Fullscreen.

When I was in high school, I had several friends who were audiophiles. This was back in the days of two-wire connectors, when an amp still had a dedicated set of input jacks for a turntable. We’d spend hours discussing the merits of one brand over another, with German names competing with the latest in Japanese technology. I always favored Teutonic simplicity over bell-and-whistle laden Asian design, but my pocketbook was never able to afford anything better than third-rate Taiwanese gear. I did, however, build my own speakers, with the aid of a book from Radio Shack, several catalogs (this was pre-internet) and a trip to Canal Street in NYC to find a pair of 8-ohm woofers. I’d studied, I’d planned, I’d done the math. I had boxes of cabling, the right crimping tools, and the know-how to dive into the back of a component–featuring the complexity of a passenger jet’s flight controls–and make things work.

Somewhere in the summer of 1995, after years of crushing poverty, I’d saved up enough cash to buy myself a big-boy TV to replace the alley-sourced B/W Zenith I’d been dragging around since college. It was a 23″ color Sharp with a remote (a remote!), and it fit comfortably atop my bass amp at the foot of the bed. And it was great! It followed me from house to house and served faithfully, hooked up to all manner of AV equipment, even though it only had a coax jack for input. It saw its share of dents and cracks; a year ago or so, Finn pushed the Power button so hard that it fell backwards into the casing, prompting the creation of some plexiglas shielding. At some point in the last five years it started randomly making a high-frequency whine for no reason, but has remained the largest screen we have in the house and thus our main window to the outside world.

At my first Christmas party as a full-time employee, I was given a $100 gift card to Best Buy, and due to the limited purchasing options therein, I earmarked it for a future TV purchase. At that time the den was still a distant dream and we had a newborn to care for. Fast-forwarding two years, I had two more gift cards of equal value in hand and a big empty spot on the chimney in a finished room. Doing some research, and based on experience with computer monitors, I decided to spend on a Samsung, and looked at 32″ and 37″ offerings. I was afraid a 32″ would be too small for the space, and after measuring out a 37″ the width looked just right– about 16″ inches of clearance on either side of the chimney. I found a real nice 37″ LCD on sale and took the girls up to look it over on Monday evening. After getting one of the Best Buy floor guys to load it on a cart, I had to wade through five different upsell pitches (Blu-Ray player, extended warranty, Best Buy card, Best Buy rewards club, and Monster cable) before I could slap down all three cards and watch the balance decrease. (Points to Best Buy for not deprecating the value of two-year-old gift cards).

In the time between TV purchases, I’ve been eclipsed by several different types of technology. Component, Optical, HDMI, DVI… This new TV has an ethernet port, for christ’s sake. So now, the issue becomes: How do I get signal from the FIOS box through our amp and to the TV? Our amp is a 10-year-old Onkyo, which predates HDMI, and only passes signal through one source (meaning one must start the chain with Component and end with Component, for example). Currently, the pathway is
FIOS box -> Onkyo -> RF modulator -> TV
but I think it will have to shift to something like
FIOS box -> TV
where the TV becomes the hub for all of the components (assuming, of course, there is even a place to put the amp and speakers). I don’t have money for all new audio components, so I’m going to have to make what I have work–which means I’m going to need HDMI or Component cabling in 25″ lengths or more. My preference is to go completely digital to preserve signal quality, but we can go with component if need be (it will still support 1080p).

The first order of business is to get the stand I’ve crafted back from the welder (sometime next week, hopefully) and drill cutouts for the cabling. Then I have to cut a hole in the floor (groan) to add a plug and passthrough for cabling, and finally install the stand itself.

And, apparently I can use Serviio to connect the TV to my computer (in absence of a MacTV, which will be coming at some point in the future), so I’m going to give that a try in the meantime.

Serviio requires Java 1.6, which is not offered for OS 10.4. Because my server is running on an older G5 tower, I can’t install anything above 10.4, and thus, can’t use Serviio. Oh, well.

Resolution.

When I started this weblog in March of 2001, I did it for a couple of different reasons. The first was to keep some kind of record of what I was doing from day to day. The second was to learn more about HTML and coding. The third was to create something each day, whether it was a page design, a photograph, a drawing, or writing.

As I approach the ten-year mark, I’m looking back through the archives and realizing that updates have been spotty over the last year, due to work, life, sleep, and motivation. I’m not going to blame anyone but myself for a lack of focus. That having been said, I’ve been wrestling with finding new ways to post at least something each day this year and get back into the habit of writing, as well as reawakening a routine of finding at least one thing each day to photograph.

The other thing I’m going to work on, with the anniversary as a target date, is getting the rest of the static content from the old weblog into WordPress once and for all.

In the meantime, electrical work on the side porch is stalled while I wait for our neighbor to get back to me. I was going to schedule drywall delivery and installation for this coming weekend, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen right now.

Mr. Scout stopped over to look at the beer in the basement, and we took a gravity reading to see how things are progressing. While the numbers were close to the target, we figured it would be better to let it sit for another week and finish fermenting.

Box of Girl.

Finn has a friend over today while her mother (not Jen) is delivering a baby. As of 9:45 this morning, the living room is filled with ballerina outfits, cat ears, pop-poms, and toddler tunes.

Over the weekend, I was able to get some time in on the side porch, where I pulled the baffles down over the front porch and redid them to fit stringers reaching all the way up to the roofline. My neighbor the electrician stopped over for a few hours on Saturday to hang light cans, but we weren’t able to get much more than that done. We still need to hook it all up and replace the small panel with the larger one I bought a few weeks ago, which will carry more circuits upstairs to the bathroom. Up there, we need to level the ceiling joists so that the cans can go in and switches can be run. I had our drywall guy come out and give us a price for both floors, which came in somewhere around “how soon can you get out here”, so the electrical has bumped up in priority.

The Harbor Freight multitool came in so handy, I don’t know what I was doing without it. I trimmed a section of roofline in a back corner, put in two old-work boxes in the shared wall (through 3/4″ sheathing), cut notches in the stringers for cables to pass behind, and cut the first of many sections of flooring out to be replaced. It went through hard pine like butter and made what would have been a time-intensive, frustrating task into a minor two-minute nuisance.

Before packing up for the evening, I cleaned up the space and took a minute to imagine it with drywall. We’re getting close!

Atrium Progress.

Update: Here’s the current status as of this morning:

This Friday we got a big present in the driveway: a nice man dropped off a 40-yard dumpster where the Honda usually sits. I proceeded to start filling that thing up with as much crap as I could, and spent a little time on Saturday afternoon swinging a hammer at the closet in the atrium.

There’s a lot more to show as of this evening, because Mr. Scout came by with the Big Bar and cleaned the rest of the place out–the walls are bare to the sheathing, the ceiling is down, and the floor is clear to the original tin. I’d have a picture but it was too dark to shoot in there this evening.

Upon further inspection, I think we’re going to skip the washer/dryer combo in favor of a larger stall shower and reasonably-sized entry door; many of the windows will disappear but we’re going to add skylights above to make up for their absence. And because the floor needs to be raised to level things off, we’re going to add electric radiant heat underneath to keep things warm and toasty.

Minus Humidity.

Today’s weather is a little less like being in the moist maw of Hell and more like being in actual summertime, which is a nice break. Unfortunately, our basement humidifier, which has been going strong since about 2005, decided it had finally enough and began to make louder and louder rumbling noises as the compressor cycled on and off. Things started feeling a bit stickier down there, and a recent reconnaissance of the litter boxes revealed some fuzz that doesn’t usually belong there. So I got up early this morning and hit the Lowe’s for a new unit, and picked up some extra parts for a mister I’m going to set up at the parade party. It’s essentially a 3GPM mister head hooked up to a set of 1/2″ PVC piping via garden hose, with a ball valve to turn it on or off. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to get it standing elegantly; I’ll probably just use a couple of pipe clamps and attach it to a wooden spike in the ground, and then wrap that with some foam pipe insulation to protect little hands and feet.

Progress.

The big news around the Lockardugan estate these days is a successful mortgage refinance, which (among other things) has consolidated several large bills into one smaller payment at a lower interest rate. We will be seeing additional benefits beyond a smaller monthly outlay, beginning with forward progress on the side porch and atrium.

To recap, the day before Finn was born, we installed a door between the living room and what used to be the exam room in preparation for renovations. Predictably, the 20 months since then have been filled with all-baby-all-the-time, so the exam room sat untouched while we gathered some shekels and got her moving under her own power. Our main stumbling block, even before she was born, was how to organize the space in the atrium above, due to the need for plumbing—the plan has always been to use that space for a master bathroom adjoining the front bedroom. The jigsaw puzzle goes together like this: In order to finish off the downstairs, we need to put piping in for the upstairs bathroom. In order to get piping upstairs, we need to have a plan for how the bathroom up there will be laid out. In order for piping to go in, we need a chunk of cash to pay the plumber.

So, we’ve got the cash. Now, for the plan. On paper it sounds simple, but we have been stumped as to how to fit a sink, toilet, and bathtub into a space surrounded by windows and flanked by a fixed attic staircase. Working with only one interior wall makes planning difficult, because a shower on an outside wall is always going to be chilly.

What we've got now.

We enlisted the professional aid of Mr. Scout to help visualize a solution to our problem above, and get the ball rolling on the space below. (The immediate goal is to have a working bathroom on the first floor in place by July 4 for parade-goers, and the long-term goal is to have a functional den completed by, oh, let’s say Thanksgiving.)

The upstairs room is, as mentioned before, completely surrounded by old, creaky windows. The basement steps drop down into the back third, right next to a doorway that was tacked on to the rear of the porch. The staircase is next to a surround which encloses the chimney.

Our checklist for the upstairs bathroom is:

• A shower
• A toilet
• Dual sinks
• A large, usable closet
• Sunshine
• An over/under washing machine/dryer (not necessary, but would be nice)

Option 1

Mr. Scout did some measuring and some thinking, and suggested a radical solution: Make the back bedroom the master. Flip the current “closet”, push it forward to meet the depth of the chimney, and make the back 1/3 of the space a dressing room. Chop the attic stairs and devise some kind of hinged stair solution that can be folded up and hidden. Delete entirely the doorway into the front bedroom. Delete all but a few of the windows on the side of the house and take back that wall space. Put a tub/shower against the back of the closet and some kind of vanity/built in cabinetry against the front wall with the sinks. And put the toilet along the outside wall so it’s not the first thing you see upon entry.

Option 2

I did another variation on this idea where the tub becomes a stand-up shower in order to fit the washer/dryer alongside; we’ll have to measure that exactly and see if it can go somewhere else instead. I’m not entirely sure I want to delete the doorway to the blue bedroom, but if there’s another way to arrange the room to make things work better, I’m on board.

Downstairs plan

Downstairs, we’re altering the original plan just a touch to make the new bathroom more usable. Mr. Scout suggested widening the room from 44″ to 50″, turning the toilet and widening the window above to center them visually, and then using a 24″ door against the office wall, opening inward, for entry. We’ll level the floor and tile it. The casement windows I was originally considering for the den will change to a trio of double-hung units like we’ve got throughout the house, and the back door will be enlarged from a miniscule 24″ to a standard 32″ 15-pane glass (although this one will be exterior-grade steel). I’m still on the fence about what to do with the window over the radiator on the back wall; it may come out and it may stay in.

We’re shooting to have a working toilet and possibly a sink in place, surrounded by some roughed-in drywall for our parade guests. After that hubbub dies down we can get to the serious business of new windows, siding, and what to do about the floor (the end cutting pliers and I have a date with the floor sometime very soon), as well as insulating the coal cellar below (more tigerfoam) and doing something with the rickety porch off the back.

Weekend Wrap-Up.

Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.

The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.

Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.

She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!

Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.

At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.

With the new motor installed

In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.

After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in

Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).

Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”

When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.

Let’s Create a Carburetor!

Wow, here’s a fantastic new repository of info for a shade-tree n00b like me: Secondchancegarage.com.  I followed a link for interpreting a vacuum gauge and stayed for Let’s Create a Carburetor!.

How To Rebuild An American V-8 Carburetor

From Jalopnik.com, a bit of timely information: How To Rebuild An American V-8 Carburetor. I’m in the process of buying a couple of 2-barrel Holley 2300′s for rebuild and tinkering so that I can become both familiar and adept at working with them.

Junkyard Update.

This morning I found myself at the entrance to Crazy Ray’s just after opening, tools in hand, looking for a Saturn of comparable vintage in order to pull the moonroof switch and motor. I had almost given up finding one in the GM section when I stumbled upon a dark green SC-2 tucked away next to the motorcycle heap, and as luck would have it, it had a moonroof.

Pulling the switch was a 5-minute project, but getting the motor out was another thing entirely. I wasn’t worried about saving the headliner, so that came out easily with a boxcutter, but the mounting nuts were small and hard to access, and I didn’t have a socket set. some elbow grease and the pliers on my Leatherman started the nuts, and within ten minutes I had it in my hands.

I had a little time to kill, so I browsed the SUV and import section for anything that might be useful for our existing fleet, and to see if there was anything new and interesting, but pretty much struck out.

After paying $21 for the switch and motor, I returned to the parking lot and plugged the new switch in to see if it worked; unfortunately, there was no response. The winding screw does work, so I’ll have to have Jen help me push the glass up the track while I wind the motor in order to close and seal the top completely.