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Thursday, May. 01, 2003 - 8:27 p.m. First off- the photo:
This was taken from the front of our building, and there are two items in the shot I will write about today. The first story� Notice the dish in the background. We pay far too much for an out-dated weather system that used to go by the name that is printed on the dish (I don�t want to mention their name, as I will probably get hits from Google. They don�t deserve new customers, but that is another story). Monday morning, I went to the monitor connected to this dish to check the local radar. For some reason, it hadn�t updated in a couple of hours. This is somewhat normal for this company. They have a tendency to crash every once in a while- usually when we need it most (tornado warning, blizzard, etc.) I called their customer service, and after jumping through several hoops they decided that either the receiver or the transducer (nose-cone-thing) had gone bad. The rep said he would ship me out new ones, and that I should call him if that didn�t fix the problem. I received the packages by UPS on Thursday, and installed the new components. Still nothing. Zero new packets of information received. My next step was to check our alignment. The height was right (43�). The offset was right (-9�). But for some reason, the compass setting of the dish was off. 40�! This made no sense. I couldn�t budge the dish, so there was no way the dish could have been moved from the left to the right by that much. Unless�. Unless somebody hit it with a riding mower. At 9:15 a.m. on Monday morning (that was the time that the receiver lost its signal) Hum�.. I moved the dish (after loosening several lock nuts), and the signal immediately came back up. I waited until quitting time, and then asked the person who operated the mower/tractor on Monday if he remembered hitting the dish. Hard. Nope- not that he could remember. At that point, several people chimed in that they had seen him hit it, and watched him climb off of the tractor to try to move it back where it belonged. �Oh yeah, now I remember. I DID bump it a little!� If he had ONLY TOLD ME THIS ON MONDAY! I wasted about 4 hours of my time, talking on the phone and playing with the system, trying to figure out what was wrong! They don�t charge us for replacement parts (they shouldn�t, as much as we pay them), so the only loss was my productivity. Oh well- most of the guys think I don�t do anything all day anyway, so at least they saw I did something that day�.. The second story� The irises in the foreground: This mass of flowers came from 3 tiny corms, dug up from an abandoned farm property around 5 years ago. Sef (from work) was reclaiming an old farm homestead. He wanted to make it back into farmland. I was invited to cut down any and all of the trees on this acre for firewood. While Codeman and I were there cutting the wood, I noticed an area that contained masses of tiny iris plants, growing from the front stoop all the way to a fence line, about 50 feet away. I dug up as many of the larger roots I could (as they would soon be tilled under), and gave them away to anyone I could get to take a few. And I planted 3 of these roots in front of our new break room addition. They have now grown to the point of needing divided once again. If not, they will soon enter the front lawn. This is what the bloom looks like:
The color is very pale blue (or is it purple? San-d says it is). Nice, but nothing spectacular. The modern hybrids have much bigger, flashier flowers, and bigger plants, too. These blooms only last for a few days, but they are worth the space they occupy. This spring, something odd happened to one solitary flower stalk. Here, I�ll show you:
Each of the upturned and down turned petals (3 each) are one half the regular color, one half dark purple! Here is another shot, with my hand holding the (rain-blasted) flower stalk:
This isn�t a hybrid, I guess. No cross-pollination is involved. This is just a new corm, pushing away from the base of the original plant. I imagine a nursery would consider this a defect, and would dig up and throw away this plant. Not me. I have marked its stalk, and when it comes time to divide the plant this summer (stop by, and I will gladly give you several of the regular roots. They NEED divided, soon!) I will put this single plant in another spot. I hope that the new roots that develop from this plant stay true to this bi-color pattern. If so, I will have a one-of-a-kind iris, all my own. �Roadiepig�s Iris�. I kinda like the sound of that��..
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