There But For Grace

Yesterday’s 40 percent chance of snow flurries turned into a solid Christmas morning snowstorm, which was completely melted off in our new winter normal by midday. It made for a fine Christmas morning, except that I read a story in the Washington Post, and then made the mistake of reading the comments. I doubt it […]

The Last Piece

When my family used to do jigsaw puzzles during the holidays, I would rarely sit down to help, but I would swipe an unplaced piece off the table so that I could come along and put the final piece of the puzzle in. This worked spectacularly (at least, I thought so, even if I was […]

Adventures in (Crawl) Space

I’ve been putting this off, and I would have put it off again yesterday, after being the first to bring it up, if Lynn weren’t such a taskmaster. Okay, she isn’t, but she did say, “Let’s do this. Right now.” And she meant it. Which is how we found ourselves, for the first time ever, […]

Petty For Gifts

Lynn and I received a gift box yesterday, a gift box consisting of several smaller gift boxes all tied up in a festive ribbon. It was from Straw and Timber Craftsmen, Dusty’s company — I was going to say “that built our house,” but since it’s a never-ending process I might need to say “is […]

Feeding the World

I was in high school when I discovered the Boomtown Rats. Now, this is “discovered” as in Columbus “discovering” the New World. Since he encountered people already living in this New World, they presumably knew of its existence. So other people knew about the Boomtown Rats, but when I “discovered” them, it opened up a […]

A Broken Electrical Record

I used all my blogging time writing the following e-mail to electrical people (Dusty, Lena with the local solar company, Roger at GCEA, and Peter, who will hopefully come save us from all this). I doubt you care, already being up to your eyeballs in my electrical complaints, but it’s all I’ve got for today. […]

Moody With the Blues

I have just, for the second time in two days, reset the garage breaker. Yesterday I feel sure it tripped by dint of me closing the bay door on my way to work (without either garage heat source turned on). I’m going to hazard a guess that it blew again this morning when Lynn left […]

The Heat is (Not) On

Days after discussing how I haven’t really figured out the best way to use under-floor heat, and one day — less; hours (hours!) — after posting/boasting about how warm our garage is, Lynn and I experienced what appears to be yet another failure of a new part. When I look at it closely, it seems […]

Cold Enough

As I type this, wherever the weather station is out here at Riverwalk, the temperature is 14. Below zero. That’s Fahrenheit; if I really want to depress us, that’s -25.6 Celsius. Either way, it’s cold enough for there to be frost on the inside of every window in our house. While it doesn’t happen as […]

Family Friendly

I don’t know if you heard about this story, but shortly before Thanksgiving at an elementary school somewhere in Utah, a substitute teacher asked the class, fourth or fifth grade, to take turns expressing their gratitude for something. While several were thankful for turkey or pie or no school, one 10-year-old boy told his classmates […]