Years ago, when the Judge and his family lived next door, and their well-natured alcoholic son took a shine to me, he walked over an old runner sled that had been sitting in their garage for 40+ years and offered it to us. Flattered, I assured him we’d make use of it. I put it in our garage and waited for Finn to be big enough to give it a try. In the following years, we never had enough actual snowfall to make use of it; there was one good year where we took the kids over to the school with the neighbors but I think that sled was a little too advanced for Finn’s age.
When we got the forecast for this past week, I knew I’d want to get it ready, so I pulled it down from the rafters and brought it into the basement. Years of neglect pitted the runners with rust, but after some focused effort with 60 grit sandpaper, I had them shiny and smooth again. I blew off the dust and used some cheap tealight candles to wax both rails, and she was ready.
Jen wisely pushed us out the door during lunch on Friday to take advantage of the snow we did get. Finn and I drove up to the local community college, which sits high on a hill overlooking our town, surrounded by excellently manicured sledding hills. As it was still a school day, we had the place almost to ourselves. I sat Finn down on the runner, gave her some encouragement, and watched her fly down the slope faster than greased lightning. We gave the plastic sled a few tries but it was no contest; the runner sled was ten times faster. We then got about 45 minutes in before I had to get her back for afternoon class, but every minute of weary trudging back up that slope was worth the exhilaration. Thanks, Howard!
I’m tempted to disassemble it, sandblast all the metal parts, and refinish the wood to clean it up for another 50 years. But maybe I’ll just oil the metal, tighten the rivets, and rub the wood with some teak oil. I like the look of things that have been used for a purpose, and this sled is a work of art as it is.
I’ve been keeping my eye on Craigslist for a used hitch-mast bicycle mount since I helped Karean get hers mounted on the back of the Benz. She originally had a rack mount we installed the year Rob passed but we quickly realized it was bending part of the window surround. I liked the one she got: it mounted up easily and folded below the bumper line so that the rear hatch can still open. I filed that away in the back of my head and we continued to use the spare tire mount rack I’d bought for the CR-V, but I’ve never liked having all that weight of the bikes and the tire hanging on the rear door.
This week a hitch-mast popped up in Dundalk for a fraction of the list price, so I ran across town today before too much ice collected on the ground. A nice man walked it out of his tidy house and we tested it on the CR-V before I gave him the cash: perfect. Both the Honda and the Scout have hitches, so now we’re better prepared for the summer, and I can carry bikes in the Scout when we go camping.
Update: looks like it’s a Roc 2, made about 20 years ago. It might be tricky to put my Cannondale on this (the top tube is actually 2 tubes that come to a joint at the center) but I’ll find a way to make it work. I’ve already added a hitch lock to my Amazon list.
We’ve recorded Finley’s growth on one of the kitchen moldings since she was a little over a year old and could stand on her own two feet. We’ve been pretty consistent in measuring her height every couple of months since then, but now that she’s a surly tween wandering around the house wiping dirty hands on every available surface, some of the dates carefully pencilled on the wall have been smudging off.
Aware that this record might not be around much longer, I busted out a tape measure last night and put each of the legible marks into a spreadsheet. Then I converted the fractions to decimals and plotted it into a graph. Here’s what we recorded and when:
This basically just backs up what we’ve known all along: she generally has a growth spurt sometime between November and January. Sometimes there’s another one in the summer, but as this data shows it’s not as pronounced. And look at the jump in the middle of age 7 and right after!
Saturday afternoon I did a yearly sweep of my accounts and downloaded all statements into categorized folders, archiving 2020 into one place. Among the records, I’ve got a record of all of our gas and electric bills from the day we bought the house until now, save a period from March 2010 to October 2013, because BG&E doesn’t save stuff that far back. In 2014 past I plotted our energy usage against the average temperature to see what the pattern was.
Looking back at that graph I realize now that I was plotting the wrong thing: I was interested in cost, which made sense back then, but because pricing fluctuates over time it wouldn’t tell the story I’m more interested in now—about any improvements made in insulation. This would be reflected in the total therms or KWh used, which BG&E helpfully includes on their statements (as well as the average monthly temperature). I dug up some further statements and spent a couple of hours plugging data into the old spreadsheet.
What I found was interesting. Apparently our gas usage has trended downwards by about 50 therms over 17 years, which means that some of the improvements I’ve made in this drafty sieve have made a difference. The scary revelation is that our energy usage has trended upwards dramatically by about 250KWh over that same time period—no doubt the spike in daily usage during 2020 did not help that average. But it tracks; there are three people in the house using appliances and devices and air conditioners instead of two, and we’ve added multiple rooms since 2003.
The big takeaway is that we’re still spending more in the winter to heat the house than we do in the summer to cool it, so my continual quest to insulate and weatherproof will continue. I think nine new windows for the upstairs rooms would help with the drafts as well as some other upgrades—I’m looking at you, front and back doors—and eventually a central air unit that would be four times as efficient as four old window units sucking dollars out of the house.
While we’re on the subject of drafty houses, Finley has been working from her fort while she’s in class. The high is around 48˚ and there’s no insulation out there, so I ran an extension cord from the garage and put my shop heater on a plank of wood to try to combat the cold. She used some Christmas money to buy a small laptop stand and a whiteboard at Target, and over the weekend went out to set things up. Back in the summer the neighbors gave us an old carpet which fit pretty well on the floor, so she’s not sitting on a bare wooden plank, but that’s it for amenities. I dusted off our old Airport base station, reset it for bridge mode, and tucked it up above the workbench in the basement. The new router sits in the living room roughly where the old one did, but if I draw a straight line from that to the fort there are two surfaces covered in aluminum siding in the way, which means the signal is shit out there. So the Airport should keep her Zoom game strong.
I’m a little wary of letting her work out there by herself, but we told her she could do it as long as her grades stayed up and her work got done. So we’ll see how things go.
Finn and I drove from one end of Baltimore to the other to find an early Christmas present: a full-size bike to replace the awesome but now tiny Diamondback Santa brought in 2015. The bicycle industry has been hit hard by COVID-19, as all the factories in China have been closed and dealers sold out of their stock pretty quickly this summer, but apparently they’re doing a great business fixing and upgrading what people already have. Finn has grown several inches since the beginning of 2020 and Jen’s bike was just too big for her to ride. I considered looking for used bikes but I wanted to get her something she’d have for high school and college, so I thought we’d hit the stores before everything gets completely locked down again.
We started at one store in Ellicott City and got her sized for a Diamondback model that was in stock; the color was an odd earthy mauve and it was several hundred dollars above the price point I wanted to pay. The saleslady was awesome and super helpful, but I figured we might be able to find a bike at a better price elsewhere. We put a hold on it and continued to our local store in Catonsville, which is tiny, just to see what they had. He was completely out, but told us a store in Arnold had just gotten a shipment of bikes in, so we drove down there in the afternoon to check out the situation.
The Bike Doctor had a bunch of shiny new Trek models in stock, and we quickly sized one out for Finn in the parking lot. I hesitated over settling on a small or medium frame, worried that she’d either outgrow a small or never size into a medium, but in the end we went medium and I had the mechanic cut about 2″ off the seat stem so that it would drop enough for her to feel comfortable. (Seat stems are cheap and easy to replace).
This bike is a beautiful red, features disc brakes and beefy 29″ tires with a knobby but not aggressive tread, and weighs lighter than it looks. And, it was $150 cheaper than the first bike. Plus, it’s got lugs for a rear pannier on the frame—something the Diamondback lacked—and should be easy to upgrade.
We got it home and took a ride around the school to get her comfortable with it. She’s still struggling with the size but I think as we practice some more in the spring she’ll grow right into it.
My daughter and her friend somehow decided they wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons a few weeks ago, which got me thinking about where my old books might be.
In 1982, my family moved from blue-collar New Jersey to a town in white-collar Connecticut, and I started at a new school. I went from middle school back down to an elementary, and I was bused in from a remote cul-de-sac on the far side of town. I was pretty isolated until school started (the only other kid on our street was two years younger, and all he ever wanted to do was sit inside and play Pac-Man) but after a rocky couple of weeks I met up with a guy who lived less than a mile from my house through the woods. He introduced me to a bunch of his friends, who lived nearby, and one of the things we bonded over was Dungeons and Dragons. They had an agreement with one of the teachers who let them play in an empty classroom during recess once a week, and they invited me to sit in.
I didn’t understand how the game worked at first. There were dice, and rules, and they gave me a character to play, but I enjoyed using our imagination to solve problems. We played as much as we could that fall, between building forts in the woods around our houses, riding bikes, and playing Pitfall! I enjoyed one of the best Halloweens of my life that year when my friend’s father showed us how to melt the plastic tip of a can of shaving cream to shoot the foam 10′ or more; we roamed in and out of epic battles with older neighborhood boys, using our knowledge of the woods to escape and regroup.
My parents bought me the D&D and Gamma World boxed starter sets that Christmas, and I played on and off until I left for college. The box is long gone but I still have the original Player’s Manual, the first dungeon module, a set of dice, and a well-loved first edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. It only took about five minutes to dig through a storage bin to find them for the girls. I showed them how to roll to create new characters, and at some point in the next couple of weeks I offered to walk them through their first dungeon to see if they like it. Which means I’ve got to read the DM Guide this week to remember how…
On Monday, we took advantage of warm weather, sunny skies, and a day off from school to hike in Gambrill State Park north of Frederick, which features an incredible 360˚ view of northern Maryland. We’re about 3 weeks too early to see trees changing color, but it was still fantastic to get outside.