Category Archives: Family-Friends-Home

Post related to our family and close friends and projects around the house.

2013_09_05 (Thu) A Picture Perfect Day

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Today was a picture perfect day in more ways than one.  We are in the middle of one of those weather spells that makes Michigan the perfect place to be; highs approaching 70, lows around 50, light breezes, and clear, blue skies.  It was also the day we decided to start putting paintings and photographs back up on the walls of our new-to-us house.  It’s an easy job to put off because it is slightly tedious work requiring careful measuring, trips up and down ladders, putting pencil marks on walls we paid someone to patch and paint just 7 months ago, poking holes in them with screws and nails, getting the piece actually hung, and hoping it ended up were you intended for it to be.  We got 13 paintings hung, and a number of others positioned where we think they are going to hang.  Not only does it make the house start to feel a lot more like home, it finally started clearing the art clutter out of the library, opening up the possibility of finishing other unpacking and shelving projects that the stacked artwork was blocking.

Today was also a day for delving a little deeper into digital image processing software.  Although our website only has a few pages, and I have only been doing this blog since early June (2013), I was surprised to find out from Scott at QTH.com that our WordPress installation had already expanded to 1 Gb of disk space.  While I don’t necessarily consider 1 Gb to be a lot of data, web-hosting companies do keep an eye how much resource you use, and will put caps on it and/or raise the monthly price.  Any company that tells you they will give you unlimited everything for $2 /month is probably practicing the virtual reality version of bait-and-switch.  Getting to that level in only 2 months seemed to indicate that I needed to do something different going forward, besides simply paying for more disk space.

The culprit, of course, was all of the photographs I have uploaded as part of the blog entries.  I tend to shoot high resolution JPEGs, as they are usable for a variety of things just as they come from the camera.  The images are 3,872 x 2,592 pixels (10 Mpixel sensor) and roughly 10 Mb files in raw mode.  The JPEG files are typically between 2.5 – 3.5 Mb each.  That’s a substantial compression compared to raw format, but 300 of those and you’ve got yourself a gigabyte of photo data.  Hmmm, that sounds familiar.  While 300 photos may sound like a lot, it’s only five per day for two months.  I haven’t gone back to check, but I would not be surprised if that is what I have averaged.

What I find interesting is that WordPress sizes these images to 300 x 200 pixels when I insert them into a blog.  That’s a reduction factor of approximately 167, suggesting a file size of approximately 20 Kb.  Kate de Fuccio, who I mentioned in a recent blog post, told me that she can click on the images in the blog and get the full resolution photos.  But if my intent is to only make them big enough to view in the blog, it doesn’t serve any purpose to have the hi-res files available.  So, what to do?  Resize before uploading, of course.  The two default Microsoft programs for manipulating images on a Windows XP Pro / Office 2007 platform are Microsoft Image Composer and Paint.  They can do a lot of things, but resizing images easily (or at all) is not one of them.

Lou Petkus, K9LU, of the SKP Photographers BOF had mentioned at a BOF meeting back in July that he generally shoots in raw mode and uses a couple of different free programs for a variety of post-processing tasks.  We are attending a SKP Photographers BOF photography workshop/rally in October, organized by Lou, and the schedule of events indicates that there will be a session on post-processing software for digital images.  I contacted Lou to find out what programs he will be discussing and to ask about re-sizing my photos prior to uploading them to WordPress.  The programs he will be discussing are Faststone Image Viewer and Photoscape.  He suggested I use Faststone to re-size and then sharpen the images (in that order) before uploading them.  I downloaded the programs successfully and have explored Faststone Image Viewer a little bit.  I will see how well it works the next time I post images.

 

2013_09_01-04 Driveway Success, Raspberries, And Old Friends

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Sunday September 1st found us at our son and daughter-in-law’s house for a Labor Day family pot luck along with our daughter, son-in-law, and step-grand-daughter.  Grand-daughter Madeline handled the crowd pretty well, but still was still wary of Grandpa Bruce, so I had to be content with mutual admiration from a distance.  She is starting to crawl and pull herself up to a standing position, and is fascinated by books, especially ones she can try to eat.

We awoke Monday morning (Labor Day) to overcast skies and the threat of rain.  We had planned to drive to Middleton Berry Farm near Ortonville to pick raspberries and decided to go in spite of the weather.  Ed and Betty, our RV friends, were working/staying there and we had said we would try to stop by.  The rain never materialized and the overcast skies made the picking experience more pleasant.

Neither of us had ever picked raspberries, or anything else other than apples, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.  We enjoyed the experience, collecting 12 pints of fruit between us.  At $4.00/pint it seemed expensive until we checked raspberry prices at the grocery store and Door-to-Door Organics and saw them ranging from $5 – $6 for 6 ounces.  We didn’t weigh our pints, but Linda estimated that it would take three of the 6 ounce contains to match one of our pints.

It seemed appropriate that we were laboring on Labor Day, even though this is the one day of the year that labor typically doesn’t labor, but rather relaxes and celebrates importance those who labor and the work they do.  Although we have been sourcing fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers markets when we can, it was very satisfying to personally harvest even a small portion of our own food from a living plant.  It also gave us an appreciation for those who do this kind of work for a living.  As we were checking out we also bought a fresh pepper and tomato.

When we got back to the house Linda washed, dried, and froze all put three of the pints of raspberries.  With that task initiated, we turned our attention to the pull-through driveway.  It had not rained for the past several days, and it was time for the BIG TEST.  We unplugged the electrical power from the bus, pulled the chocks, fired it up, and backed it out of the driveway and down the street, positioning it to drive in to the pull-through driveway.  Linda watched the tires as I drove in, and seeing nothing more than tread marks I brought in, across the pad, and out the other side, back on to the concrete driveway.  Success!!!

We inspected the pull-through driveway.  In some places there was no evidence that the bus had just been there, in others only tread marks, and in a few spots a slight channel of not more than 0.5 inches.  Phil had told me previously that compaction of up to 1 inch might be possible but would indicate that the driveway was finally locking together, so we were very pleased with the result.  I pulled the bus out and around again, but this time I tried to go back and forth over slightly different paths on the approach and then again on the parking pad area.  I did not pull the bus all the way this time, but got it lined up on the pad with Linda’s help and parked it with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house.

I e-mailed Phil Jarrell (Precision Grading) to give him the good news.  Phil has been an absolutely outstanding guy to work with, standing behind his work, and doing what was needed to fix what turned out to be a problem with the load of 21AA road gravel used in the project.  Besides building this pull-through driveway for us, he dug up and repaired our septic tanks and regarded an area in the back yard to help move water away from the area outside out basement doorwall.  We plan to eventually put up a bus barn to house the motorhome, and we plan to have Phil do the site prep, driveway(s), and final grading.

Linda spent Tuesday baby-sitting Madeline while I worked around the house, trying to clean up and arrange the ham shack/office and get all of the technology hooked up and working.  I made good progress, but I didn’t get it done.  It’s never done.  I took time out to have a long chat with my best friend from high school.  J. C. has lived in Olympia, Washington for years with his wife, Julie and their three girls, but we have managed to stay in touch.  He was my best man at our wedding and I was his best man at theirs.  In the early years we corresponded by letter with an occasional phone call, but that was in the days before cell phones and “unlimited local and long distance” plans.  Eventually it was by e-mail.  We tried instant messaging, but it doesn’t work well for me.  We’ve even Skyped once or twice, but it requires broadband to work well, and we don’t have that at the new house.  We’ve even had an occasional but all-too-rare face-to-face visit.  I drove to Ypsilanti to meet up with Linda and our good friend Kate de Fuccio for dinner.  Kate is a former colleague from my educational service agency days, the graphics designer for the agency and a very talented photographer.  She is also a kindred spirit traveler, excellent researcher, and perhaps the most considerate person I know.  We don’t see her enough.

Kate had suggested Nirmal Indian Cuisine in Ypsilanti and Linda had checked out their menu online, which has become standard practice for us.  Nirmal has several vegan dishes, and others that can be made vegan, so we agreed to give it a try.  They also serve chicken, but their specialty appears to be goat.  They place is a bit “preachy” about the health benefits of Indian food, but the way they do it is kind of innocently cute and we enjoyed that aspect of the place; it’s true after all, and we are sympathetic to the sentiment.  Most importantly, the food was excellent, and the staff was very attentive.  We had a leisurely dinner which was fine with us as it gave us lots of time to talk.  We adjourned to the Starbucks just up the street and continued our conversation.

Wednesday was errand day for us.  We picked out stain and paint colors for the rear deck, which Jim Pipoly is going to redo later this month.  Jim did all of the painting on our old house and new house.  He’s the only guy we use, and friends and family use him too.  When you find a good contractor you stick with them.  We dropped off old prescription and over-the-counter drugs at the Livingston County jail, where they have a special “no questions asked” collection barrel.  The Howell Recycling Center is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so we stopped there.  We don’t have curbside recycling like we did in Farmington Hills.  We’ve been recycling for so long that it doesn’t feel right to throw things in the trash that can be recycled so we gladly paid the $22 annual membership fee.  We picked up some drawer cabinets for the office, a free-standing cabinet for the basement bathroom (which has no other storage), and unpacked the wine refrigerator and plugged it in.  We always seem to have just enough bottles of wine that they can’t all go in the regular refrigerator so they end up in the pantry where they take up space we need for other things.  They are not cooled, which is bad for storage, but even worse in terms of limiting our choices when we decide we want to open a bottle.  It’s one of those things I’ve always wanted and it just wasn’t that expensive.  I am now trying to figure out where the popcorn machine will go in the basement rec room.  After dinner Linda continued to work on finding an RV park/campground where we can meet up with her brother and his wife in October and I worked on configuring our e-mail SpamExperts and updating this blog.

 

2013_08_31 (Sat) Our New Online Home

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From mid-afternoon on Thursday 29th through late evening on Saturday the 31st I was occupied with moving our domain {website/blog and e-mail} to a new web-hosting service.  That wasn’t all we did, of course, but the process involved a lot of back and forth and everything else seemed to fit in around it.

Like many things in our modern world, we tend to take our communications technology for granted, after all, most of the time it just works.  But just like losing power to your refrigerator, you don’t really understand just how dependent you are on technology until it doesn’t work.  Unlike a refrigerator, which either works or it doesn’t (and it’s usually obvious which condition it is in), our e-mail failure was more subtle.  We continued to receive e-mails from some recipients if they originated them (but not always) and recipients typically received e-mails that we originated (but not always).  But we did not receive replies to e-mails that we sent.  What was particularly strange was that the person sending the reply did not get a bounce-back or other error, so to them it looked like they had sent the reply successfully.  We didn’t know if they got the original message, and they assumed we got the reply.

I do not know what went wrong with our e-mail accounts at iPage, and never will, but they were definitely malfunctioning and iPage was unable to fix the problem and ultimately unwilling to move it to a sufficiently high level of technical support to figure it out.  I have nothing against overseas technical support as long as it is technically competent and customer supportive.  In my support ticket interactions with iPage I never corresponded with the same person twice.  The problem with the “big name” hosting services is the same as a lot of mutual funds.  Huh?  Way too much time and money put into marketing, way too little into a high quality, reliable offering.  It’s a numbers game, and my number was 1, as in, I am only one customer.  We will almost certainly lose money in this transition by not getting an adequate refund from iPage, but one of the secrets to life is knowing when to take your losses and being willing to do so and move on.  In the end we had no choice but to move our domain.

In the two weeks prior to reaching that decision I had two completely independent recommendations for QTH.com as a web-hosting service.  “QTH” is ham radio lingo for “location” and Scott Neader, the guy behind QTH.com, has amateur radio call sign KA9FOX.  The company is located in Wisconsin, and so is the technical support.  In the move from iPage to QTH I exchanged numerous e-mails with Scott, who personally handled much of the set up and transfer.  Moving our WordPress installation (website/blog) turned out to be particularly tricky because of how iPage had it installed.  I would not have been able to do it by myself, but Scott got it done.  By 8:00 PM EDT Saturday evening I had confirmed, as best I could, that everything was working and began sending out e-mails to a selective group of recipients asking for replies to validate the correct functioning of our accounts.  With the exception of a couple of e-mails that got blocked as SPAM (one in each direction) all of our e-mails were received and successfully replied to.

Chuck Spera, a fellow H3-40 owner in our area, found a place locally to make a screen for the awning style window in the main entrance door of his coach.  I drove down to his bus garage in Novi and borrowed it to check the fit in our coach.  It was good, so we are getting two of them.  It’s a custom fabricated part, and it’s easier to get a spare up front.  These are not rectangular screens; they have five sides and are basically trapezoids (top and bottom parallel) with one upper corner cut off to make the 5th side.  The local shop made and checked a template in Chuck’s coach before fabricating the actual screen.  They used a sturdy aluminum channel, and in spite of having five joints, the frame does not flex very much.  This is a significant improvement over the flimsy, poor-fitting we have lived with for the last three years.

I finished editing drafts of two more articles for Bus Conversions Magazine, selecting/inserting the photographs and writing captions for them, and uploaded them to my Dropbox account.  We enjoyed a lively breakfast with our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club as we do most Saturdays.  We are trying to get ready for a house warming in early October, so we continued to unpacking boxes and find places for things.  We are managing to identify a few things for disposal, recycling, or donation, but that continues to be a challenge for me, which is one of the reasons we are not full-time RVers.

2013_08_29Av01 (Thu) Moving Our Domain

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Ed & Betty’s Tiffin Phaeton in our pull-through driveway.

Ed & Betty’s Tiffin Phaeton in our pull-through driveway.

Ed and Betty joined us for breakfast and we continued our lively conversation from the prior evening.  Around 10 AM they turned their attention to preparing for departure.  An important piece of RVing etiquette is to leave folks alone when they are making or breaking camp.  Every RVer (who has used their rig more than a couple of times) has developed routines for each of these situations.  Engaging them in conversation during these routines is a distraction that creates a risk that something will be overlooked.  It’s dangerous and it’s rude, and seasoned RVers simply don’t do it.

The view from our front door.

The view from our front door.

 

With their preparations finished, we talked a bit more about future plans and when they might be back this way.  They wanted some pictures of themselves in front of their coach, and so did we, so we helped each other out with that.

 

 

Ed & Betty Burns in front of their motorhome.

Ed & Betty Burns in front of their motorhome.

 

Because our bus is in our garage driveway blocking the exit from our pull-through driveway, I had to have Ed back their motorhome out.  As the name implies, the pull-through driveway wasn’t really designed for backing a 40 vehicle out the way it came in.  The entrance to the driveway is at an angle to the road that makes it easy to get in when coming towards our house from the main road.  It’s designed so that we can pull out going forward onto the concrete driveway and make the turns needed to get us pointed back out towards the main road.

 

 

Us in front of our bus.

Us in front of our bus.

 

Because of this design, I had to have Ed make a “12-point turn”, jockeying their coach forward and backward until I could get the front end clear to pull forward onto the road while being careful not to have his tires get off the edge of the driveway or have his rear end hit the neighbor’s mailbox.  We managed to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time with minimal damage to the approach portion of the driveway, which wasn’t designed to have a heavy vehicle sit in one place and turn its steering tires.  This part of the driveway was still very wet from the heavy rains we had two nights ago, and we ended up with deeper ruts than I had hoped, but not enough to get them stuck.

With the coach extracted from the driveway, Ed got it parallel to, and near, the edge of the road and Betty brought the car up.  Again, we left them alone to go through their toad hookup routine.  More hugs and they were on their way around 11:30 AM.  If things work out as planned we will see them again on Sunday or Monday when we hope to visit the Middleton Berry Farm and pick some fresh raspberries.

My plan for the rest of my day is to sign up with our new registrar/hosting service at QTH.com.  QTH.com is owned and operated by fellow amateur radio operator Scott Neader, KA9FOX.  (QTH is ham radio shorthand for “location, destination, or home base”, as in “I just arrived at my QTH”, so it’s a clever name for a hosting service.)  The process should be relatively smooth, but there may be a window of time during which our website/blog URL and e-mail addresses are unavailable.  My plan is to position that window near mid-night this evening.  Since there is always the possibility of something going wrong, or it just taking longer to complete the switch, I am ending this post here around mid-afternoon while I know I still have access to the website.  I will do a second post when the transition is complete and everything is working correctly again.

 

2013_08_27-28 Babysitting And Our First RV Visitors

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Linda has signed up to babysit our youngest grand-daughter, Madeline, on Mondays so our son and daughter-in-law can attend to their professorial duties at the University of Michigan.  (Our step-grand-daughter, Katie, is 16 and does not need a sitter.)  However, Linda sat on Saturday the 17th.  This week she sat on Tuesday because of our Monday dental appointments.  Next week she is going to sit on Tuesday because Monday is Labor Day.  Like I said, she is babysitting on Mondays.

We both left the house early, Linda for Ann Arbor in rush hour traffic and me for Dearborn in rush hour traffic.  As retired people we are not supposed to be in rush hour traffic; it tends to spoil that special, relaxed mood that is the hallmark of the happily retired.  Morning rush hour traffic headed south on US-23 into Ann Arbor is always bad.  Morning rush hour traffic headed into the northwest suburbs of Detroit on I-96 is always worse.  I was late for my 9 AM dental appointment, but only about 10 minutes.  I won’t be making any more 9 AM appointments in that part of town.

When I was done at the dentist in west Dearborn I headed for Ann Arbor, looking forward to spending some quality time with my grand-daughter.  As I was nearing Ann Arbor I got a call from W. W. Williams in, where else, east Dearborn, letting me know that my special order part was in.  Life really is all about timing.  I continued my journey to babyland.  When I walked in the front door, Madeline was sitting up in the middle of the living room playing with Grandma Linda.  She turned, looked at me, and started crying.  You can’t take anything an 8-month old does personally, but it wasn’t quite the reception I was hoping for.  She got herself all worked up.  Linda tried feeding her, but she was not to be consoled, so we took her for a walk in her very spiffy stroller.

We peeled back the sunshade so she could turn her head and look up at me, which she did frequently.  She stayed calm for the whole ride, and even babbled for a while, apparently satisfied that I was at least doing something useful.  Or perhaps I am less scary when viewed upside down?  As soon as we got back to the house, however, she got herself all upset again.  Having no other plans for the afternoon, I made my exit and drove back to Dearborn to get the special order part for our bus.  Linda told me later that Madeline settled down as soon as I left and had a nice lunch.  It won’t always be that way, of course, and it’s not a contest to see who wins.  Eight month olds are spontaneous, irrational beings, and you just have to accept that and work with it as best you can.  That’s why she has parents, aunts, and grandmothers.

By the time Phil was done working on the driveway on Monday evening he had mixed 14 tons (yes, that’s 30,800 pounds) of sandy silt into and on top of the 6 inches of 21AA road gravel that forms the top layer of the pull-through driveway.  What we really needed at that point was a good, soaking rain and starting late Tuesday evening and overnight into Wednesday we got our wish.  The rain helps the fine particles work their way down into the gravel and lock it together to form a dense mass that will not spread out when driven on, even by a heavy vehicle.  At least that’s the theory.  I drove on it again with the car Wednesday morning and it seemed to be packed pretty hard.

The first test of the pull-through driveway came when the UPS truck showed up with our Centramatic dynamic wheel balancers for the bus.  He pulled the truck right up on the pull-through driveway and backed it out with no difficulty.  That was a good omen.  The next test came when Ed & Betty arrived around 1:30 PM in their Tiffin Phaeton motorhome.  They unhooked their car just after pulling onto our street as I needed them to be able to maneuver the RV to get it parked.  They were also going to have to back out when they left and you cannot do that with a car attached to the rear end of the rig.  I met them at the end of the street, led them to our house, and got them positioned to turn into the pull-through driveway.  Betty drove their car and parked it in our regular driveway.  Ed gave me one of their walkie-talkies and I guided him in to the pull-through driveway with voice and hand signals.  Their motorhome tires did not even leave visible tracks!  Finally, success.  Their rig has 6 tires and weights about 33,000 pounds, so the weight on each tire that is similar to our bus, except that our front tires carry a couple of extra thousand pounds each.  Once they were parked and settled they came inside and we quartered a small, round watermelon and had that as a light lunch/snack.

We had the pull-through driveway built for our own use as a convenient place to park the coach while we load/unload it.  We installed an electrical outlet so that we could also run the refrigerator and maintain the batteries while it was parked there.  We plan to eventually have a “bus barn” to store it in, but for now the pull-through drive is where it will live when we are home.  That meant that we might also want to run the air conditioners while it was parked, so we installed a full “50A” RV electrical service since that is what our coach is designed for.  We also had in mind, however, that it would be nice to have RV friends be able to come for a visit and have a level place to park with some nice shade and decent electrical service.  We also have water available, but we do not currently have a way for folks to dump their holding tanks.  We eventually hope to be able to dump ours using a macerator pump connected by a garden hose (reserved for that use only) to a fitting on the first septic tank.  We can’t use a normal gravity drain hose because we have to pump the tank contents uphill to the septic tank lid.  If we get this to work, guests could do the same as long as their rig is equipped with a macerator pump.

Some of the RV clubs we belong to allow members to list their home or place of business as available for no-cost overnight stays.  FMCA calls these “Stop’in Spots” and the SKPs include them in a list of free and low-cost camping.  There is also a program called “Boondockers Welcome” that our friends Butch and Fonda joined.  We are members of Harvest Hosts, but can’t be a host site as we are a residence not a business.

Ed and Betty originally planned to stay two nights, but they are on their way to some temporary work at the Middleton Berry Farm, a pick your own (PYO) operation east of Ortonville, Michigan.  They have worked summers there for some years, usually during the strawberry season.  At one time they owned a strawberry farm in upstate New York and were the secretaries of the National Strawberry Growers Association.  Ed has a PhD in plant pathology and has done extensive extension service work as a plant pathologist.  The owners of Middleton Berry Farm needed Ed & Betty’s assistance ASAP as the raspberries have come in very well this year.

We did our usual first time visit thing and gave them a complete tour of the house, yard, and bus.  We got to see their motorhome as well, and spent some time trying to tune in over-the-air TV stations with their roof antenna.  The only station we could get was FOX out of Detroit, so Ed turned the system off and put the antenna back down.

Ed and Betty are pretty avid cyclists and have a pair of very interesting tricycles.  They are Spike models made by Trident Trikes and purchased from Craig and Linda Current of http://www.boomersbentsandbikes.com in Florida.  It’s a two front, one rear wheel design with disc brakes all around.  The two front wheels steer and the central structural member is hinged to allow the rear wheel to fold up between the two front ones for storage.  They got the 24-speed gearing option.  I test drove Ed’s and Linda test drove Betty’s and we both found them very comfortable.  Linda can’t ride a bicycle because of occasional balance problems related to her loss of hearing in her left ear, so a tricycle or quadcycle is her only viable option.  At this point in my life, I would just as soon have the stability of a 3-wheeler as well.  Another alternative for us would be a side-by-side 2-seater, which might be a lot of fun, but would probably preclude either of us going for a solo ride.

We sat and talked like old friends and enjoyed a bottle of Pinot Grigio.  Eventually Linda and Betty set about making dinner.  Betty had prepared a “vegan cheese” out of cashew nuts and served it on Saltine crackers.  It was very good, and it reminded Linda that she had purchased a vegan cheese book on our last Holistic Holiday At Sea cruise, but had not yet used any of the recipes.  Linda prepared a nice green salad.  The main course was quinoa with mushrooms and Swiss chard.  She served it with a side of fresh corn, cut off the cob.  We opened at bottle of the 2009 Egri Merlot to go with dinner.  This wine is a little sweet for red wine aficionados, but it is one of the few red wines I will drink.  It lacks any hint of tannin, and is full-bodied enough to stand up to the earthy grain/mushroom/greens dishes that Linda often prepares.  After dinner we sat on the back deck for a while and continued to enjoy our Merlot.  The mosquitoes appeared about the same time we were ready for dessert so we went back inside and enjoyed the last of vegan chocolate cake Linda had made on Monday served with fresh strawberries.  It was still as moist as when she baked it and you would not know it was vegan.  We washed it down with the end of the Merlot, which also goes very well with chocolate cake and strawberries.

The rest of the evening was a free- and far-ranging conversation about life, travels, kids, health, careers, and interests.  We looked at maps and old copies of Wilson’s Free And Low Cost Camping directories and talked about getting large rigs into National Forest campgrounds, which Ed and Betty have done successfully on numerous occasions.  Being full-timers, they are by necessity knowledgeable and skilled when it comes to finding places to park for the night.

 

20130819-26 E-mail Problems

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It seems there is less to blog about when we are at the house, or perhaps there’s just less time to do it.  It’s not that we are less busy; it’s just that what we are doing seems potentially less interesting.  Besides the usual chores that go with owning a house, I spent the last week dealing with our pull-through driveway, ham radio stuff, and a serious e-mail problem.

By Wednesday the 20th it had become clear to me that we were not getting replies to e-mails we had sent out; not a couple of e-mails to a couple of people, but lots of e-mails to lots of people.  Most of these were e-mails to people who normally reply in a timely manner, and they were e-mails seeking information or continuing a conversation, and thus replies were expected.  I started making phone calls and sure enough our e-mails had been received and replied to.  We never got the replies, and the senders never got bounce-backs; the e-mails just vanished into cyberspace.  In one case I sent a single e-mail to two recipients, both of whom had gmail accounts.  They both replied.  I got one reply and not the other.  We also had a couple of folks send us e-mails while we were on the phone with them, but those e-mails never arrived.  Not good.

I opened a support ticket with our hosting service and spent the last week trying to communicate with their off-shore technical support people.  I don’t have prejudice towards off-shore support, but in this case they turned out to be neither sufficiently technical nor supportive.  Every time I updated the support ticket I got a reply from a different person.  I explained repeatedly and in considerable detail the difficulties we were having and they repeatedly sent replies apologizing for the inconvenience, asking me to send them information I did not have, performing simple but irrelevant tests of our e-mail accounts, and then informing me that everything appeared to be working fine.  Arrrgh.  As of this post the problem persists and I have lost any hope of it being resolved.  I hope to accomplish this with minimal downtime or disruption of service.  Our apologies to anyone who was affected by this; we have not been ignoring you and we now know that you have not been ignoring us.  We will be moving our domain to a new registrar/hosting service at the end of this month.

We have a tower that sits at the east end of the house.  It was already installed when we bought the house, and I estimate its height at about 38 feet; not that tall by ham radio standards, but tall enough to treat with respect if you are going to climb it.  It’s an older design and has obviously been there for a while.  It has an over-the-air (OTA) TV antenna on a rotor at the top.  The rotor is not connected to a controller and the coax is not connected to anything inside the house.  There is also a Direct TV satellite dish (single LNB).  The cables from that are also not connected to anything in the house.  The previous owners left the SAT-TV receiver behind, but it is obsolete.  The base of the tower is set in concrete but the tower was not secured anywhere else.  On Friday we rigged up a couple of support arms and attached them to the side of the house in anticipation of climbing the tower on Saturday to remove the old antennas and install our 2m/70cm ham radio vertical antenna.

On Saturday we went to our ham radio club (SLAARC) breakfast in South Lyon.  It’s always good to visit with this group.  Many hams are tech savvy about a lot of things besides amateur radio so I got to bounce our e-mail problem off one of them.  Thanks Larry (K8UT).  After breakfast Linda and I went to Mike’s (W8XH) QTH (location) to look at his ham radio tower as we are trying to figure out what to do for base station antennas.  He has a Heights Tower with a motorized fold-over base.  It is a very nice all-aluminum tower and a very nice installation.  Nice antennas, too, but that’s another story.

Mike then came to our house and brought his professional grade climbing harness.  We got it adjusted to fit me and I climbed up as far as the roof, probably 10 feet off the ground.  (Our tower is only an inch from the gutter.)  As I started up the tower from the roof, the tower had more movement than I was comfortable with, so we abandoned the climb.  I removed the old Direct TV antenna, which was at my shoulder level when standing on the roof, and installed our dual band VHF/UHF (2m/70cm) vertical ham radio antenna at the same height.  The dual-band is lower than I wanted and very close to one of the tower verticals, but it was the best we good do at the moment.  We routed the coax to the back deck, connected it to our Icom 7000 go box, and started looking for 2m and 70cm repeaters.  We were able to activate the K8VJ 2m repeater in South Lyon without difficulty, as well as the Livingston County LARK 2m primary repeater.  We were also able to talk to two guys on the Clarkston 2m repeater, which, according to the ARRL repeater directory that Mike installed on his smartphone, was over 22 miles away to the northeast.  Not bad for 2m on 50 watts with a less than ideal antenna location.  We tried a number of other repeaters but were not able to raise them.

While we were out taking care of ham radio business during the morning, Phil (our pull-through driveway contractor) brought a large load of sand (silt, technically) to the house, pulled the top 6 inches of 21AA road gravel out of the new pull-through drive, and mixed in the sand as he put it back.  As I noted in a previous blog, our bus got stuck in the driveway a couple of weeks ago and had to be winched out.  The problem turned out to be an inadequate amount of “crusher dust” in the 21AA road gravel.  Without a sufficient amount of fine particles, the larger stones don’t bind together and pack to make a hard surface that resists blowout and further compaction.

Mike spent the rest of the day at our house helping us with some computer issues.  He is a retired HP tech and now has an active business of his own working on personal and business computer systems and networks.  By the time we were done it was dinner time, so we treated him to dinner at Olga’s in Brighton.  Thanks Mike.

Sunday is our day to go to the Howell Farmers Market.  The fruits and vegetables are now plentiful and we picked up an assortment of yummy things.  We also got some pointers from Marjorie about apples and pears as we had discovered just a couple days earlier that we have an apple tree and a pear tree, both of which are laden with fruit.

On Sunday afternoon I used our Honda Element to “roll” the pull-though driveway.  The car only has about 1,000 pounds on each tire, so it is in no way equivalent to driving the bus, which has 7,000 lbs on each of the front/steer tires, 5,000 lbs on each of the four drive tires, and 3,750 lbs on each of the two tag axle tires.  Still, the car did a nice job of compacting the surface.  Phil had suggested that I carefully pull one of the front tires of the bus onto the pull-through driveway, but even after rolling it with the car I was nervous that it wasn’t locked together quite as much as it needed to be.  I had also heard from Ed & Betty Burns that they would be arriving on Wednesday in their Tiffin Phaeton, so I was anxious to make sure the driveway would support their motorhome.  I discussed it with Phil Sunday evening and he said he had a plan and would check in the morning to make sure it was going to work.  He was confident, however, that Ed & Betty would not encounter any driveway difficulties.

Monday saw us in west Dearborn for our summer dental checkups.  One of my old fillings was starting to separate from what remained of the tooth, and I was informed that it was time to get a crown.  They had a 9 AM appointment slot available the next day, so I signed up.  Dental work doesn’t bother me the way it does some people.  The sooner it’s fixed the better.

Jim and Kristine Gullen came over for dinner on Monday, the first time they have been to the new house.  Linda made a mushroom risotto using Farro, a wonderful, ancient, high-protein Italian grain that is earthy, slightly nutty, and has great “chew”.  She used mushroom “broth” instead of stock, of course, but that just added to the earthiness of the dish.  She served the risotto with a side of mixed green and “long” beans lightly sautéed in olive oil.  We got the long beans from an Asian vendor at the Howell Farmers Market who told us they are usually stir-fried.  How long are they?; about 2 feet, on average.  They taste like green beans although subtly different.  Linda also made vegan chocolate cake that was excellent and served it with fresh strawberries.  Jim and Kristine brought a couple bottles of wine and we had a wonderful visit over a lovely meal.

Phil came back late Monday afternoon and added some more sand to the edges of the pull-through driveway and also to where it ties in to the concrete driveway.  He had borrowed a compactor device that mounts on the arm of his backhoe and used that to compact the driveway.  I don’t know about Linda, Jim, or Kristine, but the sound of Phi’s equipment working was music to my ears.  The song was “Our bus ain’t gonna sink no more.”

 

2013_08_13 (Tue) Computer Updates And Family Time

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I spent most of the day updating various computers.  One thing you can say for Microsoft is when they issue updates for their operating systems they really issue updates.  On multiple computers it can become an all day process.  When combined with the time I spent updating our GPS units, I did very little else for the last couple of days.

Linda had a noon appointment to get her hair cut and then headed to Ann Arbor to babysit our grand-daughter.  One of my planned chores for today was to wash the bus.  It was very cool all morning and was still cool by mid-afternoon, but as warm as it was going to get.  I forced a regeneration of our water softener to make sure it would be able to keep up with the washing.  I mixed a 4 oz bottle of SUDS that we got as a sample from a vendor at the FMCA rally with a couple of gallons of water.  I hosed off a small section of the rig, applied the SUBS solution with a soft brush, and rinsed it off.  It took a couple of hours to do the whole coach, but its parking spot in front of the house is shaded.  Between the softened water and the shade I did not have any issues with water spotting.

Tomorrow is our daughter-in-law’s birthday, so I drove down to their house.  I got there around 6:30 PM, just in time to see our grand-daughter before she went to bed for the evening.  She is almost 8 months old, and was very tired from playing with her grandmother all afternoon.  Our son picked up vegan Indian food for dinner.  We had a delicious meal and great conversation with the big people, a lovely evening all-in-all.

Back home we were getting ready to turn off the lights and go to sleep when were heard coyotes howling, the first time since we moved to the new house.  That’s something we never experienced in the suburbs.  It was a bit eerie, but it was a thrill.

2013_08_09-12 (F, S, N, M) Odds And Ends

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There is a certain routine to being back at the house, and when we are here it feels like we should get back into that routine.  Otherwise, it becomes too easy to sleep in, start slow, and not get around to even thinking about doing things until the afternoon, by which time it is too late to start anything.

Friday we were still unloading a few things from the bus, finishing up laundry (me), weeding the flower beds (Linda), catching up on accounting tasks (Linda), catching up on operating system updates (me), and other such necessities of daily living.  I placed calls to various service providers and filled out an online trouble report to try and get our AT&T phone line back in service.  Based on the missed calls on our answering machine, it appears that the phone line quite working around June 25th.  What I found interesting was that our High Speed Internet (HSI/DSL) worked fine and never went out.

With necessary chores attended to I turned my attention to writing first drafts of articles for Bus Conversions Magazine (BCM).  I had started an article a while back on the exterior makeover so finished a first draft of that and sent it off to Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint for review.  I had six other projects I had worked on the last 11 months that I also thought would make good articles.  Over the course of the weekend I completed first drafts of all six and sent all seven article drafts off to the Publisher (Gary Hall) and Editor (Wendy Crosby) of BCM, sans pictures.

Until today (Monday) the weather has been delightful since we returned, with blue skies, a few puffy white clouds, highs in the low-to-mid 70’s and lows in the upper 50’s.  Friday evening we decided to get out of the house for a while so we drove to downtown Brighton and went for a walk along the Mill Pond.  This is a large pond formed by a small dam in the heart of downtown, and it has a boardwalk that runs along the east side for about 1/2 mile.  Besides people there were ducks and geese, including babies, and a swan.  We also saw bluebirds and two muskrats.  Downtown Brighton is a happening place on a Friday night.  There were lots of people at the many restaurants, but equally many out walking.

Part of our routine is Saturday morning ham radio breakfast, usually with the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) of which we are members, but occasionally with the Novi Radio Club.  Having been gone for a while we went to the SLAARC breakfast.  It was good to see our ham radio friends and catch up on what everyone has been doing.  Folks were interested in our travels, of course, and we enjoyed sharing a little bit about that.

Back home I decided to run a computer network cable from our AT&T Gateway to my office in the basement so I could connect the computers down there to a hub and and connect it back to the Gateway.  I’ve been trying to accomplish this connectivity with WiFi, but have had limited success.  I ran a small experiment first to make sure it would work, plugging my laptop into the hub and the hub into the Gateway with all of the components in close physical proximity to the Gateway.  It worked, so I proceeded with the larger project.

I had to enlarge a hole from the basement up into the wall cavity behind Linda’s desk, and managed to nick the Cat5 cable that carries the DSL/phone signal to the Gateway.  Naturally the AT&T repair truck showed up a short time later.  That did not turn out to be problem, however, as the technician very quickly determined that the problem was somewhere upstream in their system.  He had our signals restored at the outside junction box long before I was ready to reconnect to them.

I managed to get the Cat6 network cable run through the suspended ceiling in the basement and into the office.  I put the hub in the center of the room and ran the longest cables I had from various devices across the floor and over things.  I would include a picture, but it isn’t a pretty sight.  😉  The hardwired connection isn’t necessarily faster than the wireless one, but it stays connected, which is more important than speed.

While I was at it I decided to run a new, higher quality Cat6 cable from the AT&T junction box (outside) to the AT&T Gateway (inside).  After poking around in the attics above the garage and the house, I decided that this was not a project that had to be done at this time.  As I have worked on projects in the basement I have been removing old telephone wires as we use a cordless phone system and the wiring is obsolete.  I was going to to continue that work, but decided for now to just fix the cable I had damaged and get our phone/DSL connections back on line.

Another part of our routine is the Sunday morning Howell Farmers Market.  The nice weather continued and we enjoyed strolling through the market and talking to the vendors.  We bought some corn and peppers and herbs.  We bought some more coffee beans from Irene’s Beans of Milford, and also from Teeko’s of Howell.  Teeko’s is not far from our house and they keep their beans green until you buy them.  They then roast them to your taste while you wait.  They have a very wide selection of beans, including 100% Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain.  These are premium coffee beans and are not generally available even at upscale food markets.

On Sunday Linda split her time between weeding, her computer, and just relaxing, which usually involves reading.  Of course she also took time to make meals, which were good, as usual.  I continued working on articles drafts and started updating our GPS units.  I had the docking/update software for both units installed on an older laptop that is not very fast, even with a hardwired network connection.  I replaced the hard disk drive in that laptop some time ago with a solid state drive as I plan to use that computer to run the Silverleaf VMSpc software for monitoring the bus engine while I drive.  I figured the SSD would be more tolerant of bumps and vibrations.  It probably is, but I did not figure on how incredibly slow it would be.

It took quite a while, but I got the Garmin nüvi 465T updated.  This is a nice little GPS unit designed for truckers (the T model) with a 4″ diagonal screen.  Because it is designed for truckers, we can create profiles for different vehicles/combinations, including length, width, height, and weight.  That is very handy when driving a large vehicle.  We use it in the toad, and as a backup for the bus.  I need to move the docking software to my newer laptop if I can figure out how to do it.  Part of the problem is that I also have map subscriptions installed on the old laptop and have to move those as well.

Sunday night was our monthly SLAARC meeting in South Lyon.  Linda opted not to go, but as the Vice-President of the club for this year, I really needed to make an appearance.  Besides, the program was on how to use an oscilloscope.  The presenter was (Dr.) Steve Smith, N8AR, a member of our club and retired electrical/communications engineer who worked on the space program at one point in his career.  Steve has done a number of presentations for our club.  They are always good, and they always draw a crowd, and this was no exception.

This morning (Monday the 12th) we woke to find it very overcast with a high probability of showers for most of the day.  That meant we would not be doing much outside work today.  Our Honda Element (towed vehicle) was overdue for it’s 75,000 mile service, so we took it to Brighton Honda right after breakfast.  While I was getting it written up Linda picked up my favorite Amy’s frozen pizza for dinner as she had plans for dinner and movie with Diane; their belated annual birthday night out.

I planned to continue working on my articles for BCM, selecting, adding, and annotating photos to illustrate them.  But first I decided to install the docking software for our Rand-McNally RVND7710 GPS.  That was easy; the software resides in the non-volatile memory of the unit, which connects to the computer via a USB cable.  I checked for updates; there were some, so I installed them.

I then decided to purchase the Lifetime Map updates, which I had not done previously.  I accomplished that easily enough but had a little trouble getting the docking software to accept the Activation Key.  Closing the software, powering the GPS down, turning it back on, and re-launching the docking software got it to work, but that wasn’t part of the instructions.  Great; time to download and install updated maps, which I did.  It took eight (8) hours!  I know our Internet connection is not very fast, and  I have no idea how much data got downloaded, but 8 hours?!  Unfortunately that tied up my laptop for most of the day, so whatever else I had hoped to accomplish got delayed.  But that was OK; it rained all day, and a slower pace with a subdued tone somehow seemed appropriate.

 

2013_08_08 (Thu) Settling In

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Today was a settling in kind of day.  Linda spent much of it working at her desk on accounting and tax returns, with a break for grocery shopping, cooking, and a walk on an absolutely perfect Michigan summer afternoon.

I spent most of the day at my desk as well trying to diagnose our non-functioning AT&T home phone line and filing an online repair order.  I caught up on correspondence, backed up and moved computer files around, and got back to the task of writing articles for Bus Conversion Magazine.  I also finally got to be present when the backup generator started up at noon for its weekly self-test.

For dinner Linda prepared a dish using quinoa, black beans, corn, onions, and garlic in a little bit of vegetable broth and seasoned with salt, pepper, cumin, and cayenne pepper.  The dish had just a hint of heat but let the flavors of the ingredients come through.  She served it along side baby bok choy that she quartered and roasted.  Bok choy has a taste/texture suggestive of Brussels sprouts or cooked cabbage, but more subtle.  I drizzled mine lightly with white vinegar for a little added zing.  A small glass of Summer Sunset from Leelanau Cellars completed the meal.  Latter we had fresh strawberries for dessert.

2013_08_07 (Wed) Family Time

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Our daughter and our son and his daughter came to visit and have lunch today.  While we have lots of projects in the queue, both for the bus and the house, seeing family and friends is the main thing that will draw us home each time we are gone.  The pictures tell the story:

Madeline (8 months old) with her giraffe, Sophie.

Madeline (8 months old) with her giraffe, Sophie.

Madeline with her grandma Linda.

Madeline with her grandma Linda.

Madeline with her dad and grandma Linda.

Madeline with her dad and grandma Linda.

Madeline with her Aunt Meghan.

Madeline with her Aunt Meghan.