About 1:30 PM I pull in my first and only fish of the weekend/

About 15 minutes later Bill Boston from Port Angeles wanders down the short trail and greets me with a thumbs up and asks if he can fish above me. Bill is a  guide on the Olympic Peninsula that specializes in Fly fishing, here is his website. There’s plenty of space so we settle in and start talking about snaggers, etiquette, fishing on the OP, and his raft for a few minutes when it happens.

Walking up the bank to switch out a lure my right foot sinks an inch or 2 into the mud and my left foot gives way. I go down with the left foot up in the air, the right foot stays planted. I hear that sound, the sound you never forget after the first time. I fall back, lift up my leg my foot is dangling. As I sit up my vision starts to get fuzzy and my ears start ringing. I tell Bill I think my ankle is broken.

Bill comes over, we gather ourselves and he lets me know we’re going to get out no problem. He reels up the line that’s still in the river, gathers my gear and starts helping me up the trail. It’s too slippery so I have to drag myself. When it gets too steep I changed over to crawling on my hands and knees. When I get stuck he helps me up over the roots. Luckily it was a short trip up-hill to the road, maybe 100ft of distance and 30ft of ascent.

He kicks the rocks/limbs out of the way and sets to work moving my truck, putting my gear and coho into his rig. We take a trip to the hospital and he guides my mom back to my truck.

Fractured ankle (fibula) with unstable mortise. No weight for 4-6 weeks. Then 2-3 months of a little weight. Swelling for up to a year.

Can’t help but be thankful it happened where it did with who it did. If I had to drag myself out from some other holes I was thinking of visiting on the Sol Duc it would have been really bad.

So thanks Bill, I owe you.

Surgery Aftermath

Snatched out of the Bogachiel.

To my amazement an actual person answered the phone after just 2 rings. In an age where EVERY company I deal with, both for work and in personal life, makes you navigate a phone menu maze it was astounding. I got my order confirmation number from the guy in under 1 minute. Just another reason Cabela’s is great and they’re earning a lifetime customer.

The last thing I want to do is maintain another service, WordPress/Drupal/sharepoint/blah+blah all mean backups and security lists. So I advocated a hosted solution where I would only be responsible for some initial setup and training then it would be up to content people to do the content stuff. Which is really ~90% of the battle. Good content can overcome poor design, bad technology and terrible graphics.

Jason @ Pignite web design in Chehalis/Lacey/Olympia had told me about Posterous a few weeks before so I went downstairs to pay him a visit. After about 1 hour of nerd talk I was confident Posterous would be perfect. ~2 hours later and I had purchased a domain name from godaddy, setup an account and started hacking on one of the prebuilt themes to fit our red/black/white logo/website branding and we’re done. Presented it to a group the next day and people were generally satisfied. And there you have http://thefarmstand.org .

We still need some graphics done up but otherwise it’s mostly complete. A few of my coworkers also took some initiative and finished the site out by adding a list of contributors with profile pictures and bios.

Update 2:

http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/washington/
(long winded and annoying, but has info on incentives)

http://solardat.uoregon.edu/NorthwestSolarResourceMaps.html
(PNW solar potential)

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/lacey-washington.html
(Solar path diagram- they’re kinda hard to read, but that’s basically the path the sun follows across the sky from equinox to equinox.)

Update 1:

http://www.windsun.com/ChargeControls/ChargeCont.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmb5MB9_TaM

Sun tracking solar panel w/ arduino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATnnMFO60y8

Arduino solar Tracker
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224541956/9

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-13.htm

http://www.discovercircuits.com/B/batt-chrg2.htm

Links:

How to make solar power generator

http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html

Solar generator diagram

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/solargen.htm

Optomize Panel w/ mirrors

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/panplus.htm

Harbor freight solar panel demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caeEyhJZnTs

pt2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N86eHRGRJwQ

Inverter:

http://www.lanescarproducts.com/225-watt-power-inverter-450-watt-peak.html

inverter faq:

http://www.donrowe.com/inverters/inverter_faq.html

What are amps, watts, volts and ohms?:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question501.htm

DC Cabling Calculator:

http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/cable-sizing-calculator.php

I honk my horn and go 2 feet out onto the shoulder, basically as far as I can go without hitting ditch. Check my rear view mirror to make sure I can safely slow down without someone running into me. Red car that was in the left lane had switched right to pass as well. Luckily they backed off fast enough and I corrected back onto the road.

I laid on the horn for the next 30 seconds adrenaline pumping. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a serious accident, also the only time I’ve ever felt like road raging.

This reaffirms my previous suspicions held when growing up that RV drivers on the peninsula are all noobs.