Xmas Tree: Part II

The tree is still a work in progress, but this gives you the idea. I apologize for the poor color balance in these pictures. The room with the fireplace is actually much cozier than it looks in that picture.

Is that a word?

Me: Ellis you need to ask for the tissue before you get the boogie.

Ellis: Dad, it already snozzed out of my body.

You gotta keep 'em insulated

So the aforementioned attic insulation project is complete thanks to help from my visiting father. All in all it went very well excepting the fact that I bought way too much insulation, which is what you get for using the formula supplied by the manufacturer which is probably designed to make you buy a whole lot more insulation than you need. They probably figure that those of us interested in insulating our own attics drive eco-friendly Priuses and can't return more than one bail at a time, at which point we start making pillows for the homeless from our old clothes stuffed with this crap or perhaps use it to staunch the flow from our bleeding hearts. Fortunately, I have our eco-unfriendly Blazer and my boss has an even less eco-friendly truck with which I will be able to return it all at once, reclaiming my $300.

The installation of the soffit chute vents was far more arduous than blowing in the actual insulation. Because of the relatively shallow peak on a truss-style roof with few floorboards in the attic, this installation involved building something like a raft to float on the existing insulation, upon which I could lie down and get the soffit vent thingies stapled in place. The blowing was fun for about 6 minutes, at which point I realized that I would be doing it for about 50 more 6 minuteses before I was done.

I hadn't done a project of this scope with my dad in some years and aspects were notably different. He was generally fairly accepting of the fact that this was my house and I am an adult who has to make the decisions. The cussing for which my father is known was notably muted and far less creative than I remember it being 10 years ago. Remember, this is a man who when asked by an 8 year old, "daddy, can I watch you change the alternator so I can learn how it is done?" answered with, "you change it like you change everything on a car: you cuss the old one out and you cuss the new one back in."

Anyway, one area that had changed for the worse is that while I wasn't doing projects with him, his pessimism has achieved Grand-Master level status. The volume, darkness, and creativity involved, not to mention the shear certainty of failure have all advanced greatly, giving my father a truly complete game. He is like a closer with 6 out pitches who uses a random number generator to decide what to throw next. You just never can imagine what is coming next.

At various points he suggested that we would never get the soffit vent chutes installed in time, even though we had a full 16 hours to do it before the blower and insulation were delivered. In the end it took an hour to do the first three and one more hour to do the other 57 once we had a system going. He also suggested that we would never be able to get all of that insulation blown in in the 16 hours allotted. In the end, it took only a little more than 3 hours, with a long break. He suggested, as I was stapling up the last soffit chute that perhaps these were insufficient and I was destined to have wet insulation followed by rot and eventual destruction of all that I hold dear. He suggested that the insulation was going to settle far more than predicted. He asked if the attic floor could bare the load of the extra insulation and not collapse into our second story. Told me that the whole house was going to be full of dust when we finished. He pointed out where he had spilled two hand fulls of insulation and said, "You gotta make sure you get that picked up. It will never rot and when it gets wet it will be slick and someone will slip. " He also said that more insulation was a good idea as long as it didn't cause anything bad to happen and of course said several times that it was a shame I had screwed up the calculations of how much I needed because Lowes would never take the insulation back. (I checked. They will.) He warned me that sucking up the insulation that fell out of the attic into Ellis's room was likely to burn up my Shop-Vac and wove complex scenarios where various insects or vermin made cozy homes in the new insulation. (Someone tell me how a fox will get in my attic without me noticing?) At some point, I stopped arguing back and just amused myself with unspoken replies like, "Oh, checkmate old man, you really cornered me there. I never thought to consider that some a-hole on the internet had set up a malicious web of deceit aimed at making rooves in the snow belt collapse in 10 years."

Return of the Quote Post-Xmas Tree Editon

Today I cut down a Christmas tree with supervision from Ellis.

"What the hell are you two looking at? Come on guys, focus."

"Here is my impression of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Ok, so maybe I don't have the menacing part down yet."

"Smooth and even dad like this. Let the saw do the work."

"You need to be a little more aggressive. Uh, uh, now you're forcing it. Don't make me crawl back under there."

"Ok now finish strong."

Duty Bound to Do So

Back a ways, in a time whose events are now fogged over by the World Series triumph of that most hated of teams, the Detroit Tigers were in first place in the AL Central. I believe they were up by has much as seven games. Then going into the last weekend of the season, the Twins, who were something like two full games back with three games to play, managed to tie for first place on the last day of the season. This event precipitated a single day playoff and kept baseball alive at the Metrodome at least a little bit longer.

Our friends who were here over Halloween are Minnesotans and in advance of their trip we made a bet that if our team won the single game playoff, the other's child would don the colors of the winner, with those colors supplied by the winner and then photographs would be presented on the blog. Detroit lost. Then Minnesota lost in the divisional series. Despite this, Ansel and Ellis put on their Twins outfits and visited Ben and Jerry's.

Yes, they were pretty much this cute the whole visit. Ellis really likes this particular shirt and often picks it out, and he doesn't even understand that the guy whose name is on the back of his shirt won the AL MVP.

"How 'bout takin' a run over to Home Depot"

The title of this post was a sentence that sent chills down my spine when I was 14, although in those days it was Builder's Square rather than Home Depot. (It must have been bad, as I have told elements of this story on the blog before.) Often, on a Saturday morning, my dad would decide to head out to consider buying some tools for whatever project was going on or because he saw a good deal in the circular. Rarely did anything find its way back home because my father has a notorious problem buying himself anything. Before he was married, he didn't have a checkbook because in the time it took him to go get the money for something he wanted, he could usually talk himself out of it.

So these trips often turned into 3-4 hours carefully comparing features between similar tools while I stood there bored out of my mind. Then we would sometimes go to the other Builder's Square location to see if the price was better and then check a couple of other big box stores and then run back to see if there was anything like what he wanted in the classifieds. This was the days before the internet and also before my dad admitted he needed glasses, which meant he never, ever let his fingers do the walking. Investigations and question asking always were done in person.

Of course with the recent house purchase, we find ourselves at Lowes at least once every single weekend. And, on every trip, I spend 10-15 minutes drooling over miter saws. This has lead Rachel to declare that our trips to such stores are starting to resemble "a run to Home Depot". I am tempted to take her on a real "run to Home Depot" or allow my father to demonstrate the art in person later this weekend. 3-4 hours was no exaggeration and the hmming and hawing was generally over something much less expensive than a miter saw, like maybe a small drill index or a dremel tool or a small package of cutting wheels for a dremel tool. If the trip expanded to include Sears, then things became truly hellish as our Sears was in the mall, a place that made my dad really twitchy anyway. Combining that with the little angel sitting on his shoulder saying "you can build your own miter box from scrap wood and that rusty box saw is just fine" and the little devil saying, "you deserve it man, get the nice tool and never buy another one" created something that started to look like a psychosis.

Anyway, the devil is going to win out in our case: compound, double bevel...and a good stand.

Things that deserve a post that just get a bullet

We are so busy that many things are never going to get real posts. So, instead, we will be going with bullets.

• Hard cider. We have 15 gallons going. 5 of it is cranberry flavored and should be ready soon. The rest is from a special pressing done by a mill and orchard near our house. They reserve apples across the whole season to make an especially good batch for homebrewers. They let you just bring your fermentation vessel in and fill it right off of their tank, which is really convenient.
• Rachel liked the cider from the special batch, called "The Crush", so much that I put another 5 gallons in a keg and carbonated it for general drinking. Those of you that remember Apfel Schorle from visiting us in Germany will find this to be 10 times as good.
• There is a lot to do around the house...perhaps it should have its own bulleted list. Is it ok to put a bulleted list inside of a bullet in a bulleted list?
• Rachel's folks got us a K-cup coffee maker as a house warming gift. We love it, but also feel guilty for all of the waste.
• In general, all of the stuff we have had to buy for the house has left me feeling rather like a bourgeois pig. New furniture, new beds, snow blower, mouse traps because our new life cannot include vermin apparently.
• Changing the brakes on the Volvo myself and doing most of the work on the house ourselves has helped reduce the feeling that we are bourgeois pigs.
• The energy efficiency of the house seems a little better than I had expected based on the previous owners. Rachel has declared my interest in energy efficiency to be an obsession, but since we didn't buy the house early enough to lock in on a rate for fuel oil and even though I will try to time purchases to make sure we are topped up before rates start rising in January, we will no doubt have to buy some $3-$4 oil. This would be better than last year, when the oil went so high that you couldn't find a wood pellet stove anywhere in VT as everyone panicked.
• We won't be replacing any windows until next year.
• We will be adding insulation next weekend when my dad visits. I expect this to lead to a somewhat humiliating but also very comical blog post.
• Anyone with a good idea how to compost in bear country may submit their ideas, preferably electronically. If you wonder if bears really need to be considered, you should know that in February bears will come eat from your bird feeders if you don't bring them in. I suspect rotting food scraps would be even more of an attractant. I wouldn't mind if we could attract two bears who would fight over the compost. That would be way better than the wild turkey post.
• Ellis's recent antics will be getting their own post shortly. For now I will just say that his behavior at home is something like a wild animal trained in martial arts, perhaps a Ninja-Badger. His ability to hone in on and kick his father in the most sensitive areas seems to be his gift.
• Yes, pictures of the house are coming. But in the mean time, Rachel loves walking people through the house with the webcam.

Isn't it ironic?

We now have internet people. Yes, internet, the real thing in our home. After nearly 8 weeks of battling idiots and other crap, we now have DSL from the company so evil their name shall not be written.

Some people say a house becomes a home when people who love each other build memories there. I say a house becomes a home when it is possible to ignore the people you love with the entire Klingon language at your fingertips.

So we get home tonight and find in our mailbox an offer from Comcast saying that they are happy to announce they will now offer enhanced cable and high-speed internet to us and our neighbors. We don't likes the Comcasts so much, but we hateses the other guyses enough that we may be switching.

On the other hand, one might say that since the company whose name shall not be written wouldn't give us internet for two months and now have credited us with two months of free service, they effectively have saved us four whole months of internet charges. What a great, customer-focused operation they are.

if you guessed we still don't have internet at home...

you'd be right! Which is a shame because Ellis has been pretty hilarious, Trey has accounts of cider making, and we probably even have a few pictures that should be posted. But, we're both too swamped at work such that even trying to blog at lunch time results in, well, crap like this.

ghost of halloween past

For Halloween weekend, our friends Ben and Elissa came to visit. They were in New England so Elissa could defend her thesis down in Boston (congratulations Dr. Cosgrove!). Tragically and despite all the cows in Vermont, we have no pictures of Trey and Ben riding on or posing with any beasts of burden. But we did visit Ben and Jerry's and Elissa caught this:

However, these faces are much cuter with some superior DNA mixed in:

Elissa also gamely helped me complete Ellis's skunk costume, even though I lacked both skill and direction. I had this for extremely general guidance, but it's an extremely liberal definition of "pattern" that allows for instructions such as "Cut two ear shapes from the black faux fur and sew them together. That's one ear." Nonetheless, that's basically what we did. With some adjustments to reflect what a skunk's stripes/tail actually look like, I think we came out rather ahead. We were aided, of course, by the fact that this outfit didn't have to stand up to repeated wearings or daylight. Here's the only video we have of the tail in action:

Most importantly, though, candy procurement was successful. Trey sifted through Ellis's haul as we drove home and declared "Not bad, though too much chocolate for my tastes." Ellis piped up from the back seat "No, Dad, not your tastes- my tastes." After a few days of metering it out after meals, I hid or threw away the remaining spoils of Halloween. Yet still a few strays remained scattered around the house and keep popping up to provoke further negotiations on when and how many Ellis may eat. To our chagrin we came home from work last night to find Scout had been into a box of "candy sticks" (looking dubiously like good old fashioned candy cigarettes) from a Halloween package from Grandma Lise. To our much greater horror, Ellis was later seen amidst a suspicious number of chalky white crumbs. "I'm finishing the candy that Scout ate." Great...nothing like a few dog germs to up the nutritional value of pure dextrose.

still no home internet

Trey continues his battle with Fairpoint, trying to secure an internet connection for us. The suspected previous progress turned out to be in vain, since they had somehow entered the wrong address at which we wanted service. I wasn't with Trey when he made this discovery talking on his cell phone on the way to work, but he reported "I was so angry, I had to pull the car over to bitch at them." Well, yes, it does require one's full attentions. So, they've promised us we'll have it by Friday. We shall see.

What stinks? It's you.

A couple Halloween pics to keep you all entertained until we have internets again.