I got an email late Tuesday with the subject line “Grab your umbrella and a dour attitude”, which meant that the stars have aligned for me to travel to London at the end of this month on business. I’m going to be shooting video for a series of interviews about the New Climate Economy. We’re planning on a 3-camera shoot in front of a backdrop, and then adding animation in post-production. I’m a wee bit nervous because I’m going to rent a bunch of gear in London and handle the logistics myself, and I have no idea what the inside of the venue looks like (so there’s no advance scouting). It could mean that I’m recording the former President of Mexico in a coat closet. But, London! Video production! I can’t wait.
Friday evening we were invited to a friends’ birthday party with a standing invitation to bring an instrument and jam with the host. I’d known about this party for a couple of weeks, and I was nervous to join in, especially after we arrived and I heard the guys playing. There was an older guy playing drums in a flailing Buddy Rich style, an excellent keyboardist who was doing double duty holding the bass line down, a guitarist, and a saxophone player who was staggeringly good. I hung out for a while, drank a few beers, and when I had my liquid courage, I got my bass and amp from the car and set up.
They were taking a short break, but everybody assembled again and the drummer asked me to lay something down. Nervously, I started a very basic figure and the whole band picked it up. From then on out, we played whatever anyone could think of, from improv noodling to a couple of songs– Sympathy for the Devil was fun as hell to play, and I was just locking into the groove of Stevie Wonder’s I Wish when it wound down. It was exhilarating, and when another guy sat down at the drums, I found his style easier to lock in with. Three hours later, by the time we had to leave, my right index and pointer fingers were numb but I had so much fun I didn’t care. A bunch of the players walked up and thanked me for sitting in, something I wasn’t expecting but very much appreciated, and all I did was gush back at them in awe. I don’t know if he’s thinking of doing that as a regular event, but I’d love to learn some standards and go back to play again. And I’m definitely going to pick up the Stevie Wonder songbook, because that was fun as hell to play.
The shutters are now installed on our front windows. The only thing left to do after priming and painting them was to get full sets of hinges, and I’d pulled four off of our existing windows. Not looking forward to another day on the ladder, we took a drive back down to Second Chance and I dug through their boxes to find only one complete shutter hinge. On a hunch, I walked back to the shutter section and hunted around until I found a pair of shutters with the hinges I needed (male hinges with intact pins) and bought them both. By 5:30 that evening all four shutters were hung, and the house looks much better, if I do admit.
Because we got a late start Saturday morning, Finley and I missed most of the yard sales in the neighborhood, but we did look at one that was right down the street. Sitting on a barstool I saw a beat up Emerson 544 radio and offered the lady $10 for it, which she took. The woodwork on the face is in rough shape, but the rounded shell is still OK, and I think I can find a way to make a new dial cover for it. So, for the first time in years, I’ve got another radio to work on.
In other musical news, Finn had her second piano recital on Sunday afternoon in the church across the street. She did really well as the 4th of about twelve kids to play, and Bear brought Auntie Christi to listen as well.
This weekend’s big projects involved lots of paint. I ordered a new sprayer from Amazon last week and picked up paint for the front door and the shutters early Sunday morning, and got to work. First the front door came off, got cleaned, taped, and dried in preparation for several coats of red. Our last door was brush-painted, and being a metal-jacketed door, the paint showed every brushstroke. This is no fault of the painter, because red paint is pigment-heavy. The new door was just as difficult to paint: I couldn’t get the red to aerosolize enough to go on smoothly, so it looks like I painted the door with bedliner. Sigh.
Next up were the shutters. Exterior primer goes on a lot smoother, and all four shutters got two coats of it and dried in the sun. In between coats, I started scraping and priming the back windowframes, which haven’t been touched in 10 years. Then I started pulling the storm windowframes out so that I could access legacy shutter hinges left behind in all of the second-story windows. As it turns out, a set of hinges for each shutter would cost more than we paid for the shutters themselves. (For the record, they are known either as Bermuda or Parliament lift-off hinges).The frames angle outwards, making it impossible to get a screwdriver straight on the screws, so it took time to pull the windows out, unscrew the frames, get the hinges out, and screw everything back in. I got all but two left-hand hinges out, and as it turns out there are only two left on the house. It’s also a minor miracle the hinge pins even fit the hinges that came with the shutters–even though the house hinges are 1/2″ smaller on both sides.
Monday I got back outside and coated the shutters with black paint, which went on smooth but thick. There doesn’t seem to be any flow control on my sprayer, unlike the old one I had, but I cleaned up the drips with a brush and covered them over carefully with the finish coat. From the road nobody will see the imperfections.
In the meantime, all of the hardware has been soaking in diesel fuel in the garage, and years of lead paint sloughed off with a few shakes. I need to find a way to soak the shutter hooks–the arms mounted to the bottom that swing out and drop into a metal pocket on the sill–to get them as clean as the hinges.
The dumpster in our driveway is gone. We filled it with all of the concrete from the front walkway, all of the remaining hedges, bags of yard debris from the woodpile and behind the garage, the doctor’s desk from the attic, the old porch railings, and all sorts of other crap I can’t remember. We filled it to the edge. I hunted high and low to find more stuff to get rid of, and I’m sure I’ll trip over something in a week’s time that I should have chucked in there. The process of cleansing is a liberating feeling. Now I turn my attention to the piles of stuff I have on my desk, around my office, and on the shelves. It’s time for a cleansing of gear as well.
Now, to the next project: Our landscaper recommended we take the silver maple in the backyard down, as the trunk is being eaten by bugs, before we get started in the front yard. And then he pointed to the maple on the west side property line, which is actually in worse shape than the silver maple. The logic here is that if we spend a summer and a bag of cash fixing the front yard, we won’t be able to get a crane truck out back to deal with the trees after that’s done. The good news is that they can do them both at the same time, our neighbor is willing to let us use his driveway for access, and he’s willing to split the cost. They’re going to take the roots down as far as they will go, and I’ll have them leave the wood for me to split and stack. And all of that sun will help the oak tree next to it spread and grow taller.
So, the trees will come down and our parade party will be curtailed to the bare minimum (and the front yard) this year. Which isn’t so bad, really.
I switched back to the old headline font on the site here, because the other one just didn’t look good. This one (Museo Slab) isn’t my first choice but it’s not as heavy and blocky as Chunk, its replacement.
On Friday, a nice man with a big truck dropped a 20 yard dumpster in our driveway. Ordinarily, this would be cause for celebration, but there was something better to look forward to that evening: an O’s game! Our friend Mr. Scout got us tickets and we met up with them in Section 66, on the third base line, about six rows off the field. The evening was damp and misty, so we hunkered down under plastic and blankets, but the game was good and the company was excellent. Finley had a great time watching the game and eating blue cotton candy, and I think she wants to go back. Plus, she got to meet the Bird!
Saturday morning, the family got to work filling the dumpster with all of the concrete, brush, yard waste, and random debris we’ve had laying around the house since last spring. With three people working we got it all moved in three hours–much quicker than the last pile. We now have our driveway back and it doesn’t look like a Superfund site anymore.
After that got done, we went downtown for some lunch, and then to Second Chance to find some brick and shutters.
Since the hedges all have come down, the front of the house looks more naked than ever and needs softening in the worst way. I started last weekend with some cardboard cutouts to see what would work best in terms of scale, held them in place while Jen looked from below, and we found a size we both agreed upon. My plan was to build something simple from scratch and fasten it to the siding permanently. Seeing me up on the roof, my neighbor brought one of the old shutters from his garage and offered them to us. We took five and used them for sizing, but it turned out they were 5″ too short and in pretty rough shape.
At Second Chance, we got super lucky and found two pair of matching white shutters at the proper size and width. They’re as close to the original louvered windows this house came with as possible, with dogging arms and hinges intact, and sturdy. After some work picking out a matching pair and scavenging a full set of hardware, we walked to the front and paid for our find–and got a discount of $35/each for being there at closing time.
The plan is to borrow our neighbor’s powerwasher and knock the flaking paint off, hit them with a belt sander, repair any cracks, and paint them black. Then I’ve got to either salvage the existing male hinge hangers from the rear of our house and pray they fit these shutters, or buy a new set of eight hinges to hang them correctly.
We were also lucky enough to find good brick to replace the exploded and cracked examples littering the end of the walk from a batch in exactly the right size and shape. When we got home Jen and I walked out front and replaced 20 of the worst ones, and the walk looks like new again.
Sunday was rainy, pretty much all day, so I spent a lot of the day getting stuff ready to toss when the weather lets up. I made all the paint in the basement inert with cat litter, put the shutter hardware into diesel fuel to clean, and organized the basement in preparation for more cleansing. I also posted the Doctor’s old wooden desk on Freecycle, but got no response–so it’s getting tossed.
- Pulled the rear tires off the Accord to diagnose brake squeal.
- Had the rotors and pads replaced by the pros for time’s sake.
- Fixed the hose bib on the west wall.
- Cleaned rooting cedar trees from the north side second story gutter (and then the first story too).
- Sealed the foundation around the first floor toilet cleanout.
- Cleaned black sealant goop off the spare Scout windshield.
- Put oil in the Scout, which was a quart low.
- Replaced three exploded bricks in the front walkway.
This morning I fired up the Scout and got to work digging out the rest of the hedges in the front yard. We got sidetracked last fall after the sewer pipe incident, and so we’ve been living with half a moustache since November or so. It was pretty easy work, given we’d had rain on and off all day yesterday, turning to snow (!??!?!) and then a light frost this morning. The ground was damp and 4WD was in full effect, which meant I had them all out in about two hours.
Jen and I spent about a half an hour measuring out our yard so that she can map it out with graph paper; our lot isn’t actually a rectangle, but a parallelogram so that as you see the house from on center above, the property line shifts to the right as it goes back. We still have no real idea where the boundaries are, and we’ll need to have someone come out and mark it for us, but for this year we can get away with what we’ve guesstimated in the front yard.
I brewed my 33rd batch of beer with my neighbor last weekend. We brewed the same recipe, followed the same times, and brewed at the same temperature, but the only difference is that I poured my wort over ice to chill it while he used his copper chiller. We’re going to keep everything the same and do a taste test to see if using commercial ice to chill has any effect on the flavor. I’ve been using ice because it’s easy and cheap to do, but one of the mantras of brewing is that your beer is only as good as your water. I do have a chiller but I don’t have a pump to move water yet; a trip to Harbor Freight is in order this spring no matter what the results are.
Another quick project this weekend was to rebuild my light tent to be more portable and less of a giant pain in the ass. It’s been broken down for a couple of years now, but comes in handy every once in a while–so that it’s not worth getting rid of. It was originally set up at 4′ x 4′ but I reduced it to 3′ x 3′ and added two sets of cheap hinges to fold it into itself so that it packs away for easy travel and storage.
To catch up on the last few weeks, our refrigerator is fixed. We know a guy who knows a guy who fixes things as a side job, and so we called to have him come out. A huge guy named Dave showed up on the doorstep in a worn biker’s jacket and West Coast Choppers hat, and politely got down to business with the balky fridge. Within minutes he had the icemaker out, the back panel off the freezer, and had identified the culprit as the pusher fan which moves cold air from the freezer down to the fridge. The ball bearings had frozen up so it wasn’t doing its job. He neatly stacked the extra parts back in the freezer, made some calls, and had a new unit installed the next afternoon.
The furnace is fixed as well. There was another bad part that needed to be replaced, and the guys who came out to work on it had it diagnosed in minutes. I do have to call them back to have it adjusted, though, because it’s filling the basement with the smell of gas. The second guy gave me a bit of good advice about the tile in the basement, too–apparently if you measure floor tiles there’s a good chance you can tell if they’re made with asbestos by their size. And yes, ours have asbestos. Yay!
Jen took me for my birthday dinner to Woodberry Kitchen in Hampden, and we got to pretend we were adults for an evening. The food was excellent, the cocktails were delicious, and my company was beautiful. Brown liquor isn’t my best friend, but after a Manhattan, an Old Fashioned, and two vodka cocktails with names I can’t recall, I had a minor hangover on Saturday. We hit Eggspectations for brunch and spent the afternoon shopping in preparation for Easter dinner at the house next weekend with Rob and Karis and Barrett flying in from St. Louis on Friday.
So we got Jen’s laptop back from Apple this evening, and it runs smooth as silk. I swapped her drive back into it and set it back up on her desk, ready for work tomorrow. Thank god for excellent customer service.
…but now the fridge has decided it’s broken. The bottom half isn’t staying cold, so our food is now in a freezer in the dining room or stuffed into the kegerator. We have a neighbor who has a friend who works on this stuff; let’s see what he says.
Having upgraded all of our WRI work laptops to current models, I’m phasing out our older machines. This means I’m able to buy them for a nominal fee. Last week I grabbed a 15″ MBP for Finley, who has been using a tablet at school and borrowing my laptop to do schoolwork during snow days. I spent some time flattening a spare drive and installing El Capitan (I fell prey to a somewhat common bug with all of the USB installers I’d created before I got one to work) and creating a user account for her. I’m now in the process of locking it down as tightly as possible. The parental controls in OS X are a new adventure for me, but with a little research and some experimentation, I think I can make it kid-friendly and lock out all but the G-rated sites we’ll allow her to browse.
At the same time, I’ve got to rebuild my work laptop from scratch. About a month ago I had a dumb travel accident with my coffee thermos and soaked the lower half of the case, which prompted a trip to the Apple store and an emergency rebuild. They left the hard drive but replaced the lower case, display, motherboard, and several other components. When I got the machine back it booted up into an older version of my user account, but it’s been acting funky. Playing video from the internet sometimes blows up wireless connectivity and/or crashes the browser, and the Microsoft Office suite goes up and down randomly.
I grabbed a spare drive from my stash at work and cloned the drive. Over this next weekend I’m going to do a full reinstall of the OS and build it clean from the ground up.
Meanwhile, Jen’s laptop, which is newer than mine, decided it was time to throw a tantrum and blinked off. It’s doing something I’ve never seen before: the startup sequence drops out about 2/3 of the way through and blinks to a dead gray screen. Booting into Recovery Mode, the Hardware Test, or from an external recovery drive has the same result. I’m stumped, so I pulled her drive and transplanted it into Finn’s computer until I can diagnose the hardware problem. Great!
Another repair in the works is our balky plumbing system. Last fall, when I was in Abu Dhabi, our new toilet stopped flushing. Jen had plumbers come in to diagnose it, and they replaced the toilet after snaking the lines. Soon after that, the basement flooded, and they snaked the line again. That was when we found the pipe was clogged under the magnolia tree, and we dug a very expensive trench in the yard to replace it.
After Christmas, to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, the toilet clogged again.
The plumbers put a camera down in the line and diagnosed a problem with the cast iron pipe that links the second bathroom with the main waste line; when the original plumbers installed it, they didn’t add any downward angle to the last length of pipe, which runs about 2/3 of the width of the basement. This means the waste didn’t have any help moving to the main sewer line, and sat in the flat section of pipe, where it hardened and clogged. So, they replaced that entire length of iron with PVC at a proper angle on Thursday. It was expensive but if and when the upstairs bathroom ever comes into use, it’s necessary for keeping things flowing smoothly.
Friday morning, we woke to a cold house.
The boiler decided it didn’t want to stay lit, which meant we needed to call the plumbers out. Again. This time, the diagnosis is a bad spark unit, which is a module about the size of a sandwich. Unfortunately, the boiler itself dates back to Jimmy Carter’s term in office, so the part isn’t normally in stock anywhere. My plumber couldn’t source it today because his supplier is doing inventory all afternoon, so I’d have to wait until Monday. So we’re going to find a couple of space heaters, close off the outside rooms of the house, and hunker down tonight.
I made a few calls and found a different guy in town who can get the part for me by tomorrow morning; I’m going to take a $160 non-refundable chance and put it in myself (it’s three wires and two screws). If that fails, I’ll have to keep the plumbers of the world in business myself. I don’t have the money, after paying for a fancy new toilet, a trench in the front yard, two more visits to unclog the lines, and a new waste pipe, to put in a new boiler, so I really hope this works.