It was a mostly quiet week. On Friday we did make an outing to an arts and crafts show. Pam discovered baby rabbits under some fern plants. A columbine plant put forth a show of color. These topics and photos are below.
Pam, her sister Becky, and I attended an arts and crafts show in West Union, Iowa, on Friday. This was our first visit to this show and we didn’t quite know what to expect. We found displays in [fairground] buildings as well as outside displays, and live music was playing through the event. The venue was quite well organized.
Both Pam and Becky found and purchased a few small items. Pam found a couple of small metal hearts on rods which can be pushed into the ground (destined for the garden). Becky found at least one basket from a vendor and a couple cat-themed markers at the same metal crafts shop where Pam purchased the heart markers.
There was not much in the way of antiques, but we did find a vendor who does architectural salvage, along with dealing in antiques, and picked up his card. He has baseboards and corbels in his warehouse, which is located west of Waterloo. As these items may be of interest in our renovation activities, his shop sounds like it would make an interesting day trip destination in the near future.
Here are a few photos I took during the outing.
Overcast skies kept the humid temperatures to a bearable limit and we managed to walk through the event. It was good to connect with Becky again as well. The show was definitely geared more to arts and crafts but there were a few antique dealers mixed in — something for everyone.
There are a few items of note from around the house. Pam was startled to discover four baby rabbits under one of the fern plants. She was trying to determine why the ferns were not flourishing and found this nest:
Since all of our outside cats have passed on, this means there’s no feline patrolling the premises. It appears the rabbits feel safe and under cover in the fern bed now. It will be interesting if these babies survive into adolescence.
The bridal wreath is beginning to flower; photo will be in the next post. It turns out this species has male and female plants and only the female plants bloom. We have three plants and two of them are male. The female is located between the two males and the three form a nice symmetrical arrangement.
The Grandpa Ott morning glories are beginning to twine up around their metal grid support structure and are looking very healthy. Same with the wisteria plant; it’s beginning to twist around the support frame. Two of the hollyhock plants, one existing and one new this year, are forming flower buds. The goal is to have something flowering most of the season and yard plantings are getting closer to that goal.
The pink columbine burst out into a bouquet of color this week. (The blue variety did not make it this winter.)
The upstairs bath received a few minor tweaks with the addition of towel racks and re-installation of a couple shelves. Another towel rack, to be mounted where a person can reach it from the shower, is on order, as is a new small flip-top garbage can (cat proof!) to be placed near the sink. Gradually the room is becoming more and more convenient and finished.
The warmer weather kind of limits our outside activities. Warm inside temps created another side issue: our internet router, at least the wireless service of it, appeared to be overheating. Located in the upstairs Media Room, the router receives very little cool air from the A/C system. We stream our TVs over the wireless network and were getting long “buffering” pauses and long delays in switching channels. I zip-tied a small computer cooling fan to the side of the router and have not had problems since, even though it’s been even warmer the last few days. (The unit does have ventilation holes in the sides and top but has no internal fan.) Seems like there is always something technological to cause additional aggravation.
This time of year is slow for us, given my still-recuperating shoulder and the increase in heat and humidity. It may be time to rent a lift and get some more painting done, but I’ll have to see how much actual repair of broken siding and trim I can manage. These tasks may have to wait until cooler weather in the fall, but I would like to see some progress being made on getting the remaining side of the house painted.
That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!
Pam’s Penny
The tulip and daffodil bed is now the hosta bed, and have these plants ever “exploded” this spring. Almost every one of them was subdivided last year to provide plant material for Sister Becky’s yard. Most of these hostas will probably need to be subdivided again this year. I chuckle when I remember how I tried and tried to get hostas established when we lived in Colorado, without a single success. In NE Iowa, they multiply like dandelions.
Discovering baby rabbits in a ground burrow is a new experience for me. (I can only say thank goodness the startling movement at ground level was not reptilian.)
Happy Trails.
Router: Passive cooling only with home router SoC’s (more technically, WiNOC – wireless network on a chip). Their strategy is the same as with cell phones & tablets, throttling down when overheating, and/or only using low-powered cores with more sophisticated routers.
There are a variety of relatively cheap router cooling fans available, all “USB powered”, which is workable if your router has USB ports (my router offers 2USB ports).
Cost-wise, rigging up a computer fan was both workable and cheap, as you had it on-hand. You could also open up the router if you need more venting, but then it starts becoming more problems than it’s worth.
Hopefully your current solution will continue working for you without making additional investments…
Larry:
Thanks for the note. My router has a USB port but the fan I had runs on 12 volts. It has worked out well, is very quiet, but does require another outlet for the power adapter.
We use Roku Ultra boxes to stream our TVs, and the “Check Network” value went from a low of around 26mbps to the current value of 208mbps, a substantial improvement.
At work I used Cisco routers for wireless networking and never had a heat problem. Cost is much higher than your typical home router but well worth it in a production environment. As long as this solution works I will probably leave it at that for now but I have considered buying a better unit instead of renting this one which goes by the brand name of Hitron.
Cisco and Juniper Networks are the preferred industrial-level providers. Both tend to overbuild to guarantee uptime. Cisco was usually my go-to when advising with infrastructure builds…
As a “Hitron example”, Spectrum buys primarily from 3 providers for their home routers, one being Hitron. Hitron has a bad reputation as it uses the “dreaded” Intel Puma 7 SoC. Dreaded as it’s known to cause lags & slow-downs, especially with streaming services. Hitron has also been noted as one of the worst WiFi ranges.
If I remember correctly, Hitron uses mostly internal antennas, reducing its WiFi range, though it seems that isn’t a problem for you. Hopefully your fan arrangement will get you through the “hot season” (and you don’t need the power adapter outlet for anything else!).
FYI: List of bad modems, etc with Puma 6 & 7 chipsets…
https://lookgadgets.com/articles/intel-puma-modems-list/
Is this why both of our TV’S get blurry sometimes…They’ll be fine and then for like 15 seconds they’re be blurry and then they’re good again…Sometimes the picture will stop and a white circle appears going round and round…We have spectrum with the TV’s being wireless…We have Samsungs, which is compatible with the Spectrum cable without having to buy a Roku…Have both a router and modem
Craig:
Yes the white circles indicate the system is downloading some of the program data. Generally the downloading (caching) stays just ahead of the display, but sometimes the wireless signal gets behind the display. Generally this is a router issue and not the modem but not always. As Larry indicated, some wireless routers are better (faster) than others.