General – Page 5

June 9, 2019December 16, 2019

Astronomy 101

Something we discovered after moving to Central Oregon is there is minimal light pollution. Even around Bend the night sky is spectacular. A couple of local facilities are open in the warmer months to help the public understand all those bright lights overhead.

The Nature Center at Sunriver has an Observatory open to the public Wednesday thru Saturday evenings and even boasts of the “largest collection of telescopes for public viewing.”

On the top of a mountain half an hour east of Bend is University of Oregon’s Pine Mountain Observatory. Primarily a research center, they do open up to the public on Friday and Saturday nights. There are fewer telescopes, but also fewer people clamoring for a peek at the heavens.

Why red lights? Unlike white lights, red lights don’t interfere with night vision.

We picked the first dark moon night of the season (they open from Memorial Day to end of September) and made the short journey to the top of Pine Mountain. This night the cumulous clouds offered an impressive distant lightning storm and brought some additional drama to the sunset.

The space station, a small white dot on right, midway on horizon.

In the end they obscured our view of the Milky Way and southern sky. It wasn’t the astrological viewing we’d hoped for.

However, there was a quick look at Mars and we watched the international space station streak across the evening sky. Did you realize it flies past us every 90 minutes? Who Knew?

March 7, 2019December 16, 2019

Creating content & not

If you came here to read a new post…thanks, we appreciate that you are taking time to look at our website and hope that you enjoy the content.

Normally, we would have a some new content up on Thursday, but not today. There is a pretty good reason though.

The weather. In this case, tons of snow and ice. It puts a damper on going places, new places. There are still our neighborhood walks,

Tip still gets his outside time and we made it to Sunriver a couple of times these past few weeks. What didn’t happen was any exploring, it’s just too much of a hassle driving.

We’ll be back at this again on Sunday and Thursday, but today we have nothing, sorry.

Checkout the photo essay on Painted hills … thanks for coming by.

December 30, 2018December 16, 2019

Getting started, again

Getting the web site/blog back into operation has been an ongoing task. We’re finally ready to start posting. A bit over a year ago, life shifted for us. We moved physically, quit the daily scheduled grind, and settled into a more leisurely pace. Nothing like quitting the day job to present a new prospective on what you’re going to do today.

We’ve chosen to rename the site “that’ll do” because with change comes the refocusing for what needs to get done. The content of these pages will hold the random wanderings of it’s authors and their BC.

For web search you tag and categorize the web site, but ‘lifestyle blog’ only starts to define content. So there is going to be lots of #lifestyle and even some #vanlife, #SHTF, #retirementlife, #flyfishing, #foodie and of course #bordercolliesrock but also some stuff we’ve not even thought of yet.

Initally posts will go up every Sunday and hold bits and pieces of that week’s explorations. Comments are accepted, words of encouragement are appreciated and we might even entertain the occasional criticisim. Here’s hoping a good time is had by all.

December 23, 2018December 16, 2019

Why blog

We are gearing up for the offical start of a weekly post on “That’ll Do,” and for us a re-set on blogging. So why, in the age of Facebook, Instagram and Squarespace, are we managing a hosted WordPress blog? Control mostly.

Web logs originally offered designers a space to store and share Internet stuff. This grew into personal journal sites and at one point even Apple and iWeb got into the game with blog formatting software. Social media has taken over the shared experience posts for most people. But there are lots of problems with those free social media sites, and control is only part of it.

Blog ‘etiquette’ places the most recent post at the top of a page with past entries scrolling underneath. Regardless of when you find us, all the material we have is here to read, or not. A blog lets us store and share anything we find of interest.

If you read the Welcome and About pages, you’ll see we are here with our personal journal, lots of images, as well as videos, recipes and updates. If that engages you… bookmark this page and come back.

We’ll be here.

JS & JQ

December 20, 2018January 5, 2020

A new season

Winter seems to have settled into Central Oregon bringing frosty mornings and snow covered walks. We’ve not lived in any kind of real winter since leaving Montana 30 years ago. It’s become a welcome change.

Near the start of 2013 and in the middle of an OR winter there was a post on this blog praising Pacific NW winter rains. The quote was “…This NW Winter wears green on even the most lifeless hillsides.” What a difference five years makes. Attitudes didn’t just flip overnight but were a gradual erosion like the drip of water off Doug Fir boughs. The winter of ’17 was brutally gray and wet without so much as a hint of sunshine for what seamed like months. Slogging through five months of that dismal damp contributed to why we took the opportunity of retirement to make a climate change as well.

The seasonal changes in Oregon’s high desert feel more like western Montana. Though some days don’t warm above freezing, they are more often filled with sunshine than the NW corner of the Treasure state we grew up in. This infusion of Vitamin D makes all the difference. I think there is way more blue sky winter days than Montana ever offered. And we don’t miss the westside’s rain forest look at all.