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.

Wine Tasting

The Chardonnay has been "cold conditioning" in the garage at around 50 degrees. I topped up the liquid in the airlocks this week and couldn't resist stealing some wine. Not bad! Ian and I had conducted an impromptu taste test six weeks ago and I thought there was a bit of a metallic off-taste. That is now gone. The wine has a very nice finish already, though the body is a little thin. That may improve somewhat with age, but I think the grapes could have benefitted from another 10 days on the vine and another degree Brix. We'll be more patient this year.

But it is certainly going to be drinkable. I'm planning on bottling sometime in February and uncorking during harvest 2014.

Carbon Fiber, BMW & Moses Lake

Li'l old Moses Lake had a cameo in this morning's Wall Street Journal, in a column reviewing the new all-electric BMW i3 sports car. Here's an excerpt which provides a bit of insight into the world of carbon-fiber manufacture:

The i3's enveloping body shell emerges rather miraculously from a highly automated process in a matter of hours, not days, with minimal hand finishing. BMW has invested heavily in this technology, joining with the U.S. firm SGL Group for a thread manufacturing facility in Moses Lake, Wash. Thread cost, apparently, is a key driver and BMW researchers have been saying since the Frankfurt auto show in 2011 that carbon-fiber used for aerospace was over-engineered for automotive applications and needlessly expensive. 

The promise is—setting aside for the moment, the profitability—that one day many kinds of cars could be made with these fuel-saving composites, which would move all sorts of needles in the right direction. In fact, the LifeDrive architecture isn't a new idea. GM spit-balled a fuel-cell concept car with a skateboard chassis in 2000. The positives of such a layout probably occur to every automotive engineer at some point. But BMW got there first. I predict that in the timelines of technological history, the i3 will prove to be a significant event.

For the full article, click here.

SGL recently began construction on a $100 million expansion of its Moses Lake facility, adding two new production lines and doubling the plant's overall production capability.