Winter Solstice party invitation

If any of you readers are nearby, here's the text of an invitation Val and I are about to distribute among our co-workers. You're invited.

Apocalypse Party (original font: Blood of Dracula)

Okay, the world isn't going to end, but it is the winter solstice, which has been celebrated for centuries, maybe millennia; besides, Jupiter is in a good position to look at through a telescope or binoculars, not to mention the galaxy in Andromeda (the most distant object visible to the naked eye). Since I have a telescope, if the sky is clear, we'll take a look. Feel free to bring your own 'scope or binoculars.
Naturally there will be food and stimulating conversation.

When: about 6:00 PM, Friday, December 21, 2012
Where: 1314 Whittaker Rd, Newark, DE 19702 (Google it), home of Valerie and Rogers George. RSVP 302-731-5948 or rogers.george@gmail.com
Who: You, of course. Our teenagers will probably be there, so feel free to bring your own non-adults. Alcohol is allowed, but hopefully it won't flow too freely.
What: We'll have some kind of entrée, and Val says she'll be making an apocalypse cake, whatever that is. We invite you to bring a contribution for the table, too.

This picture was taken someplace besides our house. Way farther north. But it looks like the solstice at noon.

Addition, part three

Well, the exterior is assembled. All it needs is a coat of paint; the primer should hold us for a while, though.

Here's a shot of the west side. I think it'll look better after we paint it. Everything to the left of the peak in the middle is new. We took off the cedar siding on the old part to make it look more uniform. The new siding is stuff called fiber cement. Very durable and impervious to about everything.


And here's a view looking at the northeast corner. The carpenter did a nice job joining the old to the new buildings. You can see the little deck with its own door and window. It has a sheet of rubber for its floor, glued atop an inch or so of foam insulation and an R-40 SIP. Total R-value of that part of the roof is about R-50. The major roof will probably be about R-44, good enough. We'll use sprayed-in foam, so it'll be without air leaks, too.

We'll paint the addition to match the cedar so it won't look so much like we glued a townhouse onto the place. In fact, Val is talking about a painting party. Lots of pizza for attendees! Details later.

One feature of those tall walls, since the structure is post and beam, is that they are not attached to the posts and beams. That means they can bulge and wiggle. This is not good, so I attached hurricane straps to the studs. Saved myself a pile of money by doing it myself, I hope. The wall feels nice and solid now. Sometimes the wall wasn't exactly perfectly flat, so I had to pull it in before fastening it in place. It took some jury-rigging with C-clamps and a come-along. If you eyeball the west wall, though, the addition is straighter than the original building. My repeated thanks to Martin Steinberg, the best neighbor in the world, for his advice and help on this and many other parts of the project.

So what's next? We need to run the water heater exhaust so it doesn't go into the addition space, we need to run the wiring, dig a channel in the concrete for the water and gas lines to the island, install fire block, and we need to insulate. Most of these I can do, but it'll be a while before we get to the insulation contractor.

The workmanship is pretty good, with lots of nice touches. For example, they put a piece of aluminum flashing behind the joints in the siding as additional rain protection, in addition to caulking the seams. The furring strips you see make the new siding on the original structure match the siding on the addition, since the two buildings didn't quite line up.

The carpenters were Amish, and they prefer not to be photographed, so I took a pic of Isaac or Levi's  hat.

As always you are welcome to come out and see the place first hand, and you can look at lots more photos in Picasa.

Ah, the vicissitudes of putting an addition on your house

Actually, the project is coming along rather well if you don't mind reasonable delays. And most of the delays are reasonable. It has rained almost every day the guys had to work outside. We had to wait two weeks for both the windows and the floor joists. The joists arrived a couple hours later than expected, and so did the flooring, but they guys were able to keep busy while they waited for those; rebuilding the cricket.

As always, click the pictures to see them bigger

A cricket is a small roof you build to prevent water from accumulating in a place where the roof doesn't slope, such as where the south edge of the addition attaches to the old north edge of the house. Here's a shot of the incomplete new cricket. Eyeball the edge of the roof and the top of the cricket, and you can see that the angle is the same for both. This will keep the water channeled away, and save lots of grief years from now.

The building inspector did throw a noticeable monkey wrench in the gears, though. The guys from Brobst Home Improvements did a nice, standard job of sealing the windows and doors into their openings, but the inspector insisted on an additional flashing along the bottoms of the openings. Everyone I talked to said he was crazy. But the guys came out and re-installed them. Here's a shot of the opening with the flashing in place.

Well, I guess the house won't sink now if we get a flood. They re-caulked, re-nailed, taped, and re-installed doors and windows without complaining.

The big event of the day, though, was the floor joists. Hugh Lofting Timber Framing made their last delivery today—a nice truckload of big timbers, all of them about twice as long as necessary so the guys could cut them to the exactly correct length, and get two from each timber. That one post that had been out of plumb for the past couple weeks is now nice and vertical. The floor joists fit into slots in the main timbers, so they are not trimmed to a special shape. This made them useful for other projects, so as my pile of timbers vegetated in Hugh's parking lot, most of the joists got called into the ministry, as it were. Which meant that all but about three of the joists are new wood. I joked with the delivery guy that the new timbers didn't match the old ones, and he said he could make them look weathered and dirty, but there'd be an extra charge. The Amish guys offered to get some of the abundant mud around the site and rub it onto the beams if I liked. So nice-looking ceiling beams will be part of the story of the house, too.


The timbers had to be lifted into place by hand, then pounded into their slots with a sledge hammer. The fit was pretty tight. I don't picture the house coming apart any time soon. This shot shows the view from the upstairs boy's bedroom. You can see his air conditioner. That part of the wall will be hallway into the addition. Good thing he's enlisting, because pretty soon, his bedroom will be gone!

The flooring is good-quality 16-foot by 8-inch full dimension tongue and groove pine (or is it fir?). You can get poorer quality, but they are the dickens to get to fit together. The good ones go together nicely with a few hammer blows. Here is the partially-completed deck floor. You can just see a chisel in the doorway. He used it to pry up the sill so he could fit the floorboards under it. They had put in spacers, but it was very tight. It amounted to lifting the entire roof of the addition to slip the boards under the sill.

Since we're trying to keep this project mostly cash, we're stretching things out to spread out the payments, so the only flooring they put in was for the little deck, the opening that stimulated my Rube Goldberg rain protection these past couple weeks. (See two posts previous. It worked, by the way.) The rest of the flooring is stacked inside the addition to keep it out of the rain. The plan was to build some rafters on the deck floor so we could insulate the kitchen ceiling underneath the deck. As it happened, Hugh had a couple SIPs lying around, so he sent them down with the joists. They cut a SIP to fit and laid it on the flooring. We now have a nice R-40 ceiling under the deck.

SIP, in case you don't know, stands for Structural Insulated Panel, and it's what a lot of the exterior walls of the house are made of. You take two sheets of something like plywood, space them six or eight (or more)  inches apart, then fill the cavity with high-density foam insulation. You get something that is air tight and has a very high R value. They are tongue and groove along their edges, and you can get them with electrical conduit pre-installed. SIPs are usually made to order, take eight weeks to arrive, and are quite expensive. The SIPs Hugh sent were a little beat up and weathered; maybe I'll get a good price for them. Here's what the deck SIP looks like along an exposed edge. It has a temporary tyvek cover to keep rain off.


We'll put a railing around the deck, and cover up that exposed corner. The railing will have a built-in stile so we can easily climb onto the roof when the need arises. The plan is to have a rubber coating put over the SIP to be the floor of the deck itself. The Brobst guys will do that next time they come out.  I hope they don't delay.

Post 200

By some amazing coincidence, this is the 200th post on Mushrooms to Motorcycles, and the 200th post awaits my pen (okay, keyboard) on my other site, The Writing Rag. And today is my brother's birthday (not 200th, though). And today is Talk Like a Pirate day. I have to do something about this. Maybe I'll write about pirate lingo in The Writing Rag, but I suppose it makes sense to write about my brother here.
Bob (the rest of the world outside family calls him either Hey You! or Rob) is 16 months younger than I, and my earliest datable memory is of his arrival in our home. I remember being picked up, held over the basinette, and being told "This is your brother!" I also remember thinking "What's a brother?" and "If it's mine, why can't I have it?"

We were playmates throughout our childhood, and I was often guilty of treating him poorly. To this day I can't think why this was so, but I remember the first day I didn't cause a fight all day long. We were well into grade school. He has since been an example to me of how to treat people well.

When we were kids, he wanted a goat for a pet, and we eventually got one. Dad rigged up a goat harness for our wagon.

 Fortunately for me, I grew out of being a jerk, and he forgave me. We have been close all our adult lives, ever since Jr high school or so. When I began to grow up. Bob would probably say I ain't growed up yet. He likes to rib me, and I let him—I consider it fair penance for having mistreated him so badly when we were kids.

Anyway, Bob has become one of the foremost building energy management guys in the country. It started with a part-time job at a heating and air conditioning company when he was in school, and except for his time in the military, he never left the industry. (Unlike me, who has had several unrelated careers over the years.) He regularly consults on projects from large businesses to peoples' homes. He knows everything about heating and air conditioning at any size scale, and he can handle everything from the nuts and bolts to the rather complicated math of designing an air handling system. He regularly teaches classes on assorted related subjects, and he's been involved with energy management training videos, even starring in one. And he's always willing to share what he knows and give free advice. He's a good guy with useful skills. Unlike me, who can only correct people's grammar.

Bob's hobbies are scuba and blacksmithing. We have several iron implements in our house that he made for us over the years. He wants me to get into blacksmithing, too, and maybe when we finally get the addition done, I'll have room in the shed to set up a smithy.  Here are a couple of his wrought-iron implements:

He also rides a Harley, and he's had several over the years. He got his first bike (a Harley 50 cc 2-stroke) when he was in late high school or early college.

I suppose I better show him on a more recent bike. The pillion is my wife. Maybe he'll add a comment and include a photo of his current ride, a nice Harley with a custom sidecar.

Bob cleans up pretty well. Here's a photo from the last time we were together. I still think I could take him in a wrestling match, but I'm not going to try to find out—He was an airborne ranger (Lt. Col, ret), and he's pretty loyal to his military service.

Happy birthday, bro.











PS he sent me a shot of his side hack, so here it is:

The George Family North-Side Saltbox

Four years ago we started to put an addition on our house, then the contractor ran off with all our money. Late this summer we had recovered our finances enough to resume the project, so we did. I kept after him, and he did a year in prison, by the way, and he owes me most of my money back.

Here's where we started (click any of the photos to see full size):

The right side of the panorama is a concrete slab about 27 feet square. The left side of the picture used to be a two-car garage. That phase of the addition is done—Val and I put a lot of sweat equity into it, and we have a nice handicapped-accessible living space there for Val's grandmother. You can't see it, but there's also a pile of timbers in Hugh Lofting's parking lot. (He's the grandson of the author of the Dr. Doolittle books.) Hugh brought the timbers down on his crane-truck, which he had to park right in front of the slab, so I don't have a good picture of the completed timber frame, but here's a shot from on top of the truck of the first set of timbers, called a bent:

That whole downstairs wall, including the front door, is scheduled to be removed, so the addition will about double the size of the living room side of our downstairs. Within two days, the Amish guys had the frame about completed:

They got the roof on and the sheathing in a couple more days, and we passed both building inspections. This shot shows the east side of the addition. That door opening up there will go out onto a small deck, where we plan to put the heat pump compressor.

You can kind of tell that the exposed studs look unevenly spaced. That's because they are staggered 2×4s on a 6-inch plate. When we get to insulating, there won't be many pieces of wood that go all the way through. This produces an insulation value equivalent to SIPs, but at lower cost, and we don't have to wait six weeks for the SIPs. And I don't have to pay for the insulation until we have it foamed in. We're doing the project with cash, so the goal right now it to get it all enclosed, then work on the inside piecemeal as we get the cash. 

Here's a shot of the inside, facing the west wall. You can see the roof of the chicken coop through the opening. Those openings on the bottom will contain 6-foot sliding doors:

We don't have the beams for the upstairs floor yet, so right now you can see clear to the underside of the roof. When the beams arrive, the Amish guys will come back and put in the floor and attach the siding. I have another contractor lined up to install the doors and windows, and he'll do that right before the siding goes on. We got contractor's price on the windows, which are low-E glass, argon-filled, and very resistant to heat loss, and a decent price for the doors. But now I'm broke.  

Remember that little deck I mentioned? Since the floor isn't in yet, it's a 12×5 hole in the roof, and the rain can pour in. We covered it with an old tarp, which leaked so much it was like not having anything there at all. And the wall plates are caulked to the concrete, so I had to vacuum out all the water. Then I covered the opening with some leftover Tyvek, which is waterproof. But it was windy the next time it rained, and the Tyvek tore in half, dumping all the water inside. Today Val warned me that Big Rain was scheduled for tonight, so I repaired the Tyvek job, and so far it's holding up, but it looks like a Rube Goldberg with all the improvised bracing. Here's a view of the underside of the cover. There's more on the outside. 

I have more than 200 photos of the project so far, not counting about 400 from four years ago. If you're curious to see more of this phase, here's a link to all 200 pictures. https://plus.google.com/photos/101364717063049494002/albums/5782457413590914817
Some of the photos look identical. They are stereo pairs. if you arrange them so they are side by side on the computer screen, then cross your eyes so the images superimpose, that middle picture becomes 3-dimensional.

Stay tuned for more exciting adventures of the creation of the George Family North-Side Saltbox.

A good first job for a kid

A century ago, when I was a young man, I worked several summers for some seed companies. I'm not too much into agribusiness any more (I'm more a local, sustainable type now), but I ran into a poem I wrote about it, and it reminded me of the job of detasseling. If you've ever detasseled, you know what I'm about to describe, and I invite you to comment.


Many seed companies sell hybrid seed corn. Hybrid means it's a cross between two or more varieties of corn, and it's quite a science. Corn pollinates by wind distribution. How do you get the corn to cooperate and not self-pollinate? What you do is plant four rows of one variety, called the female rows, and one row of another variety, called the bull row. Alternate like this across the whole field, (In the Midwest these fields can be a mile long, but more often half a mile). The bull row provides the pollen from its tassels. And you do not want any pollen from the female rows! 


Solution: hire a bunch of kids to show up at the crack of dawn, a couple days before the tassels on the female rows mature, and pull the tassels off. A kid can walk two rows at a time, one row for each hand, so you need two kids for each set of four female rows. It's entirely normal to have a crew or fifty kids start on one end of a field, and when they get to the end, line up for another set of rows and come back, and work like this until the field is done. It typically takes a couple of trips through a field over a couple days to get all the tassels. 

That early in the morning the dew is heavy, and the pure water immediately soaks into everything. Corn leaves have scratchy hairs along their edges. and some of the corn can be pretty tall. And it changes from cold and wet to sunny and blisteringly hot as the day progresses. And you have to pay attention to what you're doing; tassels are easy to miss. My job was to follow the kids and check for quality and problems. 
We had a lot of adventures. Center pivots watering the field were not a reason to get out of the field. You walk through puddles left by last night's thunderstorm, too. The occasional snake and gopher usually caused some excitement. I remember one girl, extremely citified and dainty, hairdo and nail polish and everything, actually caught a live grasshopper and held onto it until the end of the row because I had promised that if she did so, I would eat it alive. Which I did. I'm sure it was the first insect she had ever deliberately touched. Good experience for her. 


So it's a good first job; simple, but hard.


Now go read my poem.

In which I reveal the true Olga

Stop! If you haven't already, go read the post before this one. You need it for background. Then come back here.

After the social disaster on the evening of Mr. Kelly's concert, it took me a lot of lattés (for me) and generous tips (for her), but I finally persuaded Olga to let me take a picture of her. While I was at it, and in demonstration of my sincerity as a photographer, I was able to get snaps of the other waitresses at 49 West, too. I show them now for your viewing pleasure. Guess which one is Olga:

Mystery waitress 1

Mystery waitress 2

Mystery waitress 3

When you have made your guess, ask Jack for the answer.

To tell the truth, what convinced her to let me take the photo was my wife, whom Olga likes, and who came down to visit me this weekend so we could celebrate her birthday together. She, but actually both of us, had a Very Good Time. She has since thanked me several times for the weekend. Part of our date was a tour of the Annapolis Spring boat show down on the waterfront. There was a vendor there selling buttons with mottoes on them. Val insisted on getting me a button that said "I am a Cunning Linguist." I guess it's a reference to my grammar blog, The Writing Rag, on which I featured some birthday poems for her.

I had lived in Annapolis just over a year, now, and it was time to get out and check out the night life. Actually, I have visited several parts of town, mostly on foot, but tonight was Friday night, I was alone, and I felt, well, Friday-nightish.
My favorite coffehouse, 49 West, had advertised a concert in their cramped back room: William Kelly, a high school kid who played classical piano. Just my kind of concert. So I got my name on the reservation list,  put on some clean clothes, and hopped on my bike, a 1993 BMW K75s. (More about the bike in future posts.)

Not my bike, but it looks about like this one in blue

I arrived early, figuring on doing some writing ( I'm working on a poem that'll appear on these pages sometime soon). Wouldn't you know, the kid was going to begin performing in only a few minutes! I had gotten my name on the list for the late concert, and he was performing early. (The late concert was a Bossa Nova/Gypsy Jazz group that I had no interest in.) They let me sit in the back—the room had several empty seats.
I settled in and ordered my usual, a large latté, and a sandwich. My waitress was a raven-haired beauty named Olga who spoke with some kind of Eastern European accent. She was nicely dressed that evening, wearing a blouse of the type I like my dear sweet wife to wear (and that she likes to wear for me—eat your hearts out, guys). She leaned over as she served me my sandwich, and I commented that the scenery in Annapolis was particularly nice this evening. She smiled thanks and winked at me. I noticed later that she made sure to be facing my direction when she served the next table.
Unlike Olga, Mr. Kelly was not much to look at. Scraggly long hair (fit right in with the old definition of long-hair music), he let his mouth hang open when he relaxed, revealing crooked teeth, and he wore thick glasses. But his playing was amazing! The entire concert was Brahms and Chopin (pronounced show-pan, guys, not like what you do to wood with an axe) and it wasn't easy stuff. His fingers were blurry they flew so fast. At first I wondered if he was a savant, but he spoke articulately and with a sense of humor (he cut the break short, saying he'd rather fidget, so he played some more lightning-fast Chopin.) Then I figured he had absolutely no social life, until I learned that the cute redhead at the front was his girlfriend Megan, not a loyal sister who got all the looks in the family. The kid was just plain talented, and I enjoyed the concert.
Afterwards, as I settled in for an evening of writing in the front room, Olga pointed at my helmet and asked what kind of bike I had. I said it was a BMW, and she got this funny look in her eye. Did I happen to know a BMW rider name of Jack, kind of big, and extremely funny? Has this baby seal look? As soon as I had raised my eyebrows in surprise, and before I could say yes, she stiffened up and was pretty cool the rest of the evening, in spite of my best efforts. I got a lot of writing done.

Replacement bike and a conversation with a cop

So there I was in Newark with a deceased bike. I don't have much of a prospect for getting it running or replaced any time soon. My dear sweet (she wanted me to add smoking hot, but I don't want to make Jack drool) wife offered to let me use her 600cc Honda Shadow as a loaner. She calls it a Harley wannabe, and that's a pretty good description. Low-slung, V-twin, small tank, chrome and shiny red paint, and uncomfortable. Last fall I attempted to rebuild its carburetor (without success, hence my reluctance to attempt working on my own bike), and this spring I got it done right by a professional, so the bike was running fine.

This is about what Val's bike looks like

[Interruption—my wife just called and I told her I was working on this post. She told me that she had said "smoking hot wheels," not "smoking hot wife." Myself, I like the wife version better.]

So I loaded a few things into a duffel, strapped it onto the wannabe, and headed south. You might be aware that route 50, with the Bay Bridge, is a major route between the entire greater DC area and the ocean. You probably also realize that Sunday afternoon is when all these people return home. Bumper to bumper, stop and go for miles. Motorcycles don't do well in this kind of traffic, —and the bike has a small tank, too, remember? Criticize me if you will, but I slipped onto the large left shoulder and carefully (25mph) got the bike into some airflow. And passed about a million cars and trucks. And a clutch of kids on crotch rockets, two of whom decided to follow me. I'm sure I saved more than an hour of travel time (but that's neither here no there, right?), not to mention the possibility of running out of gas. Eventually the kids switched to the right shoulder and were gone.

Eventually I saw a highway patrol car in the median.

I decided to seize the bull by the horns, as it were, and do a little motorcycle PR. I parked near the crossover and approached the patrolman. He was monitoring the eastbound traffic and didn't see me. I could make out through the slightly tinted window that he was playing solitaire on his laptop while he waited to his radar to buzz. I tapped on the window and he cleared the monitor and rolled down the window. I explained that in the traffic I was anxious about the bike overheating so I had been going down the shoulder, carefully. Can I do that? He looked at me (a distinguished-looking guy with grey hair and full riding gear), and he looked at the bike 20 feet away, and said. "Well, let me put it this way. I'm not going to stop you." I thanked him, promised to be careful, and went my way. Nice guy. I hope he got his quota.

A bad day for my bike

The two of you who read this blog probably know that I have a job in Annapolis and commute home to DE on weekends. Last Sunday I rode home to join the family for our boy's high school graduation party. In preparation for that trip, by the way, I had visited Bob's BMW and gotten an oil change and a new back tire.  You might recall that I had the clutch replaced a month or two back, so the bike was in pretty good shape. I thought.

About 25 miles from the house, tooling north on I-95, the bike suddenly lost power. I headed for the shoulder, thinking something electrical must have happened, but the bike kept running, and except for the loss of power, it sounded okay, so I figured the closer I got to the house, the better, so I kept going. I got all the way home. Later, after the bike cooled down,  I poked around, checked the oil, and couldn't see anything bad. I started the bike. Still ran weakly, but the exhaust felt the same on both sides. I called my buddy, Davis. He asked a couple questions  took note of my mention that I could detect a little oil at the end of the right exhaust. He said pull the right spark plug, so I did. Ordinarily, when you unscrew a spark plug, once you crack it loose, it's easy to unscrew. Not this one. I was afraid it had been cross-threaded. That wasn't the case. Here's what the end of the plug looked like:

I still have this in my pocket, as a souvenir. Ask and I'll show it to you.

My bike had run smoothly, if weakly, for 25 miles on one cylinder. It was too late to attempt further diagnosis, and I had to get back to Annapolis, so I borrowed a spare bike from Davis. When he saw the plug, he expressed his astonishment several different ways, none of which are repeatable in this family-friendly blog.

Today Davis and I took off the right cylinder. This is a fairly easy thing to do on these old BMWs. Here's what the inside of the head looks like: 

The mechanically inclined among you will notice immediately that the exhaust valve is missing, and the surface has been battered. 

Here's a view of the top of the piston:

Obviously something banged around in there a bit, and at about ten o'clock you can see the blackness of a hole punched clear through the poor piston. 

The valve itself was nowhere to be found. The sides of the cylinder appear undamaged.  Near as we can figure, the valve managed to escape through the exhaust port and it's resting somewhere in the exhaust header or muffler. 

sigh. Anybody interested in a parts bike? Except for the right cylinder, it's in pretty good shape. Oh. I'm in the market for a BMW K series with a full fairing.

May 2011 ride report

Yes, folks, sometimes I actually write about motorcycles. Yesterday was my chance to take a ride worth writing about. Among other clubs, I belong to a motorcycle club called something like the Mac Pac Riding and Wrenching Society, mostly BMWs and mostly eastern PA, though the club flag has appeared in many places, including Afghanistan.

So anyway. One of their number (Clay Owen), besides having a BMW much newer than mine, owns one of those holes in the water into which he pours money. It's a nice 35 to 38-foot (depending on how you measure and who's asking) single-masted sailboat. He invited me to stop by and pay him a visit, so I did. He keeps it in Oxford, MD, a little more than an hour from Annapolis by motorcycle through nice green eastern shore countryside. Apparently he doesn't read this blog, or he would have seen reports on my ride summer before last; he asked whether he was too far away for me. With a wrong turn that took me to St. Michaels—a worthy side trip itself—I got there in just under two hours.

Here's a picture of his boat. This is a stereo view. If you cross your eyes so the pictures superimpose, the middle image is 3-dimensional.





















His wife, Leslie, made that green rain cover over the aft part of the boat herself, by the way, and she makes impressive rope mats for Christmas presents. See 38 photos of the boat and the area here.

We ate at the local sports bar, where I had a fairly good buffalo burger, got to watch the Preakness—a lot of hoo-ha over a two-minute horse race, and met two young ladies, who, when they found I knew MC riders in PA asked if I knew a guy named Jack. They asked me to send him their picture.

I took back roads there, and a little ferry across the bay going back ($6.00). Sorry, no pictures of the ride (I was busy ahem riding). Take my word for it, Rt 622, essentially parallel to Hwy 50, is pleasant. The roads,  the boat, and the hospitality were worth the trip.

A hard week

Last week I was able to go home for the whole week. I was a witness for the state of DE in a felony construction fraud case, but they worked out a plea bargain, so I had the whole week free. Email me and I'll tell you about it. Or you can read some about it at the blog Inferior Building Services.

I couldn't waste the week lazing around with a whole two-acre microfarm to fix up, and I managed to keep myself fairly busy. Let's start out with a summary that should make all my motorcycle buddies groan, especially Jack. I wrote a poem about the week:

My "Vacation" from "Work"
Slaving away under noonday sun
Sawing up planks—I've just begun.
Building raised beds for our vegetables green,
The finest raised beds that you ever have seen.
Fifteen low squares each four feet by four.
Please, dear wife, don't ask for any more!
Fill them up with dirt and I'm still not done:
I have to build a fence for the chickens and their run.
Fifty feet long and six feet high,
Neighbor dogs can't see them and the chickens can't fly.
I worked and toiled and sweated like a man,
But I lost five pounds and I gained a nice tan!

I also got to dig a trench that became a nice asparagus bed. It was a productive week.

Click to enlarge

Speaking of chickens, here's a shot of the interior of the addition to the chicken coop, which we call the sun room. Val painted the trompe l'oeil. The room serves as a retreat for hens with newly-hatched chicks. We have three hens sitting at the moment; they should be good for maybe 20 more chickens. Come fall we'll be swimming in eggs, if you'll pardon the awkward metaphor.

It was daytime, so it's hard to see the little yellow flame

If you follow this blog, you might remember a series of several posts recently about biochar. The series starts here.

Biochar is homemade charcoal. You powder it up and mix it with your garden soil and it encourages the growth of beneficial microorganisms. It also sequesters carbon, permanently. Good stuff. I had four nice bags of sawdust from a neighbor's woodworking project I had saved all winter so I could make another batch. I managed to burn up a lot of scrap wood, and the barrel of biochar turned out nicely. Lots of nice fluffy charcoal that wouldn't need to be crushed into powder. I hosed down the contents of the barrel until I was sure everything was nice and wet, then turned in for the night. This was my first project for the week, and it took all day. I have several pictures on the previous posts, but here's one showing the gases escaping and burning off.

Chickens and some scrap wood

The next morning I checked the barrel to find, to my chagrin, an inch or two of charcoal in the bottom! Lesson 1: I needed more water. The charcoal was above combustion temperature, and when the air worked down to some still dry charcoal, it ignited, drove off the water, and it all burned up. Lesson 2: I should have spread out the charcoal immediately so it would cool, maybe onto the area I wanted to enrich, and hosed it all down more thoroughly. It was a lot of effort down the drain. However, we still have a lot of scrap wood to burn. Anybody out there got a big pile of sawdust?

New guy in town part 2

(If you haven't already, go read the previous post.) Being the new guy in town has brought several new experiences into my life:

• I now patronize four new coffee shops. Five if you count the one in Borders.
• I'm learning new geography (more on that in a future post).
• I get lost a lot, as in an extra 15 minutes roaming around in the rain on the motorcycle this evening trying to figure out where I am. With my rain gear in the side carrier.
• I get to say "I've never been here before in my life," a lot. This creates one of two reactions in the clerk on the other side of the counter. Either increased politeness and cheerful hospitality, or thoughts along the line of  "Hey, a new sucker!" The former raise their eyebrows, the latter lower them. 

I also make new friends, and that is what this post is about.

My new job is in a smallish office building, about the size of a standalone doctor's office. We occupy the first floor, and the dozen or so folks here are mostly youngish (compared to me), extremely competent geeks. For example, they get math jokes. (Picture the letter pi telling the square root of minus 1 to "get real." That's pretty funny.)  I just finished a glossary of their technical terms. It's 11 pages long. They speak in abstruse languages like Ruby, Scrum, OOP, Jira, and yaml.To their credit, they seem impressed with my German, Greek, and Hebrew.

My colleagues are mostly guys, though one is a slender blonde who wears her hair in glorious, curly disarray. She has a knack for pointed (read piercing) wit; she's better at it than the guys, and they hold her in respect—or fear. One fellow, who prefers a diminutive name, could fit the nickname "Goldilocks" except his hair is black. Another happens to be from the neck of the woods where I came from, and he's actually normal. My wife snickers whenever she hears that someone is from Elkton, the town just over the border in Maryland. Another of these colleagues has a beard long enough that he could fit right in with the Amish. Another, whose name ends with a q, taught me to say "how are you" in Bengali. Every one of them has something really interesting in their background.

Bucky Balls

They all play with little rare-earth magnetic spheres called bucky balls. You should see the shapes they make. I saw a stellated icosahedron (look it up) and a TIE fighter. They won't make into a nice moebius strip, though.
I feel honored to be invited when they go out for lunch, which is often at Annapolis' big mall, just across the street. The street happens to be the town's main drag, and it has no provision for pedestrians. They call crossing the street "playing Frogger."

Usually the food court is busier than this

We go to the food court, every man for himself, then find a table, and eat. Conversation is lively and they don't talk about work. They even listen when I contribute.  They're not too good at one kind of math—they guessed my age at somewhere between 58 and 72.