Chimney Light

And this... a 500 watt halogen flood. Lights up the chimney like a monument.

Mike Kluge, Jr. (M. Kluge & Sons Electrical) hooked it up for me. Top notch.

Barn Light

I've been eager to get this lamp over the shop door. It's a 16" gooseneck with galvanized cage and dusk-to-dawn photocell, made by Barn Light Electric Co. www.barnlightelectric.com.

My pals Gilbert and Lionel helped me hook it up. It's perfect!

Little Brother

Bouncing baby boy, just delivered today.

At the NCAAs in Spokane With Me Boys

Rough Pruning

Taking advantage of some beautiful, shirt-sleeve weather to start rough-pruning the vines, cutting back any dead wood and lopping suckers and any canes I know I won't use. I leave 5 to 6 buds on the remaining canes for now. Just before the buds pop in mid-April I'll go through and do a final prune down to 2 buds each. Double-pruning like this can delay bud-break by a week or so and possibly get you past a late frost that might do bud damage. (It actually worked perfectly last spring!)

Sometimes a finch will fly in, sit on a post a few feet away and trill at me: "Whatcha doing?" And I tell them.

Red-tailed hawks wheeling overhead piercing the quiet with sharp cries.

It's the best job in the vineyard.

Genie Industries' "Dreamliner"

Nice story in the Seattle Times this morning about Genie Industries in Moses Lake.

MOSES LAKE — There are no 18- or 20-story buildings in this Central Washington flatlands town.

To get 180 feet above ground level, you could board one of the Boeing 787s or Air Force C-17s that fly out of Grant County International Airport.

Or you could just hop onto the work platform of the SX-180 telescopic boom lift that Genie Industries builds here and ride straight up into the sky. The self-propelled boom, billed as the farthest-reaching such machine in the world, will smoothly carry you nearly twice as high as the airport’s control tower.

If Genie is Moses Lake’s Boeing — and in many ways it is — then the SX-180 is Genie’s Dreamliner.

The company’s engineers began designing the machine more than three years ago to leapfrog the competition’s 150-foot boom lift by a decisive margin. Innovations developed along the way are already being incorporated into other equipment painted in Genie’s signature baby-blue.

The first SX-180 will be delivered next month, say executives at Genie, which forms the Aerial Work Platforms unit of heavy-equipment builder Terex. Despite the price tag of $631,580, Genie says it has a full order book from around the globe and plans to build one SX-180 a day, four days a week.

The Moses Lake plant, which builds the SX-180 and other boom lifts, surged back to life with the economy’s rebound. It now employs 1,200 employees, up from 250 workers during the recession’s depths.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Mountain Views

The weather has been crystal clear. These photos were taken from Lot 28. The top of Mr. Rainier is visible above Travis & Brandy's house. (My camera didn't do it justice.) That's the jagged Stuart Range in the distance beyond our house.