Altivo Overo's Blog, page 2

Meet Ares

As I promised (too many days ago but things have been unusually busy here) here is our new doggo. His name (by my decree) is now Ares. The shelter folks had him as "Aries" like the zodiac sign for the ram. But he's a sheepdog, not a sheep. And the first night after he came home with us, he kept growling at and making threatening moves toward his own reflection in the bedroom mirror, so I rechristened him as "Ares" the Athenian god of war. (Who wasn't very warlike, actually, just bristly. He seems mostly to have spent his time posing nude for sculptors while holding a sword or a spear.) Anyway, both names sound the same, so Ares has had no issue with the change.

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As you can see, he has made himself quite at home here. The shelter identified his family origins as Great Pyrenees and Aussie Shepherd. They don't do DNA confirmation of that, but certainly his coloration and coat type fits the Pyrenees. And someone inappropriately docked his tail, leaving him only about six muscular inches of it. Fortunately that's enough to reach where the beginning of the "flag" of longer fur was, and that long fur is black for contrast like on his face and ears. When he wags, it looks like the tail of a very young horse in fact. And after a couple of days when he got used to our routine and his new home, he started wagging it a lot. He also promptly claimed a large and luxurious dog bed pillow I had bought for our still much missed Laddie. Laddie never used that bed much, because he preferred to share ours. About a week ago, Ares also claimed the plastic kennel crate that belonged to my long-gone bearded collie, Simon. It has been sitting in our bedroom with a pile of plush toys on top of it. The door was open enough so he could push it aside and he just walked right in and said "Mine now." So he has a private hideout.

Overall we are quite pleased with him. He has firmly bonded with husband Gary, but he does pay attention to me and will do what I tell him to do when necessary. He particularly likes me when I'm in the kitchen preparing food, but I guess that doesn't mean very much. His ribs were quite obvious and prominent three weeks ago, but he's only a year old and we're working on putting more weight on him. At 55 pounds, he can afford to gain a bit. Male Pyrenees often reach 100 lbs. or more, but I don't think he'll get that much larger. I'd like to see him at about 75 lbs. though.

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Sad stuff

Now that I can talk about it without tearing up.

About three weeks ago we said a permanent goodbye to our dog, Laddie. We could only estimate his age, since we got him from a shelter. They guessed he was five then, which would make him eleven or twelve now. Picked up as a stray in Ohio, along a country road, no tag or chip. Click image to enlarge...


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He was a great dog and we both became very attached to him, as did he to us. When the day came that he no longer wanted to eat, though, we knew things had gone bad. Our vet found on ultrasound that he had tumors in his spleen and liver. He was already losing control of his hind legs at times, and we had seen that before and knew it wouldn't be better. It was decided to spare him the discomfort and embarrassment that would have followed for a while until he starved or suffered an internal rupture.

It was too soon. I had hoped he would be with us longer, but that wasn't to be. We moped around gloomily for nearly two weeks before admitting that we just had to adopt another dog. That story is for the next entry.

If there really is a Rainbow Bridge, as I told the vet, Gary and I will be smothered in dogs when we get there. The two of us together have had nine of them over the last 40 years. I had three of my own before that. I can still feel Laddie's soft fur when I think of him.

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Of cats and chipmunks

We have a lot of chipmunks and squirrels. In general, I don't mind that, but at times they are downright destructive. The squirrels want to bury stuff in my container gardens, and the chipmunks want to dig them up. The chippies also tunnel under our wooden walks and decks, and chew up the surface wood even though it is treated with whatever lumber suppliers use now to prevent rot. This spring there have been so many tunnels and entrances that I begin to wonder if the whole house could collapse into one giant sinkhole.

Anyway, we have two barn cats left. Both of them are eager chipmunk hunters, and when the chipmunks get too fat and slow from eating seeds dropped from the bird feeders, they even catch one now and then. This morning when we went out to feed horses, The cats were feasting on a lerge, very much dead chipmunk. I let it go, but apparently Gary took it away a bit later.

I went out an hour later to turn Asher and Archie out after they'd finished their morning food, and heard a strange, cat-like "mrrph, mumph" kind of whining. On inspection, there was Emma, the smaller of the two cats, with another large chipmunk in her mouth. She was carrying it around and calling for her pal Delta, who is much larger and usually the more successful hunter. He was nowhere to be seen. I took a couple of steps toward her, and she dropped the rodent and backed up. Unfortunately for the chipmunk, though, he was seriously broken in some way (probably his back) and he could only twitch and jerk. Emma grabbed him again and ran off. I left it to her to settle her affairs.

Had the critter been able to run away, I'd have let him go. Cats can be cruel, I know, but we do need some reduction in the population this year and that's nature's way of taking care of it I think.

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Nine months and seven days later

Order placed August 25, 2021. Yesterday I (finally) took delivery on my little truck.

2022 Maverick Portrait

2022 Maverick Profile

We are pretty pleased with it. (Especially since I got back over 80% of what I paid for the temporary wheels last September when I traded that car in.) The hybrid is great. For the trip home from the dealership (~12 miles) plus a trip into Marengo to the insurance agent to change my insurance over (~8 miles round trip,) the trip meter shows it got 38.4 miles per gallon and ran about a third of that time on the electric motor alone. I drive like a grandma, which probably helps. But at the gas prices we've had lately, this is really good news. Also, despite some reviewers who complained it was noisy, we found it was very smooth and quiet. So quiet that neither of us could tell when it switched between electric and ICE power, which it must have done several times. No, "it doesn't sound like a truck." And despite that appearing in several reviews, I'm quite delighted with that. Easy to drive, very much like my old Escape carryall. Steering seemed a bit stiff, but after I got the steering wheel position and seat adjusted a bit, that feeling went away.

The ride is a bit stiffer than our recent passenger cars have been, but it IS a truck after all. I have driven a pick-up truck only once before this, for a short round trip when friends gave us some gates they no longer needed to use on our pasture fences. Gilbert lent us his truck for that, and since it had a manual transmission I was the driver. Gary F. doesn't like dealing with a clutch and shifter, and I'm used to it.

There are a lot of features to learn, and kinks to get used to. I'm only 100 pages into the owner's manual of 560 pages length, so it'll take a while. But I've got the basics down, and sales rep Anthony helped me get the FordPass app on my phone linked to the car's internals. It uses two different bluetooth linkages. Another thing to explore and learn.

Two silly but best things so far: the little "cubby hole" in the dash next to the 8 inch "infotainment" touch screen is just the right size for the little beany baby dog that looks like my old and still missed pet, Simon; and the back-up alarm which is required on all trucks now is just plain cute (sounds like one of those wind-up monkey toys that bang two tiny cymbals together over and over.)

Was it worth the excessively long wait? In my case, yes, but I'm sure glad it's over.

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Good news, finally

Today Ford informed me (at 7 pm) that my 2022 Maverick was built today and is about to undergo final inspection and testing. After that it gets shipped by rail from Hermosillo Mexico to my Ford dealer here in Illinois. Estimate on that is three to four weeks time. All in all, that adds up to almost exactly TEN months from a confirmed order to actual delivery of the vehicle.

I looked up the estimated trade-in value of my 2016 Fusion and was very surprised at how high it is. There has been a lot of talk in the news about used car prices skyrocketing in the recent months, and this might be proof. I paid $13K for the Fusion, used, last September. Granted I've not put a lot of miles on it in the interim, but even so, the estimated trade-in supplied by Ford's website is in the range of $9K to $11K. The high end of that is about half the total cost of the new truck.

Anyway, the waiting should be just about over with. Talk is that US automakers are pushing to go to ALL custom orders like that from buyers, rather than letting dealers order "stock" to display and sell from their lots. I suspect with wait times like this, that just isn't going to fly very well with either the customers or the dealers.

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Of Automobiles and Trucks

About six months ago, I bought a used Ford Fusion to fill the gap until the Maverick truck I ordered actually arrives. It was a necessary decision, since my 2007 Escape was crumbling to rust before my eyes and probably unsafe to drive any more. I chose the least expensive used car on the dealer's lot, figuring I'd only have it for a few months and could trade it in when the Maverick arrived.

The Fusion has been all right. It has a lot of features I never use, but that doesn't matter. It gets decent gas mileage, starts instantly even in sub-zero weather, rides smooth and quiet.

However, it's not a car for me. I'm six feet tall, and it is so low to the ground and has so little head room that I still bang my head getting in and out of it at least one out of three times. I've figured out how to do it, but it's an awkward move and difficult to judge. I noticed this problem immediately, but chose to overlook it. I figured I would get used to it. I haven't.

The other issue is the automatic transmission. Every car I've ever owned before had a manual transmission. Not because of any driving preference of my own, but because I knew how to drive one and it was cheaper and got slightly better fuel economy given my conservative approach to speed. I figured I'd better get used to the automatic, since the Maverick is a hybrid and only comes with an automatic trans. In fact, the Maverick doesn't even have a shift lever, just a rotary knob that gives an electronic signal to the power train.

Fortunately, I haven't had too much trouble adapting to the automatic. The Fusion in fact has a simulated manual gear shifting system, but I haven't even tried that. I stopped reaching for the nonexistent clutch pedal pretty quickly. It took me longer to repress the urge to downshift when stopping for a traffic light or stop sign. However, that is pretty much gone too. I had avoided driving my husband's Subaru Outback because it has an automatic transmission, but now I feel comfortable doing that and in fact did so a couple of times when he asked me to. (And no, I did not feel like imitating Crocodile Dundee, though the thought did cross my mind. For those who don't know, he did Subaru Outback commercials a few years back.)

Yesterday we took the Subaru in for regular maintenance and when we pulled into the Ford dealer for that, there was a new 2022 Maverick sitting right by the entrance to the lot. Same color as I have ordered, even. Believe it or not, this was the first actual 2022 Mav that we have seen "in the flesh" as it were. The "velocity blue" color is brilliant in the sunlight. Beyond admiring the outside, though, there were few comparisons we could make. The specimen in question was not a hybrid, and was the Lariat trim level (top of the line with all the luxury additions) where mine will be a hybrid XL which is the Plain Jane version. Still, it was nice to find proof that Mavericks really are being produced and do exist in the real world and not just on paper.

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Another nerdy topic: Sewing

I started sewing clothing when I was about ten years old. Yes, over 60 years ago. My mom was always sewing stuff: clothes for us kids, or for herself, or household stuff like curtains and bedspreads. The machine fascinated me, and I asked her if I could learn. By then she was used to my tendency to violate 1950s gender role boundaries, and she just said "OK!" and got me started. By the time I was in high school, I was wearing stuff I had sewn for myself fairly often. Sixties fashion being what it was (Remember paisleys and Carnaby Street and all that? Well, some of you probably don't.) Mom and I got pretty extravagant at times and no one made much comment. The girls in my classes were impressed. The boys, not so much. But I didn't care anyway.

For much of my life I have taken this for granted. Fabric stores were in every mall or plaza, and they had designer patterns for all kinds of men's wear as well as elaborate costumes. Fabric was fairly inexpensive if you stayed away from wool suiting or silks and velvets. I sewed my way through college too, and was amused that the women's dorms had sewing rooms equipped with cutting tables and shared sewing machines. Men's, of course, did not. But the women's managers accepted my ID and let me use their sewing machine, so that was fine. When I moved out of the dorm and had my own apartment it wasn't long until I went and bought an old used machine of my own for all of $20. The lady running the sewing machine store where I bought it was a bit surprised but she encouraged me, offered advice, and ordered in some additional tools and accessories I wanted. I still have that old straight stitcher, but it's out in the barn loft now and may have turned into a lump of rust. My current machine is a White portable given to me by an artist friend who used it for quilting and stage costumes.

After we bought our first house together in Chicago, my husband got interested in sewing too. He had never done it, but his mother and grandmother did so he was familiar with the process. I got him started and he took off. Next thing I knew, he had bought a new Brother machine, and a serger as well. He started sewing stuff for me and gifts for his mom and nephews. Amazing. We added new patterns to the collection I already had, and now there must be a couple hundred of them.

However, in the last decade or so, I have noticed a major decline in the availability of sewing fabrics and supplies. It's really weird. I know, we are in the midst of a generation where not even the women are willing to do any cooking, and apparently sewing is considered "quaint." But oddly enough, there are still sewing machines for sale in every Walmart and most other big box stores. I'm not sure who is buying them or what they are used for. Fabric stores have literally disappeared. One national chain, Joann, still sells some fabric, but nothing like the selection and variety we used to have available. Most of what they stock seems focused on children's wear and wedding dresses. Ask them about shirting fabrics or Oxford cloth and you get blank looks. They know more about scrapbooking and jewelry making than they do about sewing. Other once widespread names like Minnesota Fabrics or Hancock Fabrics have completely disappeared.

The competitive market in sewing patterns, once dominated by two brands in the US but pursued by half a dozen other companies, has nearly collapsed. I went to look at men's designs at a Joann store last year and was horrified to find that they had none at all. The men's section in the pattern catalogs has been eliminated. The craft is not extinct, of course. Ebay and Etsy have lots of sellers dealing in old stock sewing patterns, both new and used. The prices asked are sometimes astounding, as high as $30 or more for one pattern. The store itself was dominated by polar fleece, a peculiar fabric that can be used for some things, like blankets or scarves, without any sewing or hemming, but can also be sewn into loose, bulky garments using a zig-zag machine or serger. Actual woven or knit fabrics are offered, but in a far smaller selection than what was available even ten years ago, and most of it in bright cartoon prints suitable for children to wear and that's it.

Clothing, I guess, is something you buy at the big box, made in Pakistan or Indonesia by cheap labor and never repaired or altered. If it frays or gets a tear, you just throw it away.

More and more, I fear, Western societies are becoming like the Eloi in H. G. Wells' classic The Time Machine The futuristic society made up of people who could not care for themselves at all and depended entirely upon work done by the Morlocks for their existence.

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Amateur Radio call sign history

Begin nerdy topic, skip if uninterested. :D

While my bread dough is rising this morning, I took time to pursue a little research I have been meaning to do for quite a while. I wanted to know who, if anyone, had held my ham radio call sign before I grabbed it in 2012.

A little history for that: I first became interested in amateur radio at about age 12, introduced by my Uncle Wes whose station was K8HFM. Getting an actual license was intimidating, though. You had to pass a test to prove you could understand Morse code at least at a slow speed, plus answer a bunch of technical and regulatory questions. Even the easiest beginner license, the Novice level at that time, put me off for years. It wasn't until 1983 (at the advanced age of 33) that I finally made an appointment and took the test. It wasn't really all that difficult, and I passed. When my license arrived in the mail several weeks later, I had been assigned the station call KA9NZI. In the interim, I had actually built a small transceiver from a HeathKit prepackaged set of parts, and I quickly strung up a kinky wire antenna from the picture moldings in my Chicago apartment. Miraculously, it all worked and I managed enough shaky Morse to make an actual contact.

I'll spare you the years of history that followed, other than to say I got better at Morse, and studied enough to pass the next exam level for a General class license in about 1986 or thereabouts. There was a time (back in the 1950s and 60s) when Novice class licenses were assigned call letters beginning with "WN" and when upgrading to General, they were allowed to drop out the "N" but by the 80s, that was no longer in effect. First time licensees received WA call signs then for General class, or KA call signs for Novice. The Technician class (with access only to VHF or higher frequencies) was in the middle there and I'm not sure what they were getting in the 80s. Anyway, if you had started as a Novice with a KA sign, you could just keep it and use it with the additional privileges of the General class; or you could let the FCC give you a completely unrelated WA (or WB after they ran out of WA call signs.) This created some chaos and occasional accusations on the air from old timers with 5 character W or K call signs, who seemed to think if you used a KA call you should not be on the General class frequency bands. Some were even suspicious of WA or WB call signs, and I remember hearing one codger refer to "WB" as meaning "Wet Bottom." This eventually helped to prompt the FCC to change its rules again in several respects.

The end result was both a lot of confusion and a complete breakdown of the class distinctions once made by call sign prefix. The prefix N came into use around then. The AA through AL prefixes, which along with N had been "owned" by the US but not used, also appeared on the air, usually held by Advanced class licensees. Then the exam and privilege structures were revised, and the Novice and Advanced licenses were dropped. Those who held them could still use them within the privileges originally granted, but no new exams or licenses for those levels were issued. The original call signs in the forms W#xxx or K#xxx had almost all been used up by then. While it was once FCC practice to reassign calls after the associated license expired or was surrendered, the record keeping was considered too costly and that practice was dropped.

Another result was that all new call signs were six characters long, Wx#xxx or Kx#xxx. This was pretty unpopular because the longer call sign increases the likelihood of an error in transcribing Morse code, and takes longer to send. (Only a fraction of a second more, but still this was made a big issue.) Ultimately, the FCC was convinced to allow any ham holding a General class license or higher to request any valid call sign that was not currently in use. The cost of record keeping was reimbursed as an administrative fee paid by the applicant.

All this leads up to my indecisiveness that lasted 20 years, over whether I should drop the "A" out of my own call to make it K9NZI. I was pretty sure I had once checked and found that W9NZI and K9NZI were already assigned and active anyway. It wasn't until I was renewing my automobile license plate in 2012 that I committed to changing calls, since I had the call sign on my plates as well. Wonder of wonders, K9NZI was available then and I applied for it. You could list more than one choice in order of preference, in case someone beat you to the first selection, so I added my Uncle Wes' former call K8HFM as a second choice since he was by then a "silent key" as hams refer to those who are deceased. I received K9NZI and changed my license plates to match.

For another decade, I occasionally wondered who had previously been K9NZI and what happened to them. Today I finally found a relatively easy way to research that, thanks to the Internet Archive. Some of you know of the "Wayback Machine," which archives extinct web site contents, but that is just part of the many historical functions the Internet Archive provides. And one of their services has put amateur radio call sign directories on line in a readable and viewable format. The indexing is all but non-existent, but at least you can choose a year and a call sign district, of which the US has ten, and scroll through a PDF of those call sign listings if the year is available. Every single year is not there, but most of the gaps are earlier than about 1950. So I started browsing.

W9NZI was held by the same fellow from some time in the 1950s at least until near the end of the century. He originally lived in the Chicago area but moved around quite a bit and in the end was in Dunedin, Florida (presumably retired then.) But to my surprise, I could find no trace of K9NZI until it was attached to my name in 2012. Poking around in the books from the 50s up through the 90s made it clear that call signs after K9Mxx were not ever assigned by the FCC to new licensees. Just when they would have reached that point was when they changed to start giving out WA9xxx calls instead. So apparently, in the century and more of amateur radio history in the US, I have held not just one, but two unique call signs. I think I'll keep K9NZI, thanks.

I tried once to upgrade to the top level Extra class license, but missed the required number of correct answers on the rather obtuse and extensive examination by one question and I haven't tried again. The extra privileges earned by Extra class licensing are pretty limited and just as exotic as the exam questions are. One of those is the privilege of requesting a four character call sign, but obviously the number of four character combinations, the second or third of which must be a numeral and the other three alphabetic, is pretty small. The competition is fierce when one of those becomes available for reassignment.

All this is kind of silly anyway. But I found it amusing looking through those old directories to find out who else held call signs ending in "9NZI" over the years. I've always been weird, and there's one more way in which I am unique.

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Musical chunterings

My sometimes quartet ThingamaJig has recently asked me to cover the fiddle riffs in the Old Crow version of "Wagon Wheel." My first thought was to do it on a flute, since I do not pretend to be able to play fiddle well. At least, not in public. But the styling is stuffed with fiddle artifacts, particularly the droning on a second string while playing a melody on an adjacent one. Can't duplicate that on a wind instrument unless perhaps on a harmonica.

I don't like trying to learn something by ear. I can do it, but it's a slow and painful process for me. If I can find standard notation, it becomes much faster and less bothersome. Fortunately, someone good at the process has written out those riffs and posted them on the net. Unfortunately, our lead singer prefers the key of G over Old Crow's A major. I know I can do a reasonable cover on mandolin, so that's my target. But going down a note rather than up rules out the simplicity of using a capo. Suddenly those double stops or drones become impossible in at least a few cases, as the drone note is no longer an open string and moves up to the sixth or seventh fret of that neighboring string. Even in the pinched fret space of a mandolin, my hands aren't going to reach and hold that while fingering a melody down in the first or second position.

Now I have to rework the whole thing, changing the harmonies to make them playable in G. Bummer, but at least it looks possible. This goes way beyond just improvising the way I usually do on a flute.

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Right, Ford, well done

And today (see previous post) Ford sent another e-mail message saying they are pushing back production of my truck from the week of April 25 to the next week, beginning May 2.

They only have to do this two more times to end up with a nine month delay from ordering to production, and ten months to delivery. It is pretty obvious that Ford Motor Company should hire some new market analysts and production planners.

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