March 31, 2008

Big Red Truck.

There's really not a whole lot to talk about today. The internets are boring, and it's a gray, rainy day outside.

But in brighter news, our buddy Dave, who is always doing nice things for us, swapped our Jeep for his Ford F-350 pickup yesterday. I figure he must have spotted me Sanford & Sonning a load of 2x4x10's out the passenger window of the Jeep Saturday (their combined weight would easily have broken the roof rack) and he took pity on me. So the problem this week is to get as much demolished as possible while I have an all-purpose utility vehicle to haul it away in—the crap on the floor and out in the garage goes first—and then I move on to the front porch. Fortunately/unfortunately, I have a bunch of paying work to wade through first, so I can't start swinging any hammers until that's complete. Thanks Dave!

Posted on March 31, 2008 12:59 PM | link to this entry

March 28, 2008

Relics and Artifacts

Our new gallette iron (Berarducci model Grand GI-3) showed up yesterday! It's in absolutely beautiful condition when compared to the other one I bought last year. Notice the difference in the size of the patterns—the top is a Petit GI-1. I must now resist the urge to track down a GI-2 to complete the trio.

And, as a heartfelt and thoughtful birthday gift, the Scout's new daddy gave me this beautiful display case, with a fender badge cut from the original sheet metal and a copy of the VIN tag (he needs the real thing to re-register the chassis with the DMV). I need to dig up my Chewbacca action figure and put him in the case too.

Posted on March 28, 2008 10:26 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

March 25, 2008

Multiplication.

January 29.
Dear Zygote,
I'm writing this to you so that I'll remember how it felt when the OB showed us a small dark spot on your mother's uterus, centered it, and said, "That's your baby." It was a peculiar sensation somewhere between my stomach, which felt like it was on spin cycle, and my head, which was alternating between happiness and dizziness. I reached for my wife's hand and held it while the doctor printed out some grainy pictures.

We've been working on this particular project for a while now, and when she told me we should look into buying a pregnancy test, I was cautiously optimistic. We'd had several false alarms in the second half of last year, so I wasn't going to get my hopes too high. One Saturday afternoon in January, we shopped for groceries and home supplies, and when we returned home I got lost in my project, obliviously walking past her several times with handfuls of tools intent on breaking something. When I brought her in to look at the progress, I wondered why her eyes were welling, thinking, dirty old wallpaper can't make her this happy. In a rare moment of clarity, I correctly guessed the reason for her emotion, we held each other in the half-demolished doctor's office, and I was caught between waves of joy and stark terror. This is for real.

Today, before the first meeting with our OB, we sat in the waiting room for our appointment, both nervous and lost in our own thoughts. I skimmed Outside magazine, unable to put the sentences together, and held her hand. Inside the exam room, with the lights turned down, I was amazed that a spot five millimeters long could have such a strong effect on me. The doc pointed out the highlights (not much, considering your size) and assured us everything was fine and that our conception date was most likely the one we thought it was.

February 12.
Dear Lima Bean,
We can see your little heart beating clearly in the grainy black and white monitor next to the exam table. I reach for your mother's hand again, and we both are smiling as the doctor takes measurements. I'm not ashamed to say I got choked up as she told us it's looking good, and that we're past the first big hurdle.

February 26.
Dear Kumquat,
That's what we're calling you this week. See, mommy gets these emails every week that talk about what to expect and what's happening and what to look for, and they compare your size to fruits and vegetables. Which is ironic.

At first, the changes were minor, but now we are dealing with the brutal onslaught of morning sickness, which should be renamed monthly sickness. Food—the mere thought of food—seems to have lost all of its appeal; certain things now go by codenames so as not to make your mother's fickle stomach backflip with displeasure. There are days when the subject is completely verboten, and I must simply place some substance, any substance, in front of her and pray it will not turn her stomach. We have tried all the usual cures: Ginger, watermelon, saltines, graham crackers, ice water, etc., etc.

You laugh at these things. Our normal lackadaisical eating schedule has been supplanted by your demands: YOU WILL BRING FOOD EVERY THREE HOURS. I am horrified to find myself in charge of the menu planning, which is sort of like letting a blind man fly a plane: it's only a matter of time before the whole thing becomes a smoking crater in the ground. You'll find out soon enough what a lousy chef your father is. Thankfully, there has only been one time mommy has sent food back to the kitchen, a dark experience involving a bean burrito unknowingly sabotaged with zucchini. You and mommy both don't like zucchini. Bananas and cantaloupe are always welcome on the menu, but when you get tired of these failsafes, we're fucked.

Meanwhile, the trick has been to keep an outward sense of normalcy while we wait for the first trimester to pass while lying to everybody. Sorry, everyone, we're sorry for the subterfuge, avoidance, and outright lies when you've asked how things are going: "Nothing's new here." The truth is, we're both worn out. Your mother's had to beg off from dinner plans due to 'food poisoning' once already, and we're trying to avoid any social occasion that involves alcohol. This has not been 100% successful, especially given our, ahem, well-known love for the grape and grain. You'll find out about that, too. Meanwhile the secret is killing me.

March 11.
Dear Fig,
Today your parents dragged themselves out of bed to be in the city by 7:45 for a more comprehensive checkup at the hospital, a scant two days after the federally mandated joke called Daylight Savings Time. See how much we love you? You'll find out how grumpy we are at six in the morning in a couple of months.

We got some higher-resolution pictures of you from a cheerless technician who jabbed the sensor clear through to mommy's spine, and for the first time we heard the strong, clear whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of your heartbeat, which made me dizzy with pride. You look good! You have a nose, and little arms, and every time the tech bonked you on the head with the sensor you jumped around like a flea. You're a bit larger than a fig, actually—eight centimeters, to be exact. So we want you to know that you're ahead of schedule and to slow down a little. Your neural tube looks good, which is a relief. We talked to the counsellors about our family histories and tried to remember all the aches and pains and diseases that run through our family trees, and then they took about a gallon of your mommy's blood for testing, and then we were done and it was time for a SANDWICH.

Mommy is holding up well, considering you make her feel like throwing up all the time. I'm running out of ideas for dinner, though, so I'd appreciate it if you'd lift the ban on vegetables, chicken, potatoes, salad, and, well, everything else besides cantaloupe, bean burritos and Trader Joe's Ginger Almond & Cashew Granola cereal. Because they can't make enough of that stuff if that's all the two of you can eat.

Lately there's been a lot of talk about subprime mortgages, stagflation, and unemployment. These are all fancy terms for HOLY SHIT THE SKY IS FALLING. They say "timing is everything", and it looks like we've picked a swell time to start our new family. Things are still reasonably OK right now, but I'm hoping the country hasn't devolved to a Road Warrior state of anarchy by the time you're ready to pop out. All of this cheerful banter has daddy laying awake late at night pondering different ways of earning money to feed you. But don't worry, little one. I'll do whatever I've got to do to keep you safe, warm, and happy.

March 18.
Dear Lime,
Today was a huge day for the three of us. We saw the OB this morning to listen to your heartbeat, which always chokes me up, and every time we talk with her I like her better. I hope she's the one who hands you to your mother on your birthday. We started making some calls to my family to give them the good news, and sent your first picture, and I'd like to thank you for the best birthday present EVER.

We've started telling a few people now, which is alternately exciting and tiring. Your grandparents are thrilled, and they're chomping at the bit to spoil you rotten with all kinds of things they never would have dreamed of giving us, their children. Your great-grandfather really couldn't hear us too well, but after the fifth or sixth time shouting "We're having a baby" into the phone, I think he got it. It's this whole complicated thing with his hearing aid and batteries...we'll explain that to you someday. Hopefully you will get to meet him in person, and hopefully he'll be able to hear you.

Mommy would like to thank you for reducing the level of nausea to a dull roar. The past four or five days has been much better on her, and it's good to see the two of you up and moving around. The three of us took a drive to Lancaster this past weekend to peep some furniture at an outlet store, and you both held up surprisingly well. She's now deep in migraine territory though, which means many evenings are spent in a dark, quiet cave awaiting the bliss of sleep. The cats are not happy with the new arrangement, because they are now banished to the basement each evening, following a frightening moment when one of them used your head for a launching pad (sorry about that). And hey! That Which Shall Not Be Named isn't so vomit-inducing anymore! Talking about it is still tricky, and smelling it still isn't acceptable, but she can actually fix some things for herself in the morning, to which I have to say THANK YOU, because suddenly you've decided that you're getting the two of you up at 6:30AM, and I just can't hang with that.

March 23.
Dear Medium Shrimp,
Yeah, I'm sorry you're now being compared to shellfish. I think they could have come up with something more imaginative than an hors d'oeuvre, and my guess is that you're larger than that anyhow. I've never had the pleasure of eating a shrimp bigger than a lime, but I bet it would be good. I'm sure you'll smell better than shrimp, unless it's shrimp with Old Bay. In which case daddy might have to snack on one of your arms with a cold beer. And hey, what's this whole thing about the smell of beer making mommy want to puke her guts out? You're Irish, kid! Beer is the lifeblood of our people! And your father just learned how to brew it for himself. This is a cruel joke, little one.

This weekend, some carefully laid plans to tell your mother's family at Easter dinner were waylaid by an abrupt visit to the emergency room (not you or your mother, so don't worry), but your aunt is now at home and doing fine. We did finally share the good news with them, even if it wasn't quite the way we wanted, which means it's now time to notify the internets. Dear Internets: WE'RE HAVING A BABY.

Posted on March 25, 2008 4:00 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

March 24, 2008

Score! (again)

After one and a half years of quiet on an Ebay watchlist, a Berarducci gallette iron in the correct size (GRAND GI-3) finally popped up this evening. I have a client who pays me with PayPal for small jobs, and it just so happened he paid me last week for some old work. One email to the seller later, the iron is on its way to us.

Posted on March 24, 2008 11:21 PM | link to this entry

March 22, 2008

More Boom.

This morning I got back to work in the exam room after a week's absence and a gnawing hunger to break more stuff reached the boiling point. When last we left off, the huge pile of debris had disappeared and the walls in the main office were laid bare to the studs.

I started by shutting off the water to the sink and disconnecting the trap; moving it into the front room was easy. The toilet, however, has some ass-tacular piping that won't fully shut off. The drunken plumber who extended the lines into the bathroom used a mixture of copper, pvc, chewing gum and prayer to get water to the toilet, and because of a $0.39 plastic faucet I can't yank it. So that will all be coming out when the lines get moved.

After cursing an empty room for a while, I started dropping the cieling over the bathroom, which was installed about a foot lower than the exam room, in line with the front porch roof beyond. Several things became clear as the drywall came down; one of which was that the carpenter must have been related to the plumber, or possibly drinking buddies. The second was that the ends of the joists in the blue bedroom above were open to the uninsulated air above the porch, resulting in very cold floors during the winter.

Next, I took a crowbar to the rest of the bathroom walls, pulling down the nasty red paneling and the nastier sheetrock underneath. The carpenters must have been in a hurry, because half the studs they installed were studs in theory alone: two short pieces of scrap wood joined to make one long piece. Thankfully, the end studs were whole, which meant the walls never fell down.

Continuing out into the front office, I found that the outer wall came later than the inner wall, because it was framed over the drywall on the ceiling and the nice pine flooring. This is perplexing. It means neither of these walls are load-bearing in the traditional sense; It also means I'll probably have to yank some of the office ceiling down to see what I'm framing against.

Looking around this week, I found Lowe's has stock Pella store-brand windows that are almost exactly the size we need; $100 will get us a white double-hung window with a low-E rating and insulated glass to put in along the outside wall, which is definitely affordable. I'm thinking about six of them, possibly in a bank like the ones above, or maybe spread out in pairs of two.

Doors seem to be relatively inexpensive, too: I found a prehung wooden single French door for a little under $200, but I'll probably have to special order it. And then, there are toilets and sinks....

Posted on March 22, 2008 9:41 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

March 20, 2008

House Renovations.

The Houseblog is finally fixed. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it or migrate the posts over to the main weblog (probably the latter), but it's not giving "This directive could not be processed" errors or whatever it was saying. Carry on.

Posted on March 20, 2008 6:10 PM | link to this entry

Local History.

Today I was at a client site attempting to troubleshoot what could generously be called the worst piece of commercial software I've ever looked at. It turned out that I couldn't do anything to solve the problem, but what made the trip worthwhile was the location: a bombed-out looking collection of stone and brick buildings, decidedly 19th century architecture, surrounded by fields of junk and a mountain of steaming mulch. Many of the structures looked fascinating and practically begged for further exploration, but discretion won out over curiosity and I elected to shoot from a distance (mostly).

My Google-fu reveals the origins of this strange wasteland: it is the remnants of Daniels, MD, a mill town dating back to the 1840s, which was laid waste by Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The cupola in the photo above is the bell tower of the St. Albans church, now bricked up to prevent vandalism.

For train nuts, this is a tour of the old B&O Main line, which cuts right through the heart of what used to be Daniels. This site is notable for the excellent aerial photo of the mill in 1956.

Posted on March 20, 2008 4:27 PM | link to this entry

March 19, 2008

Seven-Up

This is a shot of some excellent signage in beautiful downtown Columbia, Pennsylvania, an old foundry town on US 30 outside of Lancaster.

Posted on March 19, 2008 2:21 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

March 17, 2008

I'm Confused.

Perhaps, dear interwebs, you can help me figure this out. And let me just apologize up front if my ignorance offends anyone.

What, exactly, besides sharing a four-year-old girl and four years of marriage, entitles the ex-Mrs. Paul McCartney to $50 million dollars? I don't understand how this rich people divorce thing works, exactly.

According to this CBS News article, the judge ruled that Paul has to provide the daughter $70K US annually. On top of that, he pays for tuition and nanny services. I understand this completely, and were I the judge, I'd probably have upped it a bit to help pay for bombproof round the clock security, given the frequency of nutjobs coming after the Beatles and their families. So the child is taken care of. CNN reported:

Mills said she was unhappy with that amount because it isn't enough for school tuition, private security, or first-class airfare.

From what I read, she has custody of the child. Isn't part of that her responsibility?

Then I read, "Mills had sought almost $250 million", while Paul was offering a $30 million settlement, "including her own assets, which the court assessed at $15.6 million." When is $15 million dollars not enough? And what kind of mental patient believes $250 million is a fair settlement for four years of marriage?

Pardon me for being blunt here, but I don't think she worked for that money. I seem to remember it was Paul doing the world tours, writing the songs, and producing the albums, before he met this woman. It could be that he is a tyrant and a bully and a bastard to live with and be married to, but I kind of doubt it. From what I've read about this, it seems like the ex is coming off as a money-grubbing bitch.

What do you think?

Posted on March 17, 2008 12:41 PM | link to this entry | Comments (9)

March 15, 2008

Crash, Boom, Bang. Repeat.

I took up an offer of help today to demo and haul away the remainder of the drywall in the exam room. Hopefully I didn't drive away my generous benefactor for the remainder of time.

For those that have been in the side bathroom, this is where the big white cabinet thing used to be. The cabinet itself is now in little pieces in a landfill. After pulling down the nasty reddish paneling behind that, this is what I found. That makes two doors in the same wall. This is the one we knew about previously (that's my new electrical box in the lower left). The moulding and drywall you see here is all gone now.

This is looking towards the bathroom. All of the drywall and insulation on the outside walls is gone, a portion of the dividing wall into the bathroom is gone, and the ceiling is completely gone.

Alternate view. We hauled over a half a ton of debris from the room out to the dump in two trips. Words cannot describe my gratitude.

The ceiling was never insulated, which explains why the atrium upstairs lost so much heat, and why the doctor eventually had a drop ceiling installed. We threw the flouresecent lighting out, because the tubes were the old single-pole design (impossible to find replacements for) and the ballast in one of the units was leaking black goo into the housing.

Next, I'm going to shut the plumbing off and pull the sink and toilet in the bathroom so that I can gut that entire space and frame it out from scratch. And then I have to figure out a way to get the air conditioner, which is as large as a fridge, out of the window and down to the ground without killing myself or anyone else.

Posted on March 15, 2008 11:41 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

March 14, 2008

Spring Around The Corner.

This morning, waiting for coffee to brew, I was sleepily cleaning the dishes in the sink when I spied the first three dirty yellow male finches of the season on our thistle feeders, munching away. By the time I was able to get to my camera and put the long lens on, they were gone.

Posted on March 14, 2008 4:48 PM | link to this entry

March 13, 2008

All In A Day's Work.

I took a break from the day job today to do a little demolition in the old exam room.

This is so I know where to get replacement cartridges for my mask. (It's better than hunting through Lowe's aimlessly for a half an hour).

This is the shared wall between the house and the exam room. I figured the chimney would be in good shape when it finally appeared, and I was right. It's covered in eighty years of dust, but it's in great shape. The horizontal boards on the right side cover over the original doorway that used to open out into this space when it was a screened porch. Also note the original shingles at foot level, still nailed to the sheathing. Back in the day, instead of Tyvek, they used tarpaper, or in this case, heavy brown paper. Not very efficient.

I did a little exploratory digging under the floor sheathing and found some pretty good-looking pine. I'm leaving the sheathing down until the bulk of the heavy demolition is done, and then I'll pull it up to see what we have. This is very promising.

Here's the entire west wall minus drywall. I found a label on the back of a few of the sheets which patents it in 1919—much earlier than I'd ever thought—so the writing on the wall is definitely from 1928.

This is the shared wall between the bathroom and the exam room. I decided to pull both of the interior walls down first so I wouldn't have to deal with insulation just yet, but there's some up above the bathroom ceiling.

Now I've got to figure out a way to haul the drywall out of the middle of the floor and up to White Marsh, where there's a sanitary landfill (they won't let me dump it at my usual go-to location, right down the beltway from the house).

Posted on March 13, 2008 3:19 PM | link to this entry | Comments (6)

March 12, 2008

Productivity.

Where last week was a blur of focused energy and productive creativity, this week seems to be a shapeless, formless blob of fog. My attention span is scattered across several fronts and I'm finding it hard to concentrate. Perhaps more coffee will help.

Posted on March 12, 2008 1:59 PM | link to this entry

March 11, 2008

Fun With Automator, Part 17.

I'm pretty good with backups. I have six CD sleeves filled with digital media that spans my professional career back to 1997, and there's one Holy Grail cataloging app which indexes the entire collection. I've been looking, though, for ways to make the process easier and more automated. After all, these are computers, right?

I suppose I could learn UNIX shell scripting and use rsync to do the heavy lifting, but I don't have that much time. Instead, I've decided to bang my head against Apple's Automator. I've been down this path before, as you may remember. This time, I found some help in various places and used a little more common sense to solve my problem.

My needs were this:
On a specified recurring date, make a copy of my Mail folders.
Compress it into a Zip archive.
Move it to my Backups folder.
Open my mail application, and email me a notification.

Simple, right? Some trial and error and six scripts later, I had a working application that did what I wanted it to do reliably, and I'll share it with you here. (These instructions are for Automator 1.0.5; I haven't updated to OS X 10.5 yet on this machine).

First, from the Finder actions on the left, drag Get Specified Finder Items over into the right window. Pick whatever files need to be backed up. (This was the step that stymied me last time, for reasons I can't remember.)
Then, drag Create Archive from the same list. Rename it something that makes sense (instead of "archive").
Drag Rename Finder Items over from the list. I added underscores for separators from the pulldown lists.
Drag Move Finder Items over from the list, and navigate to the place you want the final zipped file to live.

Note: I'm using Mail.app for my email, so there are prewritten Automator actions that ship with this program. If you're using some other email client, this may not work for you.

Now, drag Launch Application over from the list. Select Mail.app from the pulldown list. In the gray action title bar, click the Files/Folders arrow and select Ignore Results From previous Action (otherwise you will email the documents to yourself).
From the Mail.app actions on the left, drag New Mail Message over, and fill out the appropriate information. (I wrote a short email that notified me of a successful backup.)
Finally, drag Send Outgoing Messages over to the right.

When all this is done, go to File -> Save As and name the action. Be sure to save it as an application. Test it out and see if it works. Make sure it doesn't move your files from one place to another as opposed to copying them. I had issues when I used the Copy Finder Items action, where it simply moved the files instead of duplicating them, which meant I lost my email for about five minutes.

Now, to set it up as a recurring event, go to iCal and click on a date sometime in the future. Name it whatever you like. In the Alarm section, choose Open File. Directly under that pulldown, choose Other... and navigate to the Automator application you just saved. Once that is selected, you should be done.

And there you have it. An automated application that will back up a folder(s)/file(s) and send confirmation email on a specified date. I could add multiple things to this archive, set it up to compare two folders, write a log file, or a number of other scripted functions, but this works for the present day.

Coming up: An Automator 2.0/10.5 workflow to automatically mount an FTP server, compare two directories, and back up the local version. Handy for people who have multiple websites, like me.

Posted on March 11, 2008 3:31 PM | link to this entry

March 10, 2008

Jet Danger Intake

Visiting Jen's father this weekend in the LP City, I played hooky for a few hours and brought the big camera over to the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum to shoot some planes.

The museum is a curious collection of donations, acquisitions and working machinery, and they have a remarkable collection of hardware parked outside spanning fifty years of aviation history. I am always drawn to older designs, so I spent hours skulking around the oldtimers in the group, trying to find good angles and interesting subject matter. Ducking inside for what I thought would be a quick review of the exhibits, I was shanghaied by a friendly, garrulous older guide who showed me every nut, bolt, and rivet of the exhibits inside on an hourlong personal tour.

Back at the house, I pulled the last of the shelving down in the corner, exposing a pencilled note from the original workmen. The room was, as far as I can tell, finished out in 98° heat, on July 12 19(28?)

Then, I pounded all the nails out of the debris on the floor of the exam room and stacked it neatly in the garage for disposal. Tomorrow I'm going to swap filters in my aspirator and start pulling drywall and molding from the walls to see what's underneath.

Posted on March 10, 2008 11:17 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

Floorplans.

So here's the basic idea for the remodeling. We're going to do a phased approach so that the exam room is completed first, and then start work on the old offices so that the front porch space becomes one large office for our businesses. This way we can use that space effectively and reclaim one of the bedrooms upstairs, and we'll add about 300sq. feet of usable, centrally heated space to the floorplan.

The bathroom downstairs will get reorganized so the toilet faces outward and the doorway opens out into a passthrough, as opposed to the bathroom being the passthrough. While we're remodeling this part, I'm going to have a new chase and water lines run from that stack up through the wall to the atrium directly above, in preparation for conversion of that room into a master bath/dressing room.

Simple, right?

(shudders)

Posted on March 10, 2008 11:25 AM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

March 8, 2008

The Doctor Is Out.

A few weeks ago, I started demoing the shelves in the old doctor's office, but several other things got in the way of finishing the job. Today the weather outside was shite so I took advantage of a free afternoon to continue working. In order to get anything done properly, I had to first move all the crap out of that room and reorganize it out on the front porch, which began with humping two steel flat files from one side of the house to the other. Then I busted out the socket set and started disassembling the exam table, which will eventually go out in the garage until we can get rid of it.

Once the room was cleared of most of the furniture, I finished pulling up the rest of the floor tile, which took about twenty minutes—most of the adhesive dried out long ago, so a nudge with a flat screwdriver was about all it needed. Then, half an hour with a good flat crowbar was all it took to get the rest of the shelves down.

We've been wondering what's behind the drop ceiling and how bad the plaster looked, and now we know. The roofing problems that at one time afflicted the atrium above leaked down to the ceiling below, so there's some staining evident. The men who hung the drywall were obviously drunk and in a hurry, because there's little or no finishing work done anywhere. It's looking like all of the drywall needs to come down, which is fine, because the whole room needs to get reinsulated anyway. And once the interior sheathing is down, it will be easier to cut holes out for new windows.

Posted on March 8, 2008 8:17 PM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

March 7, 2008

Add It Up.

Did you feel the earth swivel on its axis last night at about 11:30 EST? Did plates fly out of the cupboards and crash on the ground? Did you feel a sense of unease at any time last night while you laid in bed watching Leno?

Well, that was me, sorry. See, I failed math in the 11th grade. Miserably. I never paid attention in class, so any math concepts I picked up on were purely by chance, not due to the shining success of the American public school system. I thought I was safe when I went off to an art school for my undergraduate degree, but I should have known better than to try an escape. In a career that's seen a few shifts in direction, eventually settling into web design, I've found that my lack of math skills is an anchor preventing me from doing a lot of things that might make me more money.

At the library yesterday, I found a book called Algebra Demystified which had a good mixture of explanation to examples, and cracked it open last night before going to bed. Starting out with fractions, I made it through to page 15 or so before turning the light off, remembering some things and relearning some others. The goal is to get through most of the book before I have to return it (a total of about four weeks). It's 422 pages, which means I've got to crank through fifteen pages a night—last night that took about half an hour, which sounds just about right.

Posted on March 7, 2008 9:22 AM | link to this entry

March 6, 2008

Oldsmobile

It's been quiet around here lately, so I'm going through the archives to pull out some pictures from years past to share. This is a pretty Ninety-Eight Holiday Jen and I spotted in Oella a few years ago with beautiful chrome styling and a two-tone paint job.

Posted on March 6, 2008 9:07 AM | link to this entry

March 4, 2008

REO

I went back for another day with the Scout last Sunday. The guys who run the yard it's stored in fired up the old Reo wrecker in the lot to move some equipment around, and I spied one shiny hubcap left on an ancient split-rim tire. I'd guess these are about as rare as hubcaps get, so I took a minute to get close and snap a picture.