The First False Hope

Snow Melt
Being a New Englander, I should know by now how cruel Mother Nature can be this time of year.  As February fades and March blows in on an icy wind, true New Englanders finally start to tire of the cold and snow and darkness, and start longing for signs of spring. But just about then the length of the days starts to increase enough to be noticed; the days of getting up in the dark and leaving work in the dark abate, and it finally gets noticed that, yes, the days are indeed getting longer. Then the vise-grip that winter holds on the thermometer loosens a bit and we see a few days in the 40s – and even the 50s – to tease us with a promise of better things to come. Joggers and cyclists emerge from hibernation in the blink of an eye to clutter the still-snow-narrowed roads and make driving even more difficult. Then the first warm-weather Nor-Easter hits during these relative heat-waves, so the would-have-been 3-foot blizzard becomes the 4-inch street-flooding deluge, melting gobs of snow before our very eyes, as long-lost yard tools and outdoor toys emerge from beneath the white blanket to remind us of yard-work to come. If one were so inclined, one could finally take the outdoor Christmas lights off the shrubs and trees and put them away until next fall.

But the tease is but a set trap, and the trap inevitably gets sprung, with a rapid and all-too-soon shift back to arctic blasts that feel all the colder and cutting after a few 50 degree days. The squishy mud that formed hardens back into concrete, the joggers and cyclists disappear again, the weatherman resurrects the dreaded wind-chill readings, and the weaker of our Brethren start mumbling to themselves about Florida or Arizona and how they hate winter.

We’re in the throes of the first thaw of the season at the TreeHouse, having been skipped over for the usual January tease. The electric spot-light and serpentine cord that illuminates the house wreath during the holiday season has re-emerged from under the snowbanks along the front walk (if I could pull the mounting spike out of the perma-frost I would pack it away until next fall, but that will have to wait for a deeper thaw), and the landscaping walls that demarcate the raised beds out back have reappeared from under the blanket of snow. Most everyone else is reveling in the warmth and diminishing snowbanks (I can see around the corner at the end of my street again for the first time since December!), but I know better. It’s only March – EARLY March at that – so we’re bound to have a return to winter sooner or later, and it will push the weaker ones over the edge. I remember the April Fool’s Day Blizzard of 1997, and the big surprise snowstorm on May 9th of one year (I forget which) that destroyed thousands of fully-leafed-out trees and bushes.

Sump Pump
In a fit of prescience brought on by the warming-trend and a weather forecast that included somewhat copious amounts of rain, I finally got around to doing what I had been planning to do for 15 years; I installed an electrical outlet by the back door for the outdoor sump-pump.

We have had water problems at the basement door since we bought the house 20+ years ago, which has gotten worse as time advanced and neighborhood construction altered the water-table. We live in a split-level-style house, and the lower (basement) level is finished off, so any basement flooding would have disastrous and expensive consequences. The back door is slightly below-grade, so water entry was always a problem when torrential rains descended upon us, especially in the spring or fall. At those times (once every 3-4 years at first, a few times a year now) I would stay up all night, manually operating a bilge pump just outside the door to keep the water from flowing under the door and into the finished basement.

Because of the enormous hassle and threat of serious destruction that a basement flood would cause,  I dug out the area outside the basement door and built a dry-well of sorts, using landscaping timbers to build a walled-in area by the door.  I then dug out and filled in the area with a good depth of pea-stone. That helped get the water back into the ground quickly before coming in under the door, and gave me visual warning of impending doom when the water was coming down faster than the ground could carry it away, as I could see the ground-water rise up through the pea-stone and that acted as an early warning (an hour or so in a good rainstorm) that it was time to drag out the sump-pump and start pumping. This arrangement was better than before, but not great, as I still needed to stay up all night and run the pump intermittently so as not to burn the pump out running it dry (it pumped water quicker than it seeped in, so it couldn’t be left to run continuously).

A few years after that I got smart and dug out a section of the dry-well-like landing and planted a sump-basin in the ground that allowed me to use a water-height-activated pump. By setting the pump in the basin just outside the basement door, the pump would cycle itself on and off as water collected in the basin and I could leave the pump plugged in and go to bed (as long as we didn’t lose power in the night – I have a generator for that contingency). Of course, the logical final step would have been to mount an electrical outlet outside the basement door so the sump-pump could be left plugged in and do its work as-required, but I never got around to that last step and have spent the past 15 years manually running the cord inside the house under the door whenever there was a flooding threat.

I’ve had all the parts waiting to be installed for five years or more now, but I finally took last Saturday to spend the time to finish the job. So much nicer!  As fate – and luck – would have it, the new arrangement was put to the test less than 24 hours after installation as a warm Nor-Easter came through, dumping 2-3 inches of rain onto still frozen ground (nowhere for the water to go) and threatening once again to flood the basement.  But the pump cycled faithfully all night long and kept the headwaters of our “crick” from slipping under the door!  I declare victory!

Baseball
To plagiarize Alfred, Lord Tennyson (and probably make him spin in his grave), In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… BASEBALL! Spring training is in full swing, and the Red Sox have re-loaded with new and exciting all-stars to join the returning formerly-wounded to make up a team which, on paper, looks downright invincible. But I’m still a long-time Red Sox fan (with a long memory – ’67, ’75, ’78, ’86, ’03), so I cringe at the expectations and predictions coming out of Fort Myers these days. But mixed in with that dread is a little bit of excitement at the sheer potential the ’11 team possesses. I’ve managed to acquire tickets to two games this year (2nd home game of the season, on April 9th, against the hated Yankees, and a night game on May 19th against Detroit) and am looking forward to watching the healthy and re-loaded Red Sox in action!  Go Sox!!

Computer Repair
My powerhouse workstation (A PowerSpec E360, with Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad Processor, 4 GB memory, and 3 TB of internal hard drive space [including two 500 GB drives in a RAID0 configuration creating a high-speed 1 TB boot drive]) has had a habit of burning up CPU fans lately. The CPU fan comes attached to a heat-sink that gets mounted (with thermal grease and four long screws) right on top of the CPU. The first fan died after a little over a year (so it was out of warranty), resulting in a thermal-triggered shutdown to keep the CPU from being damaged. The replacement fan/heat-sink failed in the same way after about 6 months (on a 90-day warranty, alas). So I’ve replaced it again and am back in business. There may have been a defect in the 2nd fan, as it was always noisy, and the second replacement is as quiet as a mouse. The fan/heat-sink assembly is not expensive (under $10) so I bought a spare one to have on-hand, in case the pattern is repeated.  No indication so far.

While I had it disconnected and pulled apart, I tried installing a PCIe eSATA board so I could attach my external SATA drive docking station via an eSATA cable instead of USB 2.0 (in addition to the 3 TB of internal disk space, I have another 4.5 TB of disk space on swappable drives for for music, image, and video archive and system backups). Alas, the eSATA board recognized the dock and drives, but never gave me access to the drives via the operating system, so I reverted to the USB 2.0 connection scheme – much slower, but at least it works!

Digitizing VHS tapes
I’ve been digitizing a dozen or so VHS tapes for my sister, since her VHS player died and it’s getting harder and harder to replace VHS equipment these days (the only VHS player/recorder I could find at Best Buy was a dual VHS/DVD device for $300!). I bumped into a small problem after I agreed to do the conversion for her and she had sent me the tapes; the device I previously used to capture analog audio/video to digitize it (a Pinnacle Dazzle Digital Video Converter [DVC] 150 USB device) does not have 64-bit drivers for use with Windows 7 or Vista (only 32-bit drivers), and I switched over to 64-bit Windows 7 over a year ago (gives you an idea as to how often I do this!). So, I reverted to the S-Video & Audio inputs for my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 internal HDTV card (which does have 64-bit Windows 7 drivers and has been working as a broadband cable TV capture board just fine). I had to buy an in-line composite-to-S-Video converter for $3 (the Hauppauge board only has S-Video inputs), but it works like a champ. Once the video/audio stream is digitized, I use Pinnacle Studio v14 to process, produce, and burn to DVD. Some of the tapes take more time and effort than others (video processing, audio scrubbing or replacement, etc.), but the process itself is straightforward and is fun from a creative aspect, so I’m enjoying it.

 

 

Be Careful What You Wish For!

This is turning out to be a winter for the recordbooks!  The all-time Boston area total snowfall record for one season is 107.6 inches (at Logan Airport) for the 1995-1996 season.  Now a snow season in these parts is fairly long – I’ve seen shovelable snow as early as October and as late as May.  We had an infamous “April Fool’s Day” blizzard on 1 April 1997 that dumped 25.4 inches of heavy wet snow on us.  So here we are on the 3rd of February, fully a month and a half – or more – of snow season to go, and we’re already at 70.5 inches for the season.  To make matters worse, we didn’t get our first appreciable snowfall until a few days before Christmas, so we can get a lot of snow in a short amount of time in these parts!

Its been an interesting season so far.  The piles of snow at the end of the driveway are taller than I am, and the piles at the ends of the streets are sometimes 10-12 feet high! It creates an interesting challenge trying to ease the nose of a car out into a street when you can’t see a blooming thing.

The big record-breaking year was deceptive because we actually had three complete winters that year.  The snow started in November, and by a week after Thanksgiving we had five-foot piles at the end of the driveway.  Then we had a thaw and it was gone in a week.  Then it started snowing again and by New Year’s we had another pair of five-foot piles at the end of the driveway.  Then we got our predictable “January Thaw” and the grass was showing in places by February.  then it started snowing again and the five-foot piles were back by the first of March.  We haven’t had any thaw yet this year, so it just keeps piling up and up!

Cabin fever is rampant among the psuedo-New-Englanders.  They started whining about the snow in mid-January! True New Englanders don’t complain about snow until at least March!

I lost the use of my beloved snow blower for a short period of time recently.  Someone delivered a big thick phone book – in a white plastic bag – at the end of the driveway, BEFORE it started snowing before one of the recent storms, so the camoflaged phonebook was able to sneak through the rotating augers with shear pins and became embedded in the impeller in the snow blower.  I spent an hour trying to get the book out and all I succeeded in doing was to split two knuckles.  The shop where I bought the beast picked it up and cleaned it out for me.  Needless to say, I was sputtering fire and brimstone that night.  Luckily I had the driveway and walkway to the stairs cleared of the six inches of slush, but I didn’t get to the front walk or the sidewalk until after it was returned.

 

Its Finally Looking A Lot Like Winter (All Around the Town)

Snow banks in front of house

NOW its winter!  We finally had a seriously serious snow storm, dumping 19-22 inches of snow at the Family TreeHouse. We got 12-15 inches a day or two after Christmas, enough for me to break out the Man-Toy (the 11.5-HP-28-inches-wide Ariens snow throwing beast that sleeps in the garage) for the first time, but it melted away and looked like the 4-6 inches of snow a season we used to get in Stuttgart – wimpy!  But yesterday was a storm!  It started snowing about 1:00 am (I was up so I saw it start) Wednesday morning.  At 6:00 am we had 8-10 inches on the ground, and it just kept coming.  I was able to tele-commute and work from home, so the van never left the garage, even though I had new front all-weather tires and new brakes installed last Thursday.

The Orange Monster at Work

By 3:30 pm it was finally letting up, so I donned my snow-boots, hooded nylon parka, ski goggles and fur-lined gloves and headed out to do battle.  The orange monster fired right up and took it all in stride.  I was able to clear the 3-car-wide, 3-car-deep driveway in less than an hour.  The plow-ridge at the end of the driveway was up higher than the snow blower opening, but the “drift-cutter” attachments did their job and I was able to cut through even the dense-pack plow ridge with relative ease.

The Next Morning

After the driveway I cleared the path from the driveway to the front stairs, and Audrey shoveled the stairs while I tackled the plow ridge along the sidewalk across the entire front of the house (~80 feet), which continued into a pull-in clearing in front of the mailbox for the mail man.  Last up with the beast was to clear out the hydrant on the edge of the woods across the street from the house.

Time Exposure Out Back

The last job wasn’t for the orange beast; it was to shovel out the gas grill and dig paths to the bird feeders out on the deck.  While out there I put the pocket camera on a tripod and took some time-exposure photos of the snow out on the “back forty” and beyond.

Clinging For Dear Life

It looks and sounds like winter as I remember it as a kid now… five-foot snow piles at the ends of the driveways that make backing out a challenge, wind-swept shelves of snow leaning way off the roofs, dozens of cardinals and titmice and chickadees and LBBs (Little Brown Birds) clutching for dear life to the snow-swept feeders, the rumbling scrape of the giant city plow pushing the ridges back late at night. This is the way New England should be!

Prepping – and Primping – For Christmas

Audrey and I headed off to hunt down and capture a live Christmas tree Tuesday night. Lynn was teaching a quilting class at the shop so the task was left to us. We also needed to pick up a 30-inch wreath for the front of the house (over the front door) and a 24-inch wreath for inside the house, over the hearth in the living room.

For many years (when we weren’t living in Germany) we’d head to Seasons Four Garden Center in Lexington for our trees and wreaths. The prices were quite good, the selection was excellent, and they had a Santa and a small petting zoo for the kids, and hot chocolate, mulled cider, and cookies for adults and kids. They also had a gift shoppe area with lots of ornaments and decorations for sale. When the kids were young and the fingers and toes got cold, Lynn would take them inside to warm up while I stalked the perfect tree for the living room.

With time and age, the extra-curricular activities had less of a draw on the kids, and the crowds that formed at Seasons Four were often daunting, to the point where parking was a problem, so last year Lynn and I decided to break the mold and check out somewhere else. We headed off to McCue’s Garden Center in Woburn, just down the street from us in Four Corners. The selection was equally as good as Seasons Four, they were much closer, the prices seemed a bit lower, and they were incredibly helpful! I never had to touch a tree or a wreath – we just pointed to the tree we wanted, they took it, gave it a fresh cut, wrapped it in netting, put it on the roof of our van and tied it down for us! Same with the wreaths. The only thing I touched was my credit card!

This year Audrey and I headed straight to McCue’s.

The trees this year continue the trend that we’ve seen over the years – they’re getting fuller and denser, with almost no inside room to hang ornaments. I have an overly meticulous method of stringing lights on the tree, where I wrap each branch from the trunk outwards. It takes a long time, and it uses thousands of lights, but it looks so much better when it’s done. This year, I’m not sure I’ll be able to fight my way into the tree to reach the trunk!

We got the tree into a bucket of water in the garage, and the wreaths on a table in the garage, ready for deployment and hanging over this weekend. Soon phase two of the holiday decorating will commence (phase one being the outdoor lights and window candles two weeks ago just after Thanksgiving), followed by phase three (“…the stockings were hung by the chimney with care…”) on Christmas Eve.

Now if we can just arrange for a little snow by Christmas Eve…

A Wonderful Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2010 was a wonderful day at the VOGT Family TreeHouse.  We hosted the feast at our Woburn home, considering briefly the idea of hosting Thanksgiving at the Ballot Box in Newcastle Maine (with the strains of Over the River and Through the Woods echoing faintly in our thoughts), but realizing that the Massachusetts friends and relatives would probably not be able to make the trek north for a Thursday holiday (nor would they probably want to!), and our daughters and son-in-law had to work the next day (as did we), we chose to host at the southern location.  The Ballot Box was briefly considered, but was wisely put aside for this year.  Someday, but probably not soon.

After 36+ years of marriage and two kids, Lynn and I have finally figured out how to host events like this with minimal stress.  The secret for us is an old adage from the past; “Many Hands Make Light Work!“  We enlisted the aid of our live-in daughter for around-the-house preparations, and we delegated a lot of the food preparations to the invited guests, with us taking care of the turkey, the gravy, and the mashed potatoes!  We had lots to do for sure, but it was manageable and we started early.  I’m always in charge of the turkey from start to finish, stuffing and all, which I prepared Tuesday night this year, rather than staying up until 2am making the stuffing the night before.

At least in my view, the single biggest chore for Thanksgiving in our family has always been making the traditional family-recipe stuffing (a meal in itself), which can be a 3 to 4 hour project.  The “old” way I used to do it, which was how my father used to do it, was to toast 3-4 long loaves of cheap white bread, dice the toast into cubes, mix the dry seasonings into the dry toast, then put that aside and chop two packages of celery (stalks AND leaves) and 2 medium onions, then sauté the celery and onions in a pound of melted butter for maybe ten minutes, then put that aside and scramble-fry 3 or 4 packages/tubes of Jimmy Dean REGULAR pork sausage, then dump everything into the bread crumbs and stir it with 2-3 cups of turkey broth liquid until thoroughly mixed (which takes longer than you might think).  When making enough stuffing for a large turkey (24 pounds this year), this concoction requires a LARGE pot because the dry diced bread takes up a large volume until the liquids get mixed in.  This year I used a giant stainless-steel lobster pot for the final mixing container.

In recent years I’ve taken to saving time by buying the Pepperidge Farm dry diced bread for stuffing in a bag (I often use as many as 3-4 bags for a Thanksgiving batch), and eliminating having to toast and dice the bread.  This year, though, we apparently waited too long to buy the diced bread, as there was none to be found in the two grocery stores Lynn visited, so she reverted to the “old” way, bought 4 long loaves of junky white bread, and proceeded to toast all the bread for me before I got home from work Tuesday.  All that was left was to dice the toast, collect it in the lobster pot, and cook the celery/onions and sausage.

Of course, stuffing the bird is a chore, but cooking the bird is a crap-shoot! How long do you cook a 24 lb stuffed turkey?  The guide that came with the turkey said 5-7 hours for a 24 lb bird, but two hours is a big window of uncertainty to try to plan a meal around!  Do I plan for five hours?  Seven hours? Something else?  I initially decided on the seven hour estimate, because a stuffed bird should take longer to cook than an unstuffed bird, but I wasn’t sure if the times were based on stuffed or not!  We were planning on sitting down to eat at 3 pm, which meant I needed to take the bird out by 2 pm to give it time to sit before carving, and to free up the oven for any other dishes that needed to be cooked or heated. Based on that estimate I planned on popping the bird in the oven for a 7-hour sauna at 325° so it would need to be put in the oven at 7 am.  At the last minute, though, when I re-read the instructions, I noticed that the 5-7 hour cooking estimate was for a 24+ lb turkey, the PLUS sign indicating 24 pounds or more! So I re-estimated on-the-fly and decided on a 6-hour sauna.  I targeted taking the turkey out of the oven at 2pm, and damned if I didn’t pull it out exactly at 2pm!  That NEVER happens!

Hors d’oeuvres consisted of stuffed celery, shrimp and cocktail sauce, stuffed mushrooms, and olives and pickles. We were playing big-band music over the internet radio connected to the stereo all day.  There were 12 guests for dinner, so that morning Audrey and I set our folding banquet table up against the end of the formal dining room table, extending the table out into the living room.  We were able to seat everyone around a single (albeit makeshift) table, banquet-style.  We sat down to eat at about 3 pm, and a fine time was had by all.  The fresh local turkey was delicious, as were all the side dishes (mashed potatoes, stuffing, baked squash, broccoli and cauliflower in melted cheese).  Our dessert table held pumpkin tiramisu, apple, pumpkin, and pecan pie, a chocolate cheesecake, and Italian pizzelle.

 

Another Halloween Has Come and Gone…

Another Halloween has come and gone; another collection of (mostly) happy trick-or-treaters with candy in their sacks and elevated heart-rates from their visit to the haunted (for one night) Family TreeHouse!

A little explanation…

For All Hallow’s Eve (a.k.a. Halloween), most people keep a bowl of candy by the front door and leave their front-door light on for the trick-or-treaters; maybe a jack-o-lantern on the step as well, but that’s it.  We do a bit more than that.

First we set up a fairly powerful sound system – this year it was a 35-year-old Dynaco ST-120 (60 Watts per channel) power amplifier driven by a 40-year-old Dynaco PAT-4 stereo pre-amplifier with a 30-year-old Shure M688 stereo mixer as input.  Attached to the mixer was a CD player and an Audio-Technica AT814 unidirectional cardioid microphone.  All this is set up just inside the front door, with the speaker wires passed through a window behind the bushes and out to the front landing, where it drives a Cambridge Soundworks  Ensemble IV satellite and subwoofer speaker system, with the satellite speakers mounted on the brickwork above the front door.  Then we place a scary-looking witch (an old house-dress and leggings stuffed with pillows, and a horrible mask on a fake head, with a pointed witch’s hat) sitting on a small chair by the front door, and the subwoofer goes UNDER the witch’s chair, out of sight, but definitely NOT out of ear-shot!

We set up a foot-light in front of the witch to illuminate her, with yellow cellophane covering the bulb for an eerie glowing effect.  This year we put a pumpkin in front of the light so it wasn’t easily visible from the street.  We also cover the front door light up above this all with the same yellow cellophane to extend the eerie glow to the entire scene.  Finally we stretch spider-webs all over the front area, over the bushes and the speakers and the door and the witch.  This is a photo from a previous year’s set-up (we forgot to snap pictures this year), and on YouTube there’s a clip with sound and motion from a windy Halloween night in 2009.

We play scary sound effects and Halloween music, and when kids come to the door, the witch talks to them because the sound system is also a PA system with the microphone in the house! We start off the evening (when the little kids are out) with fun music (including Casper the Friendly Ghost and The Addams Family theme song).  The witch “talks” to the early trick-or-treaters in a friendly voice so as not to scare the willies out of the little kids (we’ve had disasters in the past with little tykes running away screaming and crying!).  As the evening gets later, and the older kids are out, the music and sound effects get creepier and the witch gets surlier and nastier!  We’ve had teenagers run screaming from the house on occasion! Most everyone – young or old – gets startled and their heart races a bit when the witch talks to them directly and even comments on costumes or answers questions (we can hear what they say through the closed door)!

It used to be that we were the only decorated house in the neighborhood for Halloween night. A bunch of neighbors have caught up with us over the years, though, and some have surpassed us (strobes, fog machines, coffins, headstones, etc.), but we don’t feel the need to ratchet it up to keep up. It’s enough as it is.

We’ve done this for many years, even before we moved to Germany for four years (1991-95). The first Halloween we were back, we re-created our set-up, and our first visitor pumped his fist in the air and shouted “YESSS! You’re BACK!”

The Grill Is [NOT] Gone… The Grill Is Back!

A quick update – all critical parts have been delivered and installed, and the grill is working well (not perfectly though, there are still a few parts to replace; the combustion chambers that pass the ignited gas from burner to burner to spread the flame, but those parts are also in-hand)!  We re-christened the grill Monday night with beef tenderloins wrapped in bacon, and last night with porterhouse steaks that were on sale at BJs!  Awesome!