Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Window Game

Bang! Bang! Bang! Somebody was pounding on my front door. (This happened last night just before dark.) I went to the front door and two men stood there. They were window salesmen. Ordinarily I would have grabbed my shotgun and ordered them off my property. I didn’t do that, for two reasons. One, I don’t own a shotgun. And two, I’m thinking about buying new windows for my house so I was willing to listen to their spiel.

At some point I asked what their windows would cost me. “We can’t tell you that until we measure your windows.”

“But they’re ordinary casement windows,” I pointed out, “they’re 35 by 48 inches.”

“We have to measure them precisely," one man said.

“You see, our windows are custom made,” the other man added. I looked at him.

“All replacement windows are custom made,” I pointed out.

“Technically that’s true,” he admitted, “but …”

“So you have to come inside my house and measure all the windows before you can give me even a ballpark figure? You can’t tell me if it’s going to be three fifty per window or two fifty per window? There are window companies advertising replacement windows on TV for one eighty nine. There’s a place on the Boulevard that advertises windows for two twenty-five. You can’t give me a number?”

They were adamant that they could not. However, lucky me, there would be an installation guru in my neighborhood in a few days and if I would provide them with my phone number their office would call me and schedule an appointment for window measurement. And the window guru would have a sample window with him.

“If I buy windows I want a local company to do the installation,” I told the guy who seemed to be in charge.

“We’re local,” he said. “Look at this flyer.”

He handed me a flyer and while it showed their address as Virginia Beach, it also listed several other locations including Richmond. Not exactly local, but close enough. I gave them my name and number. They left happy.

I went inside my house and immediately started getting an uneasy feeling about the whole window thing. Things didn’t add up.

I googled the company. They did have a Richmond location, but it was a suite in an office building. It didn’t seem to me like window installers would be working out of an office suite. Wouldn’t they need a place to store windows, parts, tools, materials for trimming the windows, and so on? I suspected the Richmond location was a sales office. What good is that to me? If I have a broken window I want them to send an installer to fix it, not a salesman. But the installers are probably working out of their home base in Virginia Beach. So where the rubber meets the road: not local.

And why did they have to make precise measurements of my windows to tell me the price?  Supposedly they have a lot of experience installing windows in all kinds of homes. Surely they’ve replaced casement windows in a brick-over-block house before. (If they haven’t, I don’t want them to start learning with my house.) And if they have done that job before, why don’t they know what it costs?

Then a thought struck me. Their sales program is designed to get me invested in the sale: they walk around measuring the windows, discussing various models of windows they sell – casement, single hung, double hung, and so on, and the different configurations I can order – for example, do I want “dividers” inside the window to make it look like six small panes instead of one large pane, or do I want one horizontal divider, and so on. This is time consuming but must be done. They’ll have a model window with them and spend some time showing me all the features of their replacement windows (I think they’re called “window systems” now). By the time a person goes through all this to get a quote, most people are probably ready to tell them to go ahead with the installation.

I call that a game. They may think of it as a sales technique. But to me it’s a game. I’m not playing games with these people.

One more thing bothered me. The sales guys said their windows were triple glazed. I have an old house which, despite weather-stripping, has its share of air leaks. The hardwood floor has no insulation under it and gets very cold in winter. The outside walls have no insulation, nor any way to add insulation. Triple glazed windows cost more than double glazed windows and are better at stopping heat loss, but considering all the ways an old house loses heat, will I even see the difference between double and triple glazing? Doubtful. Going from single-glazed to double glazed windows is where I will get maximum heating/cooling savings per dollar spent. Triple glazed windows are overkill for this old house.

All of these factors were on my mind this evening when a woman called to set up an appointment for the window estimator. I told her that I was disappointed that I was unable to get a price out of the salesmen who came to my house the previous night.

“The windows have to be measured,” she began. Déjà vu all over again.

“I’ve ordered replacement windows before,” I told her. “I’ve gotten quotes before. The way it works is: I get quotes, I decide who I want to install the windows, then they measure the windows exactly. When those guys told me I can’t get a price until someone comes inside and precisely measures the windows, they’re playing a game with me.”

“No, it’s just that all our replacement windows are custom made,” she began again.

“All replacement windows are custom made,” I told her. “That’s why you have to measure them so precisely. Now you’re playing a game with me.”

“Have a good week,” she said.

I knew what was coming next and I hit the End Call button. I was a little surprised she gave up so easily. I think these people must work from a script, even if it’s in their heads. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Customer has this objection, answer it this way. Customer has that objection, answer it that way. Scripted, all the way down to getting the customer to sign on the dotted line. But how do you handle a customer who points out that your script is bogus? Abort the call and call the next phone number on the list?

Of course, they could tell the potential customer, “Ok, give us the approximate dimensions of the windows and we’ll get you an approximate window cost.” But I bet these guys are selling some very expensive windows. They know if they tell someone the cost up front, that someone is likely to tell them, “Adiós muchachos.” So they have to come into your home and sell these windows. They have to use incentives (if you buy today, you’ll get fifty percent off the labor!). Only then do they finally reveal the cost of the project.

I guess it works, most of the time.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Park by the River

The day was sunny and cool; the air was 58° F when I decided to visit one of my small city’s parks by the river. Though, this park is not an “official” park. It’s just a grassy area beside the river with a small parking area, a few scattered benches overlooking the river, and a porta-potty. Huge towers carry high voltage electrical lines through the center of the park. It was quiet and serene. The sun shone brightly and its warmth felt good in the cool air. A few fishermen were trying their luck along the banks of the river, and a family of three played ball with their young child.

Looking east:

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Looking west:

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A variety of waterfowl were present. Ducks, geese, blue herons, and hawks were in the air and on the water. Below, a white goose stands in shallow water near the riverbank.

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Below a Canada goose stands on the riverbank.

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Below, a white goose leads the way, followed by a Chinese goose and a white Chinese goose.

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As I sat on a bench gazing over the water and snapping an occasional picture, a businessman (for so I took him to be) wearing a red and white pin-striped shirt with a red tie, black dress pants, and polished black shoes walked up to me and asked me if this was a good place to fish for shad. I told him it was likely to be so. When I was a boy, I fished for shad in this river very near this spot. The river used to be thick with shad when they were running. That was many yarns ago. I don’t know if the humans have left any fish alive in this river. The man thanked me and departed.

The park was quiet again. Faint conversation drifted to me from fishermen far away on the other side of the river. The sun beamed its warmth upon me. Tranquility returned. For the moment, it was all good.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Aurora

Auroras above mountains and lakes near Kirkenes, Norway, are shown in this Vimeo video created by Terje Sørgjerd. The music is from Gladiator Soundtrack: Now we are Free. Auroras are caused when high-energy particles strike the Earth’s atmosphere. In Roman mythology, Aurora was the goddess of the dawn.

Full-screen mode is recommended. The full-screen button looks like: full-screen-button

Friday, March 25, 2011

Modem Intervention

I screwed the pooch today. But then, there was divine intervention. Apparently. And all pooches were unscrewed (de-screwed?)

The greedy suits at Comcast increased their modem rental fee from five to seven dollars per month. I thought five was too much; seven pushed me off the fence to buy a modem. After all, replacing a cable modem is simple, right? Just swap modems and call the cable company’s support line and read them the MAC ID off the new modem. Right?

Bwa-hahaha! In my house, there’s no such thing as a simple job.

I buy a Motorola SB6120. I take it home, disconnect the old modem (an SB5120), and connect the new modem. I call Comcast support and give them the MAC ID number. I restart my computer. I open a browser to Google and …

I get “Server Not Found”. I can’t get on the ‘Net. The modem is online; the Comcast techie on the phone says she can see it. The trouble is at my end: the new modem can’t link to the pc. I restart the pc again, but it still can’t get online. I thank the techie and tell her I’ll work on it.

This is just supposed to work. What can be wrong?

I’m using the CAT 5e cable that came with the new modem. Maybe it is defective. I decide to swap back to the old cable. I peer over the back of the pc; the Ethernet jack is obscured by the DVI (video) connector. After fumbling around for the RJ45 jack and not finding it, I pull out the DVI plug so I can see the jack. I plug in the Ethernet cable and plug the DVI connector back in. The monitor remains dark. I switch the monitor off and back on; it stays dark. Then I realize what has happened. When I pulled out the DVI connector, Windows assumed my primary monitor was gone and quit sending data to it. I reboot the pc but the monitor stays dark. I shut off both monitor and pc and power both back up; the monitor stays dark.

Scaroo’d.

My video card is dual-display with my TV as extended desktop. So I turn on the TV and there is my extended desktop. But that only means I have the desktop background picture on the TV. It has no program icons and no taskbar; there isn’t much I can do with it. I want to run System Restore to get my primary monitor back, but even if I can open the restore application (which I can’t) it will open on the now-dark primary monitor, so I won’t be able to see or use it.

I move the mouse cursor onto the invisible primary desktop, fishing around, clicking and dragging anything I can get hold of onto the TV screen. I don’t even know what I’m fishing for … I haven’t thought that far ahead. Suddenly a white bar appears at the bottom of my TV screen with a lot of tiny icons in it. WTF?! I find I can resize the bar. Making it larger adds more icons to it; making it smaller shows fewer icons. I can even resize it so there are no icons visible.  But what is it and why has it suddenly appeared?

What if I reboot the pc and, while it is booting, hit the key to boot into Safe Mode? If that works I might get my primary monitor back long enough to run Restore. But what key boots into Safe Mode?

I can’t access Restart with my mouse, so I force a shutdown by holding down the power button. I turn it back on and as it starts up I hit the F5 key and the F8 key. After sufficient time passes, I realize the computer isn’t going into Safe Mode so I force another shutdown (yes, while it is booting). I start it again and tap the Delete key but that does nothing. Once again, shutdown. Again, start. I try F10 and get the BIOS menu. I cursor around the BIOS menu but find nothing that will get back my primary monitor back. When I continue the bootup, the primary screen stays dark. So scaroo’d. It’s a catch-22: I can get back my desktop if I do a system restore, but to do a system restore I need to access my desktop. Have I converted my computer into an oversize brick?

Then I have my first flash of inspiration. I turn off the pc and unplug the DVI cable to my monitor, hoping Windows will send the desktop over to my TV. I restart the computer and voilà, there is my Windows desktop on my TV. Then I have my second flash of inspiration. I unplug the HDMI cable to my TV and plug in the DVI cable. I turn the pc back on and my primary monitor comes to life with the Windows desktop. The white bar with icons at the bottom of the screen is just a toolbar I accidentally created by fishing blindly on the screen with my mouse cursor – I had dragged a folder to the edge of the screen which automatically created a toolbar. I dispose of the toolbar and get my folder back. Everything looks normal; amazingly, not a single desktop icon is out of place. I open my browser and it displays my homepage. I am back online! I think it’s too much to hope for as I plug in the HDMI cable, but the extended desktop appears on my TV. Everything is working and nothing is messed up. It’s a small miracle.

And it only takes about an hour to do this simple swap of modems.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Rebecca Black

I’m not a Rebecca Black basher. She didn’t write Friday. She didn’t direct the video, either. You expected Spike Jonze or David Fincher to direct a video for an unknown 13 year old girl? Ark Music Factory is … well … a music factory. They crank this stuff out daily.

It must be great to go from anonymous junior high school student to worldwide YouTube sensation appearing on Jay Leno in a week. I thought, for a 13 year old, Rebecca had a lot of poise during the interview. As for the song, the lyrics may be ludicrous but Friday has something going for it. Oh, btw … there’s an acoustic version. Really. It appears to be Rebecca and friends running through a practice of the song with what I assume to be AMF personnel in the room.

If you have that quirky sense of humor that can appreciate Firesign Theater, and you’ve watched Friday, then you’ll surely appreciate Dana Vachon’s article titled: Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's "Friday" As Radical Text. If you haven’t watched Friday and plan to, be forewarned that you may find it hard to get it out of your head. That could be a good thing or a bad thing.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Raccoon Holding Cat

A friend emailed this picture to me. It’s funny. And just a little weird.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Chicken Almond Wrap

Does anything smell better than a bowl of strawberries? Yes, but strawberries are strawberriesstill high on the list. I saw a lady make this chicken almond wrap sandwich and it looked tasty. So I made one, and it really was tasty. I didn’t use her recipe; it’s simple enough that you can wing it on your own. Here’s what you do: cut cooked chicken into small cubes; add chopped green onion and slivered almonds. Mix in poppy seed dressing. Put a tortilla wrap on a plate and spread cream cheese on it and place a lettuce leaf on it. Add the chicken almond mixture and top it with diced strawberry. Roll up the wrap and cut it into 2 or more pieces. Add strawberries on the side.

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I used fat-free cream cheese and “lite” poppy seed dressing. I calculate it has about 350 calories – a third of that from the wrap bread. It’s not diet food, but if you’re in the mood for something different to munch on, eating one or two isn’t going to kill a diet.

Click image for Flickr photo. >>

Sunday, March 20, 2011

SuperDay, SuperMoon

The weather today in central Virginia city is t-shirts and shorts weather. At 3 PM it’s sunny and 84° F. Pollen season hasn’t started yet. Birds are building nests. Squirrels are digging up nuts they buried last fall. Bradford Pear bradford pear treetrees are in full bloom along the Boulevard, the main drag through my small city.

<< This Bradford Pear tree blooms beside the entrance to the Post Office.

Today the moon is not only full but closer to the earth than it’s been in years. This phenomenon was dubbed a supermoon by astrologer Richard Nolle in the 1970s.

A normal moon, photographed from my front yard with a cheap camera, looks like this at 33x zoom. Tonight’s moon will be different. moon

Tonight’s moon will be at lunar perigee, the closest it’s been to Earth in 18 years.

I’m going to stop writing now and wait until nightfall before continuing this blog entry. I want to take a picture of tonight’s moon as it rises behind my house. I have a feeling this moon will be spectacular. I only hope its enormous gravity doesn’t suck shingles off my new roof.

(Time Passes. It gets dark outside.)

Night has fallen. I walked across the street and snapped a photo of the moon rising behind my house. Not unexpectedly, the photo was worthless. The supermoon looked pitifully small in the photo. So with the help of the GIMP, I created a picture showing how a proper supermoon should look.

Or, for those who have read Samuel Delaney’s masterwork Dhalgren, maybe this is the moon the Kid saw rising in the sky above Bellona.

supermoon

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Night of the SuperMoon

I thought I’d give my inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera another chance at taking a picture of the moon. This is about as good as it can do. Not as good as an supermoon2astronomical photo … but then again, big telescopes cost more than 99 dollars and never get dropped onto a hardwood floor.

For a cheap camera, it takes excellent close-up photos. If you missed the bumblebee photo, you can view it here.

Pansies

There are already too many pansie pictures on the Internet. But that won’t stop me from adding a few more.

Indigo and white pansy with face

Purple and yellow pansies

Yellow pansy with face

Blue and yellow pansy

Bumblebee

This is the first insect of spring I’ve seen. I think it’s a bumblebee. It had a mighty grip on my screen door.

bumblebee

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Atomic Reality

I’ve been watching the news about the Japanese reactor crisis and I have questions.

We’ve been told this reactor crisis was caused when electric power to the nuclear plant was disrupted by the quake and tsunami. That meant the plant’s cooling pumps couldn’t operate. The plant had backup diesel generators, but they were knocked out by the tsunami. The plant had backup batteries, too, but batteries (assuming the quake and tsunami didn’t destroy them) only last so long before they run down.

What I don’t understand is this: the nuclear plant generates electricity, so why does it need outside electricity to run its cooling pumps? I would expect a nuclear plant to be able to operate even if it were on an island. Or a ship. Or a submarine. What kind of nuclear plant design requires an outside supply of electricity, and if that supply is cut off the plant goes out of control? And if that isn’t a bad enough idea, put the plant on a seacoast near a geological fault line on the Pacific Ring of Fire where earthquakes are frequent. And let’s not forget there’s a reason “tsunami” is a Japanese word.

Currently the reactor, or the spent fuel rods, or both, are in partial meltdown, or full meltdown, or stable, depending on who is reporting the news. But before you run and buy iodide tablets, let’s remember a little history. It has been only a few decades since the United States and the Soviet Union were detonating atom bombs above ground on a regular basis. You’re worried about a little radioactive steam from a nuclear plant on the other side of the Pacific Ocean? Think about living in Nevada with atom bombs being detonated at the Nevada Test Site only 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. You could see the mushroom cloud for almost 100 miles in every direction, including Las Vegas. In fact, it was a tourist attraction. People went to Las Vegas to see the distant mushroom cloud of an atomic test. Yes, we had strontium-90 in our bones and we liked it!

Or maybe we didn’t like it. Because in July, 1962, the US detonated its last above-ground bomb then switched to underground testing of atom bombs. There were 828 underground atomic tests in Nevada, of which 62 involved multiple, simultaneous detonations. One third of the underground atom bomb tests were detonated directly into an aquifer. Radioactivity in the ground water there reaches millions of picocuries per liter. The federal standard for drinking water is 20 picocuries per liter.

In 1997, the National Cancer Institute determined that above-ground atomic testing had spread enough iodine-131 across the US to produce 10,000 to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer.

Strontium-90 has a half life of 28 years. Cesium-137 has a half life of 30 years. There are numerous other products of nuclear fission. These elements were carried through the air and deposited on the ground when it rained. They are still in the ground and are absorbed by plants. It will be several hundred years before they decay to a low level of radioactivity. We don’t live in a pristine and pure environment.

There are three elements that can be used to produce energy in a fission reactor: uranium, plutonium, and thorium (Th-232). Thorium is 4 – 5 times more abundant than all uranium isotopes combined. The US has enough thorium to power the country at its present energy level for over 1,000 years. With a liquid-fuel cycle (e.g., Molten Salt Reactor), there is no possibility of a meltdown, it requires no emergency cooling system, it does not produce weapons grade by-products, and it will burn up high-level waste and nuclear stockpiles.

So why don’t we build thorium reactors instead of uranium reactors? The answer is money. Thorium reactors require further development to be commercialized whereas we already know how to build uranium reactors. However, India is developing a 300 MW thorium-based reactor and plans to generate 30% of its electricity through thorium-based reactors by 2050. And this year China announced it "has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology.”

Coal power in the US accounts for 45% of the country’s electricity production, but deaths and diseases caused by breathing coal pollutants cost the US $160 billion annually. The US invented atomic weapons with the Manhattan project and put men on the moon with the Apollo program. A similar national push for thorium-based reactors could end our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity generation within a decade, and put us much closer to our goal of energy independence.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Roof Leak Redux

It rained last night. Not heavy, blowing rain like last time. This time it was a gentle rain, and my roof leaked again. As was foretold in the prophecies, right here on this blog – foretold in Fixing the New Roof, Episode 1.

Quick review: the roof was re-shingled; then, heavy rain and a leak. Called roofer. Roofer sent Jesus to fix the leak. And I, being the cynic I am, predicted it would still leak. And it did … does.

Sometimes I hate being right.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Hard Drives

In 1956, a little more than fifty years ago, IBM introduced the world’s first hard disk drive: the IBM 350 disk storage unit. Its 50 magnetic platters had a storage capacity of five million characters (5 megabytes). That’s not 5 MB per platter; it’s 5 MB for the entire unit. The 350 was 60 inches (152.4 cm) long, 68 inches (172.7 cm) high and 29 inches (73.7 cm) deep – about the size of a double-wide fridge. Its electronics used vacuum tubes, of course. The read-write heads were positioned by pneumatic controls, so the unit also contained a small air compressor.

 

 

 

 

Fast forward a half century to 2011 and we have hard drives that can fit on a fingertip and store vastly more than the IBM 350 could store. The image at right shows a Toshiba 0.85 inch hard drive with a capacity of 4 gigabytes; that’s 4 thousand million bytes.

Hard drive storage has increased 40% per year since the introduction of the device. Today, a 2 TB (terabyte) drive for your desktop PC sells for $80. Two terabytes is two thousand gigabytes and two million megabytes! In fifty years hard drives have gone from a few megabytes to a few terabytes capacity (one million times greater) and have shrunk from 60 inches wide to less than an inch wide.

Kilobytes … megabytes … gigabytes … terabytes … each prefix is one thousand times greater than the preceding prefix. What’s next and when will we get there?

In 20 years we’ll have exabyte drives. An exabyte is one thousand terabytes.

In 40 years we’ll have zettabyte drives. A zettabyte is 1000 exabytes.

In 60 years, cheap consumer hard drives will be measured in yottabytes. A yottabyte is one thousand zettabytes.

The International System of Units has no prefix beyond yotta, so I’ll have to invent a prefix for what hard drive capacities will be in 80 years. Of course, the prefix can be only one thing (and you had to see this coming). It will be … yotta-yotta.

Saturn Cassini Animation

This HD video by indie filmmaker Stephen Van Vuuren was created by combining thousands of photographs from the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn since 2004. Playback at full screen is spectacular. The video uses NO computer-generated imagery (CGI) or 3D models.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Spring

It’s not here yet. But it’s not far off, either. It’s sunny and 73° F as I type this. That’s above the normal 58° high for this date. But Spring approaching is about more than the temperature. Bradford Pear trees are blossoming with white flowers, weeds are sprouting … I even saw a honeybee perched on a dandelion. You can smell spring in the air. It’s the smell of new life growing through the crust winter left behind. The warmth, the blossoms, the smells … those are the good things about Spring. Spring comes with baggage, too. Like pollen. Lawn mowing. Sidewalk edging. Curb edging. Weeds. Why can’t they take DNA out of weeds and stick it into grass? I spray my yard with herbicide and the weeds come back. I put fertilizer and grass seed on my yard and still have less grass than last year.

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<< I have a lot of this weed in my yard. I believe this weed is Persian speedwell (Veronica persica). It’s a winter annual that is common to lawns.

 

 

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And I have a lot of this, which I believe is chickweed. Chickweed is said to be good on salads and has medicinal properties. Given the number of free-roaming cats in my neighborhood, I will definitely not be testing this weed for tastiness.

 

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What lawn would be complete without dandelions? Actually, I think little yellow dandelions are kind of pretty. Some people eat dandelion greens in their salad. Some people make dandelion tea and dandelion wine. And dandelion root has medicinal properties. I’ll stick with what I can buy at the grocery and the drugstore. But if you want to eat some of my dandelions, by all means help yourself.

I have a lot of oxalis, too, but it’s not blooming yet. Oxalis likes to grow close to walls, around steps and under awnings. I think it looks decorative but to most people it’s just another weed.

When I moved into this house, I seem to remember the beginning of grass-mowing season being the beginning of May. Then it was April. Then it was early April. This year, I just mowed my front lawn for the first time, and it’s the middle of March. Who says global warming isn’t real?

Friday, March 11, 2011

Fixing the New Roof, Episode 1

The heavy rain and wind that hit last night was a test of roofs all over the city. My new roof, only about ten days old, leaked badly – though I think the leak was confined to one entry point. I called the roofer immediately and told him about it, and he showed up at my front door this morning at 9 AM. I showed him the incriminating evidence and he said one of his guys – Jesus – would stop by later and do some repair work.

Around 1:15 PM I left the house. I returned at 1:45 PM and Jesus had already gone up on the roof, had come back down, and was starting to put his ladder on the truck. I asked him if he found the leak. He answered, “No.”

“It’s a big leak,” I told him.

“Big?” he asked.

“Big leak,” I repeated. “A lot of water came in.” I tried to describe where I thought the leak was located. Jesus does not speak English well, but using simple words and a few hand gestures I got the idea across. Jesus went back up on the roof.

I went upstairs and took the air conditioners out of the dormer windows so that I could close them tightly. I wanted to eliminate any possibility that water was entering around the air conditioners and then somehow getting though the vinyl window sill to create the leak.

When I finished I went outside. Jesus had installed a piece of “ice & water” shield and a few new shingles, and was caulking along the intersection of the dormer wall with the roof. Finally he came down off the roof. “Finished,” he said.

“Is it going to leak?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

I call this attempt to fix the leak in the roof “episode 1” because my experience is that the roofer will make a couple of attempts to fix the roof, he’ll fail, then he’ll hit the roof with everything he’s got, sealing anything and everything that looks like a potential leak. In the meantime, I’ll put down sheets of plastic and basins where the water dripped. Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

“Muchas gracias,” I told Jesus and shook his hand.

“No problem,” he answered.

I hope he’s right. No problem is what I want.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Roof Leak

Arrgggh!! My new roof is leaking. Most of the roof inside is covered with insulation and sheetrock. I have a small storage area where I can see roughly 5 or 10 percent of the roof, and as it happens there is a bad leak in that small area. Are there also leaks in places I can’t inspect? What are the odds?

So I traded an old roof that wasn’t leaking (but was losing shingles every time the wind blew hard) for a new roof that is nice and sturdy and leaks like a sieve. Sadly, it doesn’t even surprise me.

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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Special Spinach

I just made lunch for this middle-of-the-week day. Burger patties broiled under the oven broiler, topped with Worcestershire sauce and onion rings caramelized in a wok with extra virgin olive oil, and special spinach. I invented my special spinach recipe, but that doesn’t mean other people haven’t also invented it. It may have been invented hundreds of times by hundreds of people.

Caramelizing the onion rings cooks the sugar in the onion and brings out the sweetness and flavor. The dish below is three servings.

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I start special spinach by cutting up half an onion. I cook the onion in a wok with peanut oil, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, and a liberal sprinkling of red pepper flakes. Before the onion is fully cooked I add a bag of baby spinach. I add cooking sherry to steam the spinach, turning it over and over with a wooden spoon until it’s wilted.

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Good to the last bite!

Monday, March 7, 2011

Irena Sendler

This video (below) is about Irena Sendler, the courageous Polish woman who saved more than 2500 Jewish babies and children from certain death by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto. She gave the children new identities and kept lists of their original and new names buried in jars under an apple tree in her yard. After the war, she dug up the jars and tried to reunite the children with their parents, but almost all of their parents had been killed at Treblinka.

Irena was captured by the Nazis and tortured, having her arms, legs, and feet broken, but refused to divulge the locations of the children. Members of the Żegota underground rescued her as she was being taken to her execution.

Another tribute to Irena includes the song “This is God” by Phil Vassar. It’s worth watching, though there’s an unnecessary dig at Al Gore and global warming near the end, which spoils it somewhat. Irena Sendler was a life-saving angel, and a tribute to her is not the proper place to express feelings about politicans and doubts about climate science.

Irena was largely unknown to the world until 1999, when four high school students in Kansas wrote a play about her called “Life in a Jar”. The play has been performed 285 times across the United States, in Canada, and in Poland. To learn more, go to The Irena Sendler Project.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Klingon Microwave Oven

For some time now, I’ve been aware that parts of my microwave oven were made in the Klingon Empire. Clearly, the clock/timer is such a part because it uses Klingon numbers.

It still makes food hot, so what the heck.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

New Roof

Monday’s blog post commented on the high winds my city has seen as March approached, and I mentioned that my house has lost shingles. Yesterday (Tuesday) my roofer came by to replace missing shingles. I watched him go here and there on the roof, replacing shingles I hadn’t known were missing. It didn’t take him long, but by the time he was finished I had decided I was losing shingles too often on windy days. It might be time to replace the shingles. With oil prices going up, the price of asphalt shingles will only go up. Plus, I don’t want to worry about calling a roofer or wonder if leaking rainwater is rotting the roof supports after every windy day. I asked for a quote and his price was reasonable. I gave him the go-ahead. He showed up this morning with his crew. By noon the old roof was history.

My roofer said the old roof could last another seven or eight years if I didn’t DSCF1524mind replacing a few shingles now and then when the wind blew hard. But I do mind. And the roof has become unsightly. A dark mildew, some kind of fungus caused by humidity and rain, grows on the gray shingles. Four years ago I had it removed by applying bleach  through a pressure washer, but the fungus has returned. And as shingles torn off by wind are replaced, the new shingles stand out because they are lighter in color than the surrounding stained shingles.

For the new roof I’ve ordered dimensional shingles, also called architectural or laminated shingles. Dimensional shingles are two layer, unlike the single layer traditional shingle. The exposure of the top layer has random notches taken out, DSCF1530and the bottom layer is adhered to the top layer, giving the shingle a three dimensional appearance. Heavier than traditional shingles, they’re supposed to be more durable and more wind resistant. At least, that’s how they’re advertised.

Now it’s 5 PM and the roofing crew is almost finished with the job. How do you like the new shingles?

What’s that you say? You don’t like them?

Relax. They grow on you. Like a fungus.