With the amazing unseasonable weather going down in New England at the moment, we were finally forced to install the screens on the new windows in the addition. This meant– in addition to the lovely cross breeze and bug-free enjoyment of frog sounds at night– that there was a large amount of spare cardboard laying about.
So of course, we now have a Transmogrifier.
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Pro tip: you can dramatically improve the yardwork participation rate among 8y.o. males if you creatively reframe the exercise as a gamified combat simulation.
"Sir! Our robot laser rakes have completely wiped out all nano-Migs in this sector!"
"Carry on, Soldier."
…and so that mountain of leaves that was keeping the new grass from sprouting in the backyard– where everything got dug up to put in the well and ground lines for the geothermal system– has been forcibly relocated to another quadrant.
It was 75 degrees yesterday. What. The. Hell. This time last year the snowdrifts were taller than I am.
A light dusting of snow last night led to spending the morning out doors with Calvin. After failing to make a snowman– not near enough snow and way too much mud, it was more of a mudman or a golem– and a sloshy snowball fight, I had to dissuade him from trying to build a treehouse from scrap iron and wood he found in the meadow. Industrious, this one. We will have a treehouse at some point, it's inevitable, but I would prefer not to try to drive nails into frozen Maple, kthxbuddy? He agreed!
Next we headed down to the beach. Picked up a bunch of glass, cans, and other tidal detritus, then hopped to the other side of the bridge for some winter bouldering. This is the route Calvin walks on the way home from the bus every day and he absolutely schooled me in a game of "don't touch the ground, only the rocks." Along the way he was pointing out rock stack sculptures that survived the whole winter, various ice-formations that looked like rockets or dragons, the sticks in the water that he is finally convinced are NOT Champ…it was awesome. "On the other side of those stairs is level THREE! The rocks are taller and pointier and slipperier."
Ever since he was born, this has been the greatest gift of all: seeing the world through his eyes. There is indeed treasure everywhere.
Home now for lunch, more tabla practice, and some science experiments.
Tonight, the Charlotte Central School held its annual kid's variety show. For some reason we missed out last year but this year Rose had been practicing for the Kindergarten song so we all went. Continue reading
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Calvin has commandeered the stereo. He has borrowed his sister's little "disco ball" lightshow toy, you know, the base with plastic spinning globe that has a weak lamp inside and several colored windows on the ball. He has taken a standard flashlight, balanced it on one end, and placed another hollow ball-with-circular-cutouts on it, to make a static lighting backdrop for the swirling colors. He is cranking tunes loud, dancing, running over to play the djembe and, simultaneously, getting himself ready for bed.
He runs into the dining room shortly thereafter, grinning, and declares that he has invented "The dance of the Pajamazons."
For reference, here is his playlist this evening: Continue reading
I hate to break it to all you fellas reading this, but I totally won at marriage. Your lady friends are charming and lovely and all that, seriously, nice catch, but no, sorry, flawless connubial victory is MINE 
10 years and counting.
6 inches overnight and coming down in big wet flakes still. Calvin and Rose were out making muddy snowmen and partial igloos all morning but have retreated for the comforts of the couch. This afternoon: the Muppet Movie. Hell yes.
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A. posted a few annotated pix of the last 24 hours that you should check out, if you haven't. Click through to see and read…
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Freshly bathed and hanging out in front of the fire in symmetrical repose…
Here's a small gallery with the pumpkins that Nina, Calvin, Rose, and I carved this year, plus a shot of the two little ones in costume. Click a Thumb to go to the gallery; from there a further click will enlarge all the images (which may not, necessarily, improve their quality).
Tonight was not promising early on, as light low clouds obscured everything. But a steady wind was blowing, so Calvin and I decided to wait it out. Rose stayed inside with mama playing Chutes and Ladders, her choice. While we were waiting Leroy Bear came bounding out from the trees and we let him inside; a good thing too, as we heard coyotes howling not long after and I do worry sometimes about leaving him outside too late.
Eventually the clouds blew past, or most of them at least, and we were able to take a gander. We switched from the 15mm to 12mm Plossel eyepiece tonight and even with some lingering high faint clouds the results were spectacular. We stared at the moon for a while again, then turned to Jupiter and this time, after quite a lot of fiddling with the focus, we were able to see the horizontal bands of the great cloud storms. Still no red spot; it didn't transit until 10pm or so this evening. Here's Calvin taking it in (click twice to embiggenate), during which, we had this conversation: "Calvin, can you see the bands?" "Ohhhhh yeah…yep…yep, I sure can." After five or six more turns, he was slightly less amazed…but only slightly!
Today after far too much delay we had a fella come by with his tractor and brush hog the meadow. We meant to get to it in the Spring, then over the Summer, but one thing led to another and it never seemed like a good time. Then, as you may have heard, it got crazy wet around here for a few weeks and there was no point. But it's been dry long enough we figured we'd better get to it or the job would be much worse.
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…if you are young.
Over dinner last night we got to talking about Sunspots, the solar cycle, aurorae, and the like. Calvin and Rose asked to go outside and look for some, even though I was pretty sure– you *were* aware of spaceweather.com, right?– that there were no recent flares headed our way. But in between dinner and bedtime, amidst much scrambling and bundling in gloves and hats and coats, we went out. Because I am so SMRT, I put the AstroScan out about 20 minutes ahead of time so it would be temperature adjusted. Continue reading
At some point here I will post a gallery of pix of the garage destruction/remodel. For the purpose of this post, all you need to know is that 1) for many weeks now there have been anywhere from 2-15 unprotected open pathways between the great outdoors and the comfy indoors, and 2) one of the less-reported but painfully obvious after-effects of Tropical Storm Irene in VT was a late hatch of a particularly active, large, hardy bunch of mosquitos.
So in brief, we've been fighting off the bloodsucking fiends for what seems like ages now. But thanks to our geothermal contractor, I now have a remedy that can be weilded from the comfort of my desk, which happens to be nearest to the source of most of the infiltrations. Continue reading
The downstairs bathroom, the one that is due to be ripped out and replaced by the new one in the mudroom sometime in the next 3 weeks, sprung a leak this morning. Luckily the water dripped straight down the joists to the basement right into the sump well. Unluckily there was some slop to the dripline and one of our small, lovely persian rugs got wet. I shop-vac'd the hell out of it, hung it to dry, started a fire upstairs and turned on the goethermal system even though the house is warm. Well-circulated super-dry stove air ought to save the rug.
I know I keep saying this, but: I can't do anything these days without running into the memory of Brett. Search email, he's in the results list; same for chat logs. Clean off desk, here's a postcard of one of his artworks. Sort pictures, duh, there he is. Except he's not. It's going to be like this for a long time, I get that, but I would like to move further down towards the "Acceptance" part of the Kubler-Ross model just about any old time now, please.
Today's example: I clicked over to SoundCloud to find an example track to test out shortcode-embeds on the blog [Note to LJ and DW mirror-readers; I have no idea if this will work for you, apologies in advance]. As soon as I log in, there is Brett peering at me from the sidebar with a ridiculous hat and bug-eyed DJ goggles. And yes, of course I clicked, and I listened, and I wept. So my example track is the ~9 minute collaboration below, "Wednesday."
These were the first sounds to come out of the studio when Brett and re-built it in 2009, after the water-heater flood and remodeling in the El Cerrito house. We were just noodling around testing out all the routing and for once, hit record. Brett is playing the Waldorf Q and I am on guitar; the clean guitar part and a dry Q part were laid down in the first take. Then we came back in and Brett played with the FX on the synth track while I overdubbed the fuzzy e-bow line. So this is composed solely of first takes. It's not perfect; we lost the plot partway through because of some now-forgotten distraction and after that point it's a little less together all around, but I am very happy with the first few minutes. Brett took it home and did some post-processing to create this final version; if you listen closely, you can hear him working pretty hard to "fix it in the mix"
As far as I can remember, this is the only piece of music we ever put to tape together. I have plenty of regrets about my life but that's at the top of the list. I have some of Brett's studio gear here with me now, and on that gear there are patterns, sequences, and samples. I have unfinished business to attend to, which is part of the reason for the changes I'm making in how I spend my time. More later, for certain.
This is a test of the post-mirroring system. This is only a test. LJ and DW *should* see this post with appropriate footers, thanks to the JournalPress plugin. Fingers crossed…
Ok, took a couple tries to get DW to cooperate, but we have achieved blog-saturation!
Stay tuned for the continuing resurrection of there.org.
Done: Hosted WordPress install; Livejournal import; Comments cleanup; Plugins Installed(Avalicious, Better Tag Cloud, Comment Reply Notification, Google +1 button, Google XML Sitemaps, JetPack, JournalPress, LJ Importer, More Fields, OpenID, Simple Twitter Connect, wpuntexturize); Plugins deactivated for now (W3 Total Cache, WP Super cache, WPTouch, Spam Free WordPress, Akismet, PubSubHubBub, Google Analytics)
To Do: Figure if default server size and php config will allow caching without eating available mem or hitting a configured resource ceiling; install Gallery or Coppermine and any required WP integration plug-in; Customize a theme; Cancel G+ and FB accounts; Configure WP->DW->LJ crossposting.
Tagged Self-Referential, There.org, Wordpress
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Tagged best served cold, people who should be slapped, they did what, vermont, work
