Tag Archives: yardwork

2015/11/03 (T) The Penultimate Cut

I heard noises in the kitchen at 7 AM and thought the cats might be up to something. I got up and discovered that Linda was just leaving the house. She is normally out the door between 6:15 and 6:30 AM but did not set her iPad alarm last night. I stuck my head out the door and said “good morning” as she was getting in the car.

I had my usual breakfast of granola with fresh blueberries and brewed a half pot of Sumatra Mandheling half-caffe coffee. I was enjoying my cup-a-joe by the fireplace when Linda called to let me know there was a story coming up on Michigan Radio (WUOM) at 8:30 AM about an underground landfill fire in Bridgeton, Missouri. Bridgeton is where my sister, niece, future nephew, and grand-niece live and I had just heard about this fire for the first time on Sunday evening while talking with my sister.

I got the leaf blower out at 10 AM and spent a couple of hours blowing as many leaves out from under bushes and away from the house into the yard as I could. Keith arrived at 10:30 AM and followed his usual mowing pattern starting with the west half of the property. The lawn in the immediate vicinity of the house is the last area he cuts which gave me enough time to get the leaves out into the yard where Keith could mulch them.

Most of our trees have dropped most of their leaves by now and Keith’s mower did a pretty good job of mulching most of them. Before he left we discussed having him come back one more time. The grass has quit growing so my preference is to wait two weeks but that will depend on the weather. Keith will check with us next Monday and we will decide what to do at that time.

Mike (W8XH) is planning to come over tomorrow after breakfast and help me work on the tower and our Hi-Q 6-80 antenna. I have been collecting materials that I need and took a little time to see if they would work with the tower. I also took the Diamond X-300N antenna down as I planned to put it on the tower in place of the X-50N that is currently up there. My materials were not working quite the way I had hoped they would so I headed to Lowe’s to see what else I could find. I also planned to drop off the used oil and filters from the bus at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store.

At Lowe’s I found clamp sets designed for mounting antenna masts and bought a pair. O’Reilly’s parking lot was still closed off. It looked like it had been re-blacktopped and they were painting the stripes for the parking spaces. This was my second attempt to get rid of the waste from yesterday’s bus maintenance. I will try again tomorrow; with any luck the third time will be the charm.damage

The area beneath the co-pilot/navigator seat. Not a pretty sight, especially when racing against the clock to get the coach finished for the upcoming winter season.

I finally got back to work on the bus at 2:30 PM and removed the front passenger chair pedestal base. The entire area under the base, between the side-to-side seat mounting channels, was rotten so I cut out the water-damaged wood. Just below the wood I found rusted metal which appeared to be delaminating. Metal does not do that so I presume there was a layer of sheet metal on top of a metal housing. The main structure of the bus is welded stainless steel but mild steel was obviously used to create compartments. Ugh.

After cutting out the damaged wood the remaining piece towards the outside was loose but would not come out. I removed a couple of screws from the 1/4″ walnut veneer side panel and pried the top out with a small screwdriver. This panel has a lot of switches mounted in it and a lot of wires behind it so I could only pull it out about four inches. That was enough to see a 3/4″x3/4″ piece of blocking screwed to the floor to catch/secure the bottom edge of the panel. It also enough to see a very large nest made of tiny bits of shredded paper.

The cavity behind the panel to the right of the co-pilot/navigator seat was apparently a great place for a mouse to build a nest.

I left the nest alone for the moment and removed two screws from the block that went into the piece of wood I need to remove. It appeared that a drain line for the front air-conditioner went through the floor near the outside edge and possibly some wires. I left the nest for Linda to see and will resume working on this tomorrow.

Linda made vegan grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and served them with some of the leftover broccoli soup and sliced fruit. We each had a small glass of the Frey Natural Red organic/vegan wine.

After dinner I called Phil to see what his plans were for this week vis-a-vis our driveway and French drain projects. I got his voice mail and left him a message. When we left on Saturday afternoon he was just finishing up placing and compacting the gravel in the driveway but said the west end of the yard needed to dry out (again) before he could finish working down there. Hopefully the new drain will help speed that process along.

The floor area under the driver’s seat in the bus with all of the rotten wood cut out.

Phil uses a self-leveling laser level system to measure elevations. Not only has he assured me that the new 40 foot parking area is level, he has demonstrated it with his system. Still, it does not look level, especially from certain points of view, and it does not feel level when driving in it, although that may also be an optical illusion. We have a transit level and I plan to use it to check the pad, but it requires two people, one to hold the measuring stick and one to look through the telescope and record the readings. That means I need Linda’s assistance, which means this will have to wait until the weekend. Perhaps by then I will have the cockpit in the bus repaired. It’s also possible that Phil will have returned and completed the job, I which case I may have him help me use the transit as a check on his laser system.

We watched our usual lineup of Tuesday evening TV shows while Linda checked in on her online word games and I worked on this post.

2015/10/16 (F) Desk Installation

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We were up at 8 AM, fed the cats, made coffee, and had breakfast. Phil showed up around 8:30 AM, unloaded his front loader, dropped his flatbed trailer, and left in his dump truck. I turned on the fireplace and we enjoyed our coffee while iPading until 10:15 AM.

Our first task today was to cut up several large limbs that I pulled out of the woods last evening to get them out of Phil’s way. I cut them up with the chain saw and then we stacked them on the disposal pile for Phil to haul away.

Phil returned at 10:30 and moved his Caterpillar 305C excavator into the woods across the street by the culvert. I went down to chat with him briefly to make sure I understood what he was going to work on. There were a lot of small trees (3″ diameter), saplings, and bushes scattered around the site. Some of them had been dead for years and some had just been knocked over by Phil. I decided to work in that area with my chain saw cutting everything up into five foot lengths so Phil could use his front loader to get them into his dump truck. I worked at this until 11:30 AM and then turned my attention to the bus. Linda worked on her needlepoint while I cut wood.

Before getting started on construction tasks I took two pieces of filter material and set them on the wire shelf in the freezer compartment of the new refrigerator, one on top of the other. I then set the two remote thermometer sensors on the filter material. Butch had suggested the other night that I set the sensor on a sponge to get it off of the floor of the freezer compartment as it was likely responding to the automatic defroster heat strips when they come on. I figured the filter material would work just as well and that placing the sensors on the shelf would definitely get them away from the floor.

Linda brought out a bag of ice from the house fridge and put it in the bus freezer. She also filled several 1/2 gallon juice and milk cartons with water, put the caps on, and put them in the fresh food compartment. The purpose of all of this was to add thermal mass to the compartments to cause the refrigerator to run less often and reduce large swings in temperature.

Inside the bus our first sub-project was installing the desk, which included putting the front passenger side HVAC duct cover in place even though it is not finished. It took us quite a while to get everything positioned just right. With Linda holding things in position I screwed the right pedestal to the wall, adjusted the position of the base and screwed the pedestal to the base. We then repeated that process for the left pedestal and base.

Linda removes the backing from the double-sided tape on the back side of the air grate in the center connector/cover for the desk.

At this point we had several things to do with, and under, the center connector/cover so I removed it and took it into the garage/shop. We cut a piece of the decorative brass colored metal grate and secured it to the back of the air opening with small screws every few inches. Next we cut a piece of black plastic mesh to fit over the grate. We then cut pieces of 3M Extreme Mounting Tape (double-sided) and attached them to the back side of the grate in between the screws. Linda peeled off the protective layer and we carefully placed the plastic mesh. Using one of the scrap pieces of the protective layer I rolled the plastic into the take with our wallpaper seam roller. Finally, we had a piece of filter material already cut to cover this air intake opening so we set that on top of the mesh, pressed it down to take advantage of the tape, and then secured it with Gorilla Tape on all four edges, rolling it with the seam roller to get good bonding.

A detailed view of one of the homebrewed tongue and groove alignment assemblies made from flat mending plates.

Back in the coach I had to tie in the outlet strip to the 120VAC power feed. I shut off the breaker for this circuit and checked with my tester to make sure it was not live. The hot and neutral wires were accessible but the ground wires were back under the left pedestal where they were not easy to reach and manipulate. It took a while, certainly longer than it should have, but I got the three ground wires tied together with a grounding clamp. I connected the hot and neutral wires (three each) relatively easily using wire nuts. I turned the circuit breaker back on and checked that the outlet strip had power between the correct terminals and did have power between any other terminal pairs.

I went to the garage to get a four foot long piece of 1″X1″ aluminum angle that I bought weeks ago to use as a support bracket for the upper rear edge of the center connector/cover. I was going to cut off a 26″ long piece and then drill countersunk holes but I noticed a piece of 1/2″X1/2″ light gage angle that was about 26″ long and already had holes in it. It was long enough to span the space between the pedestals and go under each one about an inch. That was sufficient to position it correctly so Linda held it there while I secured it to the wall with four round (pan) head screws. I then put the center connector/cover back in place.

Phil has cleared all of the organic debris from the area where the driveway extension and RV pad will be located.

Phil starts trenching and placing the plastic drain tile tubing for the French drain.

Phil had long since left in his truck to dump all of the wood debris. We had a light lunch of Amy’s Lentil Vegetable soup and fresh organic grapes. While we were eating a group of three deer came to our back yard and eventually ended up eating apples that had fallen from our tree onto the ground. These same deer, along with two others, were here yesterday at twilight and were very frisky. We saw them later in our neighbor’s yard across the street.

Another view of Phil’s smaller excavator with the 12” bucket being used to trench the French drain in the southwest portion of our property.

Phil returned around 3 PM and started working on the French drain. He replaced the 30″ wide toothed bucket with the 12″ one and started at the high end if the culvert on this side of the road.

The grand finale was the installation of the Corian desktop, which has been sitting on a blanket in the middle of the living area floor since Tuesday. I drilled countersunk holes through the four corner plates in each desk pedestal from underneath. I then inserted 1-1/4″ #8 self-drilling outdoor wood screws into each hole, again from underneath, until they just protruded above the corner blocks and then backed them off until the tips were just below the surface. We set the desktop across the pedestals and pushed it as tight to the back and right end wall as we could. Linda put her weight on it and I ran the screws home, pulling the top tight to the pedestals. We reinstalled the four drawers in the right pedestal, finally getting them off the floor in the hallway where they have been since Tuesday. We stepped back to admire the desk and agreed it was a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. Linda also marveled, once again, at how much space she now has to work in the kitchen.

A wider shot showing the excavator and drain tile. The laser level is at the left edge of the frame. The main arm of the excavator (with the bucket attached) has a laser sensor on it that tells Phil exactly where the lower edge of the bucket is relative to the laser level.

The “denouement” was mounting the outlet strip and adding felt pads to the two fake drawer fronts on the left pedestal and then adjusting the magnetic catches. I originally had the outlet strip (temporarily) mounted to the wall between the two pedestals with two screws a few inches below the cord notch in the center of the back edge of the desktop. Rather than put it back there I decided to mount it on the underside of the desktop just in front of the cord notch.

The underside location will work just as well as the wall mount location for regular 2- and 3-prong plugs but probably not as well for small AC adapters. The added pluses of this location, however, are: 1) it will not interfere with cords coming through the notch, 2) it will be up out of the way of the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that will sit on the shelf at the top of the center connector/cover, and 3) if liquids are accidentally spilled and run over through the notch they will not run into the outlet strip. Besides, devices with an AC adapter will probably be plugged into the UPS so this was a better overall approach.

Our next task was to adjust the sofa seat until it was deep enough to be comfortable. We slide the plywood seat out a couple of inches and then got the seat and back cushions (three each) from the house where they have been stored since September 21st. We put the cushions in place and sat down. We pulled the cushions out and pulled the seat board out until it was five inches farther out than originally designed and put the cushions back in.

The front edge of the seat cushions were out farther than I liked but we both agreed the sofa was now comfortable to sit on. The distance from the bottom front edge of the back cushions to the front edge of the seat cushions was originally only 16 inches and that turned out to just be too short. With the seat board moved out it will now be 21 inches.

In order for the sofa to work correctly, both as a sofa and as a bed, we will need a cushion that is 5″ wide by 6″ high, by ~76″ long to fill in the space behind the seat cushions and below the back cushions. The height and foam makeup will be such that it is level with the tops of the seat cushions and have the same firmness and feel. Would that I had designed the sofa for this depth to begin with and had the seat cushions made accordingly, but we were trying to open up the living room by not having the sofa protrude into the aisle any more than absolutely necessary.

Next up was reinstalling the wood trim in hallway. We have an interesting plan for the lower half of the hallway but in case we do not get it finished before we leave for the winter we wanted the trim off the bed and back on the wall.

The lower outside hallway wall. There were originally three framed panels of vertical strip mirrors here. We will replace them with wood panels, probably in a lighter color to contrast with the walnut trim.

This trim originally framed three panels of vertical strip mirrors. We were able to remove the mirrors as they were glued to wallpaper. In the process we discovered that the left and right panels were the same width but the center panel was wider. The trim consisted of six pieces of wood; a long upper and lower horizontal piece and four vertical pieces. The six pieces were screwed to the lower half of the outer wall but not attached to each other. The left and right vertical pieces were tight to adjacent woodwork, but the two intermediate pieces were free to be repositioned.

We reattached the upper horizontal piece first making sure the mounting screws went back in the same holes. Next we pushed the lower horizontal piece into place but did not screw it to the wall. We then attached the left and right verticals. The horizontal distance between the inside edges of the left and right verticals was 75 inches. The two intermediate verticals were each 4-1/2″ wide so the distance between verticals needed to be 22″ (75 minus 9 = 66 divided by 3 = 22). We carefully positioned and secured the two intermediate verticals to achieve this spacing.

The trim boards all have rabbited edges on the back side. I need to measure them carefully, but they are ~3/16″ deep by 3/8″ wide. Our current plan is to use 3/16″ underlayment or other 3/16″ high quality plywood to make three panels that will fit within these rabbits with a little room to spare. The panels will either have a hardwood face or we will cover them with a hardwood veneer of a wood that contrasts with the walnut trim. We can get the veneer from Rockler once we decide what we want.

Linda spread out several towels on the new desktop and we moved tools and supplies from the A-V cabinet, behind the driver’s seat, to the new desk. I then removed the Corian top of the A-V cabinet and put in on the bed. We still have a small amount of wallpaper to install in the front of the living room and into the cockpit on the driver side, but it will not be easy to do.

These areas, such as the one behind the A-V cabinet, are small with limited access so most of my sanders cannot be used. The only one that might work is the Porter-Cable oscillating tool but I did not get it out today. I got some sanding sponges instead and tried those on the wall under the passenger side window trim next to the co-pilot seat. When I sanded a dark area about 6″ long by 3″ wide the wood in the center crumbled and I ended up with a hole 3″ long by an inch and a half wide. I could see one of the stainless steel structural members through the hole. Given what was obviously water damage I was glad we bought a bus with welded stainless steel as the main structural material.

Based on what I could see, the walls in the bus appear to be 1/2″ plywood although I did not measure the thickness. This area had obviously gotten very wet over a long period of time and some of the wood has rotted. It is the only spot we have discovered that is this damaged and we immediately realized that we will not be able to wallpaper this area. We will probably panel over it, similar to what we plan to do with the veneered panels in the hallway, but today was not the day to figure that out.

It was going on 5 PM and we decided we were done for the day. I turned off all of the electric heaters, turned on the Aqua-Hot, turned on all three thermostats, and set the temperature to 20 degrees C. The refrigerator was also indicating much colder freezer temperatures than it had been before I moved/isolated the remote sensors so I reset the freezer and fresh food controls to their “normal” center positions. Tomorrow we will replace the alkaline batteries with the Lithium batteries we bought specifically for the TempMinder thermometer system, reset the min/max data, and monitor it for a few days.

I walked down to see what Phil was doing. He was making good progress with the French drain but did not have enough of the plastic drain tile to finish it today. He plans to work tomorrow and will have the additional tile he needs to finish the drain. I left him to his work and took photos of the fall colors in our yard as I worked my way back to the house.

I spent an hour at my computer dealing with e-mail and transferring photos from the Sony a100 to my laptop. Linda called me to dinner at 7 PM. It was a simple meal of vegan Coney dogs with mustard, onion, and beans served open-faced on a whole wheat hotdog bun. As a side dish Linda steamed Opo squash. It was the first time either of us had this particular squash. It was very mild with a hint of cucumber. It is available all over the world and widely consumed as it is relatively inexpensive. It was OK, but I thought it might work better as an ingredient rather than a stand-alone side dish.

I exchanged a couple of text messages with Chuck and confirmed that we would be at his shop tomorrow after breakfast to retrieve our two bus windshields. The rest of the evening was spent in the living room by the fireplace reading and writing on our iPads before turning in and watching episodes of Rick Steeves’ Europe and Joseph Rezendo’s Travelscope on Detroit PBS (WTVS).

2015/10/07 (W) The Root Cause

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We had Linda’s homemade granola for breakfast with fresh blueberries. Berry season is just about over for the year and they will become more expensive as they have to be transported from farther away. I made a pot of Sweet Seattle Dreams, the half-caff blend that Jeff makes just for us, and we drank it in the living room. Linda checked in on the world and pulled up the latest video from NutritionFacts.org while I researched hardwood veneers on Rockler.com.

After breakfast and coffee I called Metro Environmental Services to arrange to have the culvert under the road cleaned out. They were able to schedule us for this afternoon so I accepted that appointment. I then called Brighton Honda to check on my car and left a message for Rob, the service advisor who wrote up the repair for the driver side door lock. I had no sooner left that message than I got a call from Karen at Bratcher Electric.

Mike had worked up the quote to install the 100 Amp disconnect, tie it into the output of the transfer switch, and run a 100 Amp 4-wire service entrance cable to the current sub-panel, making it into a main panel. They would also disconnect and cap the current sub-panel feed from the basement as part of the work. At just north of $1,300 it was a good $300 higher than I expected. My expectation, however, was not based on anything specific other than my own sense of the cost of materials and the amount of labor that might be involved, plus a desire for it to not cost more than $1,000. 🙁

With the phone calls taken care of we worked in the bus for the rest of the morning. Linda worked on stripping the remnants of wallpaper that remained after we removed the mirrors from the lower outside hallway wall yesterday. I worked on re-routing the heater hoses for the fan-coil heat exchangers. She got her job done before I got mine done. That’s usually the way it is.

To start, I removed one of the old 4″ round plastic grates and used my inspection mirror and a flashlight to examine the inside of the HVAC duct. What I discovered was that the two heater hoses were secured periodically with plastic cable clamps to the outer wall of the HVAC duct. I also discovered that the metal part of the duct is just the inner wall and top. The bottom is the plywood subfloor of the bus and the outer wall is the plywood wall. As originally built the metal portion of the duct could be removed but when Royale Coach did the conversion they built cabinets around the ducts and put wood wiring chases on top of them in such a way that they can no longer be removed without partially disassembling the coach.

The location of the hoses and wires in the duct was such that I could safely use my 4″ bi-metal hole saw to cut access holes for the hoses. I determined where the cable clamps were located by measuring inside the duct. I then marked where the access slots in the bottom back of the bases would be located and determined where I needed the two hoses to emerge from the duct.

The manual sheet metal nibbler used to cut a line between the bottoms of the two holes in the HVAC duct.

There was already a 4″ hole at one of my needed locations so I drilled a second one next to it with an inch in-between. I used Chuck’s hand powered sheet metal nibbler to connect the holes together to make an opening that looked like the track around a football field. We vacuumed up the metal chips and I then installed door edge molding all the way around the edge of the opening. I was able to reach the screws holding the first pair of cable clamps with a #2SR screwdriver and remove them. This large slot will be behind the left end of the center connecting cover of the desk and the hose for the heat exchanger that goes in the left base will come out of it.

Plastic U-channel door edge molding installed around the new heater hose opening.

The location of the next pair of cable clamps corresponded, roughly, to where I needed the hose for the right heat exchanger to emerge. I drilled two 4″ holes, side-by-side, at that location and nibbled out the little bit of metal in-between them to make a second slot. Again, I installed the door edge molding around the entire edge. The molding was a tight fit, and I had to use a screwdriver to get it to go on the inner curves, but I got it on. The U-channel is locked in mechanically and has adhesive in it so it should stay put once it has had a few days in place. Once the hoses are re-routed I will put screen material, and perhaps some solid plates, over the openings to prevent critters from gaining access to the living area by way of the HVAC PCTS (Prevost Critter Tunnel System).

The access holes in the OTR HVAC duct in the area behind where the desk will be installed.

Linda had two medical appointments this afternoon, both routine diagnostic procedures, so she got cleaned up, changed her clothes, and left around 12:30 PM as I was finishing up the second slot. I went inside and was thinking about making something for lunch when the doorbell rang. It was our mail carrier, Michelle, with a package that was too big for the mailbox. A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. I figured it was Michelle again, but it was one of the guys from Metro Environmental Services. They were supposed to call first but just showed up.

I put my shoes on and walked them down to the clogged culvert that goes under the road. I was really hoping they could clean it out from the south side but when we went into the woods we could not see the end of the culvert. They got a metal detector and located the end of the pipe. It was almost completely buried and had a massive root running right in front of it from a very large nearby tree. They got a shovel and dug out around the root, exposing much of it and the end of the pipe.

The tree was probably 30″ in diameter at the base and the root was at least 10″ in diameter. I got my (new) 18″ chain saw but had trouble getting it started. It turned out it was out of gasoline. Once I got it started I tried to cut through the root on either side of the culvert. I thought I was all the way through on one end (closest to the tree) and most of the way through on the other end, but the root would not budge. I dulled the teeth on the chain to the point where the saw would no longer cut and did not want to take the time to put a new chain on just to ruin it quickly. The guys finally agreed to hydrojet the culvert from the north side of the road.

The actual cleaning out of the culvert did not take that long. The pump produces 2,000 PSI and they used about 300 gallons of water from the onboard tank on their truck. The head on the end of the hose has one forward facing nozzle and many rear/side facing nozzles. The forward facing nozzle loosens and cleans out the area directly in front of the head while the other nozzles force the head forward and blast whatever is in the pipe back out towards the entrance.

They started with a small head and ran it in until there was water coming out the other end of the culvert. They then pulled the hose back and switched to a much larger head and ran that all the way through and back. When they were done muddy water filled the culvert and the depressions on either end. On the inlet end the water was only about 3″ deep in the bottom of the culvert but on the outlet end it was near the top. They billed me for the minimum first hour amount even though I think they were here longer than that.

I called Phil to let him know what we had run into. He was surprised, to say the least, as he thought he had checked the other end of the culvert. Obviously not, but that’s water under the road, so to speak. Besides the problems with the root and the discharge end of the culvert being below the surface, it looked to me like the discharge area was something of a low spot and it was not obvious to me where water would flow from there. I have learned, however, that I am not very good at judging such things visually.

Cory, our neighbor across the street, had come over to see what was going on. He offered that the discharge area does, in fact, drain to the south through his property and eventually to Golf Club Road. Cory has been here for 30 years so I have no reason to doubt the truth of that. The elevation where Golf Club ends at Hacker and where our street ends at Hacker appears to be about the same. Our street is fairly level while Golf Club has a little bit of up and down, but it is subtle. I suggested to Phil that we might have to clear a path into the woods for his small digger and do some trenching to give the water a way out.

While Cory and I were chatting I noticed that the trees along this part of the road were hanging out over the road on both sides and were rather lower than they should be. This is the very thing I complain about with regards to the way most of our neighbor’s fail to maintain their properties along the road. I decided I should do something about it so I got our pole saw and spent a couple of hours trimming the low overhanging branches.

Linda went to the Whole Foods Market in West Bloomfield following her medical appointments and got home just as I was finishing up the pruning. She went for a walk while I called John Palmer of Palmer Energy Systems in Florida. I bought our Magnum inverter/charger for the bus from John along with various accessories and batteries. I needed a 4-wire terminal block for our Magnum Battery Monitor Kit (BMK) because I had messed up the one that came with it when I originally installed it. John confirmed that Magnum Energy had recently been acquired by Sensata, and was in the process of relocating the plant to Minnesota, but that several of the old-timers were still on board. John needed to talk to Tom anyway and asked me to call him back in a week to see if he was able to get the connector.

I checked with the service department at Brighton Honda again and Rob said he expected to get the new door lock mechanism back from the locksmith tomorrow morning and to have the car ready for me to pick up by the end of the day. It will be nice to finally have it back.

The cloudy weather finally broke today and we saw some blue sky with brighter light levels than we have had recently. The day was lovely but a little on the cool side by late afternoon so we both had a cup of hot tea. Linda took advantage of the light to work on her counted cross-stitch project, a holiday stocking for grand-daughter Madeline, and I went back to the bus to sand off the last traces of the old wallpaper from the outside wall in the hallway.

I used our Porter-Cable 1/4 sheet palm sander with 80, 120, and finally 220 grit sandpaper. The sander has an integral dust collection bag but it does not capture all of the dust. I used the vacuum cleaner to pick up as much of the residual dust as I could and then used a tack cloth to wipe down the wall.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled tofu with caramelized onions in sweet barbecue sauce. She served it open-faced on rye bread, because that is what we had, and steamed some fresh green beans as a side dish. Yum.

After dinner I drove to Lowe’s. I needed something I could use to plug the two heater hoses to keep them from leaking as I pull them back through the HVAC duct and out through the new slots I made for them today. I ended up buying two 3/4″ barbed plastic plugs. While I was there I looked to see if they had any bleeder valves but they did not. They do not sell parts designed specifically for hydronic heating systems and I will have to go to Northwest Plumbing and Supply for such items.

While I was in the plumbing isle I looked to see if I could figure out some combination of parts to make a fill valve for the system but did not see anything that inspired me. I would love to have one or more high point expansion tanks on this system but I do not have any easily accessible places for them from which I could also run overflow drain lines. There is a good sized volume of unused space behind the drawers on the passenger side of the bedroom but it would be a very difficult place to install anything. Perhaps Northwest Plumbing and Supply will have something.

On the way home I stopped at the BP station and topped up the fuel tank in Linda’s car. I drove home with greater consideration for fuel economy than usual and managed to get the average MPG up to 56.7 before it dropped back to 55.4 as I pulled in the driveway. It will drop into the upper 40s as soon as Linda starts the engine tomorrow morning but it was fun to get it into the driveway with numbers above 55 MPG.

2015/10/06 (T) Trimming & Stripping

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We did not get an early start to our day today. I got up a little after 8 AM and Linda got up 15 minutes later. Even so, she still had our granola and berries ready before I had the coffee made, but in my defense I had the extra step of transferring the three pounds of coffee we bought yesterday from their paper bags to our metal containers with the air-tight lids. We were wondering about whether grapes are berries so Linda Googled the topic. Botanically, grapes are berries but strawberries and raspberries are not. Also included among the “true” berries are bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants. That’s right, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants are fruits.

Linda left at 9:30 AM to meet Diane at Kensington Metropark for a 10 AM walk. Mike from Bratcher Electric showed up at 10:30 to revisit the wiring project I needed his company to do. They are going to install a 100 Amp disconnect switch next to the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage, run power to the disconnect switch from the transfer switch, and then run a 4-wire service entrance cable (SEC) from the disconnect switch through the garage attic to the electrical distribution panel in the closet with the HVAC system for the library. The electrical panel is currently a 60 A sub-panel of the main distribution panel in the basement and this project will convert it to a 100 A main panel while still allowing it to be powered by the generator if the utility power goes out.

When Mike left I gathered up the two metal cutting tools I borrowed from Chuck, our corded 1/2″ Craftsman drill (which I needed to power one of the nibblers), the small Rigid drill kit, and my telescoping inspection mirror. My plan was to cut one or two openings in the passenger side HVAC duct for the heater hoses but I decided to do some yard work instead.

We still had some bushes growing out over the drainage ditch by the mailbox and I wanted to get them trimmed up and add the waste material to the timber pile before Phil hauled it away tomorrow (hopefully). I was still working on this little distraction when Linda got back from her walk so she got a pair of gloves and helped. The bushes and trees in this area have an extensive system of vines running through them. I got a lot of the smaller vines cut and pulled free and I managed to trim one bush back enough to create an “entrance” to the inner part of this stand of trees.

Once I was “inside” the grove I found one of the main sources of the vine, a massive thing that looked like something out of a Harry Potter movie. It was easily 10″ in diameter where it came out of the ground and had 4″ to 6″ pieces branching off in different directions. I have no idea what kind of vine this but I suspect it is a wild grape vine. Given its size I surmised that it has been there for a very long time gradually chocking off the trees. I will have to eventually cut it out, but I would like to find out first just exactly what it is.

Linda helped drag all of the clippings over to the disposal pile where we cut some of them into smaller pieces before adding them to the pile. We noticed a small tree hanging out into the space above the driveway that Phil is about to build. We thought the tree was dead and decided to cut it down. It was 5″ in diameter 6″ above the ground–big enough to require the chain saw–and also had a lot of branches that were large enough to be more expeditiously dispatched with said same machine.

After felling the tree and de-limbing it I was not so sure that it was dead. We had a half dozen other trees along the northern edge of this stand woods that looked to be similarly dead but I decided not to cut them down. One in particular had a lot of obviously new, small branches. We will wait until spring and see which, if any, of these trees develop leaves. If they are alive I will trim them instead of cutting them down.

We put away the yard tools and took a break to have a light, late lunch of vegan cold cuts sandwiches and black grapes with a glass of beet juice. I like beets on salads and as a side vegetable. Beet juice is OK but a bit more of an acquired taste. We have added it into our daily food plans because of its ability to control blood pressure. Linda is adding ground flax seed to her granola for the same reason.

Measuring and cutting wallpaper on the dining room table in the house.

At 2 PM we decided to hang the wallpaper in the hallway of the bus so we gathered all of our tools and took them to the coach. I measured the wall and determined the lengths (30″) and widths of the four pieces; two full width (26.5″) and two partial width (15.5″), one for the left end and one for the right end. We cut the four pieces on the dining room table in the house where we could unroll over six feet of wallpaper, measure more accurately, and cut more easily. We cut the two full pieces out of the end of the first double roll and cut the two partial pieces out of the beginning of a new double roll.

Linda took the pieces to the bus and laid them out on the bed. I was getting ready to pour some GH-95 paste into the tray and roll it onto the wall when I decided to remove the trim board that separates the upper wall from the vertical mirror strips on the lower wall. My intent was to avoid having to trim the bottom edge of the wallpaper by tucking it behind this board. What I discovered was that the strip mirrors on the lower portion of the wall were glued to the wallpaper and some of them were loose.

The fact that the mirrors were glued to wallpaper and not to the plywood wall surface meant that they could be removed. I unscrewed the four vertical pieces of wood trim that framed the mirrors in three panels and then removed the bottom trim piece. I carefully removed each mirror by prying the underlying wallpaper loose from the wall using a large screwdriver and working from the top down. When the entire strip was loose I cut the wallpaper to release it. I handed them to Linda and she stored them carefully inside the built-in sofa. I managed to get all of them off except one which fractured in several places. We taped it up and vacuumed up the few glass fragments that were created when it broke.

At this point we were clearly not going to hang the four pieces of wallpaper we just cut as we needed to finish stripping the base layer of the old wallpaper first. We also had to take a little time to decide how to finish the lower wall. One option would be to wallpaper the entire wall and not put the wood trim back. We probably have enough wallpaper to do that, even after cutting the four smaller pieces for the upper wall, but we did not think the wall would look right if we did that.

Another option would be to install wood panels to replace the mirror strips. In this case we would use a light wood with a natural finish to provide an intentional contrast with all of the walnut trim. The mirror strips are slightly beveled on their long edges and measure 3/16″ thick at those edges. That means a 3/16″ hardwood veneered plywood should be a perfect fit, allowing all of the wood trim to go back in place. Maple or Birch with a natural finish are the most likely choices.

The wood panels is the option we will almost certainly pursue and we do not have to resolve exactly what panels to use in order to finish wallpapering the upper part of the wall. All told this will push our finish date back a couple of days, but we don’t really have a finish date anyway, and we will like the final result a lot better. We really do not like the strip mirrors and wish we could remove or cover all of them.

It was only 4:30 PM when we quit working in the bus for the day but we had both had a relatively physical day and were ready to quit. The lighting in the hallway was also a little dim due to the continuing heavy cloud cover which was having the added effect of lowering our energy level and enthusiasm a bit.

My last couple of e-mails to Lou Petkus of the SKP Photographers BoF had gone unanswered so I called Lou to make sure everything was OK. It was; he and Val have just been very busy. We know about busy. We had a nice chat about cameras and RVing plans for the upcoming winter.

Linda always puts nice dinner meals on the table and tonight was no different. She halved and cored a white acorn squash and baked it in the oven with a little vegan butter and brown sugar. She had a few Brussels sprouts left over and some baby carrots so she added onions and sautéed them to make a very good vegetable medley. Finally, she heated a package of mock chicken in orange sauce. The trio of dishes was not only tasty but lifted my spirits; not that either of us are down, but the weather has been heavily overcast for several days and had a slightly depressing effect on our moods.

I got a call from Phil after dinner updating me on his availability to work on our driveway and French drain project. The 2-day job he started yesterday morning is probably going to take him the entire week to finish so there is very little chance we will see him back at work on our project before next Monday. He did, however, find time to call a company that can hydrojet the culvert under our road and find out their pricing. He gave me the name and phone number and I will call them tomorrow and try to set something up. The other upside is that we have more time to pull dead trees out of the woods in front of our house, cut them up, and add them to the disposal pile, if we so choose.

Linda’s favorite TV shows are concentrated on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings so we watched NCIS and NCISNOLA followed by an episode of LIMITLESS, just to see what it was like. I watched Two and a Half Men, which I happen to find very amusing, and then went to sleep.

2015/20/04 (N) Family Trees

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I was awake at 7 AM and got up at 7:20, showered, shaved, and dressed for the upcoming visit by our son, daughter-in-law, and younger grand-daughter. We did not have breakfast, as they were bringing bagels with them, but I did make a small pot of coffee to get the day started. While it was brewing I gathered up a load of laundry and put it in the washing machine.

We finally turned the furnace on a couple of days ago so the house was cool but comfortable. Even so we turned on the fireplace and enjoyed our coffee while we awaited our visitors. Brendan sent a text message indicating a 9:30 AM arrival and it was only a few minutes later than that when they showed up. Today’s visit was the result of specific request by Madeline yesterday to see her Grandma Linda and Grandpa Bruce. She will be coming back on Friday after pre-school/day-care and spending the night. She is then going to go see her Grandma B and Cliff in Denver while her mom attends a conference.

Brendan and Shawna brought five bagels, one for each of us, with cream cheese and lox for them and hummus for us. They also brought sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. We provided our Melt non-dairy butter substitute, a large pot of Kenya AA (single origin) coffee, orange juice, a bowl of mixed fruit, and a bowl of honeydew melon. It was a wonderful mid-morning breakfast.

After breakfast the adults took turns playing with Madeline. At one point Brendan reminded her to ask me something and what followed was a request to take a tour of the bus. So we did! Madeline is not yet 3 years old, and the bus does not really mean anything to her yet, but Brendan and Shawna wanted to see the work we had done. We are looking forward to taking Madeline with us for short trips when she is a little older.

Madeline normally takes a nap at 1 PM and Shawna was a bit tired too so they packed up and left around 12:30 PM and drove back to Ann Arbor. There was a “block party” taking place later this afternoon for their block and they wanted to rest before it started.

We needed to get some yard work done yet today so we changed into our work clothes. I moved the laundry to the dryer and then got busy figuring out how to start and operate the new Poulan Pro 18″ chain saw. The quick start guide had 10 steps, numbered and clearly illustrated. I followed the steps carefully and it started right up. We gathered up our rake, hand saw, wheelbarrow, and compound pruning shears along with a face shield, safety glasses, hearing protector, and heavy canvas work gloves and headed down to where the dead tree fell across the road a few days ago.

The tree fell across the road and had been moved out of the road by a neighbor shortly after it fell. I had gone out a little while after that and cleaned up the limbs on the other side of the road and the small debris that was still in the road. The tree, however, was still in the ditch along the side of the road and need to be cut up and moved. Phil said he would take it and dispose of it if we cut it into pieces not longer than five feet and piled it by all the other timber and yard debris.

This turned out to be just the first of five trees that we cut up this afternoon. Once the first tree was done we cut down a second one that was still standing but very dead and leaning out towards the road. Better to take it down now than have it fall during the winter. This tree was only 20 feet from the first one and not quite as tall, the top having broken off some time long ago. These were both ash trees, killed by the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. It saddened me that all of this wonderful ash timber was going to a landfill instead of a sawmill, but we had no practical way to turn it into usable lumber.

While Linda acted as spotter for cars I made a “V” cut about three feet above the ground on the side where it was going to fall and then made a relief cut on the back side until it toppled under its own weight. Once it was down I quickly cut it into shorter pieces and Linda got them off the road.

As long as we were working along the edge of the road I decided to prune or remove a few other saplings, bushes, vines, and deadfall so that Keith could mow the grass in the drainage ditch. That turned out to be quite a bit of extra work but it needed to be done. We encountered two different bushes with serious thorns and had to work carefully. Without gloves, eye protection, and heavy weight long sleeve clothing and blue jeans it would have been dangerous and painful.

There is a complex of vines that runs all through this stand of trees. We cut a lot of smaller runners and pulled them free form the other growth but I cut several at ground level that were at least 3″ in diameter. A thorough cleaning and restoration of this particular stand of trees will take more time than we have to spend right now, but perhaps we can get some of this kind of work done next spring and early summer along with finishing the interior of the bus and redoing the water bay.

We have had a large tree down at the west end of our property for quite a while, and Keith has just been mowing around it, so we moved all of our equipment down there and worked on that area of the yard. There were a lot of other small limbs scattered about and dead/broken branches hanging in several trees. We gathered up the smaller stuff and cut it into manageable lengths and wheelbarrowed it to the disposal pile. I then used the chain saw to remove the larger limbs and cut the tree up into four foot lengths. It was 10 inches in diameter at the base and 30 feet long before we cut it up. There is also a lot of pruning that needs to be done to the trees in this part of the yard, and some of it will require the pole saw and/or a ladder, and/or some careful climbing; but not today.

With that area cleaned up we moved our gear to the firepit (burn pile). We have had a conifer tree on the ground next to the firepit for the entire summer and, once again, Keith has had to mow around it. This tree was about 6 inches in diameter at the base and 20 feet long. Linda found a second, smaller, tree and dragged it over. I pruned all of the smaller limbs with the compound shears and then used the chain saw to cut off the larger branches and cut the trunk up into four foot lengths. Rather than transport all of this material to the disposal pile we added it to the burn pile. The pile is now about eight feet in diameter and four feet high so it should make quite a fire when we finally light it up. I think we will wait for a chilly fall day to do that, if we get to it at all this year. The longer the pile sits here the more of a problem it will be, however, as small animals will undoubtedly use it for shelter and to build nests.

It was 4 PM when we quit and we had only worked for three hours but it was very physical work and we were tired, or at least tired enough that we were not going to start working in the bus at that point. By the time I cleaned off the chainsaw and we put all of the tools away it was 4:30 PM. We changed out of our work clothes and I added them to my second load of laundry for the day. We sat in the living room reading and writing for an hour or so until Linda pulled together our dinner. In the interest of time she microwaved a couple of sweet potatoes (yams), steamed some Brussels sprouts, heated the last two mock chicken scaloppini, and poured a couple of glasses of Franzia Moscato.

After dinner I tended to the laundry and then settled in to work at my desk for a while. I logged in to RVillage and saw that Curtis had posted in the Stakeholders group that he was holding Go To Meeting sessions today at 9 AM and 5 PM PDT. That was noon and 8 PM EDT. We had obviously missed the noon meeting, and would have anyway with company here but as it was only 7 PM we could still participate in the evening meeting. We had an hour to wait so I decided to start uploading blog posts starting with August 1st.

I uploaded the posts for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, including a few photos, but something did not seem right as the photos did not corresponded to the posts. I checked more carefully and observed that I had renamed photos from early September with early August dates. I quickly edited the two posts that included photos and deleted the images from the posts. I am two months behind again uploading posts and having to go back and select/process photos for my August posts will only delay the uploading further. Ugh.

I launched Go To Meeting at 7:55 PM EDT and let Linda know it was time for the meeting. Curtis was already online and we eventually had eight stakeholders checked in, some of which were individuals and some of which were couples. Curtis, the founder and CEO of RVillage, gave us an update on recent development work, new features to be released next week, monetization of the site, and the progress of the current round of investor financing. The meeting lasted about 45 minutes.

I was glad I caught the error with the photos for my blog but I was not in the humor to spend hours working on fixing it this evening. Linda cut a couple of pieces of the vegan frozen chocolate torte that she made last weekend and that was reason enough to quit working at my computer for the evening. We spent an hour relaxing in the living room eating our torte while reading and writing. Yesterday Phil said he would call this evening and let us know whether he would be here tomorrow or at another 2-day job, but he did not call.

When we finally turned in a little before 10 PM we watched TV for a while before turning out the lights. We caught the last half of a program on the glass blowing school at Pilchuck and “A Woman in Battle” about a Cuban born woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War on the Confederate side but ultimately became a Union spy. Tomorrow we hang wallpaper in the bus and we will need to be well rested so it was lights out by 11 PM.

2015/10/01 (R) New Month, Same Project

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For various reasons we have not worked on the bus the last two days. For one, Linda is still recovering from a cold and/or seasonal allergies that may have been triggered by some weeding she did over the weekend. August and September are the time of year for ragweed in Michigan. For another, I was tied up most of Tuesday with the bus windshield replacement and yesterday we both had our annual physical exams, mine in the morning and Linda’s in the afternoon. Throw in an unexpected problem with the driver door lock on my car and a lawn tractor that wouldn’t start and that took care of most of the day. Since I wasn’t working on the bus I used some of my time to edit drafts of blog posts and started selecting and processing a few photos to go with them.

I got a call from Philip Jarrell around 8 PM last night letting me know that a last minute project came up that required his attention today. If all goes well he plans to start on our French drain and driveway extension project tomorrow. Our project is a relatively small job for Phil and I accept that he has to fit it in around larger projects for long-term customers who give him a lot of repeat business. Still, I think he likes working with us and does his best to fit us in.

I had hoped to get back to work on the bus today, specifically working on priming the walls and hanging the new wallpaper, but Linda had another annual medical appointment this afternoon. Neither of us likes to get into our work clothes and get involved in physical tasks for just a small portion of the day so after breakfast, and a leisurely morning in the living room enjoying coffee to the glow and warmth of our fireplace, she settled in to work at her desk for a while before going on a walk.

Our whole house generator threw a code 34 on Tuesday afternoon indicating that it required maintenance but would still operate if needed. I called Bratcher Electric to see what was needed and spoke with Karen. I think she and Mike own the business, but it’s possible she is Mike’s daughter. Whichever, I’m certain that she is family. Our generator was last serviced one year ago on the same date (29th) and the 34 was the total number of hours it has run since being installed in May 2013. I set up the service appointment for Friday October 9th.

While I had Karen on the phone I asked about the project Mike had come out to look at a year ago. I need his electricians to run a 4-wire, 100 Amp service entrance cable (SEC) from the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage, through the garage attic, and into the secondary distribution panel in the HVAC closet in the northeast corner of the garage, making it a main panel instead of subpanel. Karen said she would leave a note for Mike to follow up with me.

It was going on noon when I finally got back to work on the bus. It is a gorgeous fall day, chilly and breezy but with abundant sunshine, and I just could not let it slip away without getting something done on our interior remodeling project. I was at least 60% done with rebuilding the landing where the stepwell slide cover used to be and that seemed like the logical thing to get finished. It was 52 degrees F in the bus so I turned on the front electric toe-kick heater and set up the small Broan portable electric heater in the kitchen blowing forward towards the cockpit. I also noticed that the refrigerator thermometer indicated 43.5 degrees F. We do not have any food in the fridge but we do have freezer packs and containers of water for mass. 43.5 is warmer than I want so I checked the freezer reading and it was 28 degrees F. Yikes! That was way too warm.

Frame and center support for the new landing platform. Air lines crimped and secured.

The 31″ X 27.5″ piece of 3/4″ thick plywood for the landing platform flexed slightly when I stepped in the middle. I’m not sure anyone would notice it when stepping on it but we do not want the tile that will be on there to crack from the deflection. My solution was to cut an appropriate length of the 2.5″ wide 3/4″ thick poplar and install it on edge running long ways to support the middle of the plywood. I had to use an angle bracket at the back edge (by the driver’s seat) and place shins under it at several places to get it to fit just right.

About this time Linda came out to let me know lunch was ready. We each had a half sandwich of hummus and raw onion on rye bread and some black grapes. She left for her doctor’s appointment and I made a big cup of Constant Comment decaffeinated tea. I called Chuck to see if he knew where his powered metal shears (nibbler) were and if I could borrow it. The answers were ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’ I decided to take his suggestion of cutting two new access openings in the passenger side HVAC duct to allow the two existing heater hoses to come out and go directly to the fan-coil heat exchangers with minimal bending. It will simplify the installation, eliminate soldered copper parts and connections that would restrict flow and be a potential leakage point. Since my car is in the shop for the next several days I will have meet up with him when Linda’s car is available.

Back in the bus I checked the refrigerator and the fresh food compartment was at 39 degrees F and the freezer was At 6 degrees F. Those are the sort of temperatures I expect to see. I had the freezer set to cycle between about 0 and 10 but occasionally saw it go as high as 17. I figured it had something to do with an automatic defrost cycle, but anything over 20 is troubling. Linda had suggested earlier that perhaps we need to replace the batteries in the remote sensors and the base unit. She may well be right and it won’t hurt to do that anyway.

When I got back to work on the landing I folded over the ends of the two air lines and put cable ties on them to close them off. The air supply for the solenoid valve that controls these two lines has a shut off valve which I intend to keep closed, but if it gets opened accidentally it could drain the auxiliary air tank through one or the other line if they were not crimped closed. I may eventually disconnect the supply line at the valve and cap it, but for now this will at least prevent an open line leak.

New landing platform structure with sound/thermal insulation.

After screwing down and cutting off the shims I plugged the hole where the air lines come through the floor with steel wool and secured the lines to the floor with cable clamps. I then cut fiberglass insulation to fit the two spaces in the floor. I used the same John’s Manville Sound & Thermal insulation that we used in my office and ham shack as I had some left. I put the plywood floor piece in place, evened it up along the front edge, and screwed it down but ran out of screws before I had it completely secured. Projects are like that.

I was walking towards the garage when I saw a car coming very slowly from west of our house headed east. The drive pulled past our third drive and stopped but I could not see what the driver was doing. The car eventually continued on, followed closely by a second vehicle and I thought the flashed me a somewhat dirty look, but they did not stop and were too far away to be sue. Still, I thought that was odd. I did not give any further thought to it until I went out to get the mail and noticed a lot of debris in the road and a large, dead tree in the ditch. It had been windy all morning and at one point I thought I heard the crack of a falling tree but it sounded farther away than where this one lay. The driver had obviously stopped to move it and was probably a little bit annoyed that they had to do that because I had not taken care of it. Hey, I didn’t know!

I moved it a little more and then got a metal toothed rake and pulled all of the small debris out of the road. There were limbs on the other side of the road that were 1″ to 2″ in diameter so the tree had obviously fallen all the way across the road. The property on the other side of the road is part of our yard but I would have cleaned up the branches regardless since the tree clearly fell from our yard.

Linda stopped for groceries on the way back from her doctor appointment and did not get home until almost 4 PM. We got a pruning saw and cutter and she helped me cut up some of the upper part of the tree and get the pieces farther from the road. We noticed another dead tree in the same area that looked like it would eventually fall over across the road. I can cut it down safely but will need the chain saw to do so. I was not in the humor to get it out and try to get it started at that exact moment but noted to myself that I needed to do this sooner rather than later.

We were not going to start any messy bus work at that hour so I changed into nicer clothes to go out to dinner. Before we left I texted Josh at Coach Supply Direct to clarify an earlier e-mail and let him know that two of the MCD shades were not staying attached to one of their clips. We left at 5 PM for the La Marsa in Brighton and stopped at the bank on the way. For dinner we split an order of Moussaka and got two salads as our sides along with the warm pocket bread and garlic spread. The food was good and we had a tasty, filling meal for under $14 plus tip. It is our best/favorite restaurant option within reasonable driving distance of our house.

After dinner we stopped at The Home Depot in Brighton but they did not have the screws I wanted. When we came back out I noticed that the tires on Linda’s car were under-inflated and on closer inspection that the side walls were badly checked. We drove to Discount Tire in Howell but they were closed. We stopped at Lowe’s and bought the screws I needed, some furnace filter material, and Lithium batteries (AA and AAA) for our TempMinder base/remote thermometers as we keep the two remotes in the bus freezer and fresh food compartment and the base station on the bus kitchen counter.

Back at the house I worked in my office for a while selecting/processing photos to go with blog posts but I did not feel like putting in a long, sustained effort on the task. I got a call from Phil at Precision Grading. His other job did not get finished today and he will have to return to that job site tomorrow. He hopes to start our French drain and driveway work on Monday but that may not happen. I am anxious for him to get started but I have no control over that. I appreciate, however, that he keeps me informed as it allows me to plan my own time.

We watched The Woodwright’s Shop, Rick Steves’ Europe, and Travel in the Americas on DPTV (WTVS) and then went to sleep.

2015/05/16 (S) Trucks and Buses

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To paraphrase, “If it’s Saturday we must be in South Lyon” and that was, indeed, the case. Most of the regulars were missing from our weekly breakfast gathering of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC), but six of us showed up and had a great conversation. By the time we headed towards home it was starting to rain lightly.

We stopped at Brighton Honda to get some information on the Honda Ridgeline pickup truck. The salesman was very nice, but unfortunately Honda has stopped making the Ridgeline. They are reintroducing it in the fall of 2016, but we will likely make a decision about a new car/truck sooner than that. There are still a few in stock around the country but we already have an orphaned Honda Element. We like the car, but would be happier if they were still being made. In this case, however, it was a moot point as the Ridgeline is not towable four wheels down.

We drove next door to Brighton Ford to look at F-150 pickup trucks. We were assisted by Frank Stapleton and he was easy to work with. He insisted that we meet his new car sales manager, Eric Wilkinson, before we left. We felt that was unnecessary at this stage in the process, but he also seemed like a nice enough guy. The entry level XL 2-door may be reasonably priced (not really, but what car is?), but the slightly nicer XLT 4-door short bed with 4-wheel drive, towing package, and off-road package looks like it would price out at $45,000 give or take three grand. Without X -Plan pricing that is simply not going to happen, and even with X-Plan pricing it is not a sure thing. Frank really wanted us to test drive one but given the rainy weather we were not in the humor to do that today.

The F-150 is a nice truck, nicer in fact than many cars, and perhaps nicer than a pickup truck needs to be or should be. On the plus side it certainly has ground clearance, but on the negative side (for us) it is also BIG. The back seat room in the four door body style is cavernous, made larger by fold up seats, and that would be very useful for us when traveling in the bus. Between the back seat and the bed we could store a LOT of stuff. It has well-placed handles by all four doors, and it is a god thing as we both needed them, along with the running boards, to get in and out. There are several engine options including the 2.7 L and 3.5 L Eco-Boost models, both of which feature twin turbochargers. These are high-tech engines, with incredible power and torque and decent fuel economy. I liked the sound of that, but unfortunately that technology comes at a significant price premium. Interestingly, Ford is using an aluminum body and the truck weighs in at about 4,700 pounds. Our Honda Element weighs over 4,000 pounds and it is not nearly as big as the F-150. How well the aluminum will hold up is unknown.

We were almost home when we decided to keep driving and visit LaFontaine Nissan. While not as convenient as the Brighton dealerships, it is only 15 miles from our house, 13 of those headed east on M-59. Linda checked their hours on her phone and they were open until 4 PM. The purpose of our visit was to look at the Nissan Frontier pickup truck and the Nissan Xterra SUV, both of which Edmonds.com suggested were viable off-road alternatives to a Jeep Wrangler while Consumer Reports indicated they were more reliable and more practical than a Jeep Wrangler. Bobby Lundwall, the Commercial Manager, assisted us and we met the General Sales Manager, Don Poley, before we left. Bobby was very helpful and brought a Frontier and Xterra around front for us to see. Again, we were not interested in test driving one at this stage, especially in the rain.

The Nissan Frontier pickup has an available 4-door, 4-wheel drive, short bed model. It is considered a mid-size truck and is noticeably smaller than a Ford F-150 in every way. The Pro-4X off-road version has 10.1 inches of ground clearance at the differential, which should be adequate for our needs. It has a transfer case but is only towable four wheels down with the 6-speed manual transmission. We looked at the Xterra but found it harder to get in and out of, especially the back seat. It is taller than the Frontier and after due consideration we agreed that we were not really in the market for an SUV.

The Frontier does not have the bewildering array of options that the F-150 has and would be more suitable for the 95% of our driving that is on local paved and dirt roads. It would be perfectly adequate for hauling materials from Lowe’s to the house and has an available tent option for camping. We presume that aftermarket bed covers, canopies, and even small truck campers are available but we would check on that before buying one. Ditto for Blue Ox base plates and the ability to install an SMI Air Force One auxiliary braking system.

We did not test drive one, but it was easy to get in and out of, and comfortable to sit in, at least in the front seats. It weighs about 4,500 pounds, basically that same as the much larger F-150. The only negatives at this point are the manual transmission and lack of choice on interior fabric; the Pro-4X only comes with a charcoal interior, either cloth or leather. The bottom line was that it is probably a better fit for us than a Jeep Wrangler or a Ford F-150 and could be acquired for under $35,000 equipped the way we want it. Nissan also has zero percent financing available at the monument, although that is often in place of other incentives. The fact that it requires a manual transmission to be towed four wheels down, however, probably knocks it out of contention.

Storage compartment under the lift-up bed platform. The two boxes concealed and protectd 4″ flexible HVAC ducts.

Once we got home we had a light lunch. I then changed into my work clothes and got back to work deconstructing the inside of our motorcoach. (I like the term deconstructing as I think it is more descriptive of what I am doing that demolishing or even disassembling.) My goal for today was to finish removing all of the carpet and all of the carpet tack strips. I accomplished all of that except for a piece of carpet on the wall behind the driver’s seat and a piece on the front wall of the entry stairwell. My first task, however, was to cut a short slot in the 3/8″ plywood filler that was under the dinette in order to free an AC electrical cable that ran through it and then through the floor.

Getting the carpet off of the sides of the bed platform was interesting. There was a piece of wood trim installed along the top edge of the side of the bed base facing the front of the bus and just under the plywood bed platform. The trim strip is rabbited on the underside and conceals a 12VDC strip light that is tied in with toekick lights in the bathroom and the floor lights in the hallway. The power for the lights comes from inside the bed base through a small hole in the plywood and carpet. The trim strip also appeared to be installed over the carpet and needed to be removed to get the carpet loose along the top.

Under-bed storage compartment with bot HVAC ducts uncovered.

There was also an adjustable HVAC louver on each side of the bed. The louvers were installed from the outside and had flexible heater ducts slipped over them on the inside and secured with screws. The flexible ducts were in the storage area under the bed and were covered by wood boxes to protect them. The boxes, in turn, were carpeted to match the rest of the storage compartment. To disconnect the wiring for the strip light and remove the boxes I had to first empty out all of the stuff stored under the bed so I could get in there to work. The bed platform is hinged about one foot from the head end and the foot end lifts up, supported by two gas struts, so there was plenty of room to work once I emptied it out.

I have disassembled enough of the bus at this point to have some idea of how the conversion was built. The cover “boxes” for the flexible ducts were actually half-boxes with a long side and top and one small end. They were installed into a corner using a cleat screwed to the floor that the bottom edge of the long side was then screwed into. There was a similar arrangement to catch the free edge of the top and it was screwed to the inside wall of the platform base. All of these screws were put in through the carpet that covered the boxes and were essentially invisible so I had to find the screw heads by touch and back them out.

The area just forward of the bed base with the bed platform raised and facing the driver side of the bus.

Once I got the protective boxes loose I discovered that the floor and wall were also carpeted. There was a small bump out in each rear corner that served as wiring chases for AC electrical outlets on each side of the bed, and these bump outs were carpeted. It seemed clear to me that the HVAC ducts, which are part of the OTR HVAC system, may have originally been installed directly into the HVAC chase outside the bed base and later repositioned to the sides of the bed thus requiring the louvers, flexible ducts, and cover boxes. They also greatly reduced the available storage space under the bed.

The OTR HVAC chase runs along the floor-wall junctions on both sides of the bus for most of the length of the coach and a 12″ section of it is accessible on either side of the bed. Removing the two flexible ducts, sealing up the openings, and installing the louvers outside the bed platform will free up additional storage space under the bed which is a good thing as we can always use for storage space. That’s a nice bonus but adds some additional work to the remodeling project. Such is the nature of remodeling; you never really know what you have until you have completed the deconstruction phase.

The aft side of the bed base. There is not a lot of room to work in here so I will remove the bed platform when I install the new tile floor. I plan to use the same tile on the sides of the bed base.

It was overcast all day with humidity near 100% and rained off and on into the evening. It was also warm so I kept opening the roof vents and running the fans to make it more comfortable in the coach, but every time I did it started raining shortly thereafter. When I was done working on the bus for the day I moved the ten concrete blocks that had been supporting the propane tank for the whole house generator and pulled up the utility marker flags for the underground gas line to our meter. Keith will be here to cut the grass this coming week and I want him to be able mow these areas.

Linda spent the afternoon thoroughly cleaning the kitchen. She also prepared a sugar-water solution, filled the hummingbird feeder we bought at Lowe’s the other day, and hung it off the railing of our rear deck. A hummingbird found it almost immediately which was very cool. For dinner Linda made pan-grilled tofu slices with caramelized onions and sweet BBQ sauce served on tortillas. She also sautéed fresh broccoli and sliced up some fresh strawberries and pineapple.

After dinner Linda went to the Edmonds.com website to see if she could get a better feel for dealer cost and Fair Market Value for the Ford F-150 and Nissan Frontier. While she was at it she looked up the Chevy Colorado (GMC Canyon), and Toyota Tacoma. The Chevy Colorado was Motor Trend Magazine’s 2015 Truck of the Year. Both the Colorad0/Canyon and Tacoma are mid-sized pickup trucks. Toyota’s full-size pickup is the Tundra.

Brendan called while we out to see if Linda could sit with Madeline tomorrow night while he and Shawna had dinner with their friend Jorge. Depending how the day goes tomorrow I may go to Ann Arbor with her. We had two episodes of Sherlock left to watch and the DVDs have to go back to the library on Monday, so we watched both of them this evening. It was a double feature so I made popcorn in-between episodes.

2015/05/14 (R) Deconstructing the Bus

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The entry stairwell and passenger seat area of our H3-40. Note the two mounting channels for the passenger seat

I spent most of the day continuing to disassemble the inside front half of our motorcoach while Linda split her time between working in the yard and helping me. But before we got started on that work I made a follow-up appointment with the endodontist who did my root canal last fall. I also indicated that I had been having some issues with my teeth in that area and they scheduled me for an evaluation as well. I got my weekly follow up call from Diane at SteelMaster. She was not very happy when I told her I wanted to consider an arched metal roof for a pole barn type structure and started to argue with me about foundations and poles.

Driver side sleeper sofa unscrewed from the floor and laying on its back. Both end panels are off and the drawer and slides have been removed.

Wrong move. If you are not going to give me the information I need to make a decision then you are not going to sell me any of your products. She did admit, however, that I could purchase the stamped engineered design drawings without putting a deposit on a materials order. The drawings would cost about $500 which I think is still unreasonable. If the County denies my building permit SteelMaster will not take the drawings back and give me a refund. It makes me wonder how they have ever sell a single building. It’s not like I can take their drawings to another company and have them fabricate the materials at lower cost. I can understand charging something, perhaps $200, just to keep people who are not serious from wasting their time, but $500 seems excessive to me.

Driver side sleeper-sofa with everything removed so I can disassemble it to get it out of the bus.

Diane passed me off to Greg who handles the arched steel roof systems. He has not dealt with me before so he was not frustrated with me. For a 25′ wide x 50′ long building with a 25″ snow load he figured the roof system would be $10k to $13k. The roof profile would be similar to their “Q” style building, which is shaped more like a Quonset hut, and attached to the top of the wall with plates that are similar to the base plates they use for their metal buildings. The stamped drawings only would be $575, so if we decide to pursue this we will just have to spend that money to get these and hope the County Building Department approves the plans. Of course, Diane was willing to sell Chuck and me two complete S Model buildings 32’ x 56’ without end walls for $20,400 total, so $10K – $13K for a roof seems expensive by comparison.

Passenger side of the bus looking towards the rear from the cockpit. All of the furniture is out.

We needed the space in garage where the lawn tractor is parked to store the furniture from the bus until we can dispose of it. The tractor hasn’t been started since last fall (or summer?) so I hooked up the battery charger and let it charge while we worked.

This motor (center) was used to drive two geared pullies via flexible drive shafts (green) to open/close the drawer under the sleeper-sofa. (One of the pullies is visible upper left.)

By the time we quit working around 6 PM we had disassembled the sleeper-sofa and unbolted the passenger chair. We got the chair, both parts of the sleeper sofa, and both parts of the J-lounge out of the bus and into the driveway. I started the lawn tractor and moved it out of the garage and parked it outside behind a thick grove of large trees and dense undergrowth so it was mostly hidden from view. Once we got everything into the garage I removed the flexible HVAC ducts and threw them away. I then started pulling up the old carpet and padding from the living room floor and steps, and removing the carpet from the walls in the entry stairwell and cockpit areas.

The base of the passenger side J-lounge. This was a complicated piece of custom furniture.

[p6 R] I got all of the old material out and into the trash or garage and then removed one of the two filler panels from passenger side front floor and took that to the garage. I could not remove the other filler panel because it had a hole drilled in it with an electrical wire running through it. I will have to cut a slot to get it out and eventually shut off the power to that circuit and reroute the wire as it also passes through one of the HVAC 4” flexible duct adapters and into the HVAC chase. A never cease to be amazed by the things that bus converters do in places they think you will never look.

The upper portion of the passenger side J-lounge sitting in the driveway waiting go in the garage.

We spent some time in the bus considering our remodeling plans. With all of the furniture out we were finally able to see what we had to work with and some new possibilities emerged. The wall paper is badly stained behind the sleeper-sofa area and the wall behind the J-lounge/dinette is unfinished as it was never visible or intended to be. A lot of the woodwork needs to be cleaned and reconditioned. We will do that with the Touch of Oranges Wood Cleaner and steel wool, after which we will apply a nice coat of Touch of Beeswax.

Passenger chair and drawers waiting to go into the garage.

We have assumed from the beginning that we would replace the sleeper sofa with a new one custom designed and built to fit the available space, including a notch for the HVAC chase that would allow it to go all the way to the wall and fit under the window trim. The only way we would be likely to get such a sofa is from Villa and their furniture is very expensive and takes an unreasonably long time to get. Most of the furniture we removed from the bus was Villa, but it was all worn out. We are now considering putting two barrel chairs where the sleeper-sofa was located, perhaps with a small cabinet between them. We need to cut cardboard or heavy paper to match the footprint of possible chairs, cabinets, and the custom desk and set them in the bus to see how they will fit.

The “living room” of the bus looking forward from the kitchen. All of the seating has been removed. Note the black ceramic tile at te bottom of the frame.

Sooner rather than later we will have to make some final decisions so I can draw up final plans for the desk and floor cabinets and get them to Jaral Beaty in Logansport, Indiana to build. We are also going to have to settle on chairs and fabrics and get them on order. Besides the floor we are going to replace the driver and passenger seats, and the refrigerator, so this is a major remodeling project. I also have to rebuild the water bay, but that’s a different project for a different day and blog post.

Driver side alcove where the sleeper-sofa was installed. Note the HVAC chase and flexible ducts used to get air out through the front of the sofa.

It was a very physical day with a few bumps and scrapes but no serious damage to us or the bus. I went to the gas station to top up my fuel tank while Linda fixed dinner. She had some left over white rice and ended up adding it to barley, lentils, split peas, carrots, mushrooms, red onions, garlic, greens, soy sauce, salt and pepper. Everything except the greens was sautéed. The greens were cooked separately and added at the end. It was a delicious and complex combination of flavored and textures. We watched Season 3 Episode 1 of Sherlock and turned in early as we needed to be up very early tomorrow and on the road to the Dayton Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio.

Passenger side HVAC chase with AC cable passing through 4″ flexible duct adapter and then through the floor. Really? Really.

2014/09/09 (T) Squashed

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We got up this morning around 7 AM to temperatures in the upper 50’s and thinly overcast skies. I hooked up the garden hose and watered part of the back yard where we have been spot seeding the grass. Breakfast was our usual yummy homemade granola and a fresh grapefruit but I had to eat the cereal carefully.

I woke up this morning with minor pain in my lower right rear teeth. The upper teeth on that side have been bothering me for a little while and the coffee bothered one of them this morning. Not a good sign, as we learned a few weeks ago when Linda developed severe pain overnight. Sensitivity to heat and lack of sensitivity to cold is one of the tests for a nerve gone bad, and that usually means a root canal procedure. I called our dentist’s office at 9:15 AM and they booked me in at 2 PM. When I was there a couple of weeks ago to have an abfraction redone Dr. Steve did not see anything wrong with the upper tooth and speculated that I might be clenching my teeth while I sleep, which can aggravate the nerves. He may want me to try a mouth guard first. We’ll see.

After catching up on blogs I finished watering the back yard and moved around to the front. Being on a well, we cannot just run the water indefinitely; once the pressure tank runs down we need to let it recharge. The tank is large and we never notice this with normal household water usage, but watering the lawn can take a lot of water.

With the watering done I had planned to work on the drywall in the library, something I have not done for the last week, but I decided instead to re-grade a small area of the yard just east of the east driveway culvert. Roese Construction brought two pieces of plastic gas line above the surface in that area, dug a big hole to connect them straight together, and then back filled the hole and buried them. In the process of filling and grading the disturbed area they blocked the lower half of our culvert. Unfortunately the water flows out of that end of the culvert, so their grading was blocking the natural flow of the water.

While I was digging and raking Bill showed up from AT&T. Linda let me know that about 20 minutes before he arrived we had gotten two calls that just identified as “Incoming.” Bill said that coincided with the time he was dispatched and that an automatic line test is run whenever a technician is dispatched. He was able to pull up a screen on his diagnostic tablet of the recent use of the line pairs by 30 minute intervals and could see that our DSL had dropped out shortly after the diagnostic calls were made. This matched what Linda had seen in the house. He repeated the test sitting in our driveway and the telephone test call caused our DSL to disconnect again. He disconnected the line from the service entrance box and went in search of the problem while I continued working on the drainage issue.

I had the drainage problem fixed by 11:45 AM and got cleaned up and dressed appropriately for my dental appointment. We had hummus sandwiches with onion and olive oil, leftover butternut squash from last night’s dinner, and fresh, perfectly ripe pears; all soft foods so as not aggregate my dental situation. I was just getting ready to leave for my appointment when Bill returned. He said it was not a circuit board but appeared to be a cable problem that they refer to as a “swinging line,” referring to a marginal section of cable that develops problems when it moves, such as with storm winds. We had problems on Friday evening as a storm front approached and the winds kicked up, so this diagnosis did not surprise me.

Bill said he moved us to yet another line pair much farther away from our original ones and then repeated the tests he had done earlier. He had not gotten any failures but was not completely confident that he had solved the problem. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for a 100% chance of storms, some strong to severe, and Bill thought that would be a good test. I let Bill know that while I was digging and raking by the road I found an old underground AT&T line that had been cut in half with ends left above ground. He said it was no longer being used but they ask the other utility crews to leave the ends exposed when they snag them so AT&T can find them.

My teeth hurt on the drive down to the dentist, did not hurt while I was there, and hurt on the drive home. Direct examination, hot/cold sensitivity testing, and X-rays did not provide a definitive diagnosis. Dr. Steve was still of the opinion that it could be nerve irritation from clenching my teeth at night, but thought I should have the situation evaluated by an endodontist. Linda saw an endodontist just down the street from our dental clinic, but she needed same day service and they were able to get her in and do the root canal. They referred me to a clinic in Brighton about five miles from our house and made an appointment for me for Thursday late morning. With any luck my teeth won’t go critical in between now and then.

I did get an interesting recommendation on how to manage any ongoing discomfort. Motrin (Ibuprofen), up to 800 mg every six hours, and Extra Strength Tylenol, every six hours, taken half way between the Motrin. Apparently it works nearly as well as narcotics, at least on dental pain, without any of the unpleasant side effects or habit forming properties.

I did not feel like changing back into work clothes when I got home so I enjoyed some quiet time on the deck with Linda, who was working on her counted cross-stitch project, under partly cloudy skies with pleasant temperatures in the mid-70’s and a light breeze. Ahhhh.

With the phone and DSL currently functioning properly I worked in my office for a while before dinner. The login attack on our two WordPress sites hosted by QTH.com had continued, but not to the same extent as before. I set the country blocking to “all” in Wordfence and then deselected the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I did not have a reply from Scott at QTH.com which surprised me a bit but was not a big deal.

Linda made a nice salad for dinner and then served the leftover baked squash and squash/pasta dish from the other night; a lot of squash for one meal, but very tasty. We had a glass of the Leelanau Cellars Winter White, a very drinkable semi-sweet white table wine blend that must contain a fair amount of Riesling, although the label does not specify the grapes used to make it.

My bottom tooth was really acting up so I took 800 mg of Motrin (Ibuprofen) around 6 PM. We were out of Extra Strength Tylenol so Linda went to the store and got a bottle. I took some of that around 9 PM and then went to bed. I will be taking a pass on wine and coffee until I get the problems with my teeth resolved.

2014/08/25 (M) AT&T and the MPSC

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I was scheduled to participate in a meeting of the FMCA Education Committee at 4 PM today but it got rescheduled to Monday, September 8, same time. That was a welcomed change of plans which allowed me to concentrate on our construction project.

Roese Construction, the contractor for Consumer’s Energy, is still working along our street. The main gas lines are run. They are now digging the connection trenches, fusing the sections of pipe together, and filling the trenches back in. We heard them working at the west end of our property and walked down to see what they were doing and take a few photographs. A large backhoe was just starting to fill a trench at the northwest corner of our yard where two pieces of main line were joined with a branch line going to the cul-du-sac to the west. There was a lot of water in that trench and it looked like a (muddy) lap pool. The surface of the water was only about two feet below the surface of the ground. I asked the backhoe operator if that was ground water and he said it was. The northwest corner of our property is a low spot that forms small ponds around many of the trees when it rains, and stays wet for a very long time even after the surface water disappears.

We spent the morning and afternoon sanding drywall compound and touching up a few spots. While the compound was drying I worked on electrical tasks and Linda worked in the kitchen and did some weeding in the beds around the house. Somewhere in the middle of all that we put all of the sections of the ham radio tower back on the middle deck, had lunch, and made a trip to Lowe’s for a light switch and various cover plates. I also picked up an 18″ x 28″ sheet of 1/4″ thick Plexiglas to use as a temporary replacement for the fogged window in the bus when I finally get around to removing it to have it repaired.

Our AT&T phone and DSL service is worse than useless at the moment. After three un-returned phone calls to both the technician (who gave us his number and said to call him directly if the problem re-occurred within 30 days) and the infrastructure manager for this area (whose name and number we got from the technician) we were fed up, so we filed a complaint with the Michigan Public Service Commission. About four hours later we got a call from a women who claimed to be from the Office of the President of AT&T letting me know that she was in receipt of our commission filing and that she would be coordinating the “investigation and service repair process.” The audio level was low and the noise on the line was high, so I could barely hear her and said so. Apparently she heard the noise too, so at least she knew we were not making this up. She e-mailed us shortly thereafter with her name and contact information. That’s a start, but what we really want is the clean, reliable signal that we pay for.

There are things I can do, and need to do, at my computer that do not require me to be online, such as editing the rough drafts of blog posts and selecting/post-processing photographs. The last post I uploaded to our blog was for August 1st, so I am once again almost four weeks behind. I needed to finish processing the tree photos from last Thursday, put them in a Dropbox folder, and e-mail the link to Paul at Detroit Tree Recycling, but I did not get that done either. When I wasn’t eating or driving back and forth to Lowe’s I was working in the garage.

Speaking of food, Linda made stuffed mushrooms for dinner and served them with a side of grilled asparagus. Both were very tasty. After dinner I gave the east wall of the garage a final sanding and then worked on the utility closet wall while Linda vacuumed up the dust. I wiped down the wall with a barely damp sponge and applied a coat of Zinzer primer. It should be dry enough to paint in the morning.

I drove back to Lowe’s to return a couple of incorrect cover plates I had purchased earlier in the day and get the correct ones. I picked up another gallon of paint while I was there to make sure I had enough on hand for tomorrow. On the way home I had a nice QSO (ham radio contact or chat) with Mike (W8XH). Ham radio is fun and we have yet to get involved in making long distance (DX) contacts with folks all over the world on the HF (high frequency) bands. Getting our tower up with some HF antennas on it will help a lot.

2014/07/10 (R) Home And Garden

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On Tuesday I agreed to demonstrate the new SLAARC WordPress website at our ham radio club meeting this coming Sunday. I would like to spend some time working on the site between now and then but it is well enough along at this point to give folks a preview at the meeting, time permitting. My current goal is to unlock the public portions of the website by the August meeting and then supply each of the members with their username and password shortly thereafter. My “stretch goal” is to have the site set up so a member’s username and password also allows them to edit their roster record in the Participant’s Database. It’s a stretch goal because it is unlikely I will meet it unless I really stretch myself, which is to say, I put aside a lot of other tasks to concentrate on this on, or I work more/harder and sleep less. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

In fact, it was a nice enough day today that we both decided to work in the yard. I concentrated on pruning branches, mostly dead, from two fir trees and cutting them up into manageable size pieces for the fire pit. Linda took some time to weed the plant beds on the east end of the house and the juniper beds behind the garage. By mid-afternoon I’d had enough of this work for the day and turned my attention towards reorganizing our RV-related computer files.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) showed up mid-afternoon with the excavator and re-positioned several large boulders on the west retaining wall so one of his crews could continue working on the walls first thing tomorrow morning. He also brought samples of three different color bricks so I could select one for the front sidewalk. The one I selected is slightly darker than the pre-cast steps and similar to the reddish color mortar used on the main house bricks. The pavers will be solid, rectangular, and installed flat in a herringbone pattern on a 45 degree bias. We also discussed placing one or two medium size boulders on either side of the upper steps to keep folks from stepping off of the porch or the side of the stairs.

For dinner we had a large salad with lots of “extras” and then opened a bottle of NV Cesar Florido Moscatel Dorado. This is a sherry from Jerez (Spain) that our son and daughter-in-law got me for Father’s Day. It was recommended by their friend, Jorge Lopez-Chavez, who manages the wine department at The Produce Station in Ann Arbor, MI. We each had a small glass (it is 17.5% alcohol by volume) served at ~50 degrees F and agreed that was very good.

After dinner I finished re-organizing our RV-related computer files, backed them up to our NAS units, and the copied them to my Windows 8.1 laptop. We watched the last episode of season four of Doc Martin using our Amazon Video account.

2014/06/23 (M) Monsoon Season

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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.

2014/06/21 (S) Happy Birthday

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Today was my dad’s 89th birthday and I called to wish him a happy one. He was 18 years old on D-Day when he landed at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France; June 6th, 1944. His unit suffered 90% casualties during the invasion, but he survived to celebrate his 19th birthday in a foxhole in France. Not long after that he was wounded during the push inland and spent 6 months recovering in a hospital in England before returning to duty. He was awarded a Purple Heart for is injuries. Only a few years ago his unit also received medals of commendation, most of them posthumously.

For all of my youth and most of my adulthood he has not discussed the events of June, 1944. He tried to see Saving Private Ryan but had to leave the theater. He said the invasion scene was the most realistic he had ever seen in a movie, too close to the truth for him to watch, but that the real thing was far more horrible than any film could capture. He still doesn’t talk about his combat experiences, but in his later years he has found a great sense of pride in his former military service.

He was recalled to active duty during the Korean Conflict, but did not serve in the Korean theater. He had finished his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and was assigned to an Army Corps of Engineers unit where he taught soldiers how to construct various kinds of bridges and other structures in the field.

When I talked to him today he said he had come across some interesting statistics recently regarding World War II. During the course of the war, which I took to mean from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the global end of hostilities, 16 million American men and women served on active duty. Of those 16 million, slightly less than one (1) million are still alive today, and the youngest of them, like my dad, are in their late 80’s. Millions more worked on the civilian side of the war effort, and I suspect the statistics for that group are very similar.

———-

We went to breakfast in South Lyon with our ham radio club friends as we do most Saturday’s. The group varies in size from week to week; sometimes it’s as small as eight and sometimes, like today, over 20. Our club was holding a volunteer examiner (VE) testing session at 9 AM, as we do on the 4th Saturday of most months, so a few folks had to leave early to run the session. After breakfast five of us went to the Field Day site at the Lyon Township Atchison Memorial Park. We helped Steve (N8AR) unload his riding lawn mower and four of us moved heavy metal picnic tables out of the way so he could mow the field where the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) will set up on Friday for the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Field Day event.

Field Day is a 24 hour operating event to showcase the capabilities of amateur (ham) radio nationwide. It starts at 2 PM EDT on the last Saturday in June and ends at 2 PM EDT the next day. This is the second year in a row that we will miss Field Day, so we wanted to at least help with some of the site preparations

We finally had a day without rain and decided to work in the yard. We have a lot of trees and bushes on our property that are in need of serious trimming, including the removal of dead limbs and branches. We also have a lot of organic debris from previous trimmings lying around the yard in various places.

While Linda made a run to the recycling center I started trimming a red honeysuckle bush in front of our living room that was badly overgrown and blocked our view of the driveway from one of the windows. When she got back from the recycling center we worked on a tree that had grown out into our pull-through driveway and down towards the ground, making it difficult-to-impossible for Keith to mow the lawn under and around the tree.

While we were working on this tree Linda found a Painted Turtle resting in the shade under one of the branches that almost reached the ground. We wondered if it was the same one we had rescued a month ago as it tried to cross the road in front of our house. I had relocated that turtle to the northeast corner of our yard near our neighbor’s pond. We worked around the turtle for a while and enjoyed observing it, but once I was done with the trimming I relocated it to the northeast corner of the yard by the pond. I then worked on another, smaller tree near the driveway that had a lot of dead branches. We had several other trees on that same side of the house that had low hanging branches so I trimmed those as well. I then moved to the area just northwest of the house and did the same for a couple of trees there.

We gathered up all of the trimmings and separated them by green (with leaves) and dead (dry and able to burn). We hauled the dry trimmings back to our recently constructed fire pit where Linda made a pile of kindling from the smallest/driest material and started the fire. I kept trimming trees and cutting up larger limbs into smaller pieces for the burn pile while Linda hauled them to the fire pit. It was almost 5 PM by the time we quit working. We were tired and a bit sore, but it felt good to have accomplished tasks that needed to be done. There is a lot more to do, of course; we are learning just how much land five acres really is, especially with as many trees as we have. It will take more than one summer to fully prune our arbor, but that’s OK, we have time.

If the weather holds we will likely work in the yard again tomorrow. Keith will probably be here on Monday to mow the grass and we need to make sure all of the larger trimmings have been picked up before he arrives. I also want to prune our pear tree and apple tree before we get any deeper into summer. They both produced abundant and usable fruit last fall, but we were unable to reach most of it because the trees are badly shaped with too much tall, vertical growth in the center. But that is for another day; tonight we finished season 2 of Doc Martin and started season 3.

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts

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I have had a Palm PDA for most of the last 13 years, and for most of that time it has been a Palm Tungsten T3. While I was still working at Wayne RESA it was synced to their GroupWise e-mail and calendar system but also synced to the Palm Desktop software on my laptop for Contacts and Tasks and my Passwords Plus program. I did not use the Tasks list much, but I did keep all of my personal contacts, and some of my business contacts, on the Palm along with all of my encrypted passwords. Linda also had a Palm PDA for a while and had it synced to Outlook on her office computer. Her PDA quit working years ago and never got replaced. Once she was settled in at the bakery she did not have a need for a PDA.

When I retired I reverted back to using the Palm calendar, which I always liked. I even installed a new Lithium Ion battery, which was no easy job, to prolong the unit’s life. But three things have converged to finally spell the end of the Palm era for me: 1) the unrecoverable failure of the Passwords Plus app on the Tungsten T3; 2) the porting of our home Outlook Express information into Outlook 2007 after the loss of our twmi.rr.com e-mail address, and; 3) getting a new laptop computer due to the end of support for Windows XP.

Over the winter we were able to purchase an updated version of Passwords Plus (CS 2.0) that synced through the cloud. Versions were available that ran on our iPads, Linda’s Samsung laptop, and my then current Win XP Dell laptop. It is also available for Android (I think) but so far we have not installed it on our phones. The new PWP apps allowed us to successfully migrate all of our passwords from the old Palm version and make them available on four devices with back-up and synchronization via the DataViz cloud servers. Just this past week I installed PWP CS 2.0 on my new Win 8.1 machine and got it synced with the other four. When the passwords are available and secure, life is good.

When we moved from the previous house to the current house last year we lost our long-time home e-mail address. I took that as an opportunity to export our home address book and all of our personal e-mails from Outlook Express and import them into Outlook 2007 on my Win XP Dell laptop. Since that time I have continued to build out the address book with contact information, but I still have and use my Palm Contacts. Yesterday I learned that I could export my Palm contacts in a vCard (.vcf) format. Further research suggested that I could convert the file to a comma separated value (.csv) format and then import it into Outlook 2013 on my new laptop. It would be a lot more work than it sounds as the vcf –> csv conversion would require me to review each entry, but it would still be a lot less work than re-entering everything by hand.

I figured I would need the better part of a long day to accomplish this task, so before rushing into it I decided to do more research. Today I discovered that there are add-ins available for Outlook that will take my single .vcf Palm output file and import it into Outlook directly, as long as I am willing to pony up the $$. The idea of spending $20 -$25 for a program I will use once does not sit well with me, but the idea of sitting all day reviewing entries one at a time does not sit well with me either. If I want to clean up duplicates, I can do that semi-automatically for another $25. I’m thinking about it.

The calendar is another matter. The Palm calendar can be “archived” but not exported. My Palm calendar goes back at least a decade, and this history may just have to remain in the Palm Desktop on the old laptop. On the upside, once I start using the Outlook calendar I may be able to set it up so I can access the address book and calendar on my Android phone. That would be nice; I have long enjoyed having my contacts and calendar information “in my pocket,” or “on my belt,” depending on my clothing choices that day.

It was yet another beautiful day today; when Michigan weather is nice, it’s the best. Linda decided to do some weeding in the front planting beds and I decided to install the new rear-view mirror on the bus. You just can’t let a day like this go by without doing something outside. After a little break we decided to work in the back yard. We had several large pine trees that had large limbs broken over the winter. I used our pole saw to cut those loose and dragged them over near an old burn pile. I cut the small branches off, cut up the larger central limbs, and made a pile. We gathered up some of the dried grass clippings from Tuesday and stuffed them under the limbs and twigs. We added a few old, large logs to the pile that were laying around in the yard and soaked everything in diesel fuel. Forget gasoline and charcoal starter fluid; let the diesel fuel soak in (it does not evaporate like gasoline) and put a match to it. You will get a sustained fire.

After the fire had burned down to a smolder we moved some of the blocks from the rear retaining walls and laid them around the burn pile. We’ve decided to use some of them to build a fire pit and wanted to see how many it would take to make a circle of the appropriate size. We plan to build the pit 2 or 3 courses high on the low side.

Kimber, from GM Construction LLC (GM Decks), called to let me know that Gary had taken ill and would not make it out to the house late this afternoon to discuss our pole barn project. We will try again next week. Village Landscape Development also did not show up or call today. I will give Steve a call tomorrow and suggest that we set a firm start date for Monday June 16.

The afternoon mail brought a Jury Summons for Linda for a two week commitment for U. S. District Court in Flint, Michigan starting Monday, June 30. That interferes with some travel plans we have and will now likely have to adjust. She won’t be able to find out if she needs to report on the 30th until 5 PM on Friday the 27th.

The Phase Place

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Tag Archives: yardwork

2015/11/03 (T) The Penultimate Cut

2015/10/16 (F) Desk Installation

2015/10/07 (W) The Root Cause

2015/10/06 (T) Trimming & Stripping

2015/20/04 (N) Family Trees

2015/10/01 (R) New Month, Same Project

2015/05/16 (S) Trucks and Buses

2015/05/14 (R) Deconstructing the Bus

2014/08/25 (M) AT&T and the MPSC

2014/07/10 (R) Home And Garden

2014/06/23 (M) Monsoon Season

2014/06/21 (S) Happy Birthday

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts