Category: General

Miscellaneous

Turkey Time

The neighborhood turkeys are huge this year.  Seems like they were little tiny babies just a couple months ago.  I found these walking through our front yard and then again in the back of our property.   Ben doesn’t even bother to chase them anymore, although Biggs does and feels really proud of how scared they are of him.  Youtube has a process that helps get rid of the jitter from handheld with telephoto shooting, but it tends to cut off some of the top frame so in some cases the turkeys head is out of the picture.  ugh.   oh well.  Life living in the woods.

And the response from our grandkids, Ace and River

Fall Creek Mountain Climb – August 2015

The annual “birthday climb” of Fall Creek Mountain, over by Feeley and Carr lakes, happened this year on 8/23.   We had ten participants, and everyone made it to the top followed by a refreshing swim in Island Lake afterwards.  Along with Kate and I, we had Stephen & Janelle, Mike & Vicky, Nan, Patrick, Alan and Kaye.  My little P&S lumix camera died before the swim so no pics of that.  It was a gorgeous day and possibly the best trip yet.  I have been climbing Fall Creek Mtn since 1999 and its always a new adventure.

Fall Creek mtn
Fall Creek Mtn taken by Patrick from opposing mountain range.
Island Lake
Island Lake in the background, our swimming hole

The King Fire

The King Fire that was near my last camp out at Loon Lake is now 43% contained and has covered over 95,000 acres.   8,000 firefighters were utilized, the largest number on a wildfire.   Colfax and Auburn and Grass Valley was experiencing much smoke and ash in the air up until it rained on 9/25.  Here is a map showing the status of the fire.  Note Loon Lake off to the east of the fire near the top.  Click the + button to blow up the map, then pan over to the left and you can see how close Colfax is.  In fact if you click the [ ] box at the right corner of the map, it will blow up to full screen size.

And check out this a timelapse movie of the sunset on Wednesday nite with this huge pyrocumulus cloud formation.

King Fire Pyrocumulus Sunset Timelapse.mov from Brandon Manning on Vimeo.

NCAA Statistical Predictions

Nate Silver (the guy whose predictions for the last presidential election were right on) has a website called FiveThirtyEight.com.  In his sports section he has a neat forecasting model for the NCAA tournament.  He calculates the chance of each team reaching each round, taking into account a composite of power rankings, pre-season rankings, the team’s placement on the NCAA’s 68-team S-curve, player injuries and geography.  After each round it is updated so the odds change based on outcomes.  Click here for the page with the odds shown in bracket form or table form.  I thought it would be interesting to see how the teams with the highest chance of winning it all turn out.

Right now the top teams and their chance % follows:

Louisville 15%
Florida 15%
Univ. of Arizona 13%
Kansas 7%
Virginia 6%
Michigan State 6%
Wichita State 5%

Lets see how it plays out.

NCAA predictions