catch-up post #n
I was off work from December 23rd through January 4th and it was a really great. 
helloheather and Nate and I relaxed and spent a lot of quality time together.
Christmas was busy, as usual, with events every day from the 24th through the 27th. But, despite the big snowfall, and the driving around, it was really all very good. Nate was a trouper and really seemed to enjoy visiting the family. Lots of photos need to be posted.
We visited the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum after Christmas, mostly to see the Butterfly Haven they have there. I really thought Nate would enjoy it, but he was not impressed. There were other exhibits he liked though, and overall the visit was a good one. Also, with so many people being off work the week between Christmas and New Years, we had no problems driving into and out of Chicago.
Nate and I also spent a lot of time outside in the snow over break, which was really great. I'm very glad we've had all the snow and that it's been cold enough to keep it from melting. Though, I did hear on the news last night that, if it warms up on Wednesday or Thursday, it'll be the first time since Christmas that we've been at or above 32 deg F. So, it's been a little chilly!
Being back at work for a full week (last week) was tough. It's really easy to get into a habit of being lazy and family-oriented around the house and very difficult to get back into work-mode mentality. However, I've managed to chase the mid-day blues away a bit by bringing a DSLR to work and walking around in the cold and snow. Boots and thermals have been a must.
So 2010 is here and the end of March is rapidly approaching. I'm still not really ready for all of this but it's certainly not waiting for me to catch up.
losing traditions before they are formed
One of the things about fatherhood that I really enjoy (and look forward to) is creating traditions. Not huge "we take a family trip" or "everyone comes over for Christmas" type traditions, but little ones.
Though it wasn't a tradition for Heather growing up in Crystal Lake, I always sorta though going to a local restaurant called "Little John's" could be mine and Nate's. An "out with dad on a Saturday" type tradition. It has been open for 29 years serving gyros, italian beef, hot dogs, burgers, etc. While not the easiest place to get in and out of, it was always worth visiting.
Sadly, I found out only this evening that the business is closing its doors at the end of the day tomorrow.
http://www.nwherald.com/articles/2009/09/18/r_kn1xtxtcsucwsn5efe_4wg/index.xml
Thankfully, the owner is not being forced out and is not closing because of the economy. He's closing on his terms and frankly, after 29 years, any small business owner deserves his or her retirement.
But in thinking about its closure, I realized something: a number of the local businesses that I enjoy frequenting are owned by people who will probably be retiring in the next few years. There are so few new local businesses opening (or finding it possible to stay open) that it's very difficult to get any sort of tradition going in the first place. Little John's, for example, is going to be knocked down and a Walgreen's put in its place.
**sigh**
I'm certainly going to miss Little John's, but I'll miss its potential even more.
11 years
If for no other reason than for me to try and gain momentum on posting to the blog, I present:
I managed to catch my odometer rolling over 111111.1 miles. My Chevy Cavalier has been with me since Easter before graduating college. I put quite a few miles on it those first couple years (trips out east, down to the Carolina's, back and forth between Indy and Crystal Lake) but a majority of its life has been quite mundane: It travels between home and the train station and around town.
How to test your back
There are many things one can do to test your back, but my method this weekend was to seal coat the driveway.
The cost of hiring someone is about equal to buying the seal coat myself but there's an advantage: the quality of the seal coat I purchase is much higher. Thus it's longer lasting and more durable. In fact, it was looking like I would be able to do it for /less/ because the quality seal coat was going further (thanks to last years application).
However, the township tore up about a quarter of our driveway late last fall (to install storm drains) and so I ended up using all the buckets I purchased. (As new asphalt tends to require a lot more seal coat.) Still, I came out of it with a better protected driveway and only a sore back, and legs, and arms, and neck and....
Er...Well, I came out ahead and that's the story I'm sticking with. 
swing low, sweet chariot
A couple weeks ago, I completed my one really big task for this summer.
It feels really good to have it done. I, of course, couldn't have completed this without lots of help from my father and the fathers-in-law. They were all quite patient with my "measure ten times, cut once" assembly procedure.
It was completed in time for the Big Visit of 8 adults and 8 kids. We had fine weather and even a little rain didn't keep us from the back yard for too long.
Yay!
Notes notes notes
- lots of people coming later this week. lots to do around the house. i should buy charcoal...and beer.
- swing set is finished (save the anchoring of the swing arm legs). i certainly could not have done it without the help of my father, and fathers-in-law, and nate. he helped by keeping us on task: "wait wait, you forgot the slide!!"
- moved rocks for a fire pit. hopefully we'll be able to try it out this weekend. lots of branches (some very dry, some green) to use up.
- having a new 1TB hard drive for photo and video storage has lifted a big bundle of stress. we have enough external storage for backups (for now) and should be set for a while.
- in a related note: i really need to do something about hellophotos.com. the load times are getting pretty long. i don't know if migrating to the latest version of the software is going to help...but the thought of migrating 11,000+ photos is daunting.
- 42 days from now we'll have the same amount of light during the day as we are having today. while i do enjoy celebrating the summer solstice, i'm also a little melancholy at the thought of the light beginning to retreat so soon. we're just now getting consistent warm temps...
- i've started using a twitter account (which updates facebook) to note positive things that have happened to me. i don't think it's going to last very long (by that i mean i'll get busy and find excuses to do other things than update twitter) but i hope that it combats some of the cynicism that has been hanging around my brain for far too long.
- somewhat ironically: i cannot keep up with the amount of information being thrown at me. between facebook, twitter, and flickr, i just can't keep up. this is not an aggregation issue, this is an absorption issue. for example: i have just finished watching the dvd's from season 1 of a canadian tv show called Intelligence. i could only tell you a couple of the characters names. the sub-plots fly like falling maple leaves in the fall. it's a good show and i like it...but i just don't have the capacity to absorb it all these days. so i don't try. the problem with this is the effect spills over to other areas of my life. i get so full that i don't remember important dates or items on my to-do list, let alone what my friends are up to.
- our anniversary is this weekend.
that is all...for now...
wasted effort
All of our wonderful snow was converted to a small (and now frozen) lake between our house and our neighbors to the north.
**sigh**
I guess we're really going to have to do something this spring about the drainage issues. I really don't want to have to cut through large tree roots...but it may be the only way.
work those cold fingers away
It may have "warmed up" to all of 5 deg F today, but I was plenty warm as I cleared the driveway of all the drifted snow. Once I really laid into that shovel, the coldness in my extremities vanished.
I think we have to throw away our finch feeder. We let it sit too long in the fall and rain clumped up the seeds left at the bottom of the feeder. It turned into a decaying mush that then turned into some sort of thistle seed cement. We tried cleaning it before but no go and I gave it a shot again today (using a long-shaft garden weeding tool) but I still couldn't reach far enough.
I did, however, lay some seed out in a planter base and put it near the front window. We did this last year with great results. Lots of sparrows visited and Nate got a great view of the birds hopping around and eating.
mulch to do
Saturday I started working on leaf clean-up at 9:30 am. I finished at 2:30 pm with zero breaks. This included cleaning the gutters and sweeping piles of leaves off the roof.
Last year we decided to use the leaves from the ginkgo tree as a mulch-substitute for part of the landscaping in the back. It was not a perfect solution, but it did help keep the weeds down early on in the season. For the rest of the leaves, I spent time each weekend mulching them into the yard. However, even with keeping on top of them we have so many leaves that I was left with spots on the grass that had too much leaf matter and, as a result, dead spots in the spring.
This years weather, being as strange as it has been, prevent us from doing pretty much anything with the leaves. There still are trees in the area with most of their leaves on them (if you can believe that) and those that did fall remained wet thanks to our frequent rains at the end of October and into November.
So, instead of mulching the leaves and leaving the remains on the grass I decided to mulch and then sweep them up, in order to cover the landscaped area in the back. And, for the most part, the idea worked. (At least so far.) Almost all the leaves from the yard fit onto the landscaped area. Now, there are a couple rather thick areas, I'll admit, but I think with some turning-over in the spring I think we'll be set.
Of course, with mulching all the leaves, we didn't have anything to burn. So, even though this took 5 hours on Saturday, it was better than 8 to 10 hours of standing around trying to get semi-damp leaves to burn...
With luck, this process each fall will keep us from having to buy wood mulch (another 18 cubic yard load? no thank you) for a long time.
Catch and Release
We've had a "population" of chipmunks around the house over the past couple of years and, the occasional hole aside, they've pretty much kept to themselves. Had they maintained the status quo and not tried to move a metric ton of gravel that surrounds the foundation of our house or dig deep into our window wells, I would still be ignoring them (except, perhaps, to watch them nibble on seeds from our trees).
But they did not keep to themselves and did, in fact, decide to dig in all the wrong spots.
So, off to the hardware store for a no-kill trap. While these types of traps do not kill, the name belies my intended usage, which can only be described as: "deferred hawk kill." For you see, I have been releasing these mini excavators to their fate in the hopes that one of the area red tail hawks will have a little extra for lunch.
At the recommendation of the manufacturer I baited the trap with slices of apple which thrilled our many local ant colonies to no end, but did nothing to entice the chipmunks. I moved the trap and baited it with Townhouse (tm) crackers. Bingo.
Wishing to keep the stress levels low, I quickly moved the trap and occupant to the trunk of my car and drove a mile to the east. I dropped the first chipmunk off and he (or she, I didn't look too closely) headed right into the tall grasses near the bike trail.
All told I have trapped four chipmunks with the winning combination of Townhouse cracker and better trap placement. The second two were caught within an hour of each other, and the fourth (a more wily opponent perhaps?) not until Sunday evening.
While a mile away may not be very far (certainly they could find their way back if they wanted to) there exists another challenge: In order to get back to our neighborhood the chipmunks will have to cross about 1/2 a mile of open grass (literally: a sod farm) thus my belief that the local hawks will have a chance to grab an extra meal.
(As an aside, it only /now/ occurs to me that I should have photographed at least one of these captures for nothing more than illustrative purposes for this very blog entry. Oh well, perhaps there are more in the area.)
this post brought to you by the word: kitchen
I'm posting this from our kitchen because we are now connectified in a place other than our basement.
I have, like many geeks, lots of extra computer hardware sitting around. So I put together a computer for the kitchen. It's sitting in the end-cabinet right next to Jasmine's food and water dishes. I was able to purchase a used LCD from work for $15 (score!) and tonight I picked up a desktop wifi card for $35. So, for $50 I was able to outfit our kitchen in the latest technology 2003 or 2004 had to offer.
Seriously though, this is pretty cool. And we're giving Ubuntu Linux a try instead of Windows. All we need is a browser and OpenOffice anyway. Though it would be nice to eventually get some small speakers in here and tap into our music share. Also, I'd like to have the OS run a screensaver of our photos from the photo share, but sadly this doesn't look very promising. I'll just have to keep a copy of the photos I want locally.
Yeah, a laptop would be nice but it would be far too expensive (even for a Asus EEE or Dell Mini) and a laptop would rarely leave the kitchen anyway.
So, yay for relatively inexpensive DIY kitchen computerin'.
Hitting home.
With the housing market clearly favoring buyers, helloheather and I took a tour of two homes for sale back in December. The first was empty, as it was being sold by a relocation company. It was decent enough but did not strike us as the right fit.
The second, however, was still occupied but had a pending foreclosure. As we walked around, four young girls and their smiling parents stared at us from photos on the mantel and walls. The artwork of these girls decorated the fridge and their bedrooms. The family's cats sniffed us as we went by.
Our tour of the house threw my conceptualization of the problems in the housing marking right out the window. I find it hard to describe the feelings I had after we left the house, but depressed was certainly one of them. I don't know the details behind the foreclosure, nor do I want to find out. That's not the point. These four girls are innocent victims of something they had no control over.
What if something happened to my job and helloheather and I were unable to make house payments? What if we were faced with a foreclosure? The loss of our home, as a concept rather than a thing, would be (to me at least) devastating.
Perhaps I'm wrongly projecting my feelings of our home onto this family. Maybe they don't even like where they live. I rather doubt this, but I suppose it's possible.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I found a compassion for this family that weeks of statistics on the radio and online had been able to hide. I had become numb to the reality of this situation because the numbers being thrown around are too abstract. This experience has given me pause and my heart goes out to all those families that have been similarly affected.
Let’s talk about Monday…
So, let's sum up what happened yesterday:
1) I forgot my key-card at home. Not a big deal but annoying to get around the office until I could get a temporary.
2) For the first time ever I forgot my tie at home. Very embarrassing. I was able to borrow one that came down to the middle of my crotch, but at least I wasn't sent home to get a tie (which would have been a 4-hour round-trip ordeal).
3) The three Hi-8 video tapes I need to have converted to digital files (for a particularly high-profile training DVD I am creating) appear to have failed completely. Attempts to get them to play on the equipment at the video conversion vendor have resulted in lots of visual static and no sound. These tapes are less than 7 years old. The company has at least 100 such tapes in storage and I fear we will lose a lot of them.
4) A 21 oz bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper (2/3 of which had already been consumed) proceeded to burst forth and spray my shirt, pants, and the steering wheel and dash of my car when I attempted to open it.
5) Our venerable Canon A80 has had power problems since returning from having the CCD repaired/replaced. The problems were intermittent and I thought perhaps they were related to bad batteries. Yesterday I discovered that the rocker/selection button on the back is stuck down on the right-side. This is a curious problem as it would suggest the camera has been damaged in some way. However, the far more problematic discovery yesterday was that the camera won't turn on unless you first open and close the battery door. This needs to be done each and every time you wish to use the camera. The A80 was working fine on Friday and never left the camera bag all weekend.
This is most distressing because helloheather and I certainly were not planning on spending any money on camera equipment any time soon. In addition, having just been repaired, the camera was (despite the intermittent power issues) performing wonderfully. Canon not only fixed the CCD but replaced the lens assembly giving the camera a whole new lease on life. The zoom was smooth and quieter than before the repair and I was marching my way towards 40,000 total exposures. Clearly we have had our moneys worth with this camera, I just wish we could have squeezed out a little bit more.
Clearly yesterdays problems, even cumulatively, were minor annoyances at best. There are far worse things that were happening to other people and there almost always are. I kept this in mind as I arrived home a few minutes early and was able to spend the last bit of rapidly fading light outside with Nate crunching fallen leaves and investigating all the yard had to offer. We came inside with cool cheeks and empty stomaches and were warmed and fed. A lot of people did not have those luxuries last night and so I remain thankful for mine.
Rhubarb
We have rhubarb in our back yard that originally came from my maternal great-grandmother's house in Chicago. She was a prolific gardener, a tradition that passed down to my grandmother and my mother. As did the rhubarb. My mother planted some of it in our backyard where, as rhubarb does, it grew and flourished.
When helloheather and I bought our house, we transplanted some of the rhubarb to our back yard. At first I wasn't sure it survived but last year it came back. This year, the growth has been strong and, for the first time, I harvested some. helloheather cooked up a strawberry rhubarb crumble that was simply fantastic.
The key to rhubarb, as I understand it, is size: small stalks make for good eating. Once the stalks get large, even though they're nice and red, they're very, very tart. Most people that complain about rhubarb have simply been eating the wrong things at the wrong time.
Unfortunately, I may have harvested too much. Research indicates that one should not harvest more than 1/3 of the plant at any given time. I harvested about 3/4 if not more. Most of it was very large stalks that I simply removed, but I realize now I should have left them. Hopefully this will not be the end of the plant and the wonderful crumble.
Productivity
We worked in the yard a bit today. Nathan helped quite a bit.
We ended up getting quite a bit done on the back planting bed. It was a great feeling. Nathan was very content to play in the mulch and attempt to stab himself with various gardening implements.