Bald Eagles

More days than not, we see bald eagles. There's a pair that own Lake Harriet. Today we saw a pair over the dog park down in Bloomington. It's so awesome to see them; when we were kids, they were nearly extinct. 

 

Outdoor Holiday Decor

The same company that does our twice-a-year yard cleanup does decorative works for everyone on the street's planters and window boxes.

 

Swag

JP has the house decorated to the 9's for Christmas. 

 

Another Teardown

 

This house four blocks away sold this summer for $825k. It was a mid-century modern split level. The house to the right of it is a beautiful 1909 Arts & Crafts monster on Lake Harriet Parkway. Hopefully the new house will fit in to the neighborhood. 

Sunroom Print

Our favorite room in the house is the sunroom. It's cozy and bright and inviting.

JP found a beautiful print by a local artist of Minnehaha Creek in winter. She took it down the street to the local frame shop and 90 days later, we got it back. It's perfect for this room!

Minnehaha Creek is where I take S on his daily dark-thirty morning dog walk.

 

Falls in Fall

We had another pretty fall day. No snow (until the evening), sunshine, and above freezing. We took the boys to see Minnehaha Falls. Technically, we could walk or bike to it directly from the house along the Minnehaha Creek trail, but we drove the five miles.

Kids can grow up, but they will always be kids. Here is CP tempting fate by standing on a slippery, wobbly rock in the creek.

 

Snuggle Time

With the cooler temps, the animals are starting to snuggle on the sofa.

 

Dog Walk X-Mas Tree

A funny thing happened on our dog walk...

We were walking the dog and passed our neighbors on their way home carrying a Christmas Tree. The Boy Scouts have their tree lot a few blocks up the street, so we went to see what they had. Ended up getting a beautiful little tree. We could have carried it home, but I didn't want to end up all covered in sap, so we called CP to bring the truck.

 

Thanksgiving 2020

This year, JP made a fancy turkey breast roulade. Inside were prosciutto, herbs, and butter. Needless to say, it was Yummy!

It was so fun having the boys home! Everyone is healthy and doing well. That's a lot to be thankful for in 2020.

 

Home for the Holidays

The boys drove home on Thanksgiving. Their semester ended early and they aren't due back until late January. They quarantined before coming home and took a lot of flak for it from their friends in NE.

 

Weekend Walks

S & I go for walks every morning. During the week, it's pitch black and we take a headlamp with us. On the weekends, we sleep in and enjoy some daylight and go down by the creek. 

 

Migration Station

There's ice starting to form at the edges of the lake in the shallows. It's full of the normal varieties of ducks and Canada geese, plus as a bonus the trumpeter swans are migrating through. They stay out in the middle of the lake, but buzz the shoreline as they arrive and depart.

S would like to chase the birds, but the water is getting chilly.

 

Weather Patterns

We've had a couple of snowstorms so far. It's a pattern: nice weather, 40° temperature drop, rain then snow. Each time it gets a little bit colder and the nice weather isn't quite as nice as the previous cycle.

 

Mask Up!

I don't enjoy wearing masks - they fog up my sunglasses and they usually hurt a bit because they are all too small. Except for the awesome masks we received from SB. They are awesome and they fit my fat face. Thanks SB!!

Here in MN, we continue to hit new highs every week. This weekend we crossed 5,000 new cases in a single day. Wisconsin and the Dakotas are in worse shape. It's time to mask up, people! Do your part to help others around you. Hopefully the new administration will be able to bring us back from the edge and get us through the pandemic before it does to us what we did to the Native Americans when we stepped foot on North America.

 

Office Help

V has a thing for pillows. She is to the point that she will only sleep on a pillow. I put one on top of the amp in the office and she quickly made it her new spot. She helps me during the day in the work-from-home office.

 

Pikachu

JP went as Pikachu for our neighbor's Halloween campfire. Stuffed into the fuzzy yellow suit is a few pair of long underwear, sweaters, and a down coat. It was a balmy 35°, but we had 35 mph Nebraska winds that kept the sparks flying and the Coronavirus germs away.

 

Halloween Hike

Our spooky Halloween hike was on the Hell's Gate trail at Banning SP.

The spookiest part was having to walk under this huge ledge.

The coolest part is that there's a pothole in the ledge that was drilled in from the top and it is exposed from the bottom where the bottom of the ledge broke off. It's probably four feet in diameter. There are potholes everywhere in the sandstone, from the top of the cliffs all the way down to the river. 

 

Banning State Park

We hit Banning State Park for a beautiful day of walking the dog in the woods. It's an easy hour and a half north of us. We didn't know what to expect other than usually state parks usually have something special. We were not disappointed.

The Kettle River has carved out a beautiful canyon through the sandstone. We can't wait to come back in the summer and canoe the rapids. 

S is a real trooper when it comes to hiking. He had fun scrambling on the rocks and ledges.

 

Sunroom

Our favorite room in the house is the sunroom. With the leaves gone from the maple, it gets south and west sun.

 

Feline Dominance

The kitty exerts her dominance over the dog in funny ways. This time it was taking over his bed. The pillows, no less!

In the end, they worked out a compromise.

 

More Snow

The big snow we had melted. But wait, there's more!

S is loving the cold weather. We took him to the dog park this morning and he ran hard for an hour straight playing with all the other dogs on the loose.

 

Spooky Neighborhood

The entire neighborhood really gets into Halloween decorating. We need to get our game on next year. Not sure where we will be able to store a dozen full-size skeletons...

 

Misty Lake Walk

The evening god walk was extra beautiful with the snow all over. We couldn't see downtown - it was all misty.

Sven Sundgaard was the weatherman on KARE11 when we moved up here. He's now freelancing it on Facebook and he's still our favorite weatherman.

 

Record Snow #1

We picked up the snowblower last Friday and four days later it was going to town. We got 6+ inches today of beautiful heavy wet snow, which is an all-time record for the most/earliest big snow. (Edit: It was still coming down at 1" / hr when this photo was taken. Officially the airport got 7.4") 

I am so glad that I'm working from home; both cars are in the garage and we don't have to go out at all.

JP was itching to get out her new snowblower and clear the driveway. It started on the 1st pull and it took her all of 10 minutes to clear the driveway.

S is right at home in the white stuff. He doesn't abt an eye at it. Says it tastes good.

I'm worried that this snow is still going to be here in six months.

 

DSL40C Reverb Mod - Amp Cuts Out

DISCLAIMER #1: This post is technical in nature and there are no family photos of dogs or food. I'm posting it because there is very little information out there about this and I could have used it. Hopefully someone else will be able to use what I learned.

I picked up a used DSL40C from GC. It's an awesome all-tube amp that sounds great without any effects pedals. Except for the reverb. Or lack of reverb, depending on if your glass is half full or empty. With the reverb knob at 10, it was barely there. I know, I know... If you want Fender reverb, buy a Fender. I always thought the reverb was weak on my 6505, but this Marshall is so anemic, it makes the Peavey sound like a Fender. There is just enough there that you can tell a difference if it's on or not. I don't wanna drop $100 for an add-on reverb pedal, especially when reverb is one of the buttons on the amp footswitch.

Looking over the schematic, there's R43 that is in series on the output of the digital reverb circuit. R43 = 2.2 meg. That's a lot of Ohms packed into a single resistor. I found something online that talked about paralleling something to drop the effective resistance to 1 M for a 3 db boost. That still seemed weak, and I only had a 1 M resistor on hand. I thought of desoldering R43 to replace it with the 1 M, but that's a ton of work to pull all the knobs & connectors & .... So much easier to parallel the 1 M on top of the 2.2 M to get 680 k. That should work, right? The output is being driven by an op amp with a ±12 V supply; the lower resistance shouldn't tax it...

Put it all back together to try it out. It's kickass! Then a few minutes into it the amp went dead. Standby did nothing, but a full power cycle reset it. Played for 15 minutes and everything worked fine. Must have been my cheapo guitar cable. I put everything back together and went on with my Saturday.

Later in the day I played for about 5 minutes and then nothing. Power switch reset it and it was good for another few minutes. Crap!!! What did I do to my new-to-me amp?!? I really liked the new reverb sound available to me; I did not want to reverse my mod. But at the same time, an amp that cuts out every 5 minutes isn't very useful.

I pulled the schematic and did some Jimmy Neutron noodling on it while we did yard work. Pulled it all apart the next day and looked over the PCB for loose components. Everything looked new & shiny and secure. Then I wiggled the DFX board. It's connected to the main amp board by a crappy pin and socket connector that I've had issues with in the past on Arduinos. I pulled it apart and hit it with some De-oxit and cycled the pins in and out a dozen times. Played it for 30 minutes with no issues, so I put it back together. Played it for two hours straight after that with no dropouts. Problem solved!! My guess is that the supervisory microcontroller is talking to the DXF board and it takes the amp into mute mode if there are any problems.

If it holds up over the next month, I may pull it apart and replace the piggybacked setup with a single 680 k and do it right. Might replace the crappy pin & sockets with a 12-pin ribbon cable. And maybe set the bias.

DISCLAIMER #2 - I am not an amp technician. I am not an electrical engineer. I have a soldering iron, I can read schematics, and I understand Ohm's law. Do this at your own risk. Oh, and be careful opening up any tube amp - they run on really high voltage (~500 VDC) that can/will do nasty things to you if you don't know what you're doing.