ONAPA WV Field Trip: Part 1, Seneca Rocks and Dolly Sods

ONAPA (Ohio Natural Areas and Preserves Association) organized a field trip to West Virginia for late June, focusing on the Dolly Sods Wilderness and the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area. There were a limited number of places so Joan and I applied early.

We opted to drive out the day before, staying overnight in Elkins. We had dinner at the Forks Inn, which Joan had discovered beforehand on Tripadvisor. It was excellent and well worth driving a few miles outside of town.

The next day we had time to explore the Seneca Rocks before the trip participants rendezvoused there at 1:00pm. This is a photo I took later, in the late afternoon light. In 1943-44 the 10th Mountain Division trained in assault climbing on these vertical formations. 

Zooming in closer. The red circle at left shows where an observation deck is located, at the end of a walking trail. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

The view from the deck goes up and down the valley and into the mountains to the east.

Just beyond, they beg you to please not go any further.

Back at ground level Joan and I briefly explored the Sites Homestead.

This is the Sites house.

After all the participants trickled in we were briefed on the plan to visit Dolly Sods. Group sizes are limited to no more than ten, so our troop was split that way, but also we were carpooling because the climb from the valley to the top of Dolly Sods takes an unpaved forest road (#75) that makes it awkward to pass a car coming the other way. (Once on top it's not so bad.) We entered this map at the upper right.

Our first stop was at the 477-acre Nature Conservancy Preserve of Bear Rocks, just after cresting the top of the plateau. The name "Dolly Sods" evolved from the name of the emigrant German family that first grazed livestock there, "Dahle," and the local term for an open high-altitude meadow, a "sods."

There are various trails at Dolly Sods, both long and short, and backcountry camping is allowed with a permit.

Much of the plateau is at an altitude of about 4,000', so the winters are cold and the winds are harsh. Unsheltered areas contain many flag trees, stunted trees with branches only on the downwind side of the prevailing winds. But today, late in June, the weather was friendly.

On the first few trails we walked a short way in, losing a few feet of altitude. This small drop was enough to harbor different vegetative zones and plant species that were pointed out by our naturalists. I neglected to take pictures during this stretch of the journey.

Further south the terrain around the road was less windblown, and water had accumulated into various wet spots, ponds, and bogs. The climate has been compared to that of southern Canada. Here's a pond, but we didn't see any beavers.

Doll Sods was used as a target range during World War II, and this sign greeted us at a trailhead.

We went on anyway. Did I mention that the mountain laurel was stunning almost everywhere up here?

The path took us to a bog that could be entered on a short boardwalk and observation deck. Carnivorous sundew plants were common in the bogs and spectacular here.

A closeup. The shiny drops at the ends of the spines are sticky.

At the end of the day, heading back to Elkins, Joan and I decided to drop in unannounced at the Forks Inn. Although there was a flock of cars and trucks in the parking area they had room for us. We even sat out on the patio, the best place to relax with the green-carpeted mountains. In this photo Bickle Knob is prominent.

Tomorrow we'll head south for Day 2, at the Cranberry Glades and on several forest roads of the Monongahela National Forest.

Fairfield 14: Poetry, a Reunion, and More

In the latter half of March 2017 I journeyed out to Fairfield, Iowa, with Belle and Alboart.

Belle on the left.

The pigs help keep me grounded after several hours of group meditation in the Golden Dome each day, on the campus of Maharishi University of Management (MUM). They approve of the plentiful vegetarian food, and remind me to partake often.

The place I had stayed last November was already booked when I enquired, so I stayed at the Men's Peace Palace for the first time.

Men's on the left, Women's on the right.

The ground floor has several meeting rooms and the upper floor has seven-ish guest rooms for rent. Mine looked out onto the back. The public spaces were adopting a new, less pastel color scheme. At first, colors were being tested.

Later on the new palette was taking hold.

Early in my visit I attended a poetry reading by Bill Graeser, Rustin Larson, and Glenn Watt. The event consisted of two rounds wherein each poet recited from their work for ten minutes.

Here's the setting in the MUM library.

Rustin Larson.

Glenn Watt, an avid birder.

But Bill's my main poet.

Thanks, guys!

Early in the visit I had a chat with Dr. Birx, the TM-Sidhi administrator. Any certified TM teacher can check your TM meditation, but only a handful of TM-Sidhi administrators exist. He wanted to follow up during my next visit, and I'm sure we'll have more to talk about.

I also reconnected with Tom Hall. Tom and Jill Murphy (later Hall) were the TM teachers in Knoxville, Tennessee when I was attending UT; Tom interviewed me and Jill was my TM instructor, and Jill taught the SCI (Science of Creative Intelligence) course when it first came out. Although I had bumped into Tom once or twice at MUM in the last couple of years -- he splits his time between Atlanta and Fairfield -- and learned that Jill had passed away, we hadn't had a chance to catch up.

Tom invited me to have dinner at his new condo in North Campus Village.

He was lucky, because there's a waiting list for these units, but a friend of Tom's who had made a deposit on one later decided not to purchase, and the developer was willing to transfer the sale to Tom.

He whipped up a Thai-style dinner while the NCAA basketball final was on the TV, and four of us, including his son Orion and a friend of Orion, sat down to eat and to chat. It gave Tom and me a chance to sketch in what had happened to us over the last thirty years or so. Afterward Orion took a photo.

Tom on the right.

I took two "day spa" treatments at the Raj. Before when I've booked at the Raj it's been for several days of the full panchakarma regimen, which includes pulse diagnosis and consultations with the director of the Ayurveda program, special meals, and extended daily treatments. I didn't feel ready to jump into all that again, and the "day spa" allowed me to simply book treatments, albeit from a restricted set, not from the whole panoply that the director might prescribe. I had two shirodara, oil on the forehead, very soothing. I fell asleep during the second one.

During the two weeks I toured the campus, its landmarks, and immediate environs, as well as shopped for a couple of friends back in Columbus.

The bridge over nothing was now complete: there were caps on the "interior" posts, which had been bare wood back in November.

A closeup.

The nearby bridge that actually spans Crow Creek now has wooden safety wings instead of yellow tape.

The removal of dead wood and replanting of the area along the creek made progress over the winter.

Looking towards the Dome.

By the end of my visit the banks of the creek had been completely cleared of deadwood. Future plans include appropriate species such as willow.

This view combines the Argiro Student Center and the miniature Vedic Observatory.

Closer to downtown an old house -- check out the stone foundation -- had been demolished (click on the image to enlarge). Who knows what I'll see on this lot next visit?

Several of Irene Murphy's paintings are on display at Everybody's Cafe, where I met her for lunch.

She likes flowers.

One afternoon I took a long walk along the reservoirs on the Jefferson County Loop Trail, not far from campus. Halfway on a flock of huge birds flew by, high enough to be in controlled airspace, first heading north and then northeast. The light was such that the maximum zoom photo was almost black and white to begin with, and I completed the job with the GIMP.

Does anyone recognize the silhouette?

This striking sunset framed the Men's Dome (the Maharishi Patanjali Golden Dome).

At the Women's Dome (Bagambhrini Golden Dome) some drainage work (pipe replacement, apparently) was going on.

On a misty evening I experimented with photos. Here's the Men's Dome, viewed from the north. Note that the padlocked basement entrance is nonetheless well illuminated.

A look at the Women's Dome from the parking lot. It's backlit by the spotlights for the Invincibility Tower.

Then after two very restorative weeks it was time to head home again.

My Stint as a Pig Surgeon

During the end of 2016 I was pressed into service as a pig surgeon. You see, the outdoor holiday pigs, seen here in 2015,

started having health problems partway through their 2016/2017 season.

First, the pig with the Santa hat but no jacket lost his head. That is, the lights through his body still worked, but the lights in his head had gone dark. I took him inside and began the laborious process of replacing the bulbs one-by-one with a good bulb. I hadn't achieved anything by the time I was forced to remove his head from the torso (it sits on prongs) to reach the lights inside. When I lifted the head, suddenly the lights came back on! Something was loose, apparently. I put the head back on, and the lights stayed on. I took Santa pig outside, and he continued to illuminate. The patient had been healed through physical therapy.

In a few days the head of the winged pig with halo, far left, went dark. This time, no amount of substituting bulbs or taking the head on and off would cure the illness. Joan found another pig to order, a dancer, and the halo pig was interred in our basement.

But then, the head of the other Santa pig went dark! This indicates something about the lifespan of these imported pigs. Again, it could not be directly revived.

However, as you may have guessed already, there was a circuit of good bulbs available: the torso bulbs of the halo pig. It was time to perform an organ transplant. I removed the bulb string from the halo pig and snipped out the dead sub-string that had gone to the head. I snipped out the dead sub-string in the head of the Santa pig. Then I installed the torso string from the halo pig into the head of the Santa pig. The operation was a success, with no hint of organ rejection. The only side effect is that the Santa pig now has two electrical plugs.

With the arrival of the dancer pig and the various surgical procedures, we had a happy group of four in the front yard again.

(This photo was taken with a shorter exposure than the 2015 one; compare the window in the upper left corner and the illumination of the grass.)

I hope my pig-surgeon skills are not called upon again soon.

Building a New Computer: Installing Software

By mid-2016 I wanted to retire Juno, my computer from early 2010. It had received an upgrade in the form of a larger SSD, but all the photos were still on a hard drive, and the 4 GB of memory wasn't sufficient when I was doing heavy photo editing, leading to interminable delays and annoying clicks as programs were swapped on and off the hard drive. It was time for a new computer.

A previous post covers the December 2016 hardware assembly for the new machine.

This post discusses software installation, and the next will describe my performance tuning efforts. Sneak preview: overclocking an i5-6600k in a small case with a 92mm cooler can be a challenge!

I hadn't installed Linux onto a computer for a few years -- I once had to restore the OS on my old computer after a botched upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 -- so I stumbled a few times. In the rest of this post I'll run through the issues in roughly chronological order.

First I created a bootable USB stick with XUbuntu 16.10 on it, using the unetbootin utility on my old computer. (16.10 is code for 2016/October.) The first ISO image I downloaded didn't work, so I tried another source; that .iso file was larger and booted.

The BIOS/UEFI interface gave me two choices of how to boot from the one USB stick. My first choice didn't work, of course. The other did.

I followed my old procedure of creating a separate root and home partition, but the installs kept bombing out with errors such as "firmware started installer in UEFI mode but it looks like maybe the OS is already installed in BIOS compatibility mode." To make a long story short, I didn't realize I had to create a bootable UEFI partition. I dsicovered this by abandoning my attempt to do a custom install and accepting the installer's defaults, which worked, and then I could examine what it had done.

I decided I wanted to try running without a swap partition on the SSD, having a generous 32GB of RAM, so I disabled the swap partition. The SSD now has a 0.5 GB EFI system partition, a 915 GB main partition, and a 16 GB unused partition.

I tried to copy my files over to the new machine via FTP from the old machine, but the FTP process kept stumbling over odd file names. I finally used grsync to copy my files from a backup HDD.

There was BIOS/UEFI tweaking to be done. By default turbo mode for the CPU was disabled, for example, and the i7z utility was handy to verify the state of the system. Also, I had to enable memory "overclocking" for the RAM to be run at its rated 2400 speed rather than the default 2133. (Another reason for using a Z series motherboard.)

At a certain point the motherboard stopped recognizing DEL at the "Press DEL to enter BIOS" prompt. Mr. Google revealed that many people were forced to reset their motherboard to restore this, which I wasn't crazy about. I have an old PS/2 keyboard, with which the motherboard did recognize the key, but I preferred the modern USB keyboard. Fortunately the GRUB bootloader has an option for "system setup," which takes you back into the UEFI/BIOS.

I also set up a prettier GRUB splash screen (the Orion Nebula). I ended up changing several settings in /etc/default/grub, including GRUB_TIMEOUT, GRUB_BACKGROUND, and GRUB_GFXMODE. After updating /etc/default/grub it's necessary to sudo update-grub for it to take effect.

I encountered a race condition that prevented Dropbox from connecting at system startup. Mr. Google pointed me to a solution, and I added these lines to my startup shell, which stop and restart Dropbox:

# work-around dropbox/dbus bug 
#
( sleep 2; dropbox stop && dbus-launch dropbox start) &

Several times I needed to register the new computer with a service (Google and Dropbox come to mind.)

Something odd was happening with the audio. The monitor (also new) was connected to the computer via a DisplayPort connection, but there was no audio unless I fussed with the entirely separate "PC  audio" ports, disconnecting and reconnecting them. I eventually discovered that the monitor sensibly was expecting its audio through the DisplayPort cable, but the pulseaudio software on Linux was somehow defaulting to "PC audio" until some external event forced it to reconsider its options. The easiest thing for me to do was to change the monitor settings so that it used the "PC audio" instead.

Eventually I'll write the performance tuning post, discussing overclocking, changing voltages, torture testing, and cooling the CPU. It takes time to collect all that data!