Day 4.026: Ohm - aye!

It was supposed to be so easy*... drop Exile #3 at a birthday party, get a haircut, put the car through the car-wash, buy a DC adapter for the camera (ready for the next time-lapse opportunity), maybe fit in a bit of window-shopping then back in time to pick her up 90 minutes later.

A simple Saturday morning in the consumer capital of the world (I mean the USA - not this particular corner of upstate NY!)

Except it didn't quite work out that way.

The car-wash was closed. The usually-quick no-frills hair salon had a one-and-a-half-hour wait and the store I wanted to visit is not open on Saturdays. OK...

At least I could get the DC adapter. I hoped. The camera is clearly marked as taking a 6.5 V supply and the polarity is specified but since I didn't have the specification for the connector I took the camera with me and went to Radio Shack.  The very helpful attendant found a 6.5 V adapter, worked out which 'tip' I needed to fit the camera's socket. All this time he was telling me that he wasn't sure this was a good idea but couldn't tell me why except that my camera looked expensive. Finally he said he would try it to check it worked before he sold it to me. He assembled the parts he needed then he stopped and went to talk to the manager.

He came back and said that no he wouldn't sell it to me. When I asked for an explanation - all he could offer was that the 2 amps that the supply could produce might be too much current for the camera and they couldn't take responsibility for potentially damaging it and I should contact the camera manufacturer. I took a moment to think it through.

My thought process amounted to this:

I always think in chalk-board (I am over 40 remember).  I told him I would buy the adapter without trying it and take it away without any suggestion that he was taking responsibility for the reckless act of attaching it to my camera**.

So that was it.  It was time to go and pick Exile #3 up - one job out of four achieved - and that was spending money against the will of the store clerk and his manager.  Maybe the US is losing its grip on consumerism?!




* This is a reference to the opening track on Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free. If you look it up be warned that it contains a lot of profanity and a moment that makes Exile #2 and me laugh very hard because he panics that he has lost something - but it's in his pocket - a scene which has been played out by me (usually involving car keys) countless times in our marriage.

** I don't expect everyone to understand how electricity works - but maybe at least a basic understanding would be good for people who work in that store.

Oh yeah - the adapter works fine - now I just need another project.

Day 4.025: Queen of the Mountain

Could you climb higher and higher? Could you climb right over the top? Exile #4 did.

Yes, she is 'standing' in that top picture with her leg straight down into the snow!

It has been a gradual realisation that the kids have been walking along the tops of the snow banks for weeks and flattening them down and widening them (on the away-from-the-drive side) - goodness knows what they would have been like if it wasn't for that! Something to be thankful for.

And here's something else for the faithful few to be thankful for - pop pun 117 for title watchers: A happy man in the snow with Rosebud.

Day 4.024: Dig, carry, throw, ache...

It took us until after lunchtime to dig ourselves out of our driveway yesterday. We did it in three phases. Here is a time lapse of the first two. Because the banks are so high we were forced into choosing between carrying each shovel-full down a path and dumping it behind the banks or throwing it at head-height over them.

We were both aching a bit today.

Day 4.023: Storm waning

In the end, day two of the storm was a little less dramatic than had been billed - the snow quickly transitioning to ice-pellets (sleet in the local vernacular) and so adding a lot of weight to the shovelling without adding any real depth to the ground-cover.  Still it was after lunch before we finished digging ourselves out - the sleet/snow mix combined with the large snow banks made it very heavy work.

In any case, I took the opportunity to combine Lego, my camera and a laptop again to make a movie. Not a stop-motion animation this time, but a time-lapse of the storm impacting our deck, which looks like this (one of these was taken today):

Here is my set-up - the Lego was used to allow me to replace the camera accurately after replacing the batteries (must get mains adapter!).  Once again I used the PK_Tether software.  I took one frame every 3 minutes for about 39 hours:

And this is what I captured - about a foot of snow on top of ten inches of previous cover:

And here is the movie (all 27 seconds of it!):

Day 4.022: Good effort: 7/12

We had seven inches of snow today - more than half the average snowfall for February on the first day of the month.

That wouldn't be too amazing - except that there is a second - larger - storm coming in tonight and tomorrow. It's a week late - but weren't we just talking about this?

I tried to capture just how much snow is in the banks by the side of the driveway but it was beyond me - maybe if you squint at the those pictures you will see that the ridges are six feet wide and up to five feet tall - and that's without tomorrow's snow. Where are we going to put it?