Although the days are getting longer and even at 5 above, the sun has enough power to melt a little snow off the dark house roof, it is still far too cold to enjoy much outside.
I filmed about 20 minutes of the sunrise this morning and then cut the part out and speeded the video up greatly using Windows Live Movie Maker (free on Windows 7) and posted it on this blog. The sun still rises in the south, but is creeping farther to the north and higher in the sky each day.
Margo is heading down to West Bend to visit her Dad next week. He has been in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat--and possibly a very mild stroke. He also has a bad cold, so it may be something to do with that. He turns 89 in a couple of months and has been getting along pretty good. He goes to a couple of funerals per week as a military honor guard--he is a WW II vet.
We took a run to the Twin Cities Friday to check out the Arden Hills MN and Federal surplus center--looking for a color laser printer for the museum at Luck. Picked up one for $100 that has a slight flaw--every inch a red horizontal line. Works good for lists of numbers, but pretty annoying for other prints. I had checked out the printer, and this is supposed to be easily fixable by just replacing the magenta toner cartridge--so hopefully that will do it (I will order it online). We have a color inkjet printer, but we don't use it very often and the ink dries out too quickly. Lasers are not supposed to do this.
The surplus center requires a bunch of paperwork to become eligible for non-profits, but has low cost furniture, electronics and miscellaneous surplus items including some military trucks. Can't quite figure out how a 6-wheel drive army truck would fit into the museum list of needs, but surely should be able to think of something. We do have a huge old butter churn (8-foot long, 6-foot in diameter) from a creamery that would look good being hauled down the street for summer parades....can see it know mounted on the back of one of those trucks, slowly turning like a cement deliver truck!
We try to get as much of our equipment as possible through donations, surplus and our help from volunteers as we get only money raised by donations, fund raising and grants. This year our share of the utility bill is high -- so very cold.
