Category: Feel Good Stuff

Where does the time go?

By Joe Berk

Wow, it’s March already.  It seems like just a couple of days ago it was February.  Seriously, though, the years are flying by.  I had a bunch of things I wanted to mention, so this blog may meander a bit.  Bear with me.

Baja John on the road to San Felipe back in 2005.

I got a note from Baja John yesterday.  He’s down in San Felipe, which is not that big a stretch for him as he leaves down in Baja now.  San Felipe celebrated their 100th anniversary this weekend and John wrote to tell me about it.   Baja John, good buddy Marty, and I rode down there for San Felipe’s 80th anniversary, and if your Ph.D is in math, you know that means our ride was 20 years ago this past weekend.  Those 20 years sure went by in a blur.  It feels like that ride was maybe a couple of months ago.

John and yours truly two decades ago. I rode a Harley in those days. John rode a Virago. The BMW belonged to our friend Marty.

Man, I miss those Baja trips.

Speaking of time, I somehow made the Ball Watch email list.  Their watches have a unique way of making the hands glow in the dark, which is kind of cool.  I usually don’t find their style appealing, but Ball introduced a watch they call the Trainmaster a couple of years ago, and that one is beautiful.  But at $2995 it’s not appealing enough (at least to me).  I don’t need another watch.  It sure is elegant, though.

The Ball Trainmaster. I would love to own one of these. It’s a GMT, too, one of my favorite watch types.

You may recall that several months ago we explained the origins of the expression, “Balls out.”  That one means running flat out, and it is nontesticular in nature (it refers instead to a mechanical governor’s centrifugal balls being fully extended).  It doesn’t have anything to do with Ball watches, either.  But another expression, “on the Ball,” does.  The official watch for railroads back in the 1800s was a Ball pocket watch (the same company that now makes the watch you see above), and if a train was running on schedule, it was said to be “on the Ball.”

Two Old Timers for $26 at Walmart! I already accidentally cut myself with the big one.

The pocketknife thing is in full swing.  I thought I had just a few laying around in various spots in the house, so I decided to gather them up and put them all in one spot.  I was a little bit embarrassed when I finished.  I don’t need any more pocketknives.  But that may not stop me.  I have one more inbound, and I’ll probably stop after that.  Or not.  We’ll see.

More good stuff:  I’ve had an old Savage 99 lever gun (chambered in 250 Savage) stashed away and neglected for several decades.  Well, I finally dug it out a couple of months ago, and the neglect was obvious.  It was rusty when I got it, but I let it get worse.  Most of the rust is now off and it looks good.  I bought some new 250-3000 brass cases and a set of Lee dies.  I’m surprised I took this long to get around to the Savage, and I’m even more surprised at just how nice a cartridge the .250 Savage is.

A .250 Savage round in a Savage 99 rifle that is one year younger than me.
I haven’t finished the dialing in the load or the rifle, and I am already getting these kinds of results at 100 yards.  The .250 Savage cartridge is a winner!

Another bit of misadventuring: I had a couple of old laptops that weren’t working and I’ve held off on tossing them for fear there might still be data on the hard drives.  How do you wipe a hard drive so that whatever was there can’t be recovered?  After a few minutes Googling the topic, it seems that the best way is to pull the hard drive and drill a few holes through the disk.  Simply deleting the files or even using programs designed to eliminate whatever’s on there really doesn’t get the job done.   I have a power drill, but I had a better idea.  How about putting the hard drives behind a target and having at them with a .45?

Two guys getting blown away at the West End Gun Club. There was a laptop hard drive behind the head on each target.
ARX .45 ACP bullets meet hard drive. Yep, that worked.
Hard drives rendered unusable:  Mission accomplished.

One more last item:  You remember I told you about good buddy Lance and how well his end shake shims worked in my Model 60 snubbie.  His company, TriggerShims.com, also makes bolt shims for .22 rifles  I have two sets coming in for two of my .22 rifles, and I’m going to see how well they work.

CZ 452 Varmint and Remington Custom Shop Model 504 22 rifles. I’m going to try Trigger Shims bolt shims in both.

Stay tuned, and you’ll get the full report right here.

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Galleta Meadows Estate

By Joe Berk

So let’s say you’re a rich guy…not little rich from a corporate job where you’re overtitled and overpaid, but big rich as in inheriting a fortune from Dad.  Let’s say Dad was George Avery, the guy who founded the label making company of the same name.  We’re talking big bucks here, folks.  What do you do with all that money?

Dennis Avery was the guy we’re talking about here.  He was George Avery’s son and he was a good guy who did good things with his money.  He gave away a lot to worthy causes both in the U.S. and overseas.  Kids going to school.  AIDS clinics.  Authors writing interesting books.  Kids’ athletic endeavors. And lots, lots more.

An author Dennis helped was George Jefferson (not the one from the TV sitcom The Jeffersons, but instead a guy who studied geology and dinosaurs).  Jefferson wanted to write a book about dinosaurs and with Avery’s support, he did.  That brings us to a point where Dennis meets Ricardo Breceda.

The 3,000-acre estate Dennis Avery bought is called Galleta Meadows. “Galleta” means cookie or biscuit in Spanish.  It also refers to a species of grass (not marijuana, but actual grass) that grows in the area (see below).
Galleta grass. It grows up to about two feet tall and it thrives in the desert.  The name is probably due to the plant’s seeds, which look like little flattened cookies.

But before we get there, Dennis started buying land in and around Borrego Springs, a small desert town northeast of San Diego.  Mr. Avery liked it as is, and didn’t want to see it consumed by development as has happened in so many other parts of California.  Score one for the good guys here, folks.

Breceda was a guy who grew up in Mexico, came to the United States, tried a few different business ventures, and ended up owning welding equipment.  He wasn’t a welder initially, but he learned how to use the welding gear.  Kind of like Joe Gresh.   Breceda’s daughter had seen the new hit movie, Jurassic Park, and she wanted a dinosaur for her birthday.  Breceda had a welding machine. You can see where this is going.  After creating a dino for his daughter, Breceda started making and selling large metal sculptures.  You can’t miss them.  We’ve seen them in various parts of southern California, including a very large mastodon looking over the 60 freeway near Riverside not too far from where we live.

One day, Dennis Avery is driving by, and he notices the large metal creatures crafted by Breceda.  He stops in to talk.  See where this is going?

What looks like hair on Breceda’s sculptures is actually tiny strips of sheet metal. We have some cool things out in our California deserts.

To make a long and fascinating story a little less long and a little more fascinating, Avery and Breceda struck up a deal to repopulate Galleta Meadows with creatures from the Plio-Pleistocene age (a period combining the Pliocene and Pleistocene eras that began 5 million years ago and lasted until about 12,000 years ago).  The concept took off from there, and the art expanded to include other creatures.  One is the 300-foot-long dragon/sea serpent you see in the photos at the top of this blog and in the three photos below.

A sense of scale. The sea serpent dragon is huge. That’s my sister Eileen and my wife Susie taking it all in.  You can walk under the coils further back.
It’s hard to imagine the labor that went into these sculptures.

We were astounded by the number of sculptures in the immediate area of the sea serpent.  It surprised me that we didn’t the others at first; I guess it was because we fixated on the sea serpent sculpture I had programmed into my Waze navigation app.

While we were viewing the sea serpent and taking a bunch of photos, we saw another sculpture almost hidden in the nearby desert.  We drove through the area’s dirt pathways to get a better look.  Wow.  You can walk right up to these things.  It was amazing.

Another prehistoric beast, as interpreted by Ricardo Breceda. It almost seems life like.
A better shot, with the sun at my back. The old iPhone was getting a workout and it was doing a good job. I was thinking I could get better photos with my Nikon the entire time I was out there in the Anza Borrego desert. Anza Borrego translates into Bighorn sheep. They’re in the area, but we didn’t see any.
A closer shot of the beast above showing how Breceda used thin strips of sheet metal to simulate hair. Brilliant work, this is.

Then we spotted another sculpture 50 yards or so away.  They were popping out like Easter eggs or seeing the whales in Scammons Lagoon down in Baja.  At first you don’t see any.  Then they suddenly appear in a manner that makes you wonder why you didn’t see them before.  We were enjoying the experience.

Oppossums and other modern animals carry their young like this. The artist is brilliant. This rusty old things actually look alive.
Another view of the prehistoric mama and her baby. That dark spot under her tail? It’s another sculpture off in the distance.

After photographing the sculpture above, I looked around and there was yet another one way off in the desert.  It was a camel of some sort.  This was really cool stuff.

Would you walk a mile for this camel? I would and I will. I’ll be back with better equipment next time.

The entire adventure was sort of an Easter egg hunt, with our spotting yet another sculpture a rifle shot or so away that we hadn’t noticed driving into the area.  I think you probably could see them all from the road if you knew where to look for them, but we didn’t know until we were at the sea serpent.  I’m glad I didn’t know where to look.  I felt like a little kid discovering one more each time I moved on to another.  It was great fun.

When I finished taking the iPhone photos you see here, I thought I had captured all the sculptures.  Boy, was I wrong.  In researching the sculptures, the artist, and the man who sponsored it all, I was astounded to learn that there are actually 130 of these things scattered around the Galleta Meadows Estate.  We had seen only a half dozen.  You know what that means:  Another trip.  On the next one, I’ll bring along the Nikon D810 and my tripod, and I’ll get better pictures.  That’s going to be really cool.

The obligatory selfie. Maybe I’m a narcissist. It was the middle of February, and it was a comfortable 70 degrees out in the Anza Borrego desert. My wife, my sister, and I had a great time

Getting there was both easy and fun.  We started in Escondido and picked up California State Route 78 east.   That’s a glorious ride on either a motorcycle or a car, winding through the mountains and then bringing you up to the Anza Borrego desert floor (where the sculptures reside).  We stopped in Julian for breakfast and a delicious slice of apple and cherry pie along the way.  It was a fun day.

The 70-series roads in southern California are fabulous roads. This is a great ride. If you’re going to see the Breceda sculptures, you can get right next to them in a car; you cannot do so on a motorcycle.

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China’s Shaolin Temple

By Joe Berk

I posted a blog yesterday about Chinese pocketknives and drew a few comments (as I knew I would).  One of them mentioned Shaolin martial arts, and that prompted a response from me about the Shaolin Temple in China.  Not a lot of folks here in the US have been to the Shaolin Temple.  I know of two who rode there on motorcycles (that would be Joe Gresh and yours truly).   I covered that visit in Riding China, and I thought it would be good to share a part of that chapter with you today.  Who knows…I might even sell a few books by doing so.  You know, so you can read the rest of the story about our ride through China.

We continued riding and entered a mountainous region. I liked that a lot. The roads were nice, there wasn’t much traffic, and because we were both moving and climbing, the heat abated a bit. We stopped for a break, and a fellow came along on a 250cc Yamaha that was configured for touring. He stopped and chatted with us and we took turns taking pictures of each other. His bike looked good. We only saw a few other Chinese on our trip who were touring on motorcycles.

A Chinese motorcyclist on a 250cc Yamaha. His luggage is from Lester Peng’s motorcycle luggage company. Lester rode with us last year on the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were very close to the Shaolin Temple when we stopped to talk to the Yamaha rider. That would be our next destination this day. Another fellow then came by and he had an animated conversation with Sean (our guide). It turns out he was selling, Sean was his mark, and the guy was working Sean hard. This guy owned a restaurant and he wanted us to eat there. He was successful; we did.

We didn’t pause for naps after this lunch, but Sean was soon having another excited conversation with folks outside the restaurant. I didn’t know what they were discussing, but I later realized it was about transportation and how we would get into the Shaolin Temple. The bottom line to this conversation was that we all piled into three small gray minivans that took us about two miles down the road, back the way we had ridden to get to the restaurant.

What I learned later was that there were two ways to get into the Shaolin Temple complex. One was through the main gate, and apparently that cost more. The other was a woodsy trail through the mountains that required a climb over two or three mountains on a slippery muddy trail. If you did that, you could sneak into the Shaolin Temple complex for free. That’s what we did, and that climb was rough. The trail was slippery, and by now the temperature and humidity were up again. Had I known what was going on I would have gladly paid to go in through the front door, but I didn’t realize what we were doing until I was doing my best impersonation of a mountain goat in the hills behind Shaolin.

So here’s the deal on the Shaolin Temple: It’s famous as the home of Chinese Kung Fu. No kidding; it’s both a Buddhist Temple and a world-renown Kung Fu school (the original Kung Fu school, actually). It’s where Bruce Lee learned his craft, and if you’ve ever seen a martial arts movie with scenes that have large numbers of young Chinese guys learning the martial arts, it was almost certainly filmed here.

The Shaolin Temple was beautiful. As we walked along its well-manicured paths, a young guy went into a martial arts routine that was mesmerizing. It was something right out of a movie. The guy was executing all of these snappy martial arts stances (one seemed to flow into the next) in a manner that almost made the display a dance routine. It probably only lasted a minute or two, but when it ended, a large crowd had already gathered and everyone applauded. I enjoyed seeing it, even though I know nothing about any of this stuff.

A martial artist demonstrating his moves at the Shaolin Temple.
More moves. I told the guys I could do this, but I don’t think they believed me.

The Buddhist Temple was beautiful, but by then it was so miserably hot and humid we weren’t enjoying anything. We were in a walled courtyard that allowed no airflow, and I couldn’t seem to get my body temperature down. I was still perspiring from climbing over the mountains.

I shot a few photos of some of the figures inside the temple (yet again, the D810 Nikon’s incredible low light level capabilities came through).

A figure inside the Shaolin Temple. It’s likely Bruce Lee saw these things when he studied here.
Another huge and menacing figure inside the Shaolin Temple.  These statues were about 15 feet tall.

On our walk out (we left through the main gate), it mercifully started raining again. The rain finally helped me cool off. So far, this day was the hottest and most humid day of our ride (and I found I was saying that nearly every day for the last several days).

At dinner that night, I thought I would have a little fun with the guys. One of the dishes that evening had black fungus mixed in with the vegetables, and I loved that stuff. As I mentioned earlier, what the Chinese call black fungus is a mushroom of some sort, and I loved the taste of it. A small speck of one of the mushrooms, a black piece about a quarter of an inch long, was on the edge of my dinner bowl. I managed to pick up that tiny piece of mushroom with my chopsticks in preparation for solidifying my reputation as a chopstick martial arts master.

I told Tracy, who was sitting next to me, that I wanted him translate exactly what I was about to tell the Chinese guys in our group. He said okay, but went back to his meal. “No, Tracy,” I said. “I want you to tell the guys to stop eating and listen to what I have to say.”

Tracy looked at me for second, and then he spoke to the group in Chinese. The others stopped eating, looking at Tracy and then at me.

“We all visited the Shaolin Temple today and we saw the birthplace of Kung Fu,” I began. I paused, nodded at Tracy, and he started speaking to the group in Chinese.

“You may not know this, but like Mr. Bruce Lee, I, too, am a martial arts expert,” I said. Tracy looked at me and translated what I just said. The others stared at me, taken in by my serious demeanor.

“You know that I am an expert with chopsticks, as I demonstrated on our second night in the peanut contest,” I said. Tracy diligently continued to translate. “You may not know that I am a master at using chopsticks in the martial arts. In fact, I created a branch of Kung Fu that relies entirely on chopsticks.” As I said that, I motioned with my left hand as if I was shooing a fly away from the food on our table. It was a motion all of us had used across China at all of our dinners to get rid of the flies.

As Tracy continued to translate, and when I saw everybody look at my left hand shooing the imaginary flies away, I lunged out into the space over our table with my right hand, still holding my chopsticks. As I did so, I emitted a piercing “eeeee yah!” (my best rendition of a martial arts cry, worthy of no less a master than Bruce Lee himself). I held up my chopsticks, which still held that small morsel of black mushroom. No one could have confused that speck of mushroom for anything other than a fly captured in mid-air by a martial arts master (with his chopsticks, of course).

A loud gasp of astonishment and admiration went up from all of the Chinese riders. Before they could get a closer look, I plopped the tiny piece of mushroom into my mouth and exaggeratedly swallowed. There was a second of stunned silence at our table, followed by another gasp and heavy applause. Gresh was the only one who rolled his eyes. A legend was born that evening, my friends, and he be me.

We had a great dinner that night (I know, I’ve been saying that about every meal on this trip). Eeeeeeyah! The fly-impersonating black fungus. The chopsticks. The applause. It was wonderful.

After dinner, all I wanted to do was get back to the hotel, take a cool shower, crank the air conditioner all the way down, and get some sleep. I posted a blog that night, I went to bed, and I probably dreamed about being a chopstick martial artist.

They’re still talking about me over there, you know.

The ride across China was amazing, the adventure of a lifetime.  You can read about the adventures of dos Joes on the entire trip here:

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A Tale of Two Pocketknives

By Joe Berk

My collecting bug has taken a turn.  Instead of guns, motorcycles, bicycles, or watches, the latest craze is pocketknives.  I’m not sure what drives the collecting bug (that is to say, what the underlying psychology is); that’s a topic for further research and when I feel like I can explain it, maybe a future blog.

I’ve been using pocketknives and inexpensive hunting knives as a filler/fulfiller on the reloading sites.  I buy a lot of reloading components online from the big reloading supply stores (Natchez Shooters Supply, Midsouth, Midway, Powder Vally, and one or two others), and they all run frequent sales where shipping is free if the order crosses a $100 or $150 threshold.  There are times when I’m under that threshold (sometimes by a lot) and that bothers me.  I can’t pass up a bargain and I want that free shipping.  I’ll use a knife to get me over the magic number.  Most lately it was a Case large Stockman pocketknife.

The Case large Stockman with polished stainless steel blades. The blade on the left is the Spey blade. The other two are for whittling, cutting twine, or whatever suits your fancy.

I’m not sure why I wanted the Case, but as I started poking around on the Midway site for things to get me over $100, the Stockman popped up.  And then it kept popping up.  If I look at something once, I’ll start getting all kinds of emails offering it.  Sometimes, I swear I can just talk about something and I’ll start getting emails with deals on that item.  Siri is a nasty and nosy bitch who seems to hear everything.

The Stockman knife looked interesting.  I knew I didn’t want plastic handles (they’re called “scales” by the knife people), and the Case knife had jigged bone.  I didn’t even know what jigged bone was (other than that it was bone of some sort).  I thought I wanted something made in America (Hack has influenced my thinking on such things, I suppose, unless something that’s made in China is a really good deal, and I’ll get to one a little lower in this blog).  The Case Stockman is American made, and they offer it in two sizes. I didn’t know what a Stockman was, either, but the name sounded kind of John Waynish and I used to live in Texas.  I saw that the knife was available in either a satin or high polish finish.  I opted for the large Stockman with a high polish finish.  It was $82, which took my $45 reloading supplies order handily over the $100 free shipping hurdle.  Yep, they got me again with that free shipping gimmick.

The Stockman knife arrived a few days later along with the $45 of cartridge case corn cob polishing media (I like my ammo shiny).  The knife is beautiful.

All the above got me to wondering:  What is exactly is Stockman, and what is its history?

The story goes like this:   Pocketknives are thought to have originally been invented five or six hundred years before the Christian era (that’s mind boggling, but I read it on the Internet, so it must be true).  The Stockman style of pocketknife is thought to have originated around 1880 in the American West as a cowboy tool.  I watched a lot of Westerns as a kid, so I feel pretty good about that.  The Stockman has three blades, with one (the large one) having its own spring and two sharing a spring (the spring is the leaf spring thingamabobber that assists the blade going into its closed position and then holds it there).  The long Stockman blade is for whittling.  I’m an old guy with a penchant for the American West, so maybe I’ll take up whittling after I finish leaning how to play “Buffalo Gal” on the harmonica.  One of the other two blades is a backup to the long one, and from what I’ve read it is the preferred blade for cutting twine.  (I’ll pick up some twine on the next Walmart visit to check this out).  And finally, the third blade, the so called “Spey” blade (spelled here as they spell it in the knife community) is for castrating young male bull calves.  You know, spaying them.  Ouch.   I read this on the Internet, too (see above regarding veracity).  I’m not going to touch this intended use.  If you’re a rancher who needs help in this area, don’t call me.

I like my Case Stockman.  I haven’t done anything other than look at it so far, but maybe I’ll whittle something later.  As mentioned above, the Stockman is made in America, although truth be told, other made-in-China knives I’ve seen look just as good (Hack, that’s your cue for a comment or two).  That brings me to the second pocketknife I recently purchased.

My new Marbles Scout King knife. I think it’s bigger than what I had when I was a Cub Scout. The uppermost blade is a screwdriver and bottle opener. The next one down is an all-purpose awl. The blade one up from the bottom is a can opener (think P38, and if you’re old enough to remember what that is, my compliments and thanks for your service to you). The bottom blade is for carving, cutting, and any of the other things you can do with a knife. It is a handsome knife.

It’s the Marbles (no, I haven’t lost mine) Scout King, and I came across it while I was reminiscing about the first pocketknife I ever owned.  That knife was a Cub Scout knife.  I have no idea who made it or where it went after I left the Cub Scouts, but I know I liked it.  I played with it constantly.  The first time I ever cut myself badly, it was with that knife despite all the admonitions from Mom and Dad (yes, I’m the guy who has to urinate on the electric fence…you know, just to see).  While writing this blog, I looked for the scar from my Cub Scout knife (I thought it might add context), but the years have obliterated it.

When looking for a replacement Cub Scout knife, I found that I could buy an original on Ebay, but they all looked pretty rough and they were all expensive.  Then I found there are a few companies out there still offering Scout knives.  The Marbles knife was the only one offering polished stainless steel (I like shiny things) and genuine jigged bone scales (instead of plastic), and it had the added advantages of a stunningly low price ($15 and change) and free shipping.  The decision was easy:  Add to cart, buy now, and it was on its way from Chicago (by way of China).  It arrived a few days later, and it’s beautiful.  I’m a happy camper.

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A Shift In Battery

By Joe Gresh

I was going to do a bunch of stories on my solar power system that powers my shed. I may still do that but this is more of an update on the batteries I use to store the solar power.

Small footprint means more energy density and hotter, more localized fires…

With solar, unless you plan on only having power in the daytime, you’ll need a way to store energy. The traditional way to accomplish this is with lead-acid batteries. I’m a lead-acid fan boy because they are so much cheaper than lithium batteries or a molten salt battery.

I should say, were cheaper…as of late lithium batteries have been dropping in price so much you can now get a 12-volt 100ah lithium battery for the same price as the cheapest Walmart lead-acid, deep cycle battery.

My solar system has been online since 2018 and in those years I’ve had to replace three Walmart batteries. The others are getting a bit long in the tooth, you know? Six years is a good service life for a lead-acid battery. Walking by the battery bank a few days ago I smelled the telltale odor of sulphur. This meant another battery had given up the ghost. It’s usually easy to find the bad battery in a bank. It will be hot to the touch, or in this case the filler caps had blown off. Kind of obvious.

The lithium batteries seem fairly even voltage wise at 100-amp load.

Looking at the average age of my battery bank I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new lithium set up. Getting in just under the tariff wire, so to speak.

My new bank will be 12, 12-volt, 100ah lithiums. Wired in series/parallel to produce a 24-volt, 600 amp hour storage capacity. That’s theoretically 14,400 watts of storage if you could squeeze every bit of juice out of the batteries.

By contrast, the existing 12, 12-volt 100ah battery bank only has 7200 watts of usable storage capacity due to lead -acid batteries dropping voltage below 50% capacity. The same total amount of juice is in the lead-acids but it’s at a voltage too low to operate equipment.

I use an old, analogue battery load tester to establish baseline numbers for future troubleshooting.

In addition, the lithium batteries have a smaller footprint so I’ll be able to rig the new bank on a single shelf instead of two shelves like the set up is now. This will cut down in battery cable length and by extension, voltage drop. Less cable is always good with electricity.

All in, I’ll nearly double my solar storage capacity in less square footage for less money than the old style lead-acids. This seems like a win-win.

Lots of important information that I will ignore is printed on the battery.

Now for the downside. These generic lithium batteries claim a 10-year life span but since the Chinese manufacturer’s keep changing brand names like I change underwear the likelihood of the same battery company being around a decade is slim. And then there’s that small detail of the fires.

Lithium batteries don’t like cold weather so that could be an issue. We do get some 20-degree nights at the ranch. I run pipe heaters at night so maybe that bit of drain will keep the batteries snug and warm.

Ah well, it’s not like lead-acid batteries don’t catch fire or explode occasionally.

I’ve had good luck with my Walmart lead-acids, no complaints, and I’m hoping these lithium replacements hold up at least 6 years. 10 years will be great and if they last look for an exhaustnotes long term review in 2035.

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Dos Ojos Cavern Dive – Mexico

By Mike Huber

Introductory Disclaimer:  So as I have been writing these blogs the last few years it’s quite enjoyable and therapeutic to literally vomit out the stories without having pressure to place any bullshit spin or embellishments (they really don’t need any embellishing). I take pride in highlighting my successes, but also annotating my shortcomings and owning them through my writings. Enjoy!

My main purpose of traveling to Mexico was tacos, but diving was a close runner up as a reason to visit this incredible country again.  Diving over the past six months has almost replaced my addiction to motorcycling, making it yet another bad decision as a hobby choice.  For those of you that have read my previous diving adventures will fully understand this.

I am currently on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and much of this land was created from a giant asteroid.  That would be THE giant asteroid that created the Ice Age and killed off the dinosaurs.  With this massive disruption in this area, the ocean floor was lifted in a strange way that created cenotes.  These essentially are old caves that are now flooded with fresh water.  There are about 5,000 of these cenotes throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and they are quite magical.  Having to mark my checklist off (I’m making this list up as I go, by the way, as a month ago I couldn’t tell you what a cenote was) scuba diving in one of these seemed like it would be incredible, and it was. Sorta.

In Thailand I had done a few swim throughs.  Not even caves or caverns, but about 20 meters.  It wasn’t something I ever enjoyed but it wasn’t the worst experience, either, so I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel during a 52-minute, ¼-mile dive through my first cenote.  Upon arriving and seeing the other divers in the crystal clear water with the sunlight mysteriously peering through the overgrowth of old forest above the cave, I instantly was put into a state of awe based on how beautiful it was.  After donning our scuba gear and jumping into the cenote, the cool water was quite refreshing from the heat and humidity in the jungle above us.  After a few minutes of joking around and performing a buoyancy test, the five of us were ready to begin exploring this cenote underwater.

It didn’t take long before the beautiful glowing natural light was absorbed by darkness.  We had nothing but our small flashlights and a string along the bottom to guide us for the next hour. As we swam along there were stalagmites and stalactites on either side of us.  Some were so old they had formed natural columns in the still crystal clear and dark water we were slowly navigating through.

We were about 30 minutes or so into the dive when I noticed my heart began beating quite rapidly.  It was beating at a rather uncomfortable rate.  I tried to shake it off as mentally I felt great, but it seemed to be getting worse.  With my heart now beating faster, my breathing also began to increase.  I knew I had plenty of air as I am religious on checking my oxygen levels (see my previous diving blogs) so I did what I could to dismiss it, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to shake it off.

With all this going on I began to float to the surface.  Normally this would just be frustrating and I would have to close my eyes, exhale and I would sink back to the level I wanted.  The issue now, though, is there was no surface.  There was only the cavern ceiling.  If I hit the cavern roof, I would probably hit my head and it would possibly be a “lights out” situation.  I did not want this. We were in a semi-single-file line (although I was a bit more elevated than the others, in several ways now that I think about it).  There really was nothing or no one I could reach out to for help.  What were they going to do? Give me a hug?  I was on my own here and as with previous situations, I had the rest of my life to determine how to resolve this mess and get my head (and more importantly, my body) under control.

It took a couple of minutes to do just that, and a short while later I was enjoying the cave, being super calm and relaxed.  It felt like coming out of an intense psychedelic trip and realizing that you are on the other side of it (and a stronger person for having undergone the experience).  Then, it happened again.  Not quite as intense but enough for me to mentally note that this sort of diving wasn’t for me, or at least it wasn’t for me at this particular time.

As we neared the entrance of the cavern where we started from the shimmering neon green light of the sun causing the water to glow and seeing the other divers floating gently above me was a beautiful sight.  My first cavern dive had been logged and as I surfaced I looked to me new friends around me and simply said “Well, that was quite a trip.”  I chose not to do the second cavern dive that day (for obvious reasons) but I am looking forward to my next dive in a few days.  That dive will include close encounters with bull sharks.  Until then I am long overdue for a couple of cold Tecates and some much-needed tacos.

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The Big Dig

By Joe Gresh

One of the reasons we got such a good deal on The Ranch©️ in New Mexico is its location. Perched on the side of the Sacramento Mountains, the land is steep. Any flat areas are man-made so when you want to build a greenhouse, you’ve got to move some earth.

I’m filling the area beyond the wall. It was a steep rocky place and now you can walk around without stumbling like an old man…which I am.

Terracing is much easier than removing the mountain so that’s what we’ve been doing. The little cabin we live in is on a terraced spot down by the arroyo. The shed is higher up on another terraced spot.

There’s a great location for a greenhouse behind our shack and down closer to the arroyo. The spot gets plenty of winter sun and it’s protected in most directions from wind. It’s so low I suspect it may flood in heavy rains.

It’s a little hard to get to but the location will be better when the high winds kick up.

Unfortunately, the location is hard to get to. A while back I made a set of stairs to access the location but there’s no way to get the Kubota tractor down the stairs. I actually could get it in position via another route but it would require cutting a bunch of trees. I don’t want to cut trees.

That leaves hand digging. The ground is not too bad to dig. It’s much easier than the front of the house where I put a driveway. Down in the arroyo the ground is a combination of hard topsoil, mid-sized rocks and some whitish, proto-rock stuff that crumbles with a sharp blow from a 2-pound sledgehammer.

The land tapers from level. At the highest about three feet must be removed.

The process is: I break up the top layer with an electric, 35-pound jackhammer (powered by the Harbor Freight Tailgator generator), then I use a round point shovel to move the loosened soil into a wheel-buggy. A little work with a pick dislodges the larger rocks. Aside from a few tree roots, it’s the best digging I’ve encountered on the property.

Since the area is so steep I’m bulkheading off lower regions with some old roll-up garage doors and using the removed earth to level a larger pad. It’s like getting free land. I plan to fill about two feet deep of as large an area as I have dirt for.

This sounds like a lot of work and it is. I take it slow and steady. It’s really no worse than going to a gym to work out and you get the added benefit of a flat spot on your ranch.

The greenhouse is a cheap Vevor 10-foot x 20-foot hoop style. The hoops are 1-inch tubing that are assembled like tent posts. A through bolt holds the pieces together. The cover is a greenish plastic material reinforced with what looks like thread. I think the cover will last a couple years if we don’t get a hailstorm. It’s not a heavy-duty unit.

It’s a happy worksite. I take frequent breaks and enjoy the smell of freshly turned earth.

The foundation will be heavy duty. I’m building a two-block high pony wall to set the greenhouse on. The blocks are dry stacked, poured solid, and they sit on a 4-inch-thick footer. The footer has rebar to keep it together when it cracks. I’ve set some 1/2-inch j-bolts into the block cavities to secure the wood sill that I will screw the greenhouse tubing into.

The foundation is overkill because I’m assuming the Vevor won’t last long and I’ll be scratch building anothergreen house one day. In the meantime, I’ll practice my green thumb.

As the project progresses, I’ll post updates. There will be solar power and a water catchment system making the greenhouse off-grid. For those of you wanting to build your own greenhouse my advice is to start with level ground.

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The Wayback Machine: A Call to Alms

This is a rerun of a blog Gresh wrote a couple of years ago.  Yep, we’ve got our palms out.   Help if you can; we’d sure appreciate it!

By Joe Gresh

Sponsored content is a way for publications to earn money. How it works is companies pay cold hard cash for bloggers to write a story about the products they’re selling.  Most reputable websites and magazines print a notice letting you know the story is paid advertising. We’ll never have to worry about that because we don’t write sponsored content.

Not writing sponsored content is not the same as not having sponsors, though.  Sponsors pay money for advertising on our website but don’t have any say about what we write. Sponsors support the website because they feel the content will attract the sort of people who they want to reach. For ExhaustNotes those people will be motorcyclists, shooters, travelers (especially Baja travelers), and concrete finishers. I know, it’s an odd mix of topics, but Berk, me, Huber, and our other contributors write about what we know.

So here’s the pitch: If you have been reading ExhaustNotes and think the eclectic collection of stories we create might appeal to your customers, by all means become one of our sponsors.

Or, if you just like reading the website and want to help support us, become a site sponsor even if you have nothing to sell. Maybe we’ll make a wall of names for people who sponsor the site. We want sponsors to support ExhaustNotes.us because they think that the writing we are doing is worthwhile.

So dig down into those dusty advertising budgets and drop an email to us  (info@ExhaustNotes.us).   Let us know how we can help you spend your money.

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The Norge

By Joe Gresh

Winter has finally arrived here at The Ranch. This year it seems like we got a late start to winter in New Mexico. I was riding my motorcycle in 70-degree weather just a few days ago. The avocado plants have been brought in to protect them from the 20-degree nights and I have installed insulated faucet covers over the outside plumbing fixtures so that we don’t burst a pipe.

Wintertime in New Mexico is beef stew time. The best way to make beef stew is with a crockpot and I couldn’t find our crockpot. Actually that’s not true, I know where the crockpot is: it’s buried under a giant mound of Amazon cardboard boxes I’m saving for my future eBay business.

Having no traditional kitchen stove at the ranch I decided to utilize the Isiler inductive hot plate as a heat source for the stew. The isiler is a sleek looking, single burner, and inductive-heat unit. It only works with magnetic-metal cookware meaning aluminum and stainless steel pots won’t get hot. I bought a whole set of inductive, stainless steel pots to use on the thing. These pots have iron or steel cast into the base so they will work with the Isiler.

The iSiler is only a couple years old. I cooked breakfast with the hot plate two or three times before, a cast iron skillet works great on the thing. The inductive heat is really efficient as no heat is wasted heating the cooktop or surrounding atmosphere. Only the metal pot gets hot and it will boil water in a few seconds on high settings. I like to cook my beef stew slowly. I toss in all the ingredients raw, meat included, and let it stew on low heat for half a day or more.

Apparently the iSiler doesn’t like being left on for long periods of time at a low (180 degrees) setting. The thing kept shutting itself off. I would come in from the Big Dig to check the stew and the iSiler was not heating. A red H was displayed on the digital control panel. Turning the unit off then on restored the iSiler and it would start cooking the stew. The shutdowns were random. If you watched the iSiler it never shut down. It was like trying to cook on Schrodinger’s hot plate: go outside to dig a foundation for a greenhouse and the unit would die but you would never know it until you observed.

Luckily, I was in the house when smoke started pouring out of the ventilation openings of the iSiler. The whole cooktop was hot and I needed a couple paper towels to pick it up without burning my hands. I unplugged the cooktop and took the stinking wreck outside. The house reeked of burnt electrical components.

And this isn’t unusual for modern appliances. In the last few years we’ve burned up three Krieg coffee makers. The fan went out on our refrigerator. Our washing machine started leaking water and then mysteriously stopped leaking. It’s hard to find new stuff that holds up over time.

Which brings us to the Norge. In the 1970’s I bought a little house on Chamoune Avenue in East San Diego. Back then funds were tight and East San Diego was a cheap place to buy a house. The house came with no appliances; I bought a used Norge refrigerator for 50 dollars. In my tatty old neighborhood there were appliance stores that sold nothing but used or repaired equipment. At least three vacuum cleaner repair shops were within walking distance of my house along with mattress rebuilders, typewriter repair shops, TV repair shops, radiator repair shops and at least 10 Chinese restaurants. You could buy cigarettes one at a time. East San Diego in the 1970s was a hive of industry captained by small e entrepreneurs.

The Norge had a thick, heavy, single door opened by a gigantic pull handle with a ruby red emblem that looked like a royal warrant. The handle would not look out of place drawing cold, foamy Bass Ale at your local pub.  Unlike new idiot proof, safety-first refers the Norge door latched closed and if you found yourself stuffed inside of the thing you would surly die because from the inside the door would not open. Even with dynamite. And no one could hear you scream.  It was a solid refrigerator, man.

There was no fan to circulate air inside the Norge. The top freezer section had a small, plastic interior door and uneven distribution was accomplished by cold air falling to the bottom of the fridge. You could turn the entire interior of the Norge into a freezer by cranking the temperature knob down to its lowest setting.

I don’t know the exact year the Norge was constructed but it looked just like the ones built in the 1940’s. The only thing I could complain about is that the Norge needed to be defrosted occasionally, failing to do so would trap frozen items in the freezer compartment like woolly mammoths were trapped in Siberian ice thousands of years ago.

I used the Norge for 10 years or so and it was running fine when I sold the house with the Norge still in it. Still keeping food fresh, still cold, still deadly to small children. It was probably 40 years old last time I saw it. And I can’t get a hot plate to last more than 4 meals.

Maybe I have a skewed view of the situation. Did the Norge represent standard 1940 quality or was it a one-off, Hyperon refrigerator? So much of our industrial energy today is expended on items that are junk. It seems like a waste of resources. Worthless and uneconomically fixable items clog our landfills, where the iSiler hot plate is heading.  You may note we didn’t include the regulation Amazon link to the iSiler. That’s because we don’t want ExhaustNotes readers to buy the thing and set themselves on fire.

I bought a new, analog hot plate from Amazon, the kind with the resistance coil that will heat all types of cookware. Sometimes I can fix things because it’s cheaper than buying new. But that’s almost never the case if you include your time. No, I fix things just to stick a finger in the gears of our throwaway society. Sure, it’s painful.  You rarely come out ahead and you can lose a finger. I won’t be tinkering with the iSiler hot plate, though. I don’t want to know if the cat is dead or alive if it means burning down the house.

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Green Bay’s National Rail Museum

By Joe Berk

That picture above?  It’s a Big Boy steam locomotive cockpit!  Look at all those valves!

Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Say that name, and most people think of Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers.  And why not?  It’s what the town is known for.  But I’ll let you in on a secret:  Green Bay has one of the best rail museums I’ve ever visited.  I like rail museums, and if there’s one anywhere near where I’m traveling, I’ll stop.  Susie and I wrapped up a trip to Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the National Rail Museum made our list. It’s easy to find, and Green Bay is a fun little town.

The National Rail Museum has a bunch of small items on display after entering the first building (track maintenance hand tools and the like).  Then it’s on to a hall where the big stuff is kept.  One of the first trains is General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s European train, the one he used as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II.  It’s big, it’s impressive, and it’s fit for a 5-star general.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower train. It’s dark green and it’s imposing.

The Eisenhower train was built by the British with a number of features to keep it low key (or so some of the signage said).  The name on the locomotive and the exotic paint theme indicated otherwise.

Not very subtle, I would say. General Eisenhower used this train for getting around the European Theatre of Operations.
The Eisenhower train was built by British Railways. That, my friends, is a cool logo.
A photo of General Eisenhower leaving his train.
A meeting room on the Eisenhower train.

The National Rail Museum has one of the very few surviving Big Boy locomotives.  I’ve seen three (well, actually two, but I saw one of them twice).   One was at the National Steam Locomotive Museum in Scranton, and another was parked at the Pomona Fairgrounds (it’s that one I saw twice).   The first time was when it went from Ogden, Utah, to Pomona under its own power.  It stopped in Pomona, and it was an amazing thing to see.

Big Boy No. 4017. I wish that Halloween decoration wasn’t there. I didn’t want to risk moving it.

It’s hard to put into words just how big a Big Boy is.  Photos don’t really do its size justice.

Signs at the museum told us the temperature in the engineer’s compartment was typically 93 degrees even with the windows open.
A peek into the coal tender. Big Boy locomotives consumed so much coal that a man couldn’t keep up with it, so instead of shoveling coal into the engine, the tender had a worm gear that drove it in.

A locomotive that caught my attention was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG-1 electric locomotive.  When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main tracks were only a half mile from my home.  We loved watching those trains scream by, always pulled by a GG-1.  They are gorgeous locomotives.

A magnificent Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotive. These are beautiful machines. The GG-1 was entirely electric. They drew power from high voltage overhead wires with their pantograph.

From the engineer’s position, the view forward is through one small window.  You really can’t see much of what’s ahead.  That would make me nervous.

By the 1950s, passenger rail travel was losing favor with the American public.  Airplanes were faster, and with the advent of the Interstate Highway System, most people drove.   The railroads wanted to turn that around.  One attempt involved General Motors designing an aerodynamic locomotive and less expensive rail cars.  GM designed the “Aerotrain” drawing on their styling talents, but the effort flopped.   I’d seen pictures of that locomotive (there were only ever two made), but I’d never seen one in person until this visit.

The General Motors Aerotrain locomotive. It was a beautiful design but a commercial flop.

The Aerotrain story is a fascinating one.  This video explains it.

There are plenty of great railroad stories and more than a few great movies.  You might remember the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor hit from the 1970s, Silver Streak.  It you ever wondered where the last car of that famed train came to rest, wonder no more.

If you haven’t seen the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie of the same name, you need to. You can thank me later.

I’ve been to the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, Golden Spike National Historic Park (where the Transcontinental Railroad was completed), and now, the National Rail Museum in Green Bay.    All are great stops, and all have great storyies.  I once did a story on Big Boy 4014 when it was in Pomona, California.  Gresh has a couple of rail blogs, too, including the Nevada Northern and the Cumbres and Toltec lines.  Rail stuff is cool.

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