making four gain stages in the circuit.

The power tubes have eight pins and therefore are called octal tubes. Here are a couple of pictures from different sides of the chassis to illustrate the complexity of this circuit.

Front control panel on the left, outputs on the right

Vacuum tubes – called valves in England – aren’t too plentiful nowadays. There was a time when you could get them at the supermarket or drug store. Now we have to rely on a few online suppliers. The main sources are factories in Russia, China and Slovakia.

There was a Russian factory in Saratov that made vacuum tubes for the Russian military called Reflektor. That factory today is operated by New Sensor Corporation headquartered in Long Island, New York. New Sensor bought the rights to many old tube manufacturer names and they offer reissues of old favorites like Tung-Sol and Mullard. The big tube factory in China is Shuguang, but they closed the factory to relocate and it’s put a real strain on the tube market.

For this amp project, I bought Mullard CV4004 12AX7 tubes for the preamp and a Sovtek 5751 for the phase inverter – these are New Sensor tubes from Saratov, Russia. For the power tubes, this amp calls for a pair of 6V6 GT tubes or 6L6 if you want more power. Remember I said that the Reflektor factory made tubes for the Russian military? Well, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian military apparently stockpiled a boat load of tubes. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these tubes flooded the market as surplus – there are still lots of them available.

A few enterprising guys bought large numbers of Reflektor tubes made in the ’70s and ’80s such as the Reflektor 6n6c. This is the Russian military equivalent of the 6V6 GT and they are supposed to be a good sounding, robust tube for guitar amplifiers. I bought four of these at a very reasonable price from NessTone in Los Angeles.

Russian tubes for the amp – note the cyrillic CCCP marking on the 6n6c box

Tubes in place – shields on the preamp and phase inverter tubes

I had reached the moment of truth. It was time to power up the amp and see if it worked. First, I built a bulb limiter. This simple device provides two very important functions for firing up an amplifier for the first time. I bought a short, three-conductor extension cord. The three-conductor cord is essential – it has a black wire for the hot lead, a white wire for the neutral or common lead and a green wire for ground. On modern household outlets, the white neutral or common wire is always on a wider blade of the plug so it’s always oriented in proper polarity when you plug it in. I split it open and cut the black wire. I connected a light bulb socket to each end of the black wire I had cut in half.

I plugged the extension cord into a wall socket, then plugged the amplifier into the other end of the extension cord. Now, the current on the hot lead coming into the amp had to go through the 150 watt bulb first. This made two important things happen. If the amplifier had a short circuit to ground or an incorrectly wired lead that drew high current, the bulb would light up brightly. If that happened, I would shut it down quickly before anything started to smoke. We all know that once you let the smoke out from an electrical device, it won’t work anymore! The second benefit is the fact that the bulb burning brightly would consume power and the lack of full power to the amp would give me time to shut the amp down, hopefully, before anything bad happened.

With the amp in standby, I flipped the switch. The light stayed dark. After a minute to allow the tubes to warm up, I flipped the standby switch to “On”. The light bulb glowed dimly for a few seconds then became progressively dimmer as the capacitors in the circuits charged and the current flow diminished. Perfect. I could breathe again.

Next I had the scary task of checking voltages in a live amplifier. This is best done with one hand in your pocket. That way you’re unlikely to have one hand on the amp chassis while the other hand accidently touches a live connection. If you did that, the current would flow up one arm, across your chest and out the other arm – likely to stop your heart along the way. With only one hand in the amp, you’d get a jolt but would survive.

My voltages checked out. When I say it was a little scary it’s because at the first check point, B+1 the voltage was 441 volts DC. At the power tubes it was 439 volts. The other tubes were “only” 200 to 280 volts.

After the voltage checks, I shut the amp down. I clipped a lead with a 100 ohm 10-watt resistor spliced in series to the last capacitor in the power section with one end of the lead grounded. This drained the capacitors, otherwise dangerous voltages would remain in the capacitors even though the amp was turned off. The resistor in the lead prevents it from arcing or sparking when you clip onto a live capacitor. That lead is pictured with the bulb limiter above.

I made one mistake. I didn’t unplug the amp. I accidently touched the jack inside the chassis where the power comes into the amp before the power switch and got a jolt of 120 volts. I won’t make the mistake again.

Everything seemed to work. It was time to plug in a guitar and see how it sounds. I had a couple of noise issues and wierd bass response. I found a problem with the tube filament (heater) wires being too close to the negative feedback wire – that was causing a 60-cycle hum. I’m still working on getting the bass response right, but otherwise it sounds good and doesn’t hiss or hum at all now.

I took our Nissan Frontier truck back to Sullivan Motor Company on Monday morning. We’re still having airbag issues and they are finally going to replace the wiring harness. Meanwhile they put me in a loan car – a beat up Kia Forte. Oh well, it beats walking. Hopefully they get it done in another day or two.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll pick Donna up at the airport. She’ll come home to nice weather – daily highs in the mid to upper 80s with overnight lows in the 50s.

Dumble Mania

Donna has been on a mission lately. She’s intent on making our park model house here in Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort our home. By that I mean she’s continuing to transform the look and feel of the place. She started last week by cleaning out the shed and patio areas and getting rid of a lot of unwanted and unneeded stuff.

Then she ordered patio furniture for the side deck along our entrance and carport. She picked up potted plants to decorate the patio. We moved the big gas grill from the back of the carport to the side deck to make it easier to access. The patio furniture she bought required “some assembly.” She intended to do this herself, but ran into issues from the get-go. I pitched in and saw why she was having trouble. First of all, the instructions were very poor – Chinese translations that were nonsense. Then there were the tools provided – a thin spanner stamped out of sheet steel and an allen wrench.

The first thing I did was break out proper tools. Donna quickly saw the reason why I like having the proper, quality tool for the job. We got it done in less than an hour.

Donna enjoying her morning coffee on the new patio rocker

Meanwhile, I’ve been obsessed with building my Dumble-style guitar amplifier. Dumble amplifiers have an interesting history, but first let me tell you about a guy named Ken Fischer.

Ken Fischer learned electronics while he was in the navy. Later, he started a business repairing televisions and radios. He became an engineer with Ampeg – a company that built amplifiers for musical instruments and public address systems. He left Ampeg in 1967 when the company was sold to Magnavox – he wasn’t interested in the corporate culture.

He made a good living repairing and modifying Marshall amplifiers in his basement. Around 1982, he built his own amplifier design that he housed in a polished wood cabinet and called it Trainwreck. He didn’t put serial numbers on his amps – he stamped the chassis of each one he built with a woman’s name. His first one was named Ginger and the last he built was Kaylene. He made approximately 300 amps and they were each voiced for the individual that ordered it – no two were exactly the same.

He built amps for Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits), Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top) Eddie Van Halen, Brad Paisley, Glen Kuykendall, Matt O’Ree and many other famous performers. He had a long history of health issues – something called chronic fatique immune dysfunction – and he passed away in 2006. His amps are highly sought after and fetch prices in excess of $30,000 today. They are also copied (cloned) by a number of manufacturers such as Dr Z, Komet and others. The Ken Fischer design is notable for its touch sensitivity – you basically set up the amp controls how you like and then forget it. Just by varying your pick attack and the volume knob of the guitar, you can get anything from crystal clear, clean guitar sounds to Eddie Van Halen distortion. This circuit is popular among home-built amplifier hobbyists. I built one in 2012.

Then there’s Howard Alexander Dumble. He’s about as eccentric as they come, but no doubt he’s also a genius. When he was in high school, he built transistor radios that he sold to classmates. Before he was 21 years old, in the early 1960s, he was contracted by Mosrite to build amplifiers for the popular instrumental band, The Ventures. Mosrite wanted to create an amplifier building company with him, but he wasn’t a corporate type and declined the offer.

He was making a good living repairing and modifying Fender amplifiers in the 1960s. Somewhere along the way – I think it was in the 1970s – he began making his own amp designs. He wasn’t interested in mass production, he made each amp to order much like Ken Fischer’s Trainwrecks. But, he was unusual in that he required an application from prospective buyers and he auditioned the buyer to decide if he could make an amp for that player – he needed to know how proficient the player was and what the style of playing was. He probably turned down as many applications as he accepted – at least that’s the folklore.

He also required each customer to sign a contract that included secrecy clauses – they weren’t allowed to let anyone open up the amp for service or to see his circuits. After getting burned and having some of his design copied, he started gooping his amps. He covers the circuit board in epoxy or RTV silicone after he builds it so no one could see what he actually used to make it.

He was known as Howard in the early days, but later insisted on being called Alexander or Alex. On the guitar forums, he’s called Mr. Dumble or his initials, HAD are used. He made a few different variations but his most popular was called OverDrive Special (ODS). A few of these were reverse engineered – most notably numbers 104, 124 and 183. They are another amplifier that’s popular among the home-built crowd, but they are very challenging to build. Both the Trainwreck and Dumble amps require much attention to detail and lead dress (routing of the wiring) is crucial or you’ll end up with a humming, squealing mess.

Many top performers used Dumble amps – Eric Clapton, Larry Carlton, John Mayer, Robben Ford, Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Bonamassa, Eric Johnson, Keith Urban and many, many more. His amps are the priciest on the planet. In the 1980s, he was selling them for $4,000-$6,000. But on the used market, people paid more than $20,000 for one. He raised his price accordingly. Right now, a used Dumble previously owned by Joe Bonamassa is listed for sale at $139,999!

I’m currently building a kit patterned after ODS #124. This kit came from Trinity Amps in Toronto, Canada. Stephen Cohrs, owner of Trinity amps, initially called it his OverDrive Special (ODS) kit. But, Andy Fuchs of Fuchs Audio had trademarked this name and made Trinity cease and desist using it. I find that interesting. Andy Fuchs copied Howard Alexander Dumble’s design, used the name Dumble had used for decades, but never trademarked, and now Andy Fuchs owns and controls the name. Sheesh. Stephen Cohrs had to change the name of his amp to Overdrive Special Design (OSD).

The Trinity OSD is one of the most affordable Dumble designs on the market – you can buy it built by Trinity for about $2,300. Most of the other manufacturers like Fuchs offer them for $3,000-$4,000. Building it yourself will run about $1,100.

This build has been my latest obsession – I intially told myself to limit my time to about two hours per day on this kit to stay fresh and sharp. That didn’t work. I spend hours each day laying it out, checking and rechecking against the schematic and layout guides and then soldering and rechecking everything again. I’ve caught a few errors, but it’s mostly gone well. One of the hardest parts was positioning and soldering 11 jumper wires under the eyelet board. The layout shows the jumper wires in a ghost view from the top side of the board. There are dozens of eyelet holes in the board so when you flip it over to position the wires, it’s a reverse image of the layout view. I wired it, checked it and rewired it a few times before I was satisfied and hot glued the wires in position. Here’s a pictorial review of the work so far.

Chassis with tube sockets and rear hardware installed

Chassis with front controls (potentiometers) and switches installed

Some of wiring needs to be twisted or braided. Wires, particulary those carrying alternating current (AC) need to cross each other at 90 degree angles to prevent induction. The output transformer has five wires on one side and four on the other that needed to be braided. I found braiding five was easier than four, but they both came out fine.

Output transformer with five wire braid on one side

Ground bus installed and wired, components installed on tube sockets

My home made amp chassis stand and work station

Power transformer (PT) and output transformers (OT) installed on other side of the chassis and wiring in place – the yellow twisted wires are 5-volt AC for the relay board which I built before installing in the chassis

Power transformer and output transformer

Populating the main eyelet board and installing flying leads for controls and tube sockets

That, in a nutshell represents five days of work.

No post is complete without a food picture. Donna is the head chef around here, but I do my share with the Traeger Smoker/Grill and I also make an incomparable Japanese fried rice. My other specialty is the breakfast omelette. My technique is a little unusual in that I flip the egg like a flapjack. I pour the whipped eggs and milk into a non-stick skillet with melted butter. Once the egg starts to solidify, I give the skillet a flick of the wrist and voila! The egg flips and I remove it from the heat and add the filling. Perfection if I say so myself.

Breakfast omelette with Italian seasoned broccoli, bacon and sharp cheddar cheese filling

Donna made a couple of simple, delicious comfort favorites this week. First up, Baja blackened fish tacos.

Last night she made white chicken chili – a favorite and just right for Sunday Night Football with bottle of Four Peaks Kiltlifter ale.

White chicken chili – pictured without the crumbled corn chip topping

This morning, we’re having our house power washed. They power wash the siding, remove the sunscreens for cleaning and wash the windows, then finish up by washing the decks and carport.

The last couple of days have been on the warm side with highs of 91-92 degrees. The swamp cooler is keeping things comfortable though. Looking ahead, we should see highs around 80 degrees with a couple of warmer days maybe on Thursday and Friday.

Donna will be flying to Florida on Thursday to visit her sister Linda in Sarasota. They will drive to Miami on the weekend for her niece’s wedding celebration – she was actually married last year but the planned wedding couldn’t be carried out due to COVID lockdowns. I’ll be a bachelor from Thursday to Wednesday.

Canada Post Comes Through

In addition to getting back on the pickleball courts, we’ve tackled a few projects here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. I agreed to take on pickleball coaching sessions again this year, so I need to knock some rust off my game. I played last Friday and again Monday and yesterday. Donna’s been a regular at the tennis courts but she came out for pickleball yesterday. I played two games against her and her team prevailed both times.

Donna ordered some solar powered LED light strings and proceeded to hang one set across the front of our car port.

She strung up another set with smaller LEDs on the railing of our rear deck.

I finally put up the end-fed horizontal antenna for my ham radio. This antenna works on 10, 20 and 40-meter bands with a MFJ 939 antenna tuner. It took a couple of attempts to get it mounted right – I underestimated the weight of the coil trap and balun – or I overestimated the strength of the fiberglass electric fence posts I used to mount it. It sagged terribly. Another trip to Tractor Supply and I was able to reinforce the mounting posts. All is good now.

Feed line and balun on my end-fed half wave horizontal antenna

I also put the wheels back on Midget-San and made it road-worthy. I turned the key to the “on” position and allowed the electric fuel pump to run for about 30 seconds. Then I pulled the choke knob and hit the starter. It fired right up! I warmed it up and was thankful that I had put Stabil fuel stabilizer in before I filled the fuel tank for storage. When I did that, the drive back from the gas station was enough to run stabilized fuel throughout the fuel system and carburetor bowl. I took a test drive – ran it long enough to get all of the fluids up to temperature and put some fuel through the carburetor. It ran like a champ!

Yesterday, Donna tackled a tough project. She cleaned and organized our shed which serves as our laundry room, tool storage and my ham shack! I should have been out there helping her, but I had a major distraction.

I mentioned the guitar amplifier kit I ordered. It was coming from Canada and I had some trepidation after reading a few online horror stories regarding Canada Post. I didn’t need to worry. They estimated an arrival date of October 14th and turned the package over to USPS on Saturday, October 9th. Yesterday, I received notification that it was delivered to the Viewpoint post office!

We can only pick up packages here at Viewpoint between 11am and 1 pm. It was 12:30 pm when I saw the notification. I took Donna’s bicycle and high-tailed it to the post office. When I was given the package, I realized I made a mistake. It was rather large and weighed about 25 pounds. As I held it under my right arm and tried to mount the bike, I must have been a sight to see. There were a few people at the parcel pick-up window and they all stopped what they doing to watch me.

I managed to get on the bike without falling or dropping the package – barely. Once I got rolling I was okay – I balanced the package against my right thigh. Luckily I didn’t have to pedal very hard to get back home. As I reached the end of the 1600 row and approached our driveway, I now had another issue. I had to stop and make sure I got my left foot down without dropping the box or falling to the right – the 25-pound box had me seriously off balance.

I called out to Donna – she was in the shed. I managed to get my left foot down and she relieved me of the package. Job done! I started unboxing the kit right away.

The cabinet work is outstanding – I didn’t expect anything less from Trinity Amps.

Inside the cabinet, I found the 120-page builder’s guide and a bags of components and hardware. This is going to be a challenge to build. As you can tell by the number of control openings on the front and back of the cabinet, this is a complicated circuit. It will be the most complicated amp I’ve attempted.

Component packages inside of the chassis

The first task was an inventory of all of the parts and comparing it to the bill of materials list. This is more tedious and time consuming than you can imagine. There are many different types and values of resistors and capacitors needed to build an audio amplifier.

I don’t trust my eye to read the color stripes on resistors to determine the values – the colors seem a bit off at times. I measure each resistor with a multimeter and group them together by type and value and tape them to a sheet of cardboard with the value written next to them. Then I do the same with the capacitors – I measure each one with an ESR meter, group them and tape them to the board.

When I start building, I’ll verify the value of each component before I solder it in place. The value and type of resistor coupled with a capacitor is how an amplifier is “voiced.” These components create filter circuits that attenuate certain frequencies while allowing the desired boosted frequencies to pass. This is how the tone of amplified sound is created.

The amplifier I’m going to build is based on a Dumble Overdrive Special circuit. I think it’ll be a great companion amp to the Ken Fischer Trainwreck type amp I built nine years ago. The stories behind these amps and their creators is interesting and I’ll write a post about them soon.

Donna cooked up a favorite dish last week. It’s chicken Lombardy and she served it with brown rice and asparagus.

The weather has been favorable. On Monday, we had gusty winds in the afternoon and evening as a cold front moved in. Yesterday’s high was only 71 degrees. We expect to have highs in the mid-70s today and tomorrow before we warm back up into the mid-to-upper 80s by the weekend.

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

When I wrote my last post, Donna was away visiting her parents in Vermont. I was a bachelor for eight days. I kept myself occupied for most of the time assembling and setting up my new guitar. I mentioned that the Fender-type longer-scale length was an adjustment for me after playing nothing but Gibson guitars with the shorter scale length. A guy on a guitar forum advised me to play the new guitar exclusively for a month or so until it felt “normal,” then I could pick up a Gibson again and be comfortable with either one. If I switched back and forth from the start, the Fender-style neck would never feel right.

That’s what I’ve been doing – playing it daily. It sounds so good and plays really nice. I made a few tweaks to the set-up and it’s a really fine instrument. While Donna was away, I sold my Egnater amp and 112 cabinet. I ordered a new 112 from Avatar in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and got it last week. It’s loaded with a Celestion 60-watt Vintage 30 12″ speaker. It has greater power handling capability than the Egnater cabinet and sounds really good. Now I’m waiting for delivery of another amplifier kit – it’s coming from Canada and I’ve heard nothing good lately about shipments via Canada Post. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

While Donna was away, I didn’t exactly eat like a king. It’s hard to prepare a good meal for one person. She left a couple of leftover dishes for me and I filled in with pre-made dishes like pot pies or enchilada plates. With Donna back, that’s changed for the better. Last week, I made a batch of Japanese fried rice and Donna grilled wild Argentine shrimp – a great combination.

Japanese fried rice and wild Argentine shrimp

She followed that up with pollo in potachio – Italian braised chicken with tomatoes, rosemary and garlic – the next night.

Pollo in potachio served over mashed potatoes with green beans

A couple of days ago, Donna put a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker along with a sweet and savory sauce.

Slow cooked sweet and savory pork tenderloin with brown rice and broccoli

Yesterday was my birthday and Donna had a theme for my present. She had me unwrap three presents in a certain order. With a nod to George Thorogood, I opened one bourbon…

One Scotch…

The Glenlivet Scotch finished in Carribean rum barrels

And one beer.

She also gave a me a cookbook called The Japanese Grill.

We celebrated with a sushi dinner at Zushi on McDowell across from Red, White and Brew. Sixty-five trips around the sun – where has all the time gone?

We’ve had warmer weather – it hit 97 on Sunday. We went over to Mike and Jodi Hall’s place to watch the NFL Cardinals put a spanking on the LA Rams. Mike and I enjoyed a cigar on their back patio with a swamp cooler and outdoor TV. It was the first cigar I’ve had in over three weeks. It’s been so hot outside that a cigar wasn’t appealing to me.

It really cooled down on Tuesday as thundershowers roared in. The temperature only hit 83 degrees and the rain poured down. The moisture and change in the temperture is doing the golf course some good. They’ve overseeded the grass and it’s really responded. You might recall the photos I posted of the dormant grass a few weeks ago. The course will open for the winter season soon.

The forecast calls for upper 80s today and tomorrow, but 90 degrees doesn’t appear in the long-range forecast. If the weather guessers have it right, we’ll be in the upper 70s to low 80s for the foreseeable future.

Flying The Koop

…from real estate to wheel estate and back again

A Quick Trip and A Shot

Typhoon Karen

Queen Creek, Olives and Pork

Full Plates

Snowy Rooftop

Cool Foam Roof

Home Alone – Building an Amp

Dumble Mania

Canada Post Comes Through

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

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