Looking for a new job, sick of corporate evil empires.

Hiking in the "mountains" (rolling hills) behind Floyd Toole's home in Agoura Hills, near the Pacific north of Los Angeles.

Enjoying an extended visit in perfect weather, 78F. Nice to get away from the lousy cold in the Northeast.

Heard a mockingbird and saw a tiny gekko on my hike. Got my heart rate up to 120, max for my age.

Alan

Max heart rate is a funny/interesting thing. I remember monitoring on an exercise bike in my 20s and getting to 165. Now I get to 145. Guess in another decade or two I'll be in the 120 club.

_A_ Mockingbird? What if _B_ Mockingbird sounded better?

Was the forest around his house a properly-controlled environment?

No, but the bullfrogs were placed midway on opposite sides of the pond.

did the gecko try selling you insurance.

I ran to the other side of the hill to the hear the B mockingbird!

Hard to set up a blind test in the wild (I crouched behind a bush and pretended not to look) so the results are worthless.

Enjoying a nice Pinot at the moment.

Cheers.

Update on the maple syrup efforts. <near disaster>

My friend decided, for some reason, that he would try boiling a smaller pot down on his kitchen stove while he did much bigger batches outside. When he finished outside, he forgot about the pot on the stove and went to bed.

He awoke in the night when the smoke detector went off. There was so much smoke when he tried to evac out down the stairs that he and his brother turned back around and waited out on an upper deck for the fire dept. They were rescued via ladders.

The good news is that nothing in the house truly went on fire. It was just smoke from when the sap boiled right down to a solid and went on fire in the pot. The pot was big and tall enough that the flames stayed contained to the pot.

The bad news is that his house and everything in it have to be professionally cleaned so they had to move out for a week or two.

Syrup production is delayed for the week but the important thing is that he still has his house and that no one got hurt.

Wow, that's terrible. I have some paranoia about stove fires (that my wife doesn't share), so that's a really scary read to me.

Oh my gosh!! Terrible! Good thinking getting out though - it's usually the smoke that gets you, not the fire.

Not to be Sandy Safety (as Alan Lofft) would say, but does a Crock Pot get hot enough to boil syrup? Wonder if that would be a good option for the homegamers.

Tiny cups of hot maple syrup while we went on hay wagon rides at the sugar shack - such a BIG part of my Canadian youth!