Category: General

Riders on the Storm

We had exactly a week of pleasant weather a week ago, and now its been back to cold and rainy every day for a week once again.

My next-door neighbor put in a new driveway. It looks really nice, but it sidles up right against the property line, and is edged with stone blocks that make it a good deal higher than his old driveway. I was concerned about the possibility of the watershed patterns changing, creating the potential for flooding on the side of my house, where I re-concreted the foundation a few years back and re-graded the earth. But seven days of solid rain have pretty much shown it’s not going to be a problem. Still, it motivated me to do a bit of landscaping on the shrubs on that side of the house.

I finished a few longstanding tasks. For the first time in a while there’s no big pressure to get stuff done. Even work is at an even keel these days. Summer’s coming soon.

We finished the project of painting the trim in the house: all the baseboards, door frames and window frames. Started back in February, the whole thing took eight sessions. Now everything is clean and shiny. Starting the fall we’ll paint the doors that need it.

Jeannie helped me put a new hard drive in my computer. I bought the drive last December but I’ve been too busy to get around to it. Then once we got into it, what was supposed to be a simple task took three days because of difficulties doing the backups.

Got my Origami e-book done. Hooray! Look for announcements about its availability soon.

Been continuing to get to know the Pilot Hoban. Lots and lots of buttons for the heater and the radio. Last week for the first time we took it further than the train station or kids’ school. Had fun with XM radio working my way thru a zillion station. They have about 20 rock stations, cracked into subgenres like petroleum distillates, but apparently no prog station and no steely station. I noticed an Elvis station and a Grateful Dead station. I want a combination of the two. “Fire – fire on the mountain, where you can be lonely, uh-uh-huh, yeah-eah!”

We watched The Blues Brothers movie with the kids, since Lizzy had done the song Soul Man in honor band, and I’d played her some of the Blues Brothers records. She was surprised it wasn’t a documentary. Michelle was upset that Jake and the rest of the band ended up in jail since it was Elwood was doing all the driving and Jake was just in the passenger seat. And besides, the light was yellow in the first place!

May Flowers

Back to the ol’ grind grind. Turmoil at work. Ah, the impersonal slings and arrows of working for a large corporation. I lost my private office recently in yet another reorg, and moved to a new location. Which is fine as far as it goes: I’m in an open area now with my actual colleagues, so the arrangement makes sense and is more social and congenial than it was before when people were scatted all over several floors. And we’re on the sunny side of the building. The thing is, my location has a built-in desktop that was several inches too low (I’m 6’6” tall). Before I left on spring break, the building services people came by and said they’d raise my desk, but when I got back they’d done nothing and closed the work order, declaring the problem solved. So I had to go after these people, which was a drag. When pressed they refused to fix it as a matter of policy. Picking up a screwdriver would cross an uncrossable line it seems. So I moved to another location nearby with an adjustable desk, causing lots of annoyance to my neighbors I’m sure.

Some good news: it was a lovely weekend. The first really warm weekend of the spring, with hint of summer. The girls had their dance recital on Saturday, and both did really well. The studio puts on a really nice show every year with acts and costumes and music. Sunday we did some more yard work, planting and edging, and I went skating and took the Mustang out for a ride, and we made a barbecue.

Also: getting used to the new car. At first I was just relieved to be done with the car shopping ordeal, but now I’ve driven it a few times, mainly to the train station and am starting to get a feel for it. It’s certainly much quieter and less falling-apartish than the old car. Plus the color is really nice. Blue with hints of purple and green when the light strikes it the right way. The stereo is weird. It has subwoofer, so the bass tends to be muddy and indistinct. Also all the bass is coming from the back of the car. It took some time, but I adjusted it to sound better. Next up is figuring out how to set the clock and the radio presets.

I figured out “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on guitar. Don’t ask me why. The song’s been stuck in my head since the 70’s. Needed to get it out. Lizzy asked my why all songs about disasters are so long (she’s heard me play American Pie too). I figured out the secret for WotEF: it never resoloves. The first and last chord is an A sus, so you never know if it’s in a major or minor key. There’s not a C or C# anywhere in the tune, just a void.

Spring Break

Another mainly rainy week. We’ve been on spring break, such as it is. Took a few days off of work because the kids were off school. Manly catching up on our rest and doing odd jobs. Last Wednesday I worked at home and the kids did art all day. Thursday the rain stopped and I got a bunch of yardwork done. Turned over the garden, laid down cedar mulch under the hedges. Pretty much done with the spring cycle.

We finally retired El Jeppo last week and replaced it with a shiny Pilot in a very attractive shade of blue. Yes, our quest is at an end and good riddance to the whole ordeal. On the way back from negotiating the deal I was say to Jeannie it would have been nice to get a better trade-in price. But then back windshield wiper stopped working and I remembered why I needed to get rid of the old bucket o’ blots, and considered it was probably a fair deal. We named the new car Hoban after the famous starship pilot Hoban Washburne.

Last Friday I took the kids into the city for a visit to the Guggenheim museum. It’s been years since I’d been there, before I moved to California. Lizzy has been getting into abstract and impressionistic art. This was the perfect exhibit for her. It was all about the birth of Modernism, 1910-1918, plus a side exhibit on the Bauhaus. Lots a Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky and others all in one place. Modern art’s greatest hits. It’s been a while since I checked in with this stuff and it struck me how deeply the language of modernism has come to permeate every day pop culture, media and industrial design, to the point where it’s almost invisible. It’s always interesting to image a time an place where ideas we now just accept were new and radical and challenging. Plus the gallery itself is a most excellent space, with it’s snail-shell spiral main hall.

Jeannie has been making Lego robots to solve a Rubik’s cube. More on that later.

Like a Lion Fighting an Angry Ram in a Wet Cardboard Box

Feeling the first hints of early spring. The weather has been more mild lately. Traded snow any bitter cold for rain and heavy winds. Cold comfort for change.

Work has been busy; big deadline looming at the end of March. Jeannie has been having dental work the last few weeks and has a few weeks more to go. We’ve begun researching cars. Lizzy got accepted into honor band for middle school, which starts this week.

We’ve been painting again. This time it’s the baseboards, door frames and trim. We’ve done two sessions two weekends in a row. The downstairs is done, and the stairway (huge amount of work) and the kitchen and living room. Still to go are the hall, bedrooms and bathrooms, plus some window frames and doors. Most of time is laying down tape. Hope to be done all this by the end of March so we can concentrate on outdoor stuff when spring come in April.

A Little Thaw

It’s been up above freezing the last few days, a big relief and a tease that spring is not far off. Still plenty of big piles of snow on the ground though, even in midtown Manhattan. Even if it keeps on melting at this rate it’ll be another month before I see my lawn again.

Have an Ice Day

You’d think that by now I’d have something else to talk about besides the bad weather. And I do, I swear. Origami and music stuff, but it’s all work in progress.

The bad weather is neverending. But even so it hasn’t run out of nasty new surprises yet. Today it was freezing and everything iced up bad. In my driveway an 18” high icicle formed sticking straight up like a stalagmite, from water dripping from the power line above. I went out to shovel, which meant mainly breaking up the ice, but left the icicle. Jeannie ran it over with her car.

For some reason Michelle was really excited about Ground Hog’s day. She woke up before daylight and brought her stuffed animals out to the couch to camp out and wait for it, like it was Xmas morning or a space shuttle launch or something. As I was getting up she’d already woken up Jeannie and the two of them were finding the feed from Punxsutawney, PA. So I witnessed the rodent prognosticate an early spring. Oy. Wait until she finds out the rodent doesn’t know jack.

Let It Snow

Yep you guessed it, more complaining about the weather. We had a good 2 feet of snow over 24 hours earlier this week. I worked at home Wednesday and went out about 4 in the afternoon shoveled out about 6 – 8″. It was pretty fluffy and took about 20 min with the snowblower, and another 20 so shovel the steps and clean up. It started snowing again after dark and by Thursday morning we had another 15-18″. Jeannie and the kids had the day off, and I worked from home again. Jeannie and the girls went out around 10:30 and I joined them around 11:30. This snow was much heavier. Even with the snowblower we didn’t get done until after 1:30.

The good news is it’s all cleared now. The temperature got above freezing this afternoon, and I’ll take snow over extreme cold any day. I guess I’ve adjusted to the cold. And I definitely picked the right year to buy a snowblower. The bad news is we’re not even halfway thru the winter. Already it’s the 5th snowiest winter on record for NYC, and the snowiest January by a factor of 50%. The last winter that came close was ’96 and that was one big storm and two moderate ones. It’s already snowed 5 or 6 times down here. And more snow in the forecast. Also this year January has five Mondays, which is cruel and unusual. If I were King of America I’d make the fifth Monday of every month an automatic day off.