Recently I’ve spoken with numerous people about rainwater collection systems.

I always thought the idea would be cool, tho I haven’t gotten around to it yet for my own house (so many other things to deal with). Of course, with the severe drought, well… rainwater collection is only useful if you have rainwater to collect. 🙂

Nevertheless, it seems that you don’t need much rain to collect a lot of water… one roof can have enough surface area to collect a lot of water, more than enough to get you by, provided you have a good system for collection and storage. With the recent rains we have had, one could easily fill up a system.

Some do it for survival/preparedness reasons. Some do it for landscaping and gardening reasons. Some do it for long-term economy. Whatever your reason, if you’re going to do it, you first need a system.

On Facebook I saw a buddy of mine posting pictures of a big cistern project he was doing. I asked if he had a public webpage, and he finally got one set up.

Purple Fountain Tree.

Jef does irrigation, rainwater, and greywater systems. With the way the Texas climate is turning, efficient use of water is going to become more and more important. Jef also can do other sorts of landscaping and hardscaping projects.

If you’re in the market for such things and in the greater Austin area, give Jef a call.

Shawn sent me the link to this story, about the appropriate use of shrapnel. It’s a really cool story with a cooler end result.

Go read. Won’t take long, and the pictures are totally worth it.

After having read it, it renews my interest in taking the blacksmithing classes over at Pioneer Farms. Something I’ve wanted to do for the past couple years but just haven’t yet. Why? Because it’d be cool.

Jim Wendler wrote a simple piece about goal setting.

Jim hit on the right thing: to have a larger goal, but then you have to break the goal down into smaller chunks. I like to say that you have your goal, but then you have milestones along the way. And you can have various levels of milestones. Maybe your goal will take a year to accomplish, so maybe you can break it down into monthly milestones, and even further into weekly and daily milestones. It’s things to help you measure progress, accomplish the goal, and have success along the way because that will provide motivation as you see yourself progressing towards meeting your goal.

Jim alluded to but didn’t really talk about one vital part to goal setting:

Deadlines.

To set a goal is one thing, but it means nothing if there isn’t a time component to it. “I want to be rich”… yeah, don’t we all? “In 10 years I want to have one million dollars” is a bit more tangible, and gives you a more concrete idea and direction as to where to go and what you’ll need to do to get there. Compare that to “in 20 years” or “in 5 years” or in “1 year” and think about how that time component will change what the plan of “making a million dollars” will have to be.

Set goals. They’re good for you. Make sure you set a time component, then break down the goal into milestones over time.

Then bust your hump to achieve them.

Jim Wendler on teamwork:

Teamwork is not something that can be taught without consequences. We?d like to think we are all about Teamwork until the shit hits the fan; then it’s every man/woman for themselves. This is the same thing that people do in marriages, relationships and in some cases, as parents. It’s easy when it’s easy but no one wants to stick around when it’s hard.

Teamwork is spreading the credit when it goes well and not selling your co-workers out when it doesn’t.

90% of the time people point fingers and go to the boss and complain/bitch about co-workers. Unfortunately, these kinds of people are rewarded.

TEAMS are built strong by three things:

1. Strong leaders.
2. People who are willing to fulfill their roles.
3. Team is willing to take care of problems internally,

Teams work together to bring everyone into the group.
Teams work together to make sure there is success.
Teams don’t tattle on others like a 10 year old.
Teams work to make weak people better.
Teams have a strong leader; the leader delegates and doesn?t reward suck ups.

Full article.

A couple of nights ago, Wife and I were sitting in the bedroom talking when we heard a sound we’ve heard before.

Coyotes.

But we’ve never heard them this close to our house. It sounded like they were in the greenbelt immediately behind our house… not far away at all.

Honestly I wasn’t too concerned because we were inside, so what can they do (the neighbor’s cats were the ones in danger)… but all those howls do get your attention — it certainly got Sasha’s attention. Puppy-girl went into “seek and destroy” mode like a good defender. I didn’t let her out tho because frankly if the yotes were in the immediate area I didn’t need her getting into anything — that’d be an ugly fight to break up.

I went outside to look around. I did see some shapes/eyes scurry away but I wasn’t in the best position so I have no idea what I saw. But as I kept scanning (thank you to 200 lumens of Streamlight Super Tac X) eventually I caught a few pairs of eyes staring back at me. I watched for a little while trying to determine what they were. Still not 100% sure but we have a few guesses based upon the glow of the eyes.

Wife found this online. She didn’t provide me the original source URL, just emailed me the contents:

Funny to see your post on here tonight. I was just perusing a website about this very topic earlier today. Here’s its link: http://wildlifedamage.unl.edu/handbook/Chapters/html/eyeshines.htm

It mentions that there are things that can affect the color that an animal’s eyes will reflect:

Here are some other factors that also may influence the color of the eye shine:

* Distance of light to the subject
* Intensity of the light
* Line of sight or perspective of the viewer

It also gives the following list, which varies from several accounts mentioned here in this post. But it piqued my interest anyway, so I thought I’d copy/paste it in case someone else might find it interesting. Here it is:

What are the colors of an animal’s eye shine?

The many factors that affect eye shine contribute to the various reports of eye shine color, even within the same species. The following list is a good example of this (The most likely color is listed first.):

* Domestic dog-green, emerald green
* Coyote-bluish green, emerald green
* Domestic cat- yellowish green, green, yellow, reddish
* Bobcat-yellow, bright yellow, emerald green
* Raccoon-emerald green
* Weasels-green
* Opossum-light or bright orange, pink
* Alligator-red
* Deer-greenish white, yellowish white, green, white, orange, bluish green
* Black-tailed deer- brilliant blue
* Flying squirrel-reddish orange
* Birds-red
* Rabbits-red
* Cattle-bluish green, yellowish white

So there you go. Eye glow, and how it can help you identify what you’re looking at.

I went looking for the referenced website, but that page doesn’t exist any more. But what there is now is the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management. Looks like a collaborative effort between Cornell, Clemson, University of Nebraska, and Utah State. Poke around that website a bit. It’s quite interesting at how to identify and deal with damage caused by wildlife.