Category: Family & Home

The humming of the home RAID under my desk has been getting on my nerves – enjoyment of music is diminished. Finally won approval to stick it in a closet. Which left the dilemma: Run ethernet across the floor, or drill the floor and run more cable under the house? The simplest jobs turn complex.

First, had to deal with the crawlspace of death — the dusty, low-vertical, lung-compressing passage into the secondary foundation beneath our office. Obtained a 16″ monster boring bit, then faced the question of whether to drill from the top down, risking the possibility of hitting a joist, or to try and calculate the position of joists mathematically, with multiple trips into the hell-hole and back. Decided on the former and got lucky – hole landed neatly a few inches from the foundation. Then the push-pull fun of trying to get enough cable lead on either end, carefully stapling cable to sub-floor under the house.

Finally, the challenge of stripping, arranging, and crimping ethernet cables. Which is tricky enough without a 3-yr-old offering to “help” and climbing your shoulders for a better view. Ended up wasting a pair of terminators, but finally success. Office is both quiet and cable-free.

Woke this morning to a pair of precisely arranged cardboard boxes in Miles’ play area with a note attached (apparently dictated to Amy by Miles), informing me — in no uncertain terms — that not only was I not to disturb the boxes, which were configured in the shape of a race car, but that my only son was headed for New Zealand. It’s going to be lonely around here. Kind of bummed – I had hoped to travel to N.Z. with him when he turns eight, and now he’s apparently decided to go without me.

Late that morning, up to his elbows dolling up the car with purple and red finger (read: hand) paints. Once the car was ready to race to New Zealand, thought he’d be gone like a flash, but nope. Found him on the living room floor paging through a book of Mark Rothko paintings (not kidding), telling me what he liked or didn’t like about each. Guess he’s not leaving after all.

So we’re thinking of installing ventilation fans in the bathrooms — the window just doesn’t cut it for steam nor stank. Electrician can cut a hole in the ceiling, but says we should hire a roofer to cut the roof hole. Does it take a Ph.D to cut a hole in a roof? We can’t get one person qualified/willing to cut both holes and wire it up?

If we want to be able to control the fan independent of the light, need to run wiring down through the wall – a tedious job, and Electrician Dude says it’ll take all day to do both. There’s got to be a better way. Gave Berkeley Solar a call (the guy I talked to was really helpful, BTW), to see if there might be a way to power the fan from a PV cell and switch it on from a pull-chain. You’d think a unit like this would be available pre-fab, but no dice. Will have to assemble a kit from scratch.

$35 – 300W inverter
$35 – charge coupler
$50 – motorcycle battery
$300 – 50W photovoltaic cell
$100 – consulting fee to work out the whole kit, make sure everything plays nicely together
$20 – mounting brackets, switches, etc.

In other words, no savings over paying Electrician Dude to wire the wall. Except that it would be a fun project and have some geek cred. But we’re talking about a circuit that runs, what, 30 minutes a day?

If any entrepreneur wants to put together a self-contained solar unit like this, with integrated fan, for a fraction of the cost, I’d think you’d find a sizable market.

Miles: “Daddy, Panamum is the land of my dreams.”

Me: “Do you mean PanaMA?”

Miles: “No no no, PanaMUM. In Panamum the land smells like bananas.”

Me: “So where do all the bananas come from?”

Miles: “The bananas come from Egypt.”

Spent a couple days with a stomach bug while in Minnesota. Miles (3.5 yrs) was concerned, and tended to my spirits one day by bringing me a series of Lego assemblages, which he called “secret agent tools” (he alternately referred to them as “old fashioned”). He’d disappear for five minutes, come trundling back upstairs with a new one, lay some terminology on me, and vanish again. Had a laptop with me in bed, so took notes, which I’ve left unedited here.

secret agent tool – shoots orange juice and pancake syrup and apple juice and clouds. when it shoots out clouds that brings dinosaurs back to the world. And the secret agent tool makes a sound like “Mooooo.”

crab claw – bites a crab and then the farmer fire axes the crab – the farmer shoots the crab with a fire axe and then people can eat the crab for dinner.

“I’m going to make three more toys for you because I’m nervous that my daddy is sick because he’s my special friend, so I’m going to make three more and then that’s all” (he made a total of eight more).

The second toy was called “iceberg tabasky headphones” and it m n nn nb

The third toy was a “Vizerator” or “paper cleaner” and you put paper in a hole and people made new paper

the fourthest toy – shooted out fire and then people could cut down old trees. You can also hold this one.

the fivest toy: shoots out canonballs – “The Sockador” – for cutting down old trees and the swords will come back to life and people can hold them. You can hold this one.

The next one is an evaporator — it cleans up the old garbage and old pieces of paper and the fire dragons come back to life.

this one is “evaporator 2” and it cleans paper AND keyboards.

a keyboard typer big tragasky panpot aggregator – it spurts some goo from here and it cleans out people from here and then the dinosaurs live in the futures.

then he stuck a tire in my eye and said “you get these rings for being so helpful today.”

Reasons Why I Love My Wife #213:

Deep in the code when an urgent message arrives from the home front:

I noticed that you threw away a shampoo bottle the other day. Are you anti-reduce, reuse, recycle? I didn’t know this about you when I married you.

I am jarred out of my complacency, forced to shift gears. Pleasantly lolly-gagging in a garden of functions and arrays when I’m suddenly slammed into another reality, F2F with the 3Rs. It stings. But in a good way.

Unclear where this came from, but for those of you expecting pups and wishing there was an instruction manual for all of the little challenges:

via

Treated to an emergency room visit tonight, after Miles suffered a temporary lapse of reason and forgot that pillows don’t have the structural integrity of boards and decided to bridge the gap from couch to coffee table with one. This would not have been a problem except for the fact that he was being a bunny at the time, and everyone knows that bunnies hop with both feet forward. If he had placed just one hand on the bridge, as a fox or rhinocerous would have, he could have caught himself with the other hand when it gave way. But bunny basically dived headlong into the brink and smashed his sniffer on the edge of the table.

Three-year-old noses are still very soft, and the distortion was really scary. Fortunately it snapped back into shape pretty well after half an hour. The good folks at Children’s Hospital were fairly sure it’s broken, but also confident it’ll heal fine on its own, though he’ll have “raccoon eyes” for a few days as busted capillaries eep out into surrounding tissues.

All told, we were lucky this time, and he was a champ about it all. We’re considering it a practice run.

Amy catches Miles jamming a pencil into the 1/4″ headphone jack on the tape deck I’ve had attached to my Mac for the past few weeks, just in time to watch the tip of the pencil snap off inside the hole.

Amy: “Miles, what are you trying to do?”

Miles: “I’m just trying to hook into the internet.”

Well, can’t fault him for trying.