In the end i decided not to watch the eclipse, despite having marked it on the calendar, because i was just too damn tired. But at ~3am, i woke up anyway (damn that internal alarm clock, why can’t it wake me up at 7am?). So i went outside to see the coppery moon already in the umbra stage; just in time, too, because within minutes it was completely obscured by cloud.
Due to thunderbird and firefox having built-in update checker, i now keep them up to date instead of running 2-yr-old versions. So i updated thunderbird the other day and was met with some annoying changes. Firstly, they changed the icon set. They have a new folder icon which only sort of looks like a folder, because counter to any other folder icon in windows history, this one is on its side. it looks more like an oddly shaped brick. They kept the old application icon, good, but the new icon set is a totally different style; Grr — When alt-tabbing through windows, there is no similarity between thunderbird ‘main window’ icon and ‘compose mail’ icon. They also randomly changed email ‘flag’ column to a ’star’ column. How could that have been a necessary change? You don’t star things, you flag them!
I cannot fit a bobcat down into our back yard, nor do i have even a small scale vibrating screener for processing dirt… so i had to find another way. I started with a hand build screen, about 3ft x 4ft, on a couple of saw horses. This worked well, but i ended up with a pile of dirty gravel that needed to be ‘washed’ before it could be used on a path. Hosing it off worked a bit, not so well for large piles, so it made sense to wash it small batches at a time. This wastes a lot of water so i had to figure out what to do about that. Turns out i have a huge rectangular plastic tub (holds about 340 litres) which suited the job perfectly. After running enough dirt through the screen, the screen is moved on top of the tub where the gravel is hosed down. All water is stored up for later (watering plants?). gravel is then dumped into wheel barrow and moved to destination. At one point i also set up a big ramp so that a wheel barrow’s worth of dirt could be dumped directly into the screen. The entire process works well but there are definitely some stages that need to be automated 
I feel like i am finally making some headway again in the climbing department. At christmastime i was climbing 5.12 at the gym with confidence… but somehow since then i have felt like i not only plateaued but began to get worse - 5.12 seems to have been out of reach for a few months now. Last night was good though, bouldered some tough stuff, sailed up some 5.11 routes that had previously been giving me major troubles, and almost finished a 5.12. Maybe i was eating better before christmas, or was lighter or something, haha. Who knows? In any case, i feel good about the near future w.r.t. climbing.
saw Bourne Ultimatum yesterday… it was good, as good as the first two. However i was disappointed that they decided to film it using the ‘jiggly camera’ method again. With nothing to focus on my brain starts to hurt after a while. Honestly, humans have built in jitter-control so the world does not appear to jump around, filmmakers don’t have to go adding jitter to make things seem “more realistic”.