The Abandons - Netflix Series

The Abandons | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Feels a bit clumsy. Set in the 1850's, we've got two strong women opposing each other over the expansion of a silver mine in the fictional town of Angel's Ridge in Washington territory. On one side we have Lena Headey (famous for her role as Cerci Lannister in Game of Thrones) as Fiona Nolan the matriarch of a small cattle ranch. On the other we have Gillian Anderson (X Files) as Constance Van Ness, matriarch of the local silver mine. The silver mine built the town, but the mine isn't performing as well as they like and Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the primary investors, is threatening to pull out. Gillian/Constance's solution is to buy out four land owners to expand the mine, but those four owners have no interest in selling. Cornelius is famous for having gotten rich by building a railroad empire, but  there is no mention of mining in his Wikipedia article. However, like all uber-wealthy people he no doubt had his fingers in a number of pies. Early on in the show he visits Angel's Ridge, arriving in a fancy carriage pulled by four horses. Would he have actually made such a visit? Seems unlikely, but hey, it's TV.

Interesting bit. Fiona has made a group of orphans (The Abandons) into her 'family', most of them are teenagers. Our sympathies tend to lie with this group, Constance is obviously the evil capitalist. So I kind of expected the other land owners to side with The Abandons, but a couple of guys don't want to have anything to do with this mess and just want to be left alone. Can't you guys see what's coming down the pike? Are you blind? They're not blind, they're just not looking. I see that a lot in modern day politics.

Anyway, push comes to shove, and then the situation escalates and then it escalates more and we get a spectacular finish.

The show was filmed in Alberta, Canada, at the CL Western Town & Backlot.

7 episodes, about 40 minutes each.

Unlimited

2025 Apollo APBA Gold Cup Final Heat
H1 Unlimited

Nothing in the news was grabbing me this morning, my mind started wandering and Slo-Mo-Shun popped up, so I go looking for videos, and look what I found: an unlimited hydroplane race that happened last week just a stone's throw from where I live. (OK, it's 200 miles away, but compared to the world it's practically next door.)

I liked the original hydroplanes. They were wooden boats with massive V-12 engines and open cockpits. Times change and the cockpits are enclosed, the engines are gas turbines and the hulls are no doubt made of space-age plastic. But they are still faster than snot.

The race doesn't start until just after the six minute mark. There are videos of the old boats, but the ones I looked at were pretty grainy.

Port of Lewiston Idaho

Why There’s a Pacific Ocean Port in Idaho
Half as Interesting

Marine traffic, trains and pipelines are relatively invisible and mostly ignored, yet our civilization is totally dependent on them. Lewiston is like in the center of the proposed expanded state of Idaho.

So we have a serious method for getting the grain down the river to the ocean from Lewiston, but how do we get all that grain to Lewiston? So I started thinking about combines and how many you would need and I figured we need some videos. There are bunch of modern ones. Many of them are very long. Here's a short modern one and a couple about the old days. I thought the 20 mule team was a big operation. That's nothing compared to these guys.

Wheat Harvest on the Palouse
BJ Swanson

24 million bushels are exported out of Lewiston each year. An acre of ground can produce about 50 bushels of wheat, so you would need 480 thousand acres, which translates into 750 square miles of land. If you are driving a combine with a cutter head width of 15 feet and you are traveling at 4 miles per hour, if will take 66,000 hours to harvest all that wheat. Figure you got a month to get it all cut, and you're working 24 hour days, you're going to need 100 combines to get it all cut. And you probably are not going to have a month, you might have two weeks, and 24 hours a day is wishful thinking, so more likely you are going to need 500 combines. Make allowances for problems as the necessity to get the wheat harvested come hell of high water, you are probably going to want double that number.

To Till a Field: Man and Machine in the Palouse
Washington State University Libraries' Films

Harvesting Wheat with a 33-Mule Team
Fort Walla Walla Museum

Palouse Prairie in the Pacific Northwest

The Palouse:

The Palouse is a distinct geographic region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of north central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and, by some definitions, parts of northeast Oregon. It is a major agricultural area, primarily producing wheat and legumes. Situated about 160 miles (260 km) north of the Oregon Trail, the region experienced rapid growth in the late 19th century.

The Palouse is home to two land-grant universities: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. Just eight miles (13 km) apart, both schools opened in the early 1890s.

 

Piper Cub

Sunset over the Palouse in the J3 Cub

Just a cool photo of a small plane in an idyllic setting. Except - what the heck is a Palouse? Sounds like a jailhouse buddy.

The Palouse

The Palouse is a range of fertile ground north of the Snake River and south of Spokane.

Willamette Falls, Locks & Paper Mill

View of the four lock system from the downstream end - U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Willamette Falls is on the Willamette River:

The Willamette River is a major tributary of the Columbia River, accounting for 12 to 15 percent of the Columbia's flow. The Willamette's main stem is 187 miles long, lying entirely in northwestern Oregon in the United States. Flowing northward between the Oregon Coast Range and the Cascade Range, the river and its tributaries form the Willamette Valley, a basin that contains two-thirds of Oregon's population, including the state capital, Salem, and the state's largest city, Portland, which surrounds the Willamette's mouth at the Columbia.

Willamette Falls is located at the southern end of the Portland metropolitan area.

Wikipedia gives us some background:

The Willamette Falls Locks are a lock system on the Willamette River in the U.S. state of Oregon. Opened in 1873 and closed since 2011, they allowed boat traffic on the Willamette to navigate beyond Willamette Falls and the T.W. Sullivan Dam.

Business Tribune tells us The Corps of Engineers are planning on making some 'repairs' to the locks before transferring ownership to the newly constituted Willamette Falls Locks Authority.

Willamette Falls (top left) and Locks (along the right hand side)

The place has been a fixture of the landscape and a fixture in my mind, but not much happens there, it just sits there, letting all that water just flow on by.

Welcome to Willamette Falls Paper
Willamette Falls Paper Company

The big industrial looking place on the island between the locks and river proper is a paper mill. It was closed several years ago, but then reopened a few years later. Now they make paper from pulp that comes from a pulp mill up in Washington state. That pulp is made from wheat straw. The pulp is shipped in bales and they add water before they feed it into the paper making machines. At full capacity, the mill could produce 260,000 tons of paper per year. To haul that much pulp with trucks they would need a bunch, like 50 trucks a day. There is a rail line, but it is on the other side of the river. 

Columbia Pulp plant in Lyons Ferry near Starbuck

The pulp plant is between a rail line and the Snake River, so their product could be shipped by truck, rail or barge. However, I don't see any docking facilities at the Willamette Paper Plant.

Interstate Bridge

The aging Interstate Bridge between Oregon and Washington.
Courtesy photo: Oregon Department of Transportation

The Interstate Bridge is a pair of nearly identical steel vertical-lift bridges that carry Interstate 5 traffic over the Columbia River between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon in the United States.

The bridge opened to traffic in 1917 as a single bridge carrying two-way traffic. A second, twin bridge opened in 1958 with each bridge carrying one-way traffic. As of 2006, the bridge pair handles around 130,000 vehicles daily. The 3,500 foot long bridge carries traffic over three northbound lanes and three southbound lanes. - excerpt from Wikipedia

24 hours times 60 minutes per hour times 6 lanes equals 8,640 lane-minutes per day. 130,000 vehicles divided by 8,640 comes to 4 cars per minute, or one every 15 seconds. That would imply smooth sailing, but that is only if the traffic was evenly distributed over the course of the day, but of course it isn't. During rush hour morning and evening it is freaking jammed up and backed for miles. Pity the poor sods who spend hours of their life creeping and crawling over this aging erector set.

The Glenn L. Jackson Memorial Bridge, opened in 1982, is another big bridge about six miles upstream (east) of the Interstate Bridge.

Business Tribune is talking about a plan to replace the Interstate Bridge. The Feds have allocated a boat load of money to this project, but Washington and Oregon have to get their act together and get a plan in motion if they want to make use of this money. You might think this would be a straight-forward engineering project, but this is Portland, land of the morons, so we have this little bit of crap right in the middle of the discussion:

We learned last month that the program anticipates it will require approximately $6 billion to achieve equitable and climate-conscious multimodal infrastructure through the program corridor.

This kind of bullshit practically guarantees that the time to completion will double and the cost will balloon by a factor of ten, but hey, that's okay because the Feds are picking up the bulk of it, right?

Portland and Vancouver are at opposite ends of the bridge. Portland is in Oregon and Vancouver is in Washington and these two states have radically different tax structures. Oregon has income tax but no sales tax. Washington has sales tax but no income tax. So we have a bunch of people who live in Vancouver but work and shop in Portland. A change in tax laws might eventually result in a change in traffic patterns, but I doubt that will ever happen. Both states are too entrenched in their ways.

Lou - Movie

Lou | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Single mother living on Orcas Island with a taciturn older woman for a landlord and neighbor. The landlord goes by the name of Lou. Why is mom single? Her husband done got blowed up somewhere in the Middle East, or did he? Silly audience member, or course he didn't, and now this psycho is back to collect his daughter and reunite his family, which happens to include his mother. Of course, he wants to put his own special twist on it - they are all going to reunited in a glorious fireball. And in case you haven't figured it out yet, Lou, the landlord and neighbor is also the psycho's mother.

The two women leads, Hannah, the mother, and Lou are a couple of tough cookies. Lou does an excellent job of taking out a couple of psycho's henchmen with nothing more that the kinds of things you find lying around in an old fishing shack. It's especially impressive given that Lou is over 60 years old. The fight scenes were just on the edge of believable. I suppose it depends on whether you believe that old age and and treachery can beat youth and skill.

This movie is set in the 80's - Ronald Reagan appears on TV briefly, which makes it plausible that Lou was in Iran when the Shah was overthrown. My Aunt Milly was there around that time. Could this movie be about my Aunt? Somehow I doubt it. She never struck me as the knife wielding assassin type. Then again, it's always the quiet ones you need to look out for.

Parked

Airliners parked at Grant County International Airport

What makes this photo special is Grant County International Airport is a former SAC airbase in Moses Lake Washington. We've been there before.

Pic of the Day

A monster pile of tumbleweeds forced a 10-hour closure of State Route 240 in Eastern Washington, trapping several drivers before they could be freed by WSDOT workers. Trooper Chris Thorson shared this photo from the scene on Twitter.

Via The Oregonian

Des Moines, Washington

Anthony's HomePort in Des Moines

Went up to Seattle to visit an old friend who had come from Dallas to visit family. Saves us having to fly to Texas, so good. Went to lunch at Anthony's in Des Moines. Who knew there was a Des Moines in Washington? Not me, the only one I had ever heard of is the big one in Iowa.

Salty's in Redondo Beach

After lunch we stopped for happy hour at Salty's in Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach? That name sounds familiar.  Well, yes it should be familiar, it's also the name of a place in southern California.

Afterward we are trying to find our way back, but the smart phones are giving the girls fits. We end up on Marine View Drive where I spied this imposing edifice.

Completed in 1926 as a retirement community for members of Washington’s Masonic Society, the Masonic Home of Washington in Des Moines serves as a showcase for Masonry in Washington State. Designed by the architectural firm of Heath, Gove, and Bell, the building features box beam ceilings, hand carved woodwork, stained glass, and terrazzo floors throughout. The same architectural firm designed Stadium High School in Tacoma and Paradise Inn at Mt. Rainier, both of which are listed on the National Historic Register of Historic Places. - Historic Seattle

The drive to Seattle and back was quick and easy, three hours each way, even with a stop for coffee. Traffic was very smooth, no big traffic jams due to construction like our previous trips to Seattle. There is still a bunch of construction going on around Tacoma which means the roads are a little rough, but traffic was flowing. There was a little hiccup when somebody's smart phone tried to direct us to a previously agreed upon rendezvous, not the new one. We ended up in downtown Tacoma and with traffic and construction we ended up spending about five minutes getting turned around. Stupid smart phone.

DDI: Diverging Diamond Interchange

Diverging Diamond Interchange comes to Washington State
Sometimes it seems like highway designers are running wild. The roadways may not be any wider, but the space surrounding them is growing. What used to take a couple of acres now takes 10 or 20 or 30. Problem is that the highway departments are charged with making roads safer, but we are still operating our motor vehicles with version 1.0 humans, so designers are responding with larger run-out areas. Being as medical care for even minor injuries can run into tens of thousands of dollars, it makes a certain amount of sense to set aside these wide open areas around these intersections. Sliding through the grass off the side of the road may scuff the paint on your car, but you are unlikely to be injured.
     I see one problem with this DDI design and that is that you can only have traffic flowing on the overpass in one direction at a time. This would only be a problem if most of your traffic was simply crossing the Interstate. If most of it is either getting on or off the Interstate, then it might work okay, though I suspect traffic light wait times are going to be longer. I guess we just have to have faith that the traffic engineers know what they are doing.

Jackson School Road Roundabout Plan

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Washington County has started construction on a roundabout to deal with, you guessed it, increased traffic coming from NW Scotch Church Road. Seems all the jobs are in Portland, but nobody wants to pay Portland rents, so they live out in the boonies and commute. Going this way is about 3/4 of a mile shorter than taking Glencoe Road north to North Plains. A simpler solution would have been to just close Scotch Church Road, but that would be moving backwards I suppose, and we can't be having that.

Moses Lake, Part 2

Keechelus Lake, Snoqualmie Pass area.  I-90 in the foreground.

I've started reading SEVENEVES by Neal Stephenson and we find ourselves driving east on Interstate 90 in Washington State, heading over Snoqualmie Pass. Hey! I was just there. I'll bet Neal was inspired by my blog post. Not. Still, it was pretty cool to be reading about a place I had just been.

Central Washington, Snoqualmie Pass (upper left) to Moses Lake (right center)
Yakima (bottom center)

Doob, the character driving, is headed to Moses Lake. Me, I turned south at Ellensberg heading for Yakima. Doob is headed to Moses Lake because there is an enormous airport there, a relic left over from the cold war. 

Big Hangar at Grant County International Airport
That gray strip cutting across the upper part of the picture is the runway

The runway is more than two miles long, and according to Wikipedia, it has one gigantic hangar that the Strategic Air Command used to house eight B-52's. The hangar has been taken over by a company that manufactures high lift work platforms. This is the only decent photo I could find of the place.

The airport is being used mostly for testing now, but occasionally it comes in handy for moving things.

Moses Lake

Antonov-225

Back in May of 2012 the six-engine Antonov An-225 Mriya flew into the airport at Moses Lake, Washington, to deliver two mammoth winches destined for the Alaskan oil fields. While the Antonov could have landed at Sea-Tac International Airport, it was too large to park. At Sea-Tac, there was no area to put the plane once it landed. From a story in the Puget Sound Business Journal

Another case of an Antonov landing at an old SAC airbase.

Orcas Island

East Sound, Orcas Island

My wife and I drove up to Orcas Island for a couple of days last week. We think it's only the third time we have been away from the kids since we started this family. We stayed at the Kangaroo House B & B. We had a good time doing nothing, reading mysteries, eating at restaurants, sleeping. No computer, no internet. We did go for a hike in Moran State Park. We originally planned to take a walk around the lake, but I saw this trail heading up the hill and said "let's take this one". We climbed until it started heading back down. I was already pretty tired and I didn't want to go someplace that I was going to have to climb out of to get back, so we decided to turn back. We climbed maybe 500 feet in about 45 minutes. It wore me out.

Update September 2022 replace defunct Picasa album with photo and link.