Sunrise in Bellevue

This past week we experienced the autumnal equinox of 2009. I enjoyed watching it so much that I decided to bring my camera the next day. Of course, since I had my camera the clouds obscured the sunrise. So I took time-lapse video of the clouds and waited until the next day to capture the sunrise.

The sunrise video is fairly crude, but not bad considering the camera was duct-taped to the window. The light level changes dramatically so my amateur efforts at adjusting for it are obvious.

Grape Harvest

Today, Sep 20, I picked the rest of our grapes. None of them were green, or even red. The inside of the grape is green and the skin is dark purple. They taste good when eaten fresh, but the skins are bitter and the pulp is chewy. And there are lots of big seeds in them. So we're making grape jelly out of them this year.

Lots of the grapes had already fallen off the vine to the ground. Some of them shriveled up and looked like dehydrade raisins on the vine. So this is a late harvest. I want to remember that for next year and be ready to pick them sooner.

The attached photo shows my picking setup. Each bowl like this was about 64 ounces, or one batch of jelly. I picked eight batches today and one last week, so our total harvest was 36 pounds! I read the other day that 2009 has been an exceptional year for grapes, and our vine seemed to be happy too.

I think these are Concord grapes, but I'm not absolutely certain.

Lief's New Bike

Last Sunday Lief and I went for a five hour bike ride, to break in his new bike, in endurance mode. I brought my camera so we could get some photos of his new bike, and play around with motion photography...the kind where the subject is in motion. We ended up with some rejects due to improper camera settings. Then Lief surprised me by picking out one reject that has an artistic appeal.

So here is Lief on his new bike, and me following on a cloud.

SharkBite Plumbing

Monya saw an episode of "This Old House" where they described a new type of plumbing connection. It's called "SharkBite" and it works sort of like the Chinese finger trap toy. You simply slide a pipe into the fitting and it holds. No clamps, no solder, no sweat! It works with copper, or Pex, or even PVC (not that I recommend PVC). Best of all, if you make a mistake, there's a little plastic ring you can use to disconnect it, so you can reconnect it again later. No parts are consumed in the disconnect/reconnect.

It took me a whole day to remove the iron, PVC, and Pex combination shown in the first photo. Most of that time was extracting the iron pipe from the wall. Then it took four hours of measuring and fitting to assemble the copper/SharkBite combination in the wall, and about 30 minutes to measure, cut, and assemble the Pex/SharkBite combination shown in the second photo.

SharkBite fittings are a little expensive, but they don't leak, and they snap together with a click, saving a ton of time. This assembly job would have taken me three days and a call for help from a sweat-joint expert (Dad) if I did it the old way.

The ony drawback is that SharkBite fittings do not hold the pipe rigid. So our bathtub and shower fixtures wobble. I left the wall open on the back side so I can still do something about that if I can think of how.

Bowl of Tomatoes

The other day I picked a second (or third?) batch of small but delicious tomatoes from Monya's tomato patch. It is a wonder that we got any tomatoes at all since the only thing anybody did with them was apply water. There was no pruning, no tying up, and no pest removal. We didn't apply any bug repellent or fertilizer of any kind, so I guess these are organic tomatoes. I can only credit the excellent location, in full sunshine, against a southwest facing wall.