The whole world appears fresh and new again! Or at least not a blurry......

We now have off an on snow showers.......

Still snow is better than rain. I can move snow out of the way. But mud is mud and sucks.

I'm sick and tired of the dreary dismal weather here in the frozen Norf of Minnesota. The leaves are all gone and all the maples and ash trees are bare except of the pines.

The fish do not want to bite right now as we all wait for the lake to turn over and freeze. I can't wait to get enough ice to be able to walk or drive out there to fish.

It's too wet to go out hunting too. It sucks to get rained on in the forest. And it makes the scent conditions poor for the dog also.

The little birdies are huddling out there somewhere and not even coming out to visit my feeders right now.

All I've been doing is messing with a new CAD program I heard about. (it's a hobby) And finding all the weak spots in the program. Fillets are hit and miss if they will even work. I could manually draw them in, but I'm not quite there yet with the tools to do so.

I NEED some sun! I NEED some time out in the forest!

I had some tubes pulled out of me yesterday and a leg bag is no longer needed! I now feel merely old rather feeling like crap!

I've been through this 3 times now over the years and this was by far the worst experience. I just wanted to curl up and die over the last week. While knowing full well I would live through this and I was just being a sally ass about it.

Now I just need to keep my jets cool and not start doing stupid things just because I feel better. Got to wait a couple more weeks before it's safe to get stupid again.

I'm considering a new printer this winter. I'm looking to replace my trusted Prusa Mk3S. And I've whittled it down to 2.

First is the Qidi Q2. I've been eyeing Qidi printers for a couple of years now. I like the enclosure and the high temp printing ability. The heated chamber works well for engineering filaments by all accounts. And it comes with MET certified filtration system already installed. I would buy it without the Qidi box because my A1 Mini has taught me that I just don't do a ton of color prints much beyond some signage. And I'm unsure of just how much I would be using high temp filaments beyond PETG and ABS/ASA due to the costs.

The contender is the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2. I like the price, even with their Canvas 4 color printing, it's still $100US cheaper than the Qidi. But it doesn't have a dedicated chamber heater or air filer system as standard installed either. Both can be worked around as dyi add-ons though with extra effort and money required.

While things like how much and what filaments I would use that require heated chambers and fancy air filters is something only I can decide, there is the matter of reliability and repair ability.

As someone who had to design and build machines and then often needing to be the one that has to fix things when it all goes bad, I value reliability and repairability very highly.

So which printer can be relied upon to just work and is easiest to maintain and repair when needed in your opinion. How is manufacturer support? Is the Carbon 2 really as quiet as advertised?

The final harvest of 2026 and farming is done for the year. I just need to get my little shovel out and do some tillage.

Overall, it was a good year. My first ever excellent carrot crop was had, my chilies and bell peppers were excellent as always, the tomatoes were decent, the string beans would have been better and the beets a total failure due to the evil deer.

Such is the life of an old farmer.

I have a JD 4720 Tractor that I use to do heavier work around the 5 acre yard. I have a loader on it and I use a 6 way blade to move snow come winter.

This past May, one of the two blower fan motors quit working while clearing the last snowstorm. I could smell the angry pixies blowing out the magic smoke inside the cab and then it quit altogether. My cab windows frosted over very quickly and I had to finish with the heat off and the door open to prevent the frost build up.

I put the repair off for the summer and finally got around to trouble shooting and getting parts for the repair about 2 weeks ago. I needed to remove the cab roof to get at the motors. After looking up the part number from JD, those blowers are $500 a piece. There has got to be a better way.

I tried to locate the 3 speed resistor, (.75+ .75 216/22) used for the motor. JD does NOT sell them. They are unavailable anywhere on the North American continent. But I could try and get one from the factory in Italy, or oddly enough Ukraine. Not likely.

I could actually take the resistor apart very easily by removing 2 tiny screws. On the inside, there are 2 resistor coils and with some serious searching and a couple of dumb questions ID'ed as a thermal fuse soldered in to 2 terminals. I got a good lead to DigiKey and I found the correct one under mini fuses. I ordered a pack of 5 pieces on Wednesday. Got them this morning and had one soldered into the resistor before dinner. And everything reinstalled and buttoned up 2 hours later. Everything runs like new again.

I changed what was a $500 repair down to an .83 cent repair. And yes, there is a pour of well earned bourbon today.

I have picked a peck of not pickled peppers today! It is the last of them. Now I just need to cut them up and get them into the freeze for the long winter.

It's always a welcome sight to wake in the morning after a fall rain and seeing that you are being visited by the shaggy mane mushrooms. They don't show up every year and the numbers can vary from only a few to covering the whole hillside for the next several weeks.

This year it seems there are just enough to pick for a meal maybe two. It's great to be able to forage for supper in your own yard.

The maples are making a good start on packing it in for the year as usual. Soon the ash and poplar trees will follow. Leaving the just the red pines to hold the green and defend against the winter.

The Orange Boy is at least 18 years old (as near as we can figure). And the little kitten isn't quite a year old yet (she's got a couple months to go yet)

My wife has 2 other cats also and these two have been inseparable since Silly Cilla arrived at our front door on a freezing morning late last October. Kitty Kitty, the old one, has put up with her pushing her way next to him since nearly day one.

My rain gage got it's first test the other day. We got a nice 1 7/10" of rain in there. The water line is just barely visible under the bottom holder bracket.

And yes BillyBob in Kansas, your rain gage is metric because it measures in tenths of an inch. So take that! You commie pinkos in California!

As a side note: We got a light frost last night. It got down to 31F/-1C at some point last night. Not a hard enough frost to kill the bell pepper plants outright, but it did singe and tip the leaves a bit this morning.