Catharsis

 We did a 3-month test which showed 204 Bequerel/cubic metre of radon in our basement. The threshold for leisurely mitigation is 200. Argh!  And apparently, when selling a house, you must disclose any information you have about radon. So we got a radon mitigation system installed.  Carefree Properties professional installation It depressurizes under the foundation slab, and blows the radon-laden air it collects out the side of the house. A possible  side effect is sub-slab humidity will also get blown out, and stop rising through cracks into our basement. 'Way too early to tell, but this data from the crawlspace humidity sensor is encouraging: The crawlspace humidity dropped slightly when the radon system started, but rose higher than the baseline earlier in the day after I turned off the crawlspace dehumidifier.  But it isn't still rising.  The dehumidifer costs about $250 per year to run, and our experience is the equipment breaks every 2-3 years. The fan...

  Pretty sure this one is an airplane. It's too long to be a meteor trail. Often, they change course over our house. So maybe it is something falling from outer space. Space junk? We have had about two, good, clear 24 hour periods in the last month. One spanned the eclipse afternoon. Very lucky!

I travelled to Fredericton to be within the totality path of the April 8th solar eclipse. My first total solar eclipse. I'm still a bit overwrought, but, feel like it is the best thing I've ever seen.  I recorded my remembrance about an hour afterward as we were driving home:  Google drive MP3 file Currently still have some dysphoria. Will it be permanent?

 I've been playing with getting the excellent allsky software working. Tonight, it captured the image below. I've tweaked the contrast and saturation a bit, but there's definitely some colour there. It's captured some more nice images since, including a good meteor:

 I came across these tufts of hair while patrolling the yard. They seem rabbity, or non-domestic cat. I did see some rabbit tracks a few days ago, when we still had snow. Whatever they're from, I don't think said beast was having a good time. No signs of bloodshed nearby, though. Update:  I've had a few fellows opine that this is deer hair. A couple are hunters and have personal close-up experience. We had a pretty good windstorm yesterday. This root mass looks freshly lifted. Nice reflection of the dangling bit of ice: I believe this black spruce is freshly fallen. I did hear a big crack when the wind was howling. Life goes on:

 We're investigating improving our home heating situation. Electric heat pumps seem to be the way to go. They're rated using SEER (cooling efficiency) and HSPF (heating efficiency). You'd think efficiency would be dimensionless, or maybe in per cent , to move some significant digits into the integer part of the number. Consider my final grade in high school social studies. 67% means I understood two-thirds of the material, or 0.67 as a decimal number.  But no!  Heat pumps use electricity. The only unit anyone knows for electrical energy is kilowatt-hour. Heat pumps pump heat. The only unit anyone knows for heating and cooling is BTU. So both SER and HSPF are in units of BTU/W-h. watt-hour instead of kilowatt-hour, to get rid of those pesky digits to the right of the decimal point. A good heat pump has an HSPF of about 15. That has no intuitive value. Convert from BTU/W-h to just efficiency by multiplying by 0.29307 BTUs per watt-hour. An HSPF of 15 has an efficiency ...