Yes, and OMSI was my customer. It wasn't generally known that they were [are?] considered to be one of the top exhibit design teams in the world. Having them agree to market my product was HUGE! 1996 IIRC That flood probably cost me about $3 million
But nobody knew [or was supposed to know] about area 51 yet. That was top secret. That was even long before Bob Lazar, who popularized the myth.
Thanks. I love hearing about the interior. Beaches bore me. LOL I can see that would be disconcerting for someone who hasn’t seen snow.
After I give the cat a bath The worst part about giving a cat a bath is getting all of the hair off of your tongue afterwards.
That was an amazing flood. Do you remember Rogers Landing? It was the boat launch area on the Willamette River at the south edge of Newberg. It was completely submerged. The river overflowed completely submerging the farm land to the south in Marion County.
I never got up that way during the flood but I was aware of the damages. But yes, that was quite an event! We were marooned for a better part of a week IIRC. I thought for sure I was going to lose the barn and the bridge but they both survived. It was interesting to note that I could tell you what the water levels would be in Portland about 8 hours ahead of time based on the level of our creek... which was actually a 2-mile wide river for a time.
This was the very first carpet recycling system. I helped to design it and did the controls. The biggest challenge for me was getting the precision control required using equipment not design for precision control. Unfortunately I only got involved after all of the mechanical equipment had been purchased. So I was stuck with what they gave me. But in the end we got it all to work beautifully, It was successful for a few years but then the bottom fell out of the market for the byproducts, which is why I can post the photos. One of the things that sucks about my work is that I do some seriously cool stuff, but rarely can I share photos. I have to sign NDAs for almost everything I do. But this guy went out of business. What you see are sanding drums that take off about 0.020" of the carpet backing per pass. This exposed the back "hooked" part of the fiber, The backing is something like 60% corn starch. The dust is controlled with the vacuum lines. After the backing was removed by the sanding drums, the carpet is flipped and passed down below, where this seriously wicked plucking drum would yank out the fiber. You can only see where it is located about in the middle. But this thing was insanely dangerous. If someone had gotten pulled into it they would have been pulverized in about a half a second. But I must say, it was very effective at removing the fiber, which had value as a recyclable. This was the first control panel where I was connected. This was obviously taken after they started operating. As can be seen, the biggest challenge was controlling the corn starch dust. You can see my chair and table in the lower right corner of the photo. LOL. I was there every morning at 6 AM for about six months. And in the winter it was cold! Brrrrrrrr!
We always had one or two of these guys around. In our later years bald eagles made a big comeback and two were nesting in some trees on our property. But not so good, we were always worried about the cats after that.
One of our old-growth trees. This was the biggest I think. It was about 200 feet high. We had a number of them on the property but I had to drop two [not this one]. I didn't trust them and had a logger come out and string a logging cable around them and a few other trees. And a good thing I did! When I had them dropped some years later they were rotten through and through - like a sponge. And they were directly in line with the house during a heavy wind from the South West, which was common. But this guy was always healthy along with a few others.
