Category Archives: WFPB

Posts related to our Whole-Foods Plant-Based approach to healthy eating. We became vegetarians in 2000 and transitioned to being vegans in 2011. We discovered the WFPB concept in 2012.

2014/08/13 (W) Bad Times

Leave a reply

Linda had a rough night last night.  The tooth on which she just got a new crown two weeks ago started throbbing and even Tylenol did not do much to dull the pain.  She finally got some sleep early this morning and slept in while I had toast with jam and coffee for breakfast.  She called the dentist when she finally got up and they said they could see her at 10:30 AM.  She tried drinking some coffee but the hot liquid immediately aggregated her bad tooth.

Linda has been following a story in the news about Ferguson, the town in Missouri where we grew up.  There was an incident there over the weekend in which a cop ended up shooting an 18-year-old African-American male.  There were limited witnesses, so the truth about what happened is obscure at best.  The town, a northern suburb of St. Louis, is now experiencing “riots” and looting.

It is difficult for me to picture what is happening.  Although Linda’s oldest brother still lives in Ferguson we have not been back there in years.  This is the kind of situation that “happens to other people in other places” not in the Ferguson of my memory from the 1950’s and 60’s.

Darryll and Alec (DCM Heating &Cooling) showed up just after 9 AM and Linda left for the dentist at 9:15 AM.  The stormy weather of the last two days cleared out overnight replaced by cool northwest breezes, abundant sunshine, and blue skies.  When the weather in Michigan is nice it is really nice.  I took a few minutes to get the trash to the curb, made sure Darryll was all set, and then retreated to my desk to work on the membership and financial records for our FMCA Freethinkers associate chapter, of which I am the current vice-president and secretary.

I got a call from Linda around 11:15 AM letting me know she had a 2:15 PM appointment with an endodontist down the street from our dentist.  She was going to go to Fairlane Mall to kill some time but since she did not get much sleep last night I suggested she go to the endodontist’s office and sleep in their waiting room.  Given her discomfort and sensitivity to hot liquids she will likely come home today with a new root canal procedure having been done.

Darryll and Alec finished the 2″ iron pipe installation, connected an air pressure gauge, and pressurized the pipe to 12 psi to check for leaks.  The natural gas pressure in the line will only be ~4 in-WC (inches of water column).  1 PSI = ~27.67 in-WC, so 4 in-WC us is approximately 1/7 PSI, a relatively low pressure.  Still, there cannot be any leaks in the piping connections.

With the pipe done for now they turned their attention to hanging the Reznor garage heater.  To support the unit Darryll installed two U-channels in the attic spanning the top side of the bottom cord of three trusses.  He determined the location of the threaded support rods from the garage ceiling side using a cardboard template and drilled the holes up into the attic.  He and Alec then assembled everything with Darryll doing the attic work.  The Reznor is not that heavy, but he prefers to hang the unit when possible rather than screw it into something.

To position the unit they set it on top of one of our 6′ tall plastic shelving units and blocked it up another six inches with scrap wood.  (We used the same technique to install the pull-down attic ladder a couple of weeks ago as described in a previous post.)  The unit is 12″ high and they set it 6″ below the ceiling near the center of the rear (north) wall.  That location will optimize getting heat to all parts of the garage and put the unit right where Darryll needed it to connect the exhaust flue pipe using the existing flue that was originally used for the wood-burning stove.

Linda usually fixes our meals, but I used to do a lot of the cooking during “tax season” when she was working ridiculously long hours as a C.P.A.  Lucky for me we had chickpea salad in the refrigerator and I remembered how to make a sandwich.  A few almonds and some of this morning’s coffee (Teeko’s Seattle Blend half-caff) made for a tasty, quick, and easy lunch.  I checked the pressure on Darryll’s gauge and it had dropped quite a bit, so there was a leak (or leaks) somewhere that he will have to find and tighten.  That’s unfortunate given the size of this pipe and the number of connections, but “it’s all part of the job” as the saying goes.

I was hopeful that Phil from Precision Grading might come fix our pull-through driveway today, but as of 1 PM I had not seen or heard from him.  There’s still a chance we could see him later today, but it was a long shot at best based on the premise that with all the rain on Monday and Tuesday he might not be able to work anywhere else today.

Linda called around 1:45 PM to let me know the endodontist was able to see her at 12:15 PM.  They did some tests to confirm it was the nerve in the suspect tooth and then did the root canal procedure.  Apparently sensitivity to heat and a lack of sensitivity to cold is indicative of a nerve gone bad.  They gave her an initial dose of antibiotics and some pain killers (Motrin) and sent her on her way with prescriptions for more of the same.

Darryll and Alec wrapped up for the day around 2:15 PM and walked me through what they had done and what was left to do.  While I was eating, talking, and working they had run the gas pipe through the back wall of the garage and installed the flue pipe for both furnaces.  Darryll needed a few more parts to finish the job and needed to get home to deal with a flooded basement situation from the recent rains.  He indicated they should be done by the end of next week, at least with everything they can do until the gas line gets run to the house and hooked up to meter.  The timing may turn out to be tighter than expected.  When Linda turned onto our street she observed that Roese Construction had started running gas line down our road and appeared to be hooking up houses as they went, but that turned out not be the case.

I was questioning Darryll about the exhaust flue for the Reznor garage furnace and discovered that it is not a sealed combustion unit like the one we had at the other house.  He assured me it was approved for use in garages and that he has installed a lot of them over the years, but would double check to make sure.  He can return this one if needed, but said the sealed unit is more expensive.  It would also require completely different fresh air and exhaust ducting that would have to go through the back wall of the garage.  I suspect we will stick with the one that is already installed.

Darryll sprayed every iron pipe connection with soapy water and the only leak he found was the cap they put on the end of the run this morning.  Apparently they did not tighten it fully when they installed it.  He snugged it down and had Alec re-pressurized the pipe to 12 PSI but did not recheck for leaks.  (Hypothetically, if the leak at the end of the pipe was big enough other leaks might not show up anywhere else until that one was fixed.)  If there are no other leaks then the pressure should stay at 12 PSI indefinitely; certainly until they come back on Monday or Tuesday.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and a pepper seitan dish served over white rice; simple but delicious.  I checked the pressure in the black iron pipe after dinner, when it was cooler and the sun had dropped lower in the western sky, and it was down to 11 PSI.  That seemed like a lot of pressure loss to me, but the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT) says that for a fixed volume (V) the pressure (P) and temperature (T) are directly proportional (by the factor nR).  We know from experience that the pressure in an RV tire changes a little with changes in the ambient air temperature even when sitting still and quite a bit when the tire heats up from driving.  If all the tire pressures are set to the same value first thing in the morning and one side of the RV is facing south on a sunny day the pressures in the tires on the sunny side will be measurably higher than the shady side at mid-afternoon.  Of course there is a lot of air in our bus tires since they run at 100 PSI, more or less.  Most of the black iron pipe is not exposed to direct sun for most of the day so tomorrow I may re-pressurize the pipe at 10 PSI and record the pressure and temperature every 30 minutes until 2 or 3 PM to see how it varies.  Or not.

Phil (Precision Grading) called back this evening and said he could take care of fixing the driveway on Friday afternoon for a very reasonable price.  Sold.  That means we will not be going to the Clio rally on Friday for the 1 PM roundtable discussion.  So be it.  We will probably drive up on Saturday after our ham radio breakfast.  While Phil is here we are going to shoot the grade in the back with his laser level if he has time and see what we really have.  He and I agree that just eyeballing it things do not look quite right.

It’s obvious to me after the heavy rains on Monday and Tuesday that the two plastic drain pipes running out into the back yard should have had a third drain tile line put in the trench with them (perforated with an oversock) and the trench should have been filled with pea gravel to create a French drain that would remove the water flowing into that low lying area and keep it from saturating the ground.  It would also have made the pipes better able to withstand being driven over by a vehicle.  As it stands, anything heavy that drives over that area while it is moist/soft will most likely crush the pipes (again).  I’m annoyed because I did not know enough to specify this as part of the job and because Steve, for whatever reason, did not recommend it.

To fix this correctly we would need to have Phil locate the existing plastic pipe and dig it up back past the Y-connector for the two downspouts and up into the two slopes far enough that it is out of his way.  That would allow him to re-grade the entire area properly, dig a new trench starting from the edge of the lower deck, install the three drain lines, fill the trench with pea gravel, and then finish grade the slopes and valley correctly, all of which Village Landscape should have done, in my opinion, but did not.  It would also give us the opportunity to replace the corrugated plastic drain line with PVC pipe which would better withstand the weight of a vehicle once encased in pea gravel.  The rear retaining walls and front stairs/sidewalk look nice and appear to have been built correctly so we did get something for our money, most, in fact, of what we paid for, just not everything we needed.

 

2014/08/11 (M) SLAARC/WordPress

Leave a reply

Some of the members of SLAARC are former Detroit Edison employees (now DTE Energy) and one of them (Bruce, W8RA) currently works for Intercontinental Transmission Company (ITC).  Bruce was curious what size transformer we had and said that there were likely numbers on it that I could read with a pair of binoculars.  I went out this morning to check, but the only info on the transformer can is a metal plate that is too small and illegible to read from the ground even with our fairly good binoculars.

Darryll (DCM Heating & Cooling) had not shown up or called by 10:30 AM.  His work doesn’t make a mess of our yard or house, at least it hasn’t yet, so it is less of a concern that he is not here working today than it was with the landscaping.  When he left Thursday he had a short list of parts he needed to get and perhaps could not do that until this morning.  Or he may have gotten emergency service requests, which take priority over new installations.  Still, we would like to have the new HVAC work completed in the next week or so to make sure it is done ahead of the natural gas hookup.

As part of that work I have to complete some of the electrical pieces, finish dry-walling the utility closet, and continue cleaning, repairing, and organizing the garage while we have the storage pod.  I then need to get to work on a long list of bus projects.  I also have a lot of desk/computer work to do and I prefer to do that when I know I can settle in for a long stretch.  I tend not to be in the right frame of mind for desk work when I do not know if/when contractors are going to show up.  It’s turned out to be a busy, and in some ways complicated, summer that way.  Darryll called late morning to say they would be back first thing Wednesday morning.  That information allowed me to adjust my expectations and settle in for a long day and evening at my computer.

My main focus was working on the page content for the new SLAARC WordPress website, which occupied me until dinnertime with some e-mail mixed in.  After dinner I started uploading blog posts beginning with the one for July 7th.  I decided that I would not select and upload photos for most of the posts in July and early August and instead create more extensive gallery posts for the landscaping work and the garage/HVAC project.

One of the things I have noticed in the past week is that our Internet connection seems to be faster, or at least my e-mail processes much quicker than it used to.  That could be the result of the AT&T repair on the 4th, which ended up moving us to entirely new wire pairs, or a change that AT&T made to our DSL service back on the 3rd (when it kept going off temporarily), or it could be that QTH upgraded their e-mail server system, or some combination of these.  Whatever the case, it seems to be an improvement.

Phil from Precision Grading called at noon to see if he could stop by sometime after 3 PM today.  It was raining gently at the time but when he called back a little after 3 PM the rain had finally opened up into a sustained downpour.  He had an 8 AM appointment in Hell (Michigan) and we agreed that tomorrow morning after his appointment would probably be a much better time for him to stop by.

We ordered a “cat tent” the other day and it showed up this afternoon.  We opened it and set up in the living room with the “door” tied open so the cats could explore the inside.  They were wary, but did go in briefly.  It’s kind of like a back-packing tent but all the fabric, including the floor, is mesh.  We thought the floor would be a solid material, but it’s not.  It will be OK for use on our deck at home, but seems less suitable for use on the ground when we are RVing.  We intended to use it for both so we are not sure if we are going to keep it.

For dinner Linda made a tomato-onion-mushroom ragu and served it over a three rice blend with a dark mixed greens salad on the side.  Later she served fresh strawberries with Lotus brand cookies and dark chocolate with bits of almond and sea salt.  Seriously, what’s not to like about that?

 

2014/08/10 (N) Kathi Comes To Visit

Leave a reply

Kathi Slater is a long-time friend, the mother of three girls who went through middle and high school at the same time as our children.  Her oldest daughter, Emily (who is now an MD) was one of our son’s best friends in high school.  Kathi ended up working at Metropolitan Bakery with Linda and is still there.  We have been trying to find a mutually agreeable time for her to come see our new house and today was finally the day.

Kathi arrived around 10:30 AM.  As with all first time guests we gave her a tour of the house and then, being another gorgeous summer day, we walked the property.  After the tours we settled in at the table on the deck under the shade of the umbrella and had a nice long chat.  Linda made her wonderful chickpea salad and served it sandwich style for lunch with sourdough pretzel nibblers, fresh grapes, and sweet cherries.  She left to return home around 2 PM.

I worked at my desk on website usernames and passwords until 5:30 PM.  For dinner Linda made sautéed green beans and a dish with whole grain macaroni, cannellini beans, kale, other ingredients, and spices.  Both dishes had a hint of garlic and red pepper flakes; just enough to elevate the dish but not so much as to dominate or overwhelm the primary flavors.

We finished eating a little after 6 PM and I had to leave for the 6:30 PM meeting of our ham radio club.  The meeting was well attended with several of our newest club members there.  After a short business meeting we had a brief introduction by Mike (W8XH) to ham radio projects that can be done with the Arduino (and similar) micro-controllers.  Mike and Steve (N8AR) then led a discussion on the subject of antennas; specifically simple ones that can be built fairly easily.

I got home rafter 9 PM and had a piece of watermelon.  We stayed up a little later than usual and decided to turn in without watching an episode any of the TV programs we are currently following.

 

2014/08/08 (F) Decked Out

Leave a reply

Today was the first day in over a month that we did not have contractors at the house, were not wondering why we did not have contractors at the house, or were not working on projects getting ready to have contractors at the house.  I like working on projects, but today was a deep breath day for both of us.  The weather was near perfect so we both spent much of the day on the rear deck where we made great use of our table and sun shade umbrella.

We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the deck, a first since we moved here.  Linda read there, and I worked at my computer there during the afternoon and early evening.  At one point our male cat, Jasper, was sitting by the dining room doorwall crying for us to come in and pay attention to him.  Instead, Linda put him in his carrier and put it on the table.  I don’t think he was comfortable at first, but he was near us and seemed to like being “outside” and able to look around.  At least he stopped crying.  Linda got online, found a “kitty tent” on Amazon that we liked, and ordered it.  It’s a 5′ x 6′ tent that folds up and stores like a backpacking tent.  All of the sides and the floor are nylon screen mesh.  It has a zipper door.  It should be here on Monday.

I worked at my desk all morning and finished up the test items I was writing for the Lectora version of the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  I got the items e-mailed off to the MAC and to Bill at Wayne RESA and e-mailed an invoice to the Kathy, the president of the MAC.  Linda spent some time cleaning part of the house; she’s been doing a little bit each day.

The high point of the day was a low altitude flyover by five World War Two vintage aircraft from the Yankee Air Force based at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti about 40 miles SSE of our house.  They came directly over our house in a V-formation banking to the left and heading south.  A B-17 bomber (4-engine) was at the point with a P-38 and a P-51 fighter on either side and two additional fighters at the tips that I could not identify.  We heard them coming from some distance away and the sound was as impressive as the sight as they passed overhead.  Linda checked online and discovered there was a major air show tomorrow at Willow Run Airport so we surmised they were on a practice flight.

For dinner, Linda made sweet potatoes topped with a mixture of black beans, tomatoes, onions, and several spices.

 

2014/08/07 (R) Endings And Beginnings

Leave a reply

I did not sleep well last night.  I was a bit worked up about the landscaping and a bit worried about the iron gas pipe installation which looked to me like it would be difficult no matter how Darryll decided to do it.  We were both awake at 5:30 AM and finally got up at 6:45 AM and had breakfast.

The landscapers arrived early, before 8 AM, and got right to work.  Steve brought three guys and got them busy right away.  Linda and I walked the site with him, but he immediately saw more problems than we did.  There was no arguing or convincing; he seemed determined to make sure it was done right and that we were happy with the end result.  He stayed and worked alongside the crew to make sure stuff got done correctly.  They finished up around 11 AM.  We took one last look at the work and paid Steve the balance of what we owed him.  He said he would check back in 2 – 3 weeks to spot seed and fertilize the new grass.

Linda took off for the post office and grocery store around 8:45 AM and I started routing and stapling the sub-panel ground conductor along the edge of the deck by the rear library doorwalls.  Darryll (DCM Heating and Cooling) showed up a little after 9 AM with his nephew, Alec, so I took the next 30 minutes to walk through the gas pipe installation options.

Darryll decided to go with the original plan of running the pipe from the southeast corner of the house down the east side, around the corner across the back of the house under the upper deck, dropping it down and going under the middle deck, across the back of the garage just below the bottom piece of siding, around the northwest corner of the garage and up the west side of the garage to its end point behind the whole house generator.  There will be a T-fitting on the garage side of the middle deck, to supply gas into the garage for the two new furnaces, and another T-fitting at the end of the run.  One branch of the end T will have a shutoff valve and cap and will be used to supply gas to the generator.  The other branch will be capped and available should we ever decide to run a gas line to the (future) bus barn.

I determined where I wanted the sub-panel ground wire to enter the basement and drilled a 5/16″ hole an inch to the right and an inch below the water faucet that comes through the west wall of the house about 16″ back from the northwest corner above the lower deck.  This allowed me to route the ground wire around an inside corner to the hole and will allow me to tuck it up under the bottom piece of siding.

I wanted to get the ground wire into the main panel but I could not turn off the main breaker as Darryll was using electric power tools and Linda was working on her computer.  The connection will have to wait until no one is using power.  Once the ground wire is tied into the main panel I will remove the bonding screw in the sub-panel.

Linda made a different kind of bean salad sandwich spread for lunch using Great Northern beans and various other yummy ingredients.  We had some grapes and green tea to go with our sandwiches.

Having run out of construction projects for the moment I decided to work at my desk for a while, but my mind was elsewhere and I just wasn’t feeling the love.  The steps at the back door of the garage were going to be in the way of the iron pipe, so I removed them.  As long as I was out there I hung around to watch Darryll and Alec get the pipe under the middle deck.  It was a challenge, as expected, but for reasons that were unseen until Darryll tried to drill holes through the end boards.

First he encountered wet wood that kept fouling his hole saw.  Then he hit a nail, which did not enhance the performance of the saw.  It also bent his extension shaft slightly which he had to stop and straighten.  He then encountered joist hangars on each end and had to bend those out of the way.  Finally able to feed the pipe through, they encountered wood sleepers and a couple of large rocks.  They managed to go over the sleepers and push the rocks out of the way and got the pipe through.  Darryll and Alec put in a long, physically demanding day and got most of the 2″ pipe installed.  Two inch iron pipe is very impressive stuff and we were very impressed with the work required to install it.

For dinner Linda made a Farro pilaf, after which we sat on our deck and enjoyed a small glass of Riesling wine to celebrate the end of the landscaping project that has had our property torn up for the last five weeks.  We are very fortunate that we became vegans and that Linda took a serious interest in learning about whole-food, plant-based recipes, ingredients, and cooking methods just as we retired.  I shudder to think what our health would be like had we continued to eat the way we did until three years ago where, even as “vegetarians,” our diet contained a lot of eggs, dairy, and seafood, and not so much fruits and vegetables.  We watched Dr. Michael Greger’s annual summary address on NutritionFacts.org and went to sleep without the worries that interfered with last night’s rest.

 

2014/07/31 (W) Wrapping Up?

Leave a reply

We were tired and went to bed early last night.  Naturally, that meant we were up earlier than usual this morning.  Linda made her fabulous vegan blueberry pancakes to get us fueled up for a long day of work.  The landscapers were also here reasonably early and had a very productive day.  More on that later.

Our first task this morning was installing a switch controlled dual LED floodlight fixture on the back of the garage above and to the left of the door (when viewed from the outside).  The location was determined by the construction of the rear wall of the garage.  I measured and re-measured the location of the cable hole to make sure the surface mounted junction box ended up in the center (vertically) of one of the siding boards.  I drilled a 1/2″ hole through the back (north) wall of the garage just to the right of the back door (when viewed from inside the garage) and just below the top plate.  I ran a 14-2+g (NM) cable (that I had previously prepped and left in the wall cavity) through the hole in the wall and then through the hole in the back of the junction box.  This was the part of the north wall where I had to remove concrete backer board, a burned 2×4, and singed insulation, so the studs and back side of the exterior plywood sheathing were exposed and accessible.

We moved around to the outside and I caulked the hole around the wire, put a generous band of while caulk around the hole on the back of the junction box, and a half circle of caulk around the top back edge of the box and mounted it to the outside of the house with the center knockout centered over the hole in the wall.  I installed the dual LED light fixture and put a bead of caulk around the top half of the junction box where it met the fixture.  (The heads of the cheap machine screws that now come with electrical fixtures and plates strip very easily making it difficult to get a tight fit.)  I caulked the wire hole from the inside and then dressed and secured the cable.  I turned the circuit breaker on, and checked for proper operation of the switch and light fixture.  It was all good.  I like it when that happens.

Our next task was to install three round blue plastic junction boxes for bare bulb light fixtures; two for the garage attic and one for the garage end of the library attic.  I was originally going to install a switch near the top of the fold-down ladder to control the lights and run power to it from a new ceiling light fixture in the utility closet, but we came up with a better solution.

There was a three-gang electrical box in the east wall of the garage just inside the door from the library.  It had two switches installed and the cover plate had openings for a duplex outlet in the third position, but no device installed there.  We thought this would be a better place for the switch—as there was already power to the box—if we could get a wire through the wall from the attic to the box.  The drywall is missing from the lower half of the wall so we had good access to the underside of the box.  (The drywall was removed by the previous owner to repair the frozen hot water baseboard heat pipes.)  I checked in the attic and it looked like we had a good shot at making this work.  The icing on the cake was that we could install a switch with a pilot light that is designed to fit in a duplex outlet cover plate.  Not only would it be convenient, it would provide a visible indication that the lights were on.

I did the attic work while Linda took care of the garage end of this task, passing me parts and tools as needed and helping feed NM cable. We ran 14-2+g (120V, 15A) wire from the attic through the east wall to the existing outlet box.  I pulled the cable over to the location by the library attic, mounted the box, cut the cable, unsheathed it, stripped the wires, ran it into the box, and secured it to the truss.  I repeated that process with the end of the free cable.  The plastic light fixtures I bought very conveniently feature pass-through wiring terminals so all I had to do was hook up the cables, fasten the fixture to the box, and screw in the 100 W rugged service bulb.

I repeated this process for the next box/fixture which I positioned just to the west side of garage ridge 1/4 of the way in from the front (south) wall.  Finally, I repeated most of this process for the third and final (for now) box/fixture which I positioned on the east side of the ridge 1/4 of the way in from the back (north) wall.  Somewhere in the middle of all that we stopped for lunch.

With the attic lights installed I needed to pull the wire that supplied power to the outlets in the west half of the garage out of the rear/north wall and up into the attic.  Easier said than done.  The cable was originally part of the circuit that powers the outlets in the northeast wall of the garage (and now powers the new floodlights on the back wall) but I disconnected it a week ago knowing that I wanted to feed it from a separate breaker.  The cable went through a hole in the top plate and I discovered that the bottom cord of the gable truss had been set partially covering this hole with the cable pinched under it.  I cut the cable from above and ran it into a plastic switch box.  Linda was then able to pull the tail end loose from underneath.  I will run a new cable from the sub-panel to the junction box after I get more pressing work done.

On that note I also realized today that I do not have to get the cables for the new circuits through the top plates above the sub-panel, which was going to be difficult-to-impossible.  The sub-panel is surface mounted and I already planned to box around it.  With the supply air duct coming out of the new HVAC unit and running straight out along the ceiling above the utility closet door I will have 16 inches of clear ceiling space.  The sub-panel is about four inches deep so I will have about three inches of ceiling above the panel and in front of the top plates where I can run new cable into the attic.  Brilliant!

Our last attic task for today was to disconnect two telephone wires in the wall cavity to the right of the sub-panel, pull them up into the attic, reroute them, and reconnect them.  One of them turned out to be the main phone/data line coming into the house from the AT&T box at the southwest corner of the garage.  There was a telephone wall outlet to the right of the old sub-panel that this line ran to before continuing on to the rest of the house.  The wires are very small gage, are unshielded, and the cable is draped through the attic over multiple 120 VAC cables.  I need to replace this with a single run of much better (shielded) cable when I have time.  Perhaps we will get less static on the phone and faster Internet data transfer rates.  (Nah, probably not.  It will still be an AT&T landline.)

While I started working on re-wiring the three-gang box in the east garage wall, Linda made a run to Lowe’s to get a 32′ roll of 16″ x 3.5″ (R-13) insulation and a switch with a pilot light.  I got the box rewired, we energized the circuit, and everything worked.  Yippee!

The landscapers today consisted of Steve (the owner), Spencer (his nephew), and Tommy.  Steve used the excavator to place four large boulders on the sides of the new front steps.  That was the last work to be done in front that required the excavator so he used it to back blade (level off) and compact (with the bucket) the pull-through driveway.  He was not able to return it to its existing condition but did the best he could with the equipment he has.

He took time out to use his chain saw to cut down a dead pine tree, cut it up into 4′ lengths, and carry the pieces back to his truck with the excavator.  He then used it to fill/grade a large low spot just southwest of the garage.  This was the route they used to get the excavator to the back yard.  It was also where all of the construction debris was piled until yesterday, and the excavator really tore the ground up in that area over the last four weeks.

Spencer and Tommy worked in the back hand-grading the slopes beyond the retaining walls and the area that was trenched for the drain tiles.  They worked in a layer of good topsoil, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw.

Steve plans to lay the brick pavers for the front sidewalk tomorrow and have the whole project wrapped up by the end of the day.  It looked like they were on track to accomplish that until Spencer informed us that there was apparently a leak in the drain tile somewhere in “the valley.”  Leak was an understatement; we had an area at least 8′ x 12′ that had turned into a pond.

It appeared that the drain line for the sump pump was somehow discharging its water at this point rather than it flowing all the way down to the drains at the back of the yard.   Spencer dug up some of the line coming down the slope and found several holes on the top side, but it did make sense that these were the source of the problem.  Our guess is that that line, which is not one continuous piece of drain tile, has become disconnected at the valley floor allowing all of the water to escape at that point, and/or crushed, causing the water to back up through a connector (which is only designed for water to flow one way).  Fortunately we kept the original PVC discharge extension pipe from the sump pump outlet so we temporarily disconnected the buried drain line and reconnected the extension pipe.

Whatever the cause of the leak, we are sure it will be found and fixed, we’re just not sure that will happen by the end of the day tomorrow.  I had thought about “testing” the system by using a garden hose to put a significant volume of water into each of the drain lines.  As of now, I will definitely be doing that.

Our final task was insulating a section of the rear/north wall.  We got three of the four plus cavities filled and ran out of steam.  Besides, it was dinner time.  Linda made one of her “go-to” dishes; angel hair pasta with onions, garlic, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and mixed baby greens lightly sautéed in olive oil.  This is a dish she can throw together from ingredients on hand without a recipe and it is always delicious.  We had a small glass of Leelanau Cellars Summer Sunset wine while she cooked and a small glass of Meiomi Pinot Noir with the dish.  No salad and no dessert; just a great pasta dish and nice wine.  I got cleaned up and we watched the first episode of season five of Doc Martin.  As we were drifting off to sleep we thought we heard the distant howl of a coyote.

2014/07/30 (W) Winter In July

Leave a reply

By the time we started breakfast the landscapers were back.  Steve started to dig a trench for a drain line from the end of the lower deck and hit 2×8’s on the flat about 2-3″ below the surface, so he abandoned that work and moved the excavator around front to the trash pile.

The major construction work up in the back is nearing completion and the lads were picking up some of the smaller debris, the larger stuff having been moved around front to the trash pile yesterday.  Steve used the excavator to load some of the trash onto the trailer (normally used to move the excavator), where the crew covered and secured it.  He loaded more of it into the back of his pickup truck.  They are still having tire issues with the trailer so I charged up my 200 psi air compressor (150 psi regulated) and rolled it over so they could fill one of the tires.

Steve moved the excavator to the southeast corner of the house to dig a short (10′) shallow trench for a drain line to get water from the downspout away from the house.  I conferred with him regarding the exact location because the main propane line enters the house at that corner, the electrical service for the RV outlet runs under there, there is a tree about 12 feet southeast of that corner, and that corner is where the new natural gas meter will be installed. There will be a similar short drain line at the southwest corner of the garage, but it will be dug by hand as the main electrical service runs directly under there about 2′ below the surface.

The lads continued to work in the back placing egg rock.  They were about 1/2 cubic yard short and I asked Steve to order a full cubic yard and use the other 1/2 yard on the west end of the north edge of the lower upper deck to match what they had done at the top of the west retaining wall.  Steve gave the crew instructions on how to prep that area, add a piece of edging to define where the rock will go, and install landscape fabric.  He and I then looked at the boards he hit in the back while trenching and it turned out there were only three of them 4-6′ long and they appeared to be old construction material that had possibly been used as a step off of the lower deck.

Linda gathered up household trash and recyclables and headed off around 10:45 AM.  I finally got started on my projects for the day around 11 AM, opening the garage door so I would have light when the power was turned off at the sub-panel main breaker.  My first task was to move the new outlet I installed in the utility closet the other day.  The return air duct will be installed against that wall and would cover the current location.  When we installed the door yesterday we did not put any 2×4’s above the door and up to the ceiling.  Darryll is going to run the supply duct straight out from the furnace above the door and then angle it over against the east wall of the garage.

With the outlet relocated I cut some scrap insulation to fill the lower half of the open wall cavities and then stopped while I pondered getting a ground wire into that space.  Linda got back from running her errands about then so I decided over lunch to call Bratcher Electric to see if they could give me an idea of what it will cost to run a 100 Amp service entrance cable from the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage to the garage panel in the northeast corner of the garage.  (I estimated it would take 40′ of cable, but have no idea what the labor will be.)

The earliest I will be able to talk to Mike Bratcher is next Monday so I decided that I really needed to run a ground wire from the sub-panel to the main panel allowing me to disconnect the ground wires from the neutral wires in the sub-panel by removing the bonding screw in the sub-panel and giving us a code-compliant, and much safer, sub-panel until such time as it gets re-wired as a main panel.

Linda and I determined that I needed about 40′ of #10 copper wire to get from the sub-panel to the main panel.  Pondering sometimes leads to good things.  I really did not want to stop working to go get wire when I remembered that I had a length of green insulated copper wire I had used for grounding a ham radio and antenna mast at the old house.  It was coiled up on the floor in garage and when we uncoiled it we discovered it was … 40′ long!  I love it when that happens.  I checked the gage and it was #8, so it was actually larger than required for the 60A cable that feeds power from the main panel in the basement to the sub-panel in the garage.

I checked the approximate location for drilling a hole and then drilled a 1/2″ hole from the inside of the garage just above the base plate and out through the siding.  I fed the ground wire through the hole from outside the garage, pulled it up into the sub-panel, and secured it to one of the ground bars.  I dressed it and fastened it to the side of a stud and coiled up the extra outside on the lower upper deck.  I will complete the run to the main panel another day.

With the ground wire installed I was able to install the insulation I had cut earlier and secure it with our staple gun, which I had managed to locate in the tub of tools we took with us out west last summer.  With Linda’s assistance I cut and installed two pieces of drywall from an old scrap piece we had.  I then taped the seams and mudded the screw dimples.  By the time I finished it was 4 PM.  Spencer came to the garage to let me know that they would all be leaving around 4:30 PM due to a severe thunderstorm that was on course to hit our area around 5 PM.

By 4:45 PM we were hearing thunder and I decided to stop work temporarily and help Linda close up the house.  The storm came, a cold wind blew, and it rained hard, but only for a few minutes and we did not get any of the hail that was reported prior to the storm’s arrival at our location.  An hour later we had a lovely summer evening with blue skies.  Linda made roasted winter vegetables for dinner.  It’s the end of July, but we had overnight lows in the mid-40’s two nights ago.  The first six months of this year have been the coldest in 21 years, so winter vegetables were appropriate for dinner even though it is the end of July.

I had planned to do a lot of other electrical work today, but it was a full day and everything that got done was something that needed to get done.  It was also work that had to get done in the order in which it was accomplished.  My original plans were obviously too ambitious, and today’s work involved details that required time to figure out and execute.

 

2014/07/27 (N) Attic Access

Leave a reply

We had a long day of work today.  We were up just after 7 AM, had a light breakfast of toast, fruit juice, and coffee, read a few blog posts, and got to work.  My first task was to apply a second, light coat of drywall compound to all of the divots in the wall.

Our main morning task was the installation of the fold-down ladder for the garage attic.  It was definitely a two-person job.  Per the instructions, we installed temporary installation boards to support the assembly while we secured it in place.  The installation required one of us to be in the attic and that job fell to me.  We put the assembly on top of a plastic shelving unit to get it close to the ceiling.  Once I was in the attic with all of the tools I would need, including a headlamp, Linda slid the shelving unit so the assembly was directly under the rough opening.  It was still too far from the ceiling for me to reach from above so she placed two footstools under it.  I was then able to reach one end from above and pull it up into the opening while she lifted the other end into position from below.

We read and followed the directions carefully so we already had the pull string and T-handle installed.  That allowed Linda to move the plastic shelves out of the way, carefully open the door from below, and position the step ladder.  I dropped her the cord for the worklight and then had enough light to work comfortably.  We temporarily secured the unit with deck screws.  They were cheap screws and the heads tended to strip easily, but we got them in far enough to hold the unit in place while I installed the lag screws.

The 10 lag screws got installed through pre-drilled holes, six of which went through metal hinge plates.  The instructions said to drill through these holes into the trusses and headers, but the folding ladder hardware made that difficult, and my drill buts were all a bit short to do much.  By cutting the zip ties and partially unfolding the ladder I was able to get all 10 lag screws most of the way in with my drill.  They all had to be shimmed.  The final tightening was done with a socket and ratchet.

We took a break for lunch around 1 PM and had leftover miso soup, tofu hot dogs, and fresh apples.  I made a quick run to Lowe’s to get some additional electrical parts I needed to install lights and a light switch in the garage attic.  While I was there I also bought a baby gate for our basement stairs.  Up until now we have blocked the landing for the basement stairs with a couple of chairs when grand-daughter Madeline has come to visit.  Now that she has successfully spent the night at our house we anticipate many more such visits and wanted a more permanent solution.

The device I bought had a gate with a latch.  It was designed to be installed under tension, but the directions said it had to be anchored to the walls if used at the top of a flight of stairs.  We were not thrilled about mounting it to the walls, but we did.  The installation took about an hour to complete.

Back in the garage I found an old, unopened drywall sanding/finishing sponge.  It had a 1/4″ thick coarse pad on one side for sanding.  The regular sponge side was used to wipe off the drywall and slightly wet the areas to be sanded.  I let the sanded areas dry, wiped everything down, and applied a coat of white exterior semi-gloss to the area of the two existing walls and the ceiling that will be inside the utility closet.

The probability of rain rose steadily though the day and finally resulted in thunderstorms around 4:30 PM.  Steve said yesterday he would be here today and I tried to get him to understand that based on the forecast he needed to be here early.  He wasn’t.  He showed up with the excavator about an hour after the rains, by which point the retaining wall work site had turned to mud.

He took the excavator back there anyway and we watched him work while we had dinner, which consisted of a very nice green salad with strawberries and the rest of the Pad Thai from last night.  (Even left over it was still exceptional.)  He was moving boulders and a lot of dirt trying to get rid of the small mountain range that blocked the flow of water away from our lower deck and was spreading the dirt around in an effort to create some of the final grading.  He brought a helper with him and they had long lengths of drain pipe that I think the intended to install.  But the skies darkened, the rain started, the wind came up, and the warning sirens came on.  He shut off the machine and the two of them made a run for their truck and left.  More rain is forecast for tonight with a chance of thunderstorms, possibly severe.  The probability for rain on Tuesday is currently 60%, and stays at 40% through Wednesday.  At this juncture it appears that they won’t get much work done here this week, and their machine may be stuck here until it dries out.

After dinner Linda and I finally built the base for the platform where the library HVAC unit will be installed.  It’s a 40″ deep x 46″ wide box with center cross bracing.  It’s made of pieces of 2 x 12 on edge.  We set it in the northeast corner of the garage, leveled it with shims, and secured it to the studs in the walls with 3.5″ nails.  I had to make all of the cuts with my Rockwell 8″ circular saw as the chop saw won’t cut something that wide.  I did not cut the plywood platform as I need to install it after the new (west) wall of the utility closet is in place so I can nail through the base into the wall studs.  I will, however, cut the plywood tomorrow before the wall is built as I will be able to set it on the base and trace around it on the underside to get a perfect fit.

My goal for tomorrow is to cut the platform, build the west wall, set it in place and anchor it, and install the platform.  Linda has a 12:30 PM dentist appointment, so I will have to do most of this work by myself.  By that point I will need to get cleaned up, shift gears, and get ready for a 4 PM FMCA Education Committee work session.

 

2014/07/26 (S) Climbing Ladders

Leave a reply

We did not go to our usual ham radio breakfast in South Lyon today so I could get an earlier start on the construction work in the garage.  Before I even got started I got sidetracked by a small rain gutter project which led to further gutter projects.

I bought a downspout elbow yesterday and wanted to get it installed before the next rains, which are forecast for tomorrow at 20% in the early morning riding steadily to 90% by 6 PM.  The elbow is a replacement for a short straight downspout section that feeds water from the end of one gutter into a slightly lower gutter that is perpendicular to the first.  The second gutter has the main downspout at one end.  Rather than dumping water straight down into the lower gutter, the elbow will direct it towards the lower gutter drain hole and away from the house.  A picture would make this much clearer, but I did not take one.

While I was installing the elbow I noticed that both gutters had a lot of “stuff” in them and the wire mesh drain hole grates were mostly clogged.  I cleaned all of the gutters last year, although I do not remember exactly when.  I expect a certain amount of organic material to accumulate in the gutters—the house is surrounded by trees after all—but I was surprised by the amount of granular material that had washed off of the shingles.  There was a lot of granular material last year, which I assumed had taken many seasons to accumulate, and I had flushed all of it out of the gutters with a hose.

The guy who inspected the house when we bought it said the roof was “serviceable” without being much more specific.  I suspect it is approaching the end of its useful life, but is not a project we can take on this year.  We have a ranch house with a low pitched roof, probably not more than 4-in-12.  It would take me several weeks to roof it myself, but it’s something I am (still) capable of doing.  Perhaps next summer, after we build the barn.

Given the condition of these two gutters I decided to check/clean all of them.  In the process I found that the gutter on the front of the house had three mounting screws loose at the west end.  I tightened them up, completing my unplanned roof tasks for the day.

There are several interesting things about “small construction projects.”  One is that they seem small because you can conceptualize the outcome and visualize all of the major steps quickly and easily.  Another is that you assume they aren’t going to cost very much; they are, after all, small projects.  Having been educated and worked as an engineer at one point in my life I tend to design things rather than jump right into the building phase.  The design phase is where I usually get my first reality check as I start to consider all of the details of the project that I was not able to quickly and easily visualize.  The next reality check comes when I am finally ready to build, which means cutting and fastening wood, only to realize that I have many days of other tasks I must complete first.  The tricky part of construction is that stuff has to be done in a certain (correct) order.  If not, you end up having to deconstruct something and then reconstruct it, or engineer an entirely different solution which takes even longer and costs even more than what you planned to do in the first place.

So even though I worked all day I did not build the platform.  Here’s what I did instead:  removed some drywall to expose a wire that was a little too short to get the sheathing into the new sub-panel; installed an outlet box and duplex outlet using the old wire and ran a new wire to the panel; filled out the panel with circuit breakers I will eventually need for new or rewired circuits; patched holes in drywall; cut and installed two studs in the north wall to provide 16″ on center spacing for new drywall; bored holes through the new studs for an old wire; installed a switch near the rear garage door fed from the old wire; ran a new wire for a new outside light; went to Lowe’s and purchased a 36″ exterior grade door (steel), a fold-down ladder for the garage attic, an exterior LED light fixture, and a light fixture for the new utility closet; enlarged the garage attic access opening from 22.5″ x 45″ to 22.5″ x 54″; read and pondered the installation instructions for the fold-down ladder; and decided to call it a night.

Somewhere in all of that we had orange/grapefruit juice, Teeko’s Sweet Seattle Dreams coffee (a blend that Jeff does just for us) and Linda’s homemade granola for breakfast; tofu hot dogs for lunch with sweet cherries, and; vegan Pad Thai for dinner that Linda made from scratch.  The Pad Thai was a complicated dish but Linda’s efforts really paid off; it was outstanding.

By the time I showered, worked on this post, and caught up on some blogs I follow it was time for bed.  I was tired but, having exerted myself physically and mentally and accomplished tangible things, it was a good kind of tired.  I no longer climb corporate ladders.  Today I was up and down real ones.

 

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

Leave a reply

We were up earlier than normal.  Linda went into the bakery today and likes to be on the road ahead of the worst of the morning traffic rush.  Since she was working I figured it was a good day for me to also do some paid work (plus a couple of loads of laundry).  Earlier in the summer I agreed to write assessment items for some of the modules in the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  The items are needed for use with the Lectora platform, which Bill Heldmyer at Wayne RESA is using to re-package the modules.  These are modules that other team members developed, so I have to spend some time with the content before I can write the items.

I did some work on this in June and then got busy with contractors and out-of-town trips.  I am still tied up with construction, contractors, and other projects but a timely completion for this work would be early August so I spent much of today working on it.  I already had one module done and hoped to finish the other six but only managed to complete three of them.  I am anxious to get back to work on the HVAC prep in the garage but I plan to continue working on the assessment items tomorrow as I would like to e-mail them to the team for feedback before the end of the day.

I have a lot going on at the moment.  I like being busy, but this is starting to feel like “work.”  I have a growing list of “must do” bus projects that I have yet to start:  1) fogged window replacement; 2) auxiliary air filter / water separator replacement; 3) Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir replacement; 4) Aqua-Hot exhaust leak repair; 5) motorized windshield shade repair; 6) finishing the installation of the ZENA power generator (for charging the house battery bank while driving), and; 7) redoing the water bay (that’s a big one).  I have an optional project to replace the rear view camera system.

Butch is building new ride height linkages for his bus and wants to build some for me as well, so that makes nine “bus projects” I would like to accomplish before the weather turns too cold to work outside.  Some of these are projects I can do with the bus in front of the house once I can move it back into its normal parking spot.  The rest are things I will work on once I get it down to Butch and Fonda’s place in Twelve Mile, Indiana, probably this September.

The FMCA education committee work is ramping up and I have three websites I am trying to launch, one of which has an August 11 target date, plus our own website/blog to maintain (as of this writing I am over two weeks behind on blog posts).  I am also supposed to be writing a “featured bus” article for Bus Conversion Magazine on Marty and Pat Caverly’s MCI MC-5B conversion “Scooby Doo & Bookworm.”  It’s a great conversion that has taken 20 + years to build and will be the cover/centerfold story when it is published.  I have 1,500 photos from Marty and the only way I will make sense of the project is to sit down with Marty, select images, and make notes.  Once I have a sense of the chronology of the work, and the images to illustrate it, I can weave the words together to tell the story.

Kyle and Spencer were here working on the landscaping for most of the day.  Steve stopped by in the morning to go over the work from yesterday and outline the work for today.  It’s coming along, albeit much more slowly than I think it should.  For a job that requires a lot of manual labor we normally only have two guys on site, sometimes three and sometimes only one.  And, sad to say, they simply do not work as hard and as persistently when Steve is not here.

Linda got home ahead of the afternoon traffic.  We had leftover potato and lentil curry and naan for dinner and both the dish and the bread were still excellent.  A few black grapes and dark, sweet cherries for desert and we were off to bed early.

 

2014/07/23 (R) My Platform

Leave a reply

The primary elections are just around the corner but my platform has nothing to do with politics.  My platform is a 46″ x 40″ surface 12″ above the floor in the northeast corner of the garage, or will be once I build it.  This platform will be the base for the new HVAC unit for the library and I need to have it built before the equipment gets here and Darryll shows up to install it.  Once the unit is installed I need to enclose it to isolate it from the garage to prevent explosive vapors or noxious fumes from entering the combustion chamber or fresh air circulation.  That will require the construction of two walls one of which will have an exterior grade door.

John’s chop saw, which I borrowed the other night, allows me to make more accurate cuts (clean and square) than I can with my circular saw.  In the meantime I have some work to do removing/installing a few studs in the north wall of the garage and running some new electrical wire.  I need to run 120V 15A circuits for the furnace portion of the library unit and for the ceiling mounted garage furnace and a 240V 20A circuit for the library air-conditioner.  Eventually I will have a 240V 30A outlet for our radial arm saw, which would be great for the woodworking aspects of this project, but that’s a project for another day.

Three landscapers showed up a little before 8 AM (Tommy, Matt, and Spencer).  Tommy was on the phone with Steve getting their instructions for the day and then they got to work building an additional section of the west retaining wall with medium size boulders and preparing the area under the east end of the deck for a layer of egg rock.  They took off around 9:45 AM for some unknown reason, but the sound of their truck reminded us to put the trash out at the street for pickup.  They were back in a little while, worked until noon, and took their lunch break.  By 3:30 PM they had the boulder wall built, the egg rock placed, a strip of edging set into a small trench, and small boulders placed on the eastern slope below the large boulders.  That certainly looked like progress.

Linda worked at her desk until mid-afternoon and then started working on dinner.  Although simple in presentation at the table, she put a lot of time into our meal.  She made a potato and lentil curry that was very good with deep, complex flavors, and garlic naan bread.  Both were as good as anything I have ever had at an Indian restaurant and the naan was vegan, made with unsweetened soy milk in place of dairy milk and olive oil in place of dairy butter.

I spent most of the day taking the measurements I needed to turn my mental concept for the utility closet into a set of design drawings from which I could produce a material list.  By supper time I had a good set of drawings to guide the carpentry work but was still puzzling over some electrical issues.  By the time Linda had dinner ready I was ready to set thus project aside for the night.

It was after 7 PM by the time we finished eating and cleaned up, but that left us plenty of time to sit on the deck and enjoy a cool northwest breeze and the muted light of scattered clouds.  It eventually got too cool to stay outside so I worked at my computer until bedtime.

 

2024/07/22 (T) A Quiet Day At Home

Leave a reply

We ran the air-conditioner all day yesterday and well into the evening.  It cooled off into the mid-upper 60’s overnight so we turned the A-C off when we got up this morning and opened up the house.

Ron and Mary were mostly packed before breakfast.  We all had some of Linda’s yummy homemade granola with fresh blueberries for breakfast and everyone agreed it was superior to any store-bought granola they had ever had.  We visited until 9 AM and then helped them load their car for the trip back to Pennsylvania after an all-to-short visit.  Still, it was nice to see them for the time they were here and they got to see our grand-daughter for the first time and chat briefly with our children.  They had a nine hour drive ahead of them, plus or minus, depending on traffic, construction zones, and number/length of stops.  The day was forecast to be sunny and very warm, with a high temperature at our house of 90 degrees F, but with no precipitation along their route.

Only one landscaper (Spencer) showed up this morning around 10 AM.  Steve had some hand work for him to do.  I checked to see that he had water and he assured me that he brought plenty to drink.  With the outside air temperature rising, we closed the house up and turned the A-C on.

We were both surprisingly tired but wanted to get something useful accomplished today.  Linda worked at her desk while I cleaned the concrete driveway leading up to the garage from the street.  The landscapers have been using the driveway to stage some of their bulk materials such as crushed limestone and egg rock.  They got all of that material moved to other parts of the yard over the weekend but there was a layer of dust, small rocks, and other debris left behind.  I swept most of it off the driveway with a large push broom and then finished the job with a leaf blower.

There was a lot of crushed limestone left so over the weekend I had Steve push it into a 8′ wide by 15′ long parking pad 4″ – 6″ deep off the west side of the driveway and adjacent to the woods that run along the road.  The pad still had tracks in it from the excavator treads so I raked those out, filled in some dirt around the edges of the pad, and tamped the edges down.  The pull-through driveway from the front stairs to the concrete driveway was also rutted from the Bobcat front-loader being driven on it so I raked that out as best I could.  By the time I was done it was noon, it was hot, and I was sweaty and thirsty.  I decided I’d had enough for the day, closed up the storage container and garage, came in, and drank a bottle of ICE brand water.  This water is lightly carbonated and lightly fruit flavored, and I find it very refreshing.

I had a phone message yesterday from Darryll of DCM Heating and Cooling with some information I needed in order to prepare the corner of the garage for the library HVAC unit.  There were a few things I still needed to know, so I put in another call to him and left a message.  For lunch Linda served the left over salads from last night’s dinner along with hummus and chips.  We sat on the back deck for a while enjoying the slight cooling effect of a warm summer breeze, but eventually went back inside to escape the heat.

We did not do much the rest of the day.  I apparently broke our grandfather clock on Monday while winding it and spent a little time looking for information online.  I found a Sligh manual that included some troubleshooting tips but did not get as far as trying to diagnose and fix the problem.  We were both tired and took naps in the late afternoon.  That was unusual for us but could easily become part of our daily routine, especially on hot days like we had today.

I worked on bus barn drawings while Linda prepared dinner.  I then called John to see if I could borrow his chop saw and if he had time to look at the drawings.  Linda went along and visited with Diane.  We stayed until almost 10 PM.

 

2014/07/21 (M) Matthaei Botanical Gardens

1 Reply

Ron and Mary are leaving tomorrow morning so we did our Ann Arbor trip today.  Before leaving we closed up the house and turned on the air-conditioning, the first time we have used it this year, as the forecast was for a warm, humid day and we wanted it to be comfortable when we got back.  It was also a good excuse to run the system and make sure it really works.

Mattheai Botanical Gardens (Univ. of Mich), Ann Arbor, MI

Matthaei Botanical Gardens (Univ. of Mich), Ann Arbor, MI

We chose the Mattheai Botanical Gardens over the Arboretum primarily based on ease of parking.  The “Arb” is located near the University of Michigan campus in the center of Ann Arbor where parking can be very difficult.  The Gardens are on the east edge of town, somewhat in the country with very little traffic on the access roads, and has parking lots with plenty of spaces.  We still had to pay to park—there’s no such thing as free parking for any facility connected to U of M—but the rates are reasonable and admission to the Gardens is free.

 

Gardens and Conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, MI

Gardens and Conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, MI

The botanical gardens were very nice with an emphasis on native Michigan plants which we appreciated.  After walking the gardens and conservatory we hiked one of the shorter trails along the stream.  I took quite a few pictures but it was a sunny, cloudless day, so I don’t know if any of them will be any good.  The plants were brilliant to see, but this was certainly not ideal light conditions for plant photography.  We were there for two hours, long enough for a first visit on a warm day, and left in time to have lunch before visiting our son and his family in town.

 

Mattaei Botanical Gardens

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

We went to Elevation Burger on Washtenaw Avenue west of US-23 for lunch.  EB is an organic burger joint with a couple of veggie burger options, one of which was vegan, and an interesting choice of toppings.  They also have fries and ice cream offerings.  Our vegan burgers and fries were very good.

We arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s around 3 PM to find Madeline already awake from her afternoon nap and visiting with Jake and China.  (Shawna’s mom, Carol, is married to Cliff.  Jake and China are Cliff’s sister’s grand-children.)  Our daughter, Meghan, drove in from Dexter to join the family gathering.  Shawna took Jake and China to see downtown Ann Arbor while the rest of us walked to Burns Park.  Madeline played for about an hour, with lots of help from Mary and Meghan, before we all headed back to the house.  Shawna returned and we visited some more until Madeline indicated she was hungry.  We left around 5:30 PM as Madeline was beginning her dinner.

 

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

 

Madeline shows her dad where the airplane is (Burns Park, Ann Arbor)

Madeline shows her dad where the airplane is (Burns Park, Ann Arbor)

We were going to take Ron and Mary to downtown Brighton for a stroll on the boardwalk that surrounds the Mill Pond, but we were all tired so went directly home instead.  We had a lovely dinner at home of chickpea salad, wild rice salad, sliced nectarines, and whole grain bread with vegan “butter” spread.  It was an easy meal, as Linda had prepared the salads ahead of time, and the lighter, cooler dishes hit the spot on one of the warmest days we have had this summer (upper 80’s with humidity).  After dinner we played a card game called “Up the River and down the River.”  I’m not much for games, but the other three really like them so I was a good sport and played.   I lost, but I did not care.

 

 

L-2-R: Ron, Mary, Meghan, Linda (behind), Brendan, and Madeline (in stroller).

L-2-R: Ron, Mary, Meghan, Linda (behind), Brendan, and Madeline (in stroller).

2014/07/20 (N) Company

Leave a reply

The landscapers were back at 7:45 AM as promised.  We were up and ready for them and I was back working on the new sub-panel in the garage by 8:30 AM.  I finished the work (for now) and cleaned up the mess as best I could.  Electrical work, especially panel wiring, is very physical and tends to produce a lot of scrap.  Once the garage was cleaned up I applied the same treatment to myself.  By 1 PM I was ready for part 2 of my day, which began with a load of laundry, and then off to my desk to put a little time into our much neglected blog.

I have been taking photographs and writing daily blog posts all month but have not been taking the additional time to select and process the images and upload the posts to our WordPress site.  The last blog post on our website is from July 6th.  During the early afternoon planned to upload a few of the posts while we waited for Ron and Mary to arrive.  I ended up filing and deleting e-mails, which I have also neglected for the last few days.

Ron (Linda’s brother) and Mary (Ron’s wife) arrived at 3:30 PM.  They are on their way back to Pennsylvania after a week in Madison, Wisconsin participating in day-long bicycle rides.  They are fairly serious bicyclists; a few years ago Ron rode from Seattle to Boston with a large group over the summer.  This was their first visit to our new house so they got the full tour of the house and the property.  We were sitting on the deck enjoying cool beverages and good conversation when the landscapers returned.  They were still working with their heavy equipment, so we went back inside to talk.

Linda started pulling dinner together at 5:30 PM with Mary’s assistance.  We had a green salad with cut up vegetables and seitan stroganoff served over white rice the way I like it.  A glass of Merlot balanced nicely with the richness of the stroganoff.  Linda, Ron, and Mary went for a walk after dinner while I loaded and started the dishwasher.  When they returned we talked into the evening and Mary showed us pictures from family gatherings and their just-completed bicycle rides.  Linda had baked a vegan chocolate cake this morning and served slices with fresh cut strawberries and vanilla coconut milk ice “cream” for dessert.

 

2014/07/19 (S) A Busy Day

Leave a reply

At 7:30 AM we were about to leave for our usual Ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon when we realized some of the landscaping crew was already in the back yard.  I talked briefly with Steve to see if he had any questions for us and to let him know we would be gone for the morning.  We arrived at the Senate Coney Island a little later than usual to find a big group, some of whom were not regular attendees.  We would normally have lingered and enjoyed conversation over coffee, but we needed to get to Ann Arbor for a quick visit and to pick up my socket wrench toolbox from our son.

When we arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s house Madeline was outside pushing her push toy around the front yard.  As soon as she saw us she took off down the sidewalk towards the park.  Shawna retrieved her and got her stroller ready while Brendan and I transferred things out of and in to my car.  We then walked to Burn’s Park where Madeline played for about 45 minutes before we headed back to their house.  We had hugs all around and left.  We stopped at the Whole Foods Market in our way back to US-23 and then headed for home.

Back at the house, four landscapers were working, including Steve, and lots was getting done.  Hurray!  I got busy working on the electrical sub-panel in the garage while Linda made a run to the recycling center.  When she got back she did a load of laundry, which is normally my job, while she cleaned the lower level of the house.

I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for electrical parts and Linda had to make one in the evening to buy some 15 Amp single-pole circuit breakers, but I managed to get the old sub-panel removed, the wires labeled, the new panel hung, and all but one wire reconnected.  That wire needs to be replaced and I will do that first thing in the morning.  We turned the breaker on in the basement that feeds power to the sub-panel in the garage, turned on the main breaker in the sub-panel, and then turned each branch circuit breaker and checked to see that it was working correctly.

The reason Linda had to go get 15 Amp circuit breakers is that I discovered the old sub-panel had 14 gauge (AWG) wires “protected” by 20 Amp circuit breakers.  14 AWG wires are only rated to carry 15 Amps.  If allowed to carry more than that for any length of time they will overheat which could melt the wire insulation and lead to a short or worse, arcing, which can start a fire.  I will be placing those circuits on 15 Amp breakers in the morning.

 

2014/07/14 (M) Education

Leave a reply

Linda was up at 6 AM and was out the door and on her way to Twelve Mile, Indiana at 6:30 AM.  She decided last night not to have breakfast at home in favor of getting on the road.  I slept in and got up at 7:30 AM.  Lind’s homemade granola made for an easy, tasty breakfast.

Two landscapers showed up a little before 9:00 AM as I was getting ready to leave to run some errands and said Steve was on his way, so I stuck around until he got there.  We looked at a few things together and then I left.

On the way home from running my errands I got a call from TOMTEK reminding me that we have an annual service contract with them for the main house furnace (hot-water base-board heat) and air-conditioner.  I agreed to have them come on Thursday to service the A-C.  Perhaps while they are here they can figure out why it makes a noise that sounds like the thump, thump, thump of a helicopter blade.

About a mile from the house I spotted a small Painted Turtle trying to cross Hacker Rd.  A truck going the other way spotted it at the same time.  We both turned around and came back.  I got there first and put it on the front passenger floor mat after assuring the other driver that I was going to take it to our property and release it near the (neighbor’s) pond.  Turtles have very little chance of successfully crossing a road most places, including around here.

The two landscapers worked into the afternoon.  They could only go so far before needing Steve to inspect and approve their work.  He did not make it back today and I think they quit working around 3 PM.

Education is what I did professionally for the last 21 years before I retired, and I am still doing it to some small extent.  Back in the late winter I agreed to serve on a newly reconstituted FMCA national education committee.  There are 6 – 10 people on the committee, depending on how you count, and except for a couple of staff at FMCA headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio we are spread out all over the U. S.  Our meetings are, therefore, conducted by telephone conference with ideas and information shared via e-mail in-between.  I also set up a folder in our personal Dropbox as a place to put documents so the committee can retrieve them.

We had our third meeting today from 4:00 to 5:30 PM EDT.  I spent the rest of the evening creating an outline of a possible RV curriculum and dealing with e-mail related to our meeting.  Linda got home at 8:00 PM and we had leftovers for dinner, after which I returned to my work and she headed to bed.

I have one, maybe two, days to concentrate on desk tasks.  Once the Pack-Rat storage container arrives on Wednesday I will be tied up with house-related chores through the 19th and then company through the 23rd.  I expect delivery of some HVAC equipment and materials during that window.  With any luck Darryll will be here starting on the 24th and I will be tied up working with him through the end of the month.  I’m hopeful, if not optimistic, that the landscapers will also be done with their two projects by the end of the month.

 

20140713 (N) Pack-Rat

Leave a reply

Guilty as charged.  I am one of those guys who likes my stuff; it’s one of the main reasons we are not full-time RVers.  In order to get the garage and library ready for Darryll, and not trash the house in the process, we checked online for portable storage units.  We decided to order one from 1-800-Pack-Rat.  They were slightly less expensive than PODS, but the main factor was their ability to deliver a 16-foot long unit on Wednesday this coming week.  That will give us Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to clear enough stuff out of the garage to store the materials for Darryll and give him the space he needs to work.

Linda got a call from Butch at Service Motors to let her know they were back home from the Crosley Automobile Club national meet in Wauseon, Ohio and to see if she was available to come down tomorrow to finish up some critical accounting tasks related to the sale of most of their businesses assets.  The purchasers were in Wauseon for the rally and arrived at the business as I was chatting with Butch.  They plan to load all of the stuff they have bought into the five vehicles they brought with them and leave sometime on Tuesday, so Linda will be there mid-morning tomorrow and probably be home by 9:00 PM.  It will be a 15 hour day for her; 8 hours of driving and 7 hours of accounting, but she can/will do it.  I would normally go along, if for no other reason than to keep her company and share the driving, but I expect to have landscapers here tomorrow (and the rest of the week) and need to be here to interact with them.  Besides, there isn’t anything useful I can do at Service Motors at the moment so I would just be in the way and twiddling my thumbs.

We were both tired this morning and slept in a little later than normal.  That meant a later breakfast, which meant we skipped lunch and had an early dinner.  That, in turn allowed me to have dinner before going to our monthly Ham radio club meeting in South Lyon.

The morning overcast gave way to scattered clouds and blue skies on pleasant northwest winds, bringing cooler temperatures and lower humidity.  It was a perfect day for sitting on the (north facing) deck and doing sit down things, and that is exactly what we did.  Linda spent some time reading Veganomicon while I finished up a couple of blog post drafts and reviewed the SLAARC/WP website in advance of having to demonstrate it this evening for the ham radio club.  The site still needs work.  Some pages still need content, I found a few spelling errors, and I still need to resize photos so they take up less disk space and load faster.  The login feature is still working and the roster/database still displays correctly, if somewhat inelegantly.  But it’s functional enough to give the club members a preview and I will only demonstrate one photo gallery with a limited number of images so it shouldn’t be too sluggish.

By mid-afternoon it was warm enough that I decided to work in my office and get a few more blog posts uploaded to our WordPress site.  Linda made a “pasta e fagioli” recipe from Veganomicon and added some chopped dark leafy greens she had on hand.  She needed a dry white wine for the recipe and opened our bottle of Semi-Dry Riesling from Chateau Chantal, a gift from our daughter’s recent trip to the Traverse City area.  It was a little dry for my taste as a before dinner wine but paired very nicely with the meal.

I got to South Lyon just ahead of the 6:30 PM start of our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) monthly meeting.  The business meeting was short.  We then had a lengthy presentation/discussion of our ARRL Field Day participation followed by a short preview of the new WordPress website.  It was generally well received and I got a few good suggestions during the discussion.

When I got home around 9 PM we had chocolate cake (vegan, of course) with raspberry sauce and relaxed for a while before turning in for the night.

 

20140711 (F) Nice Weather Lately

Leave a reply

Steven’s nephew, Spencer, was here a little after 8 AM and spent some time cleaning up the driveway.  He was joined by Tommy, who was only available for the morning.  Tommy got instructions from Steve by phone and they tried working on the retaining walls, but I’m not sure what they accomplished.  One of the large boulders Steve positioned yesterday on the lower west wall had dropped 6 inches and they were unable to re-position it.

It was another pleasant day, so I decided to work outside during the morning.  I cut up some previously trimmed tree limbs and then started pruning our apple tree.  I tried to cut all of the dead limbs and branches I could reach from the ground using our new Fiskar’s ratcheting lopper.  With that material removed I was able to use the pole saw and compound lopper to remove some larger and/or higher limbs.  By noon it was getting warm and I knocked off for the day and had lunch.  Linda made the chickpea (garbanzo bean) salad that we both like so much and served it on a bed of greens with red grapes and sweet Bing cherries on the side.

Tommy had to take off for the afternoon and left Spencer to start moving smaller rocks onto the slope of the east retaining wall.  We would occasionally hear one thud against the foundation and I decided I should check on his progress.  He was doing a fine job of tossing rocks into place, but I did not like the way the earth was pitched as it appeared to slope back towards the house.  I examined the west wall and it appeared to have the same problem.

Since the whole reason for this project was to get water to flow away from the house, I asked Spencer to take a break while I called Steve.  I told him that something just did not look right to me and that I could not see any evidence of a drain tile behind the upper wall on the west side.  He was running the excavator at another job site and wasn’t able to come look at our job so he sent Kyle over to pick up Spencer, who did not have a car.  With a chance of rain in the forecast for Saturday through Monday it is looking more and more like this job will not be done until the end of July.

In the afternoon I continued working on configuring my Windows 8.1 laptop.  My challenge today was getting Outlook 2013 to preview PDF files.  I used the search feature on the Start screen to locate information, some of which indicated I would have to create and/or edit the registry.  In the end the solution only required two steps:  installing Adobe Reader 11 and then setting it as the default program for PDFs.

With that problem solved I edited my blog posts for July 1 through 9 and started uploading them.  I managed to get the posts for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd uploaded before dinner.  I also got a return call from Darryll at DCM Heating and Cooling and we agreed he would come to the house tomorrow at 10:30 AM to finalize the work we need done and pin down a start date to prep the house for natural gas and install a small HVAC unit for the library and a furnace for the garage.  We also need the main air-conditioner serviced.  Luckily it has been a cool summer so far.  The conversion of appliances will have to wait until the natural gas line is connected to the meter and turned on, which could be as late as early October.

I got a call from Gary at GM Construction sometime in the last few days.  He finally had all of his supplier quotes for our pole barn / bus garage project and had a price for us.  It was higher than I would have liked, but less than the quote from Morton Buildings, which was for a much smaller barn.  Last night I called Phil from Precision Grading to update him on the status of the project and to see if he would swing by and look at the pull-through driveway which the landscapers have torn up more than I expected.  My best guess is that we will get a barn up somehow, but I’m not sure when or how.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled sliced tofu with onions and Bar-B-Que sauce served on a toasted sandwich bun with a side of lightly oiled and baked potato wedges and a few fresh strawberries.  Of course, that meant ketchup with Tabasco sauce.  We split a can of cold Yuengling beer which was the perfect beverage for this meal.  Sometime in the last two days Linda made a raspberry sauce from frozen raspberries we picked last year.  Earlier today she made a vegan chocolate cake and this evening the cake and raspberry sauce came together for dessert.

 

2014/07/09 (W) vCard Magic And Adult Tonka Toy

Leave a reply

This morning when I turned my computers on there was an update available for Adobe Creative Cloud so I let it download while we had breakfast using our new Corelle dinnerware.  Adobe updates are either very large or their servers are very slow or both.  Whatever the reason, their updates seem to take a very long time to download and install.

A couple of the landscapers arrived at 8:00 AM and resumed work on the front stairs.  It was overcast at dawn but the clouds were forecast to clear by the afternoon with temperatures in the low 70’s and zero chance of rain.  That would normally be a perfect day to work outside, if the ground wasn’t saturated with water from the recent rains.  They worked on the front stairs until lunch time, took a short lunch break, and then worked a little longer.  When they quit for the day they had all nine of the large precast steps installed and the crushed limestone base built for the brick paver sidewalk.  I think they left because there wasn’t anything else for them to do at our site until they either had some additional materials (slag and paver bricks), more crew members (for moving dirt in wheelbarrows or digging trenches by hand), or dry enough conditions to get the excavator around back ( to trench and set boulders in the retaining walls).

Linda decided not open more boxes today and focused instead on deep cleaning the kitchen, including the freezer/refrigerator, stove, and microwave and getting things ready to go to the recycling center and the Salvation Army donation center and resale store.  While all of that was going on I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and got to work on my computer tasks.  I checked my e-mail using my new ASUS laptop computer.  Everything looked OK, so I started reading and replying to e-mails on the new laptop.  That was a major milestone in that I am now committed to using the new machine as my primary computer.

With that transition in mind I spent much of the morning copying files from my old laptop to both the old and new NAS units.  I then copied critical files having to do with my websites and photographs from one of the NAS units to my new laptop.  Getting the new laptop setup with everything I need will take quite a while, but that’s OK as it also affords me the opportunity to move over only those things that I absolutely need when I need them.

I installed the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) add-in without difficulty but the installation of the Duplicate Killer add-in failed.  I checked the 4Team.biz website and then e-mailed their support address.  My ASUS is running Windows 8.1 / 64-bit and apparently my Outlook 2013 is also 64-bit.  According to their website the vCard Wizard add-in supports the 64-bit version of Outlook 2013, but the Duplicate Killer add-in only supports the 32-bit version.  One of my reasons for buying vCard Wizard was that I figured the companion Duplicate Killer program from the same company would work better with it than it would with a vCard converter from another company.  If I had realized it wasn’t compatible with my configuration I could have pursued other options.

I sync’d my Palm Tungsten T3 to my old Dell laptop and then did a vCard export of all my contacts and moved it to the ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units.  From there I was able to import all of my old Palm contacts into the Contacts folder in my Personal Folder, creating duplicates if/as needed.  The Personal Folder is a carryover from my previous conversion from MS Outlook Express to MS Outlook 2007.  I am a bit unclear about the distinction between the “address book” and “contacts” within the context of MS Outlook and I am not sure I have accomplished what I intended to accomplish with vCard Wizard.  I have accomplished something for sure–my Palm contacts are now clearly in my Outlook 2013–but I thought they would be added to my address book, which does not appear to be the case.  Perhaps I chose the wrong destination folder?  More research is needed.

By 4:30 PM it was obvious the landscapers were not coming back today so that gave me the opportunity to practice using the Kobelco 35sr excavator again.  I worked for about 90 minutes digging more junk out of the woods just southwest of our house and adding it to the pile I started on Monday.  Think bricks, cinder blocks, railroad ties, landscape timbers, dimensional lumber, cut up tree trunks and large downed tree limbs and you will have the picture.  In addition to the bucket for digging and transferring material, the excavator has a claw “thumb” that can be closed to hold things in the bucket, like tree limbs, or pick things up, like boulders and cinder blocks.  It turned out that the bucket/claw combination are much stronger than a cinder block; I broke several trying to pick them up.

By the time I parked the machine and turned it off Linda had dinner ready.  She made a salad of dark greens with almonds and grapes and a barley, split pea, lentil risotto with carrot, red onion, celery, garlic, and a few chopped up greens.  We finished the bottle of Merlot we bought at Whole Foods on Saturday.  At $3 per bottle (750 ml) it was competitive with box wines like Franzia, and of comparable quality.  Although slightly dry for my taste, it was a good accompaniment to the somewhat savory dishes Linda has made this week.  I would be tempted to stock up at that price if I liked a bit more than I do.

After dinner I edited photographs on my new computer for the first time.  They will appear in the various blog entries starting with July 1st, which I will also edit and upload using the new machine.  Although the transition to a new computing platform always feels awkward for a while, and there is desire to return to the comfort of the old familiar one, from here on out I will be focused on making the ASUS my primary computing platform.

 

2014/07/08 (T) New Dinnerware

Leave a reply

I did not get all of the debris pulled out of the woods last night with the Kobelco sx35sr-3 excavator.  I was just learning how to use it so I wasn’t very efficient, and even if I had been experienced I could not have moved everything before it got dark.  I was up early this morning to get some more stuff moved before the landscapers showed up and needed it, but they beat me to the punch.

Steve showed up briefly to get the two-man crew on task and then left.  They worked on preparing and setting the next course of steps in front.  By the time they had one set it had started misting and progressed quickly to a light, steady rain.  They tried taking the excavator around back to do some trenching but the rain intensified and the ground was already very soft.  They almost got it stuck so I waved them off and made them take it back around to the front of the house.  They left shortly thereafter.  The afternoon weather was dry, cool, and breezy–very pleasant working conditions–but no one returned to resume the work.  The forecast for the rest of the week is for drier, cooler conditions, but it will take days for the ground behind the house to dry out enough that they can work efficiently and safely.

We still have a lot of unopened boxes from our move last year and Linda decided yesterday to start opening them and trying to deal with the contents.  She is always eager to get rid of things while I tend to be reluctant to part with stuff, but I am slowly coming around accepting that we have a lot of stuff we do not need, will never use, has no value, and that we have no place to store.

Her target was five boxes today.  I thought that was optimistic, but she dealt with five yesterday and five more today.  One of the boxes today had a collection of stemware with all the pieces individually wrapped in newspapers from circa 1995.  The newspaper was from our previous community, so we are the ones who packed them and obviously had them for some time before that.  We think we got them from my parents but no longer remember when or why.  Some of them may have belonged to my mother’s parents.

The discovery of the stemware led to them being washed and set out to dry followed by a re-thinking of what is stored/displayed in the kitchen/dining area.  That, in turn, led to a reconsideration of our everyday dinnerware.  We bought our Mikasa Studio Nova dinnerware a long time ago, perhaps more than 30 years, and it has served us well.  I still like the pattern; a simple round white plate with a colorful geometric edging that reminds me of the work of the Russian artist Kandinsky.  We have broken or chipped enough pieces over the years that we no longer have a complete service for more than four people, and many of the remaining pieces have developed stress lines and will eventually break.

Mikasa no longer manufactures the Studio Nova pattern and we have been looking for a replacement for the last couple of months.  We found one we liked at Bed, Bath, and Beyond but held off buying it while we continued to look.  We get 20% off coupons from BB&B regularly and when the rain let up Linda decided to go to the store in Brighton and buy the Noritaki set we liked, but came back empty handed.  It turned out that what we thought was a set of four pieces for four place settings (16 pieces) for $40 was just one place setting of four pieces.  We wanted to get 12 place settings plus service pieces, so this was not going to be our new dinnerware.

We spent some time looking at products online and found that the price of Mikasa products was similar to the Noritaki.  This changed our view of the price of Corelle dinnerware which we had also looked at and liked but mistakenly ruled out as too expensive.  We live about 11 miles from an outlet mall that has a Corning store (I know, I know, we live in a rural paradise) so we drove over there to see what they had in stock.  They had a 40% off sale on all open stock items (if you bought 12 or more pieces) and 20% off on boxed sets.

We looked at square designs and modern patterns, but decided to go with their plain Winter Frost White round product.  This is one of their longest running and broadest product lines with all items available as open stock.  They had boxed sets of five pieces for six place settings (30 pieces total) so we bought two of them to have a service for 12, and filled in an extra set of 12 medium plates, some serving bowls, and a couple of serving platters.  The simple white dinnerware makes any food look good and easy to see.  Our walls and appliances are white and our dining room table is a darker oak so the plates will both match and contrast nicely with our decor.

When we got home we opened everything and put it in the dishwasher.  While it ran Linda boxed up all of the old Mikasa pieces that were still serviceable.  She will donate them to the local Salvation Army store tomorrow.

My focus for today was purchasing and installing an add-in that allows Microsoft Outlook to import multiple vCards from a single file.  It’s really galling that I have to spend money to get Outlook to do something that it obviously should be able to do as a standard, built-in function, but there it is.  I researched plug-ins for this a few weeks ago so I revisited what I had previously found.  I finally selected the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) along with Duplicate Killer, both from 4TEAM Corp.  By purchasing them together I got Duplicate Killer for 50% off.  As soon as the purchase was completed I received the downloaded links for both programs and downloaded them but did not install them right away.

Why all the bother?  My old Palm Tungsten T3 PDA can output my contacts in vCard format, but it puts them all in one file.  There are manual ways to import this data to Outlook, but it would take days instead of minutes.  I may be retired but I do not have the patience for that and have better things to do with my time; even a nap would qualify.  The problem with the manual (free) approach is that it requires you to review each contact and decide what to do with it.  I have over 1,000 contacts in my Palm and there was no way I was going to review them one-by-one.

Dr. Michael Greger (NutritionFacts.org) recently did a nice video on the research findings about the health benefits of eating yams.  Linda picked up a nice big yam at Whole Foods on Saturday and baked it for dinner this evening, topping it with black beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, and finished off with vegan sour cream.  Yes, the “sour cream” is added fat calories, but we do not use it very often.

After dinner I copied over the Outlook mailbox (.pst) files from my old Dell laptop (Win XP / Outlook 2007) to my new ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units in preparation for moving to the use of Outlook on the new laptop tomorrow morning.  I spent a while after that selecting and processing images for blog posts going back to July 1st.  I have been keeping up with writing these posts, but not with posting them.

 

2014/07/05 (S) Re-Search

Leave a reply

Contractors who do outside work, such as excavators, builders, and landscapers are at the mercy of the weather, so they work when they can, and when they can work, they often put in long hours.  For those of us who made our living doing “white collar” work for companies with paid holidays, the 4th of July often meant a 3- or 4-day weekend.  For other kinds of workers, the 4th of July is a day off; one day, and for yet others (think retail) it is just another workday.  It doesn’t matter that it fell on a Friday this year.  The landscapers couldn’t work on Thursday because of the overnight rain.  No work means no pay.  Saturday July 5th, however, was forecast to be great weather for working outside, and with sunny skies and no rain since Thursday, our job site had dried out sufficiently to allow people and machines to work.  Alas, the holiday spirit was with them and they did not show up first thing this morning like I thought they might.

Since grand-daughter Madeline spent her second night in a row with us last night she was still here this morning.  Consequently we did not go to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon like we usually do on Saturday morning.  Madeline woke up hungry and Grandma Linda had her bottle warmed up and ready to go.  She had also prepped all of the ingredients for her yummy vegan blueberry pancakes.  Madeline had a little banana and some fresh blueberries while grandma cooked the pancakes and I made the coffee.  We all enjoyed our breakfast.

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it's the cover for our well).

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it’s the cover for our well).

After breakfast we played and read and went outside to walk around in the driveway.  Our son called and we figured out who was going to travel where and when to get Madeline back home.  He was working on a project to rebuild their front porch/steps and was involved in painting wood pieces prior to assembling them, so we agreed to drive Madeline to their house in Ann Arbor in time for a light lunch before her usual nap time.  That also allowed us to stop at the Whole Foods market near their house on our way out of town.  A Whole Foods market is the only thing we do not have in the Brighton/Howell/Hartland area that we truly miss.  We would shop there several times a week if we had one nearby.

I managed to sneak away to the basement occasionally to do a load of laundry and install 126 updates on our Linux computer.  The updates involved file downloads totaling just over of 310+ MB so I started the process and let it run.  We get an effective download speed from our AT&T High Speed Internet (HSI) DSL connection of just over 1 Mb/sec or 64 Mb/min.  That is roughly 8 MB/min.  At that speed, 320 MB takes about 40 minutes to transfer, assuming AT&T doesn’t detect the amount of data being transferred and “throttle” (slow down) the speed.  Cell phone companies are known to do this but it is less clear whether AT&T does that sort of thing with their landline services.

We got back to the house at 2:15 PM.  Linda developed a headache while we were out, so she took some meds, put the groceries away, and laid down to rest.  There was no sign of the landscapers and no phone call, so there was no chance at that point that they would show up today.  That was OK with us; it is a holiday weekend and it was their idea to come work today, not ours; I just said it was OK if that’s what they wanted to do.  Apparently they didn’t.  The one thing I was looking forward to was having Steve show me how to operate the Kobelco sk35sr-3 excavator and then practicing operating it by removing concrete blocks, bricks, downed trees, and other detritus from the woods by the road southwest of our house.  Just behind these woods is where they are piling all of the construction debris anyway, so I would be able to position the excavator to allow me to grab most of the trash out of the woods and then swing it over and deposit it on the pile.  Maybe Monday?

Yesterday I posted a question to the WordPress.org support forum for the Jetpack plug-in and I got a reply a couple of hours later that directly answered my question.  I wanted to install/activate the Jetpack on more than one self-hosted website and needed to know if I could use a single WordPress.com account or if I needed a separate account for each site?  I was glad to find out that I only needed the one account that I already have.  The Jetpack plug-in is massive overkill for what I need to accomplish immediately, but some of the reviews suggested that it is so comprehensive it may be the last plug-in I ever have to install.  That is unlikely for a number of reasons, and a bit contrary to the open source nature of WordPress and the international community of developers that support it, but the plug-in does have 33 different “components.”  For most of those features there are other plug-ins available–in some cases lots of them—but this provides everything in a neat package with its own special place on the admin panel menu.

Linda was feeling better after a long, much-needed nap but did not feel like cooking.  She picked up ingredients at Whole Foods today to make mock beef stroganoff but decided to make it tomorrow.  Our go-to for no-prep meals are the various frozen products from Amy’s.  We try to always have a few in the freezer for occasions when Linda does not have the time or interest to prepare a meal from scratch.  Tonight we had the lasagna.  Linda wanted some fresh greens with dinner but did not feel like making a salad so she used a bed of mixed greens as a base for the lasagna.  If that sounds a bit strange, all I can say is that it was very nice for both taste and texture.

I spent more time this evening investigating the WordPress Jetpack plug-in, the result of which was that I deferred installing and activating it.  The attraction of this plug-in is that the Carousel feature works with the existing WP Gallery shortcode(s).  That means it works retroactively with every page and post containing a WP Gallery and that I would continue to create galleries they way I always have using the native WP Gallery functionality.  That sounds like exactly what I need, except that on further investigation I started seeing comments about banner ads, and a feature that allows website/blog visitors to comment on individual images with no easy way to disable it.  The workaround involves custom CSS code.  Ugh.

I kept looking and found a plug-in where the “author” had simply “forked” (extracted) the code for the Carousel function from the Jetpack plug-in and offered it as a separate plug-in.  Ignoring whether that was even ethical, some of the reviews suggested that it did not work correctly and that support issues were not being resolved.  I need something more reliable and better supported so I kept looking and found a very extensive plug-in that was free and had been downloaded over 1,000,000 times!  Now that has to be a great plug-in, right?  Maybe; maybe not.  The reviews were very mixed and many seemed to complain about the constant “tinkering” the author does with the plug-in, issuing updates every 3 – 4 days.

If I was willing to spend money for a plug-in my options would be greatly expanded, but I have looked at those as well and they all have mixed reviews.  The leading contender is the NextGEN Gallery plug-in, but the biggest downside with all of these gallery plug-ins is that they do not work with the native WP Gallery shortcodes which, in turn, would require me to rebuild existing galleries from within the plug-in. The ones that I find the most annoying are the ones with a free version that turns out to just be a teaser; the features I need are always in the “pro” or “premium” version.  An episode of Doc Martin gave me a needed and entertaining break from my research, which is appropriate in this situation as I have searched for a good image display plug-in before and now I am searching for one again.

 

2014/07/04 (F) Independence Day

Leave a reply

Pictures from today are in a separate gallery post with today’s date.

In spite of a ridiculous series of very brief power failures late last night, Madeline’s first overnight stay at our house was a complete success.  She was busy and cheerful all day yesterday, took a nice nap, went for a walk around our yard, and enjoyed a hearty and substantial dinner.  After all that she was ready for her evening bottle and then went to bed without a fuss at 7:45 PM.

She slept for almost 12 hours, which meant we could get up before her at our usual time and get ready for her awakening.  It took her a few minutes to fully wake up, during which time she was a little groggy but not fussy.  By the time Linda got her dressed she was ready for breakfast.  Linda made oatmeal with raisins and cranberries and all three of us had some.  Madeline also had fresh strawberries and blueberries.  Blueberries are one of her current favorite foods, along with peas.

We played with toys, read books, and played (with) the organ until 9:30 AM and then got ready to go on a field trip.  At 9:45 AM we left for the Howell Conference and Nature Center (HCNC).  The HCNC is the largest wildlife rehabilitation and permanent care center in the State of Michigan, and is located about eight miles south and slightly west of the heart of downtown Howell.

We were there for just over two hours and spent most of that time looking at a lot of animals including the following:  Coyotes; a Sandhill Crane; Whitetail Deer; owls (Screech, Saw-whet, Barn, Barred, Snowy, and Great Horned); a Wild Turkey; Bobcats; a Porcupine; Opossums; Turkey Vultures; an American Kestrel; hawks (Broad-winged and Harrier); a Peregrine Falcon; and American Bald Eagles.  Although HCNC rehabilitates wildlife for release back into the wild whenever possible, all of the animals we saw today were permanent residents due to injuries and/or habituation to humans that have made it impossible for them to survive without human care and protection.

After we were done with the Nature Walk and Raptor Center we explored Alexandria’s Playscape for 20 minutes, by which time we needed to start for home in order to have time for some lunch and still get Madeline down for her nap on schedule.  Linda rode home in the back seat to keep Madeline engaged so she wouldn’t fall asleep and this proved to be a very successful strategy.  We all had lunch and Linda got Madeline ready for her nap without a fuss.  Once Madeline was asleep Linda also laid down to rest for a bit while I started a load of laundry, booted up all of my computers, and installed updates.

Madeline had a good, long nap and was ready to tackle the last third of the day when she finally woke up.  We played with her new set of Lego Duplo blocks for a long time.  She enjoys taking them apart but this afternoon she figured out how to assemble the square ones.  She has a very good attention span for an 18 month old, but her attention naturally shifts in response to a stimulating environment.  She is always busy, and often in motion, but takes a break occasionally to enjoy one of her books.  She is also very independent and usually knows what she wants at any given moment.  She is, however, also open to suggestions and interacts very well with us.  She verbalizes quite a bit and is developing vocabulary.  We know this because she has a few words that we are able to understand and she uses them correctly and consistently.  She has a lot of other sounds that are clearly an attempt to communicate using speech, but she can’t quite form the words well enough yet for us to really understand what she is trying to say.  Sometimes, however, we can figure it out from the context of what is going on and what she is looking and/or pointing at.  We also discovered that she knows the names of colors as she consistently picked out the correct color Lego block when we asked for it by color.

For dinner Linda made a dish with baked beans, rice, carrots, onions, and celery.  I doubt that she will make it again as none of us seemed to like it that much.  My opinion was that it simply contained too much cinnamon.  After dinner we went for a walk around our property and saw a deer in the neighbor’s yard across the street.  When we got back to the front of the house we let Madeline explore the inside of the bus for a few minutes.  By 7 PM she was ready for a clean diaper, pajamas, and her evening bottle.  She fussed for about 10 seconds and then let grandma carry her to her bedroom where she looked at the paintings before yielding to her porta-crib for the second night in a row.

We have been hearing fireworks occasionally for the last few days, but starting around 8 PM things got cranked up and between 9 and 11 PM I thought we had inadvertently attended a major fireworks display.  I have written before about how much we like living in the country, but I have also written that the country is not always a quiet place; it just has a different kind of noise.  Usually that noise is the sound of nature, and we love it.  But occasionally it is an all too human sound, such as a gun being fired, or a dog barking.  But tonight we had fireworks, and a lot of them.  At our previous house the police would have showed up, and maybe the fire department too, if someone tried to fire the size and quantity of explosives we heard tonight.  Not out here in the country; big bonfires (burn piles) and big fireworks are apparently perfectly OK.  So is shooting a gun whenever you feel like it.

The house is not overly insulated, but Madeline was sleeping in the middle bedroom with the door and windows closed and the windows covered to keep out light while she naps during the day, so the fireworks did not wake her.  I felt bad for the cats, who spent most of the day in the basement or hiding in our bedroom to avoid contact with Madeline.  She gets very excited when she sees them and runs after them because she wants to pet them, which just reinforces their desire to be somewhere else.  When they finally came upstairs after she went to bed they had to endure several hours of explosions, which they were not used to and did not like.  The celebrations were mostly concluded by 11 PM and finally settled down completely by midnight.

 

2014/07/03 (R) First Overnight Visit

Leave a reply

I awoke this morning to the sound of light rain which had started sometime during the overnight.  The landscapers were supposed to be back first thing this morning to continue working on the retaining walls in the back, but the rain had made the work site muddy enough that I figured they would not be here today, which turned out to be the case.  The clouds cleared off by mid-morning and by early afternoon the site had dried out enough that they could have continued with the hand work.  With tomorrow being a holiday, however, I did not expect them to begin their workday at 1 PM.

After we had breakfast I left around 10 AM to drive to Adams Distributing in Novi to return a pair of battery chargers.  I visited with Scotty (AC8IL) for a while discussing his ham radio setup.  Since getting back into the hobby after many years he has done very well making DX (long distance) contacts all over the world.

I got back around 11:30 AM and our son and grand-daughter showed up shortly thereafter.  Today was Brendan and Shawna’s third wedding anniversary and we all agreed it was an opportune time for Madeline to have her first sleepover at our house, allowing her parents some much needed adult only time.  Brendan brought the porta-crib and portable stroller, and transferred the car seat to Linda’s car.  Brendan visited until it was time for Madeline’s nap and left once she was asleep.

Madeline had a good long nap and woke up refreshed and ready to go.  And go she did; we played with toys, read books, explored the main floor of the house, and went for an explore in the yard.  We have a five acre parcel, so it was an extended exploration.

For dinner, Linda cooked some Dr. Praeger’s vegan burgers and served them with sliced parsnips with sautéed in a small amount of water and quinoa with dried cranberries.  Madeline enjoyed all of it, along with some peas and strawberries.  I have not had parsnips very many times in my life.  When sautéed they taste like slightly peppery cooked carrots, which tend to be sweet.

We had more play time after dinner until 7:30 PM when Linda got her ready for bed and she had her evening bottle.  She was tucked in her porta-crib at 7:45 PM and quickly drifted gently off to sleep.  Brendan also brought their baby monitor and set it up, so we were able to keep an eye on her without opening the door to the bedroom and possibly disturbing her.

We stayed up a little while longer and then turned in around 9:30 PM to watch another episode of Doc Martin.  At 10:12 PM we lost power for a few seconds and a minute later it happened again.  We received a couple of e-mail notifications from our standby generator regarding the loss of utility power but never got one indicating that the generator had started.  Apparently the outages were too short to trigger the start sequence.

Even though most of the critical electronics in the house are connected to uninterruptible power supplies, I got up and shut down all of the computers, NAS units, and the laser printer.  The power flickered a couple more times but we never lost our Internet and were able to watch the last 10 minutes of Doc Martin.  Our last message from the generator indicated that it would stop notifying us of the situation until the fault had cleared for 24 hours.  The generator ran a successful self test at noon today, as it does every Thursday, so I was confident that it would start if needed.  We had a power outage while we were away this past winter during which the generator started and the automatic transfer switch transferred the house to the generator, so I was also confident that all if this would work if needed.

The worst part of this kind of momentary power outage is that the UPS units all start beeping (an alarm) as soon as they lose AC power.  It’s kind of like a smoke detector or other alarm going off; it tends to jolt you awake and once up it is hard to go back to sleep as you lie there anticipating the next alarm.

 

2014/07/02 (W) Trees And Rocks

Leave a reply

Steve arrived at 6:45 AM and got right to work using the excavator to place additional large boulders for the rear retaining walls.  He was done by 8:30 AM and loaded the excavator back on his trailer to take to another job site.  I noticed that one of his trailer tires was very under-inflated so I got out my large portable air compressor to inflate it.  This tire turned out to have a puncture in the tread and was not going to hold air.  Steve knew the tires were not in good shape but I discovered that they were not an adequate load range for the weight he was carrying even if they were inflated to their maximum cold pressure, which they were not.  I inflated all of them as high as I was comfortable given their age.  If it had been my trailer I would have taken it, unloaded, immediately to a nearby tire store and had them put on four new tires with an appropriate load range.  I am not a tire expert, but we have been to enough seminars on RV tires and weight safety, that I have a better understanding of the subject then most people.

The excavator working on the rear retaining walls.

The excavator working on the rear retaining walls.

Linda made her yummy vegan pancakes for breakfast after which I decided to trim trees in the southeast corner of the yard.  It was cooler than yesterday but still a bit humid, so the working conditions were not ideal.  I worked until mid-afternoon and got one tree pruned of all its deadwood and took some low dead limbs off of several other trees.  I enjoy the pruning; it requires some thought about ladder placement, choice of tools, and where to cut, and I have a nicer/healthier looking tree when I am done.  Taking the small branches off of the larger limbs, cutting the limbs into shorter lengths, and carting everything to the fire pit; not my favorite thing to do.  Linda assures me that cleanup has never been my forte.

Two landscapers showed up around 10 AM and worked on the retaining walls.  There were supposed to be three of them, but one guy could not make it.  The hand work they were doing really needed three guys, so it was hard for them.  They got to a point where they were waiting on a delivery of sleeved plastic drain tile that wasn’t showing up in a timely fashion so I gave them directions to the Lowe’s at Grand River and Latson Roads where they bought a 100 foot roll and tied it to the roof of their car to get it back to our house.  They were then able to place the landscape fabric behind the first course of boulders, across the bottom of the shelf and up the back, lay the drain tile in the trench, and back fill the trench.  This gave them a place to stand as they worked on the next shelf.

Linda spent the morning cooking a batch of her amazing granola and her equally amazing vegan potato salad.  She boiled and then cubed red potatoes and mixed them with vegan mayo, apple cider vinegar, celery, onion, dill pickle, and dill weed.  We have been having tofu hot dogs for lunch with some regularity as it is an easy, tasty summer treat (with mustard, onions, and relish).  The potato salad was the perfect accompaniment, especially as it was still slightly warm.  Sweet cherries provided the finishing note for a tasty summer lunch.

Steve came back around 3 PM to check on the progress of his crew, gave them some specific goals for the rest of the day, and took off.  The crew was here until 6 PM.  Everyone has been working hard but we are at the stage in the project where there has been a lot more destruction than construction.  We have been through enough construction projects over the years that we know what to expect, but it is still stressful to see everything torn up.

Linda made baked stuffed acorn squash for dinner with a side of grilled baby bok choy.  The stuffing was made from carrots, celery, mushrooms, onions, sun dried tomatoes, bread cubes, raisins, walnuts, flax seeds, and sage.  It reminded me of stuffing from a Thanksgiving holiday meal.  We had a small glass of Franzia Sweet Red wine which paired well with the savory main dish.

 

2014/06/30 (M) Happy Birthday L

Leave a reply

Today was Linda’s “Medicare minus one” birthday and she started it off by Facetiming on her iPad with our son and grand-daughter.  I put the coffee on to brew and joined the Facetime session.  Madeline was initially engaged in consuming a great quantity of blueberries and getting most of them in her mouth.  She was obviously feeling much better than the last time we saw her.  Breakfast was followed by a good face washing and then active exploration of the house and the wearing of adult size flip flops, which is one of the most fun things to do at the moment.  Their plans for the day included her first visit to the local water park, which has hours reserved for very small children.

Linda called the dentist’s office and got a call back just after 9 AM.  They said they could see her at 1:30 PM and she accepted the appointment.  A little while later I went outside to get the mail and discovered a fawn curled up on the door mat in front of our front library doorwall.  Its eyes were open and it was clearly alive as it watched me carefully but did not otherwise move.  I searched online and found a list of wildlife rehabilitators on the Michigan DNR website.  It was arranged by county which made it easy to locate Diane Solecki in Pinckney.  She was listed as specializing in fawns so I called her and she talked me through what to do and what to look for and directed me to her website where she had all of that information, and a lot more, for our reference.

Linda and I went out to examine the fawn according to the directions Diane gave us.  To our surprise, as soon as we started to handle it, it got to its feet, ran away to the east, and disappeared into thick cover.  That was probably unfortunate for its survival, but its odds were not very good where it was, lying exposed and very visible in the hot sun all day.  Per Diane’s instructions Linda mashed some strawberries with bread and put it over by the woods along with a bowl of water in the hope it would find it and eat and drink.  There was plenty of evidence of deer in that area so there was also some small hope that the mother might wander through there on her regular circuit and find her baby.  I checked the bowl and paper plate several times but there was no sign of it having been visited by any animals.

I got a call from Steve at Village Landscape Development letting me know they had to attend to another job first thing this morning and would be at our house around noon.  He called back around 3 PM to let me know it would be tomorrow morning between 8:00 and 8:30 AM.  It was hot and humid today, and by 3 PM the workers were drained.

Since today was Linda’s birthday, and she was still sore and tired from not sleeping well, we went out for dinner.  There is a salad shop in Brighton named Toma’s.  I had been there once and based on Trip Advisor reviews she wanted to try it.  As we were pulling out of the driveway we noticed an adult deer go into the woods to the west of our neighbor’s yard across the street.  There is a lot of evidence of deer in and around our yard and neighborhood but we only see them occasionally.  We wondered if it might be the fawn’s mother but there was no way to tell.

At Toma’s we each had a “create your own” salad with a piece of grilled pita bread.  The cook reversed our greens, but we didn’t realize it until we had each eaten half our salads. Our waitress was delightful but a bit math challenged.  I gave her $16.50 to cover a $16.29 bill and had to help her make the change.

We stopped at Staples on the way home to get a pad of large graph paper.  I am drawing plans for an alternative design for the bus barn that might make it easier for me to build myself.  Back at the house I spotted an adult deer lying down by the marsh at the NE corner of our yard near NW corner of the pond to our east.  I spent the rest of the evening editing photos from Saturday to post on our blog.  We had vegan ice cream to celebrate Linda’s birthday.

 

2014/06/28 (S) CSJ Leadership Installation

Leave a reply

We are all gathered for Marilyn’s installation ceremony as a member of Leadership Team and the Director for the St. Louis Province of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph – Carondelet.  The CSJs are an order of Roman Catholic nuns that originated in LePuy France in 1648 and came to the St. Louis, Missouri area in 1836 to set up a school for the deaf.  The St. Louis Province is one of four that makes up the current Federation of CSJ’s in the U. S. The St. Louis Province has sisters in 18 states, South America and Africa.

The ceremony was today at 2 PM CDT at the Motherhouse in south St. Louis.  It was both a celebration of the service rendered by the current leadership team over the last six years and a call to leadership of the new team.  It was not a mass but it was certainly a religious ceremony, planned and executed by the Sisters in accordance with the principles and traditions of their order.  I have posted pictures from the event in a separate Gallery post with today’s date.

There was a reception following the ceremony after which Marilyn gave us a tour of some “public” parts of the building, including her new office.  By then it was time to head to the TreeHouse where we had a 5:00 PM dinner reservation for 10 people.  Mike had to work today and was not able to attend the celebration or dinner, so we ended up with nine: Marilyn, Linda H., Ron and Mary, Clayton, Judy and her daughter Mary, and finally Linda and me.  Judy is Marilyn, Ron, and Linda’s cousin.  Marilyn had selected this restaurant for several reasons.  For one, she and Linda were familiar with it as it is only a few miles from the two hospital complexes where they worked (Linda still does).  It was also convenient to the CSJ – Carondelet Motherhouse.  But mostly they selected it because it was a very good vegetarian restaurant with lots of vegan dishes and options.

We ordered the last four of the special salad of the day and shared them.  The ingredients were very fresh and very tasty.  Linda had the “beef bourguignon” stew and I had the “jambalaya” as did several other people.  Both were made with seitan (a wheat gluten product) and both were excellent.  The TreeHouse makes their own seitan and vegan cheeses.  Since I was driving I had a Ginger Beer (non-alcoholic).  It came out of a can, but it was also very good.  For dessert Linda had a vegan cheesecake and I had a vegan ginger/pear crisp.  Both of them were disappointing; definitely not on par with the salads and entrees.  Those who had the chocolate desserts said they were excellent, although not quite as good as Linda’s chilled double-chocolate torte that she made Thursday evening and served after dinner on Friday.

After dinner we exchanged contact information with Judy, Mary, and Clayton, said our farewells, and drove back to Linda and Marilyn’s house.  We relaxed and chatted until the effect of the long wonderful day finally settled in.  We said our good nights and farewells with Ron, Mary, and Linda before they drifted off to bed as we would likely be gone in the morning before they arose.

 

2014/06/27 (F) Family Finances

Leave a reply

Linda H. was up very early to go to work.  We would not have heard her get up and leave if not for the three dogs, which make quite a ruckus anytime someone comes or goes from the house.  Marilyn, Linda, and I got up a few hours later and had toast and coffee for breakfast.  I worked at my computer until 9:30 AM when we had to get ready to leave for an 11 AM appointment with our financial advisor.

We have worked with John Christensen for at least a decade.  We first met John at A. G. Edwards when my parents’ stockbroker decided to leave and John was assigned to handle their accounts.  We liked him right away and ended up moving all of accounts there, including accounts for our children.  My sister and Marilyn eventually opened accounts with John as well.  A. G. Edwards was an excellent local brokerage that unfortunately got absorbed by Wachovia.  Wachovia ultimately failed and the remnants were acquired by Wells Fargo Advisors.  John and his administrative assistant, Maggie Smith, had an opportunity to move to a new office being opened by Stifel-Nicholas in O’Fallon, Missouri and our family moved all of our business to S-N along with them.

We usually manage to make at least one trip to the St. Louis area each year, often around this time, and we always try to arrange a meeting with John if our schedules permit.  We arrived at 11AM, talked for an hour and then walked to Bristol’s for lunch.  Maggie joined us, which was great.  We have interacted with her for as long as we have worked with John, but do not know her as well on a personal level.  We got to know her a little better today.  Linda and I both had a grilled vegetable platter with asparagus, mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, and sliced green tomatoes.  They were some of the best restaurant vegetables we have ever had.

We returned to John’s office around 1:00 PM and spent another couple hours going over reports, plans, and projections before finely making a few decisions about our portfolio.  All told we were there for four hours.  I don’t know if that’s typical for financial advisors, but we appreciate that John has extensive reports prepared when we arrive, has already developed recommendations, and takes the time to go over everything with us.  Most of our financial interactions are easily handled by phone and secure e-mail during the year so having our financial advisor three states away is not a problem, especially as John and Maggie are real people with whom we have a real, face-to-face, relationship.

By the time we left the afternoon rush hour was well under way.  St. Louis is a midwest city with east coast ties.  Normal business hours here are 8 AM to 4 PM which corresponds to 9 AM to 5 PM in New York.  Kansas City, Missouri, only 240 miles west of St. Louis on the Kansas border, is a decidedly more western city, and the southern part of the state, which borders Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, is decidedly southern.  We fought our way back to Illinois through stop-and-go traffic and by the time we got back to Glen Carbon Ron and Mary had arrived from Pennsylvania.  Linda H. got home from work not long after we arrived and Mike and Clayton arrived not long after that.  They live and work in St. Louis area.  Linda, Marilyn, and Ron are siblings and Mike is their nephew.  Their other nephew, Rick, was unable to attend.  Marilyn had spent the afternoon making vegan Sloppy Joe’s.  For dinner we had a nice summer meal of green salad, Sloppy Joe’s, and chips, followed by Linda’s vegan double chocolate torte, accompanied by white and red wines.

By the time we finished dinner, wine, and conversation we had all had a long day.  For us it was a day of family finances and family.  When we finally went to bed we did not even watch an episode of Doc Martin.  As an aside, today was the SLAARC pre-setup for the ARRL Field Day event.  The main setup will be tomorrow morning and the operating event begins at 2 PM EDT.  It is the single largest, and most public, amateur (ham) radio event of the year.  We are missing it for the second year in a row because family comes first.

 

2014/06/23 (M) Monsoon Season

Leave a reply

The morning was cool with temperatures just above 60 degrees F and a thin layer of high clouds.  I was tempted to work in the yard trimming low branches off a few more trees but today was supposed to be lawn care day and it did not make sense to create a mess.  That was Linda’s argument, anyway, and it sounded right to me.  Besides, the chance of rain was 0% until noon but then jumped to 60%, and the radar showed a band of storms moving out of Wisconsin over Lake Michigan and in our general direction.  Keith always mows our neighbor’s yard first, starting around 9 AM.  The first raindrops fell around 11AM.  He got part of our yard mowed but by 1 PM there was a light, steady rain, causing the grass clippings to clump and making him less than comfortable, so he called it quits for the day.  While not the steady, heavy rains of a true monsoon, late spring this year has been persistently wet.

I chatted briefly with Steve from Village Landscape Development this morning.  They have continued to be delayed in finishing projects by the recurring rain.  His newest ETA for our job was Wednesday (this week) but he was not aware of the rain that was expected for today and tomorrow.  I figure Wednesday next week; maybe.

We were sitting on the back deck enjoying our morning coffee and decided to look for some information on our Mugo Pine.  It turns out that our Mugo pine isn’t a Mugo pine after all; it’s a dwarf weeping Norway spruce.  I trimmed off a dead branch yesterday and this morning discovered that it was the right thing to do, so no harm done.  In the future I should probably follow the corollary of the carpenter’s rule: research twice, cut once.

Linda had an appointment with the dentist this morning to have her broken molar prepared for a crown.  She left mid-morning for the 50+ mile drive to Dearborn and stopped at the mall on her way back.  Between the time needed to make the crown and her upcoming jury duty she won’t be able to go back until late July to have the crown installed and all of the other work done that was postponed so the broken tooth could be dealt with last week.

Several weeks ago I bought a replacement handle and lock set for the front storm door but did not get it installed right away.  It was not a perfect fit so installation required modification of the door frame.  I’ve been putting it off but today was finally the day to get it done.  I had to drill new holes and enlarge existing ones, which never works well.  I did not get the holes in exactly the right spot the first time, which required even more drilling and enlarging.  I stayed with it and eventually got the hardware installed and working the way it is supposed to.  The trim pieces cover all of the holes, so none of my modifications are visible and the door looks fine.

I spent the afternoon at my desk catching up on posting entries to our blog and working on tasks related to several RV clubs we belong to.  I also downloaded documents and videos related to our role as RVillage Ambassadors.  The second teleconference meeting of the FMCA Education Committee today was at 4 PM, and I sent a short e-mail summary of my findings regarding the RV Trip Wizard website in advance of the meeting.  The meeting lasted 80 minutes and we had a good discussion.

We rarely go out to dinner anymore.  Besides avoiding the expense, eating at home affords us a much greater variety of ingredients prepared as healthier dishes with appropriate portions.  Tonight was an exception, though not for any exceptional reason.  Linda looked a little tired and I figured she didn’t feel like cooking, so we went to the La Marsa restaurant in Brighton.  We split an order of Koshary, a wonderful Egyptian dish with rice, macaroni, spaghetti, lentils, fried onions, and a spicy tomato sauce.  We also split the green salad that came with it, and each had a cup of crushed lentil soup.  The pocket bread was hot from the oven and the garlic spread was delicious, and it was all vegan.  Yum.

By the time we got home from the restaurant we were done working for the day.  We relaxed for a while and then turned in to watch another episode of Doc Martin.

 

2014/06/22 (N) Outside Inside

Leave a reply

We split our time today between outside work and inside work.  The temperature was 60 degrees F when we got up so after a light breakfast of homemade granola with fresh fruit and some coffee we resumed our tree trimming work from yesterday.  While Linda gathered up branches from yesterday’s trimming, I worked on our Norway Crimson King Maple.   This is a magnificent tree, one of the nicest on our property, but it is close to our rear deck at one end and has grown out over the deck such that low branches are at or below eye level and block access to part of the deck as well as the stairs that lead down into the northeast yard.

In the same general area as the maple tree are several large White Pine trees.  The lower limbs had grown out and down to reach sunlight, placing their extremities at or below eye level.  We want to be able to walk under these trees without getting poked in the eye and we want Keith, who cuts our grass, to be able to drive his zero-turn riding mower under these trees without getting poked or knocked out of the seat.

While I was trimming the maple and pines for clearance I also removed as many dead branches and limbs as I could reach with the pole saw.  I had noticed yesterday that our pear tree and our apple tree also had quite a bit of deadwood so I turned the pole saw on them next.  Linda continued to gather the smaller branches and pile them in manageable size bundles around the outside of the fire pit.  She also dragged the larger limbs over near the fire pit.  Once I was done pruning I used our bow saw to remove the smaller branches from these larger limbs and then cut the limbs into 3-to-4 foot lengths.

Linda was going to shovel the ash from yesterday’s fire into a plastic bag but discovered that it was still quite hot.  We stirred up the ash cone, made a big pile of small branches on top of it, and then stacked the larger pieces of wood on top of that, teepee style.  It took a while but the amount of smoke steadily increased until we finally had a small flame.  It did not take long from that point for it to develop into a good size fire.  We also recalled that ash from a burn pile is good to add to the soil for some flowering plants and decided we would use it rather than dispose of it in the trash.

We needed to work at our desks today and did not want to exhaust ourselves doing outdoor work so we quit at 1 PM and put our tools away.  We had lunch at 2 PM and then spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening doing various tasks at our desks.  Part of that time I investigated a web-based RV trip planning tool called RV Trip Wizard.  Making recommendations relative to this program is one of the things the FMCA education committee has been asked to do.  The website had a demo available, as well as a tutorial and a user’s guide, so I was able to get a good feel for what it does and its ease of use.  The Geeks On Tour also had a review available which filled in some details and highlighted a few deficiencies.

Overall I found the website well conceived and nicely implemented, having most of the features needed to plan an RV trip without a lot of unnecessary clutter.  Features included routing with: turn-by-turn directions, mileage, overnight stops (17,000 in the database and growing), points of interest, and estimated expenses.  Trips can be exported as Excel spreadsheets and as files that can be imported into a GPS.  The trip preferences section allows you to specify key parameters about our RV, travel “style”, and estimated costs.  Missing from the parameters, however, was weight and propane.  It also allows you to indicate a prioritized order for RV parks and campgrounds when looking for places to stay overnight.  When planning a trip it will alert you if your rig is incompatible with part of your route, but does not automatically route you around it.  That would be unacceptable in a GPS, but is probably OK in this case as you can drag the route around on the map or add waypoints to change it.  Finally, you can save an unlimited number of trips indefinitely, recall one, do a “save as,” and then modify it if you want to repeat a previous trip with modifications.  RV Trip Wizard is a web-based subscription service and you must have an Internet connection to use it.  You cannot save your trips to your local device, and if you do not renew your subscription all of your saved trips are gone forever.

We had fresh fruit at 7 PM (bananas, blueberries, and strawberries) and a glass of wine, after which I worked for a couple of more hours before turning in to watch season 3 episode 2 of Doc Martin.

2914/06/20 (F) Couch Potatoes

Leave a reply

Over the last few months I managed to connect our friends and fellow Prevost H3 owners, Chuck and Barbara Spera, with our friends and fellow Prevost XL owners, Pat and Vickie Lintner.  Chuck was looking for a sofa to replace the one in their motorcoach and Pat and Vickie had one they were looking to sell.  Today was the day for consummating the deal, which necessitated a road trip from the Detroit, Michigan area to the Elkhart, Indiana area to pick up the couch, pay for it, and bring it back to Chuck’s shop.

Chuck and I drove down in his Ford Excursion.  I went along to keep him company, for the opportunity to catch up on a lot of conversation, and to help load and unload the couch.  We arrived in Elkhart just after noon and grabbed a quick bite to eat at Burger King.  I had French Fries, thus today was about couches and potatoes.

While I was away on the road trip, Linda went to Ann Arbor to visit our 18 month old grand-daughter and her parents (our son and daughter-in-law).  By dinner time we were both tired so we had Amy’s Pad Thai and turned in to watch two episodes of Doc Martin.  We did not get to watch any episodes while we were at the rally in Goshen, Indiana so we are catching up.

 

2014/06/19 (R) Visitors

Leave a reply

We got to visit several times with John and Marian Hagan while we were in Florida this past winter.  They were members of our FMCA Freethinkers chapter until they decided to stop full-timing, bought a house in Dunnellon, Florida, put their motorhome up for sale, and did not renew their FMCA membership, which meant they could no longer be members of any FMCA chapters.  But we had established contact with them by the time all of that transpired and as Dunnellon was only 25 miles south of Williston, it was easy to meet up with them, which we did on several occasions.

John has a daughter who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan and she has twin 4-year olds, so he and Marian had indicated that they would be visiting them sometime in June.  I e-mailed John as soon as we got back from the GLAMARAMA rally to check on their status and found out that they had arrived in Michigan about the time we left for the rally.  They were planning on staying for several more weeks, but we invited them to come to our house for dinner and a visit as soon as mutually possible.  That turned out to be today!

We had cloudy skies leftover from the storms of the day before but no additional rain.  John and Marian arrived mid-afternoon and stayed until almost 9 PM.  We had a good, wide-ranging chat and enjoyed a nice meal of mixed greens salad, lentil loaf, baked potatoes, and roasted asparagus.  We had the Franzia Sweet Red wine with dinner and capped off the meal with fresh strawberries, Lotus Biscoff cookies (the same ones they serve on the airliners), and our Sweet Seattle Dreams 1/2 caff custom coffee blend from Teeko’s in Howell.

Since John and Marian are in the area for an extended period of time, they have been visiting a lot of local attractions, especially things connected with the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  We all agreed that we would get together at least one more time while they are here, perhaps meeting them in the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti area and dining at a local restaurant.