Gilbert & Sullivan

6FPS V7#9: September 8, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

It’s September, so we’re post Labor Day, and that means baseball is headed towards the playoffs, football is back, and hockey is starting to gear up for training camps and the new season. August was a hot month, which slowed me down (air conditioning rocks) on some projects, but overall was a good month.

It sure feels like fall has arrived here a bit early. As I write this, we’re getting a bit of light rain and the temperatures are dropping 10 degrees this week. The alder tree at the top of the driveway started changing color about a week ago, and we had a big flock of Robins show up for a day or so — as fall hits they’ll flock up and them move downslope to winter quarters, and for about 36 hours we had over 50 of them on the lawns. Me, I’m looking forward to it, and hoping for a nice, cool, rainy winter.

I’ve got my post-Labor day trip scheduled, and I’ll be headed out to Ridgefield for a last summer visit to the refuge, and then down to Newport for a couple of days, and then up to Astoria for three days of exploring the northern Oregon coast and Southern Washington area.

As usual for me, I’ll be staying at Best Westerns. They tend to be the places I prefer as a good value for the quality. Interestingly enough, the Best Western I have used in Astoria is no longer a Best Western, because they took over what used to be a Comfort Inn, so there’s been some furniture re-arranging going on. I’ve actually stayed in the place when it was a Comfort Inn, and it’s a nice building and when fitted out as a Best Western, probably has a better mattress in it. So hopefully a win-win.

We have a motel we love in Newport, but it’s full, so to the Best Western for me there, too. No great plans for this trip other than unplug, explore and relax. I’ll carry my camera with me and see what happens, if anything. I’m just going to let this trip be what it turns into. I do intend to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, and the Yaquina Point Nature area, but beyond that, I’m not planning much.

Since there’s not much to go chasing here in Kitsap County for me during the summer slow season, I’ve been putting some energy into exploring nearby counties and to some degree scouting new locations for my fall/winter birding o9utings. August I made a few trips into Clallam County around Sequim and as far as Port Angeles, just so I can see which spots are worth my time once the winter birding starts kicking in. I’ve added a few nice places onto my list, and seen a few nice birds, but nothing really extraordinary at this point. It’s mostly about getting out and exploring more than what I find when I do, which is nice.

That was one of my goals this year, to shift from a focus just on this county to becoming more familiar with what’s within about an hour’s drive from here, which allows me to get to Port Angeles in one direction, and Tacoma in the other.

It’s paid off; last year at this time I had seen 103 species (of 132 for the year), and this year, I’m already at 150 species without going further away than Ridgefield (about 2.5 hours from here). And hey, In’N’Out just opened their first Washington place in Ridgefield in August, so assuming the lines aren’t too insane when I visit, I know where dinner will be.

About That July Head Cold

On further consideration, I’m now convinced that head cold I had in July was, in face, Covid. Sigh. It finally nailed me, it seems, and there are some lingering symptoms that are minor but annoying, but seem to align in well common Covid symptoms. Things are much better now than they were at the start of August, but they’re hanging on, as the long covid symptoms seem to.

Oh well. It was, I guess, inevitable.

St. Judes Donation Time

Every September, the podcast network Relay.fm rallies the troops to raise money for St. Jude Research Hospital, which treats children with cancer. One of the co-founder’s son has been one of their patients so this is really personal to them.

I lost my mom to breast cancer (which moved into the colon and bones) and then my sister to lung cancer, so when I decided to find a place to start donating to a cancer fund, supporting this one was a logical choice. I am someone who is rather picky who I’ll donate to, and a good way to get me to stop sending in money is to make me feel that all the money I give goes to trying to get me to give even more money (I’m looking at you, Planned Parenthood). St. Judes has a long tradition of successful and meaningful work, which makes them easy to recommend and donate to.

I’ve made my annual donation, and if you are interested in sending some money to one of the groups fighting the good fight against cancer, I can recommend this organization as one worthy of your money.

To donate t them through relay.fm, you can go to https://relay.experience.stjude.org, Relay has raised over $4 million for them since they started these campaigns in 2019, which makes them one of the good guys in this fight too.

Shop Update

I’ve made good progress on the shop; the table saw is now on a portable stand that lets me shove it up against the wall and out of the way, and I found a flip cart by Powertec that now has my planer and jointer on it, which means I could remove another cart out of the shop, freeing up more space. The saw cart is by Vevor and it’s okay, but I find the shift from upright to folded awkward, but it’s a minor annoyance. The Powertec is built like a tank, and I know I’ll hear from the “you should build this” crowd, and to some degree you’re correct but I was willing to spend some bucks to speed up the shop cleanup.

I spent some time a few days in a row sitting in the shop considering options and trying to figure out what I liked, and what was annoying me. Top of the list was the positioning of the table saw (especially since I find I use it a lot less than I expected). Second on the list was the lack of outfeed support for the miter saw, which is not just annoying but for long board a bit dangerous. In doing some looking around I found some decent outfield rollers I can place on top of the stove and they fit perfectly, so I can now chop boards up safely there.

I also identified a few projects to tackle and I’m now starting to work through them. Next up is re-organizing the wall shelves and the bins I store there, and then pulling everything out of the toolboxes and re-organzing that stuff since some of my choices were — sub-optimal. I haven’t done much the last ten days or so because we had a run of 90 degree days and so life’s been a lot slower and mostly in the air conditioning, but I’ll be getting back on it shortly.

Backup Disaster (fortunately avoided)

My “God, I can be such an idiot” moment came this month when I decided to do some re-organizing and cleanup of my online archives. They live on my NAS, and when I set that up, I set up things to back up the NAS data to Backblaze as my offsite. This re-organization started because I got my Microsoft Office renewal (old price, $99/year, new price $129/year) and I have for a number of years used OneDrive to share my files across machines. Back when I was working I had regular need for both Word and Excel, but these days I don’t need them, and I decided to cancel the subscription and move my shared content onto iCloud, which has plenty of space.

And, of course, if I’m going to move stuff, I’m going to clean it up and re-organize it, because, well, that’s me. The migration to iCloud seems to have worked just fine, and I ended up moving between 100-200 gigs of stuff off my disks and onto the NAS where it’s there if I ever need it.

And that’s when I found the problem: I set up the backup to Backblaze just fine and made sure the initial content was backed up fine, but I never actually set up a schedule for the backup to run. So for about the last year and a half, it’s been sitting there idling, and I never noticed.

That has, of course, been rectified and the backup is grinding away getting all of that content up onto the offsite store, and it might actually finish sometime in the next week or so. If something catastrophic had happened, and I’m happy I found it before it did, but boy, it’s a great reminder to go make sure your backups are actually working. And mine were, if you think about it, as it sat there weekly verifying itself but never firing up to sync up the changes. Oops.

New Wallpapers

I’ve wrangled up a new set of wallpaper images for you to download and enjoy. This new set has many eagle images, and 11 birds, with the 12th being a nice sea otter image. Enjoy! Download info is below.

Tea Hack

One of my readers sent me a suggested hack for better decaf tea: heat your water and fill your teapot and start seeping your tea, and after a minute, pour it out and re-fill with fresh hot water. That initial steep will suck most of the caffeine that’s going to be extracted, so you can remove it but still maintain most of the flavor of the tea in the second extraction. That makes sense, but in my case, I’m happy to be drinking my Herbal Peppermint, which is zero caf, so I haven’t experimented with this myself yet.

Bears! And a Bobcat! And Pigs?

It’s been that kind of month here. After months of not seeing any sign of bears, we have plenty. One night we had two 2-3 year old bears come through, clearly not full grown but old enough to be kicked out by mom. And the next night, a mom showed up with two first year cubs in tow. And if that wasn’t enough fun, the next night another bear, this one a full adult, wandered through and seems to have grabbed a few apples off the tree. That is six different bears in 48 hours, which makes me wonder if there’s some kind of convention for bears going on around here.

The full adult male bear seems to have moved into the territory, and the others have left, which only makes sense since the male can kill younger bears if he gets a chance. It also seems like some of the raccoons have left as well; things are a lot quieter since the big bear showed up.

On top of that, we had a bobcat wander through. We see one every year or so, and it’s now shown up on our cameras twice. One neighbor let me know they’d seen it a couple of weeks ago walking up the top of our driveway, sos out seems to have decided to make this area its territory for now. Plenty of squirrels around here.

And then a couple of days later suddenly we had three pigs wandering the yard. Clearly escapees, I went off trying to see if I could find the owner, and after some online digging, it turns out that Ham, Bacon and Sausage (no, seriously) lived at a house just down hill from us in the next tract over, and had gotten out again.

Fortunately for the pigs, they were picked up by animal control (no, I didn’t turn them in, someone else did) safe and sound after a bit over a day of freedom, and I was able to contact the owner and point them at Kitsap Humane to get them back.

And if that wasn’t enough fun — while looking around on the local groups to see if I could find a posting by the owner, I ran across some nice camera video of a cougar walking up a driveway about half a mile from here a few days earlier.

It is never boring here.

See you next issue!