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My 2018 in Pictures

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 23:54:57 -0500

As has become routine with these posts, my annual photo year-in-review is arriving late. Unlike in years past, however, I don’t have a ready excuse, unless you count interference from the time I now have to spend understanding and coming to grips with the slow-motion trainwreck that is the current administration.

Much as I appreciate and value the uncompromising, brutally honest takes of the women of Bombshell or the cautious, thoughtful analysis from the people at Lawfare, I often think fondly of the days when they would have represented more academic and less vital outlets for me.

But here we are.

Late being preferable to never, then, here is my year in pictures. These are the moments - significant or otherwise - that characterized my year personally, which is to say that there’s nothing in here about the aforementioned trainwreck. Before we get to the pictures, however, a quick check-in on travel.

Travel

Due to a number of different factors, we found ourselves down an analyst for the better part of the year, with the result that my travel went in the wrong direction in 2018 - particularly in the first half of the year. It was only two more extra trips from the year prior per TripIt, but it was a hell of a lot more mileage.

It wasn’t backbreaking, and poor James was the one to bear the brunt of the travel woes in the second half, but the intent for the year ahead is to scale my travel back down to something more manageable. I didn’t accumulate enough miles to qualify for JetBlue’s Mosaic program until September, which is worse than last year’s December but still a major improvement from my more typical June-timeframe.

In the meantime, a few other tidbits courtesy of Cemre’s TripIt Year in Review tool and Openflights.org.

Distance: Clocking in at 85,148 miles I was up 34% on the year, which was not the goal.
100K: This was the fifth time in eight years I failed to reach 100,000 miles. That part was good, I will try to keep it up.
Carrier: After years of loyalty, with the odd dalliance here and there with a Virgin America, I finally gave up on JetBlue and made the jump to Delta. As soon as Delta matched my Mosiac status on JetBlue with a Silver Medallion, I cut over and put a bit over 20,000 miles on my new airline in the fourth quarter. My switch, as it turned out, would have been necessary anyway as JetBlue stopped flying into PWM year round, and instead is now only a seasonal carrier.
Airport: I reversed last year’s trend, and spent more time this year in Boston than Portland.
First Time: Visited Providence, RI for the first time, as well as Missoula, MT and Westcliffe, CO. Enjoyed all of them a great deal.
Where To: San Francisco narrowly took back its crown from New York this year as the destination I visited the most. Here’s hoping the city that’s only 45 minutes away by plane makes a comeback this year.

With that, on to the pictures.

January 4

Started the year off…by getting buried in snow. Quite the contrast with this January.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BdjUfIHlSxo/

January 17

Finally got frustrated enough with our old router that I swapped it out for brand new Amplifi gear, courtesy Ubiquiti.

January 31

Maybe my favorite pub in London has now sadly closed. RIP Electricity Showrooms.

February 2

Hit up Monki Gras, which was amazing and somehow keeps getting better every year.

February 10

Possibly related to the fact that they’re now in bankruptcy, after Sears no showed on us three times in a row wasting a month in the process, I finally got frustrated enough to try and fix our dishwasher myself.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfB-tzbFBYt/

February 17

Tough to top hitting up a local shark exhibit with your best friend and his family who flew in for your birthday, but we tried a few months later.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfUuCdXlOS5/

February 24

Signs that spring is near: Eleanor and I took in the first spring training game of the year.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfmBj4KFtm7/

March 31

Made it out to Denver to help celebrate our friends Tess and Joe’s 25th anniversary.

April 10

Out in Santa Monica for work, took in a Sox/Yankees game at probably the best known Red Sox bar on the West Coast, Sonny Maclean’s.

April 24

Having seen Kate have to resort to keeping her sourdough starter in the oven with the light on, I built her a proofing box for her birthday.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bh-fGh3lvAN/

June 3

Winter prep begins.

June 30

Portland joined the rest of the nation in protesting the appalling and horrifying family separation policy of the current administration.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BkqyKOIlhjZ/

July 11

Accompanying Kate on a work trip down to lovely Providence, RI, we took Eleanor to the zoo.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlG072wlgGU/

July 14

Also took her to the carousel, which went much better than her expression suggests.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlOaKBYlGYt/

July 18

En route out to Portland, OR for OSCON, overflew the wildfires.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlXH4dPlK0h/

July 29

The one week we get to spend up here every summer is what gets me through the winter. Perfection.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl0mIXClPR5/

August 5

After the old gas mower finally seized up, it was replaced with a battery powered alternative. Hopefully the first of many such replacements.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BmHHp7ElPLX/

August 14

Maybe the only thing that could top having my best friend in town for my birthday was meeting him in Missoula, MT to see our favorite band play. Thanks for the assist, Jim.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BmdjtqHF5vu/

August 21

Picked up a whole lot of hard rock maple.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BmwIfekFAfr/

August 22

Which is in part why I turned our living room into a shop.

August 28

Taking a break from trying to work with the stone-like maple, made my annual pilgrimage out to my happy place.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnCK73Jl8X5/

September 6

Weathered an enormous storm that had power lines down on our street. Managed not to get electrocuted.

September 12

After a decade plus of loyalty to JetBlue, I finally gave up and accepted that they were never going to return the favor with features such as lounge access or first class upgrades.

The hilarious thing? I got upgraded to first on my very first Delta flight, which was one more upgrade than I ever received from JetBlue in spite of my near million point mark.

September 29

The family and I took one for the team and made the annual pre-Monktoberfest run out to the Alchemist in Vermont. Their beer is incredible, but if anything, the people are better than the beer.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoUOu99lz8r/

October 4

Survived the largest (but still small) Monktoberfest yet.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BohcxlsFkNH/

October 6

Part of the unwinding and recovery process from our conference was a quick trip up to Newcastle for Oxbow’s Goods from the Woods event.

October 10

Remember that storm in September? That was the last straw, and a full standby generator went in on October 10th. It got used four times in the two months that followed.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoxvRLyFfYE/

October 13

Three days after that, we had our first frost which meant our first fire.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo5JE1Tly9D/

October 16

This was the first time I’ve ever watched a Red Sox playoff game while hiding out in a speaker’s green room. God bless the sound guy for updating me on the score just as I came off stage.

October 18

Two days later, I watched a Red Sox playoff game from a Delta lounge for the first time. For the record, we were 2-0 when I watched from the lounge at SFO.

October 28

I got a little excited when the Red Sox won the World Series.

https://twitter.com/sogrady/statuses/1056747225601191938?tw_i=1056747225601191938

October 31

Let’s be honest, as a parent, Halloween is basically all about what kind of costume you can get your kid to wear.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpnb40aFHrP/

November 4

2018 was the year my best friend and his family pulled the trigger and bought a sweet little place in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. November of 2018 was the month I first visited it, and it was totally worth getting my ass handed to me in Gin to see views like these. So happy for him and his family, and I can’t wait to get back.

November 10

Another year of taking Eleanor to watch the Biggest Little Game in America. An unusual meltdown on her part was actually fortuitous in that we missed the Ephs getting throttled in the second half.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqAzqj2ASlF/

November 15

In spite of my best efforts - from leaving an event in Westchester four hours early to head for the airport, attempting to rebook myself into Boston and then looking at forgoing the plane entirely in favor of a train - I got stranded in NYC overnight. That was inconvenient. Worse, it meant that we had to pass on tickets to Elf, The Musical.

But, made the best of it with a Stranger Things marathon and a few choice selections from Beer Culture.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqOkSm8gXe8/

November 25

Later than normal, but finally got the woodshed loaded.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqnrUctAVGX/

December 1

No idea where three years went, but here we are.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq3pSoCgpgC/

December 14

Remember all that maple? The project it was intended for was scrapped at the last minute thanks to the problem of baseboard heating, but it turned this:

Into this:

December 22

With Kate’s lease almost up, we [no surprise] picked up another Volvo.

December 28

Poorly recreated a particular birdhouse for my Mother-in-law’s birthday.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Br8922MgZPD/

Ten Podcasts You Might Not Have Heard

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:06:12 -0500

Almost twenty years ago, my parents got me the BBC’s full cast audio version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a Christmas present. I was ecstatic. Like a lot of people, I enjoyed the books as a kid and was curious to see how they’d translate in an audiobook form. More importantly, however, it was hours of entertainment - thirteen hours on thirteen discs, to be precise. Given that I was reverse commuting out of Manhattan at the time by car, this was a veritable goldmine of fresh content.

It meant that I didn’t have to listen to the shriekers on sports radio at all for almost a week, which was glorious.

These days, it’s difficult to appreciate what a content wasteland commutes were at the time. First, because the advent of digital and then streaming music meant that you went from a music collection limited by physical, easily damaged discs to any version of any song ever, at your fingertips. But these days, for me, it’s more because of the explosion in podcast content available.

It took me a lot longer to get into podcasts than it should have, mostly because I was dumb, but these days they’re a staple of my media consumption diet. In the jobs to be done parlance, podcasts take otherwise dead time - time spent commuting, as mentioned, or chopping wood, or working in the shop - and make it productive. Or more productive, at least.

The good news is that your options are basically infinite. From business to history to horror fiction, there’s a podcast for pretty much everyone. The bad news is that discovery, however, remains a pretty major problem. If you’re content with what is essentially the podcast incarnation of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, you won’t have any problems. And to be fair, many of the shows that make those lists (and there are one or two on here there are probably on there towards the bottom) - shows like 99% Invisible or S-Town - are creative, exceedingly well produced and deserving of the attention they receive.

But if your tastes are a little more specific and a little less mainstream, it can be hard to find new shows - hence the ubiquitous pleas for ratings “so that new listeners can find us.”

My own tastes are undoubtedly a bit eccentric and very unlikely to match yours perfectly, but you might find one or more of the following (sorted alphabetically by category) worth a listen - I certainly do.

Enjoy.

Baseball: Effectively Wild

It’s embarrassing to admit this, but something like a quarter of the podcasts I subscribe to are about baseball. Maybe a third. Anyway, they run the gamut. Some are hosted by local writers or media outlets, others MLB itself. But the show that best balances relevance for a wider audience while being entertaining and informative is probably the current incarnation of Effectively Wild. It’s nerdy and stat-oriented, but covers the game with a critical eye. Episode 1165 with Jeff Passan, as but one example, is a must listen if you care about the game itself.

Business: Postlight

As long as I’m confessing my podcast subscription sins, I should acknowledge that for someone who works in an industry where there’s a podcast for literally every subject, I listen to very few technology podcasts. Part of it is a format thing: a lot of these are panel type shows, which aren’t my favorite. But a lot of it is that given that I spend most of my day immersed in industry news and analysis, it’s nice to take a step back. Postlight’s Track Changes show, however, is an exception to this rule. It’s a great show run by founders Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, and while they’ll occasionally rant on subjects such as their hate for LinkedIn, they have a remarkable and diverse assemblage of talent come through their studio to talk about aspects of technology I don’t hear anywhere else.

Fiction: Magnus Archives

There are a great number of fictional podcasts out there, with more arriving by the day. As with most published fiction, the quality of these varies, whether it’s the production or the writing. The most common trap that series fall into is one familiar to fans of Lost or The X-Files: the writers, not having a predetermined ending in mind, get themselves so tangled up narratively speaking that they can’t extricate themselves. One of the best currently going is a little show out of the UK called The Magnus Archives. The episodes are ostensibly stand alone horror vignettes, but if you stick with it a narrative emerges. More importantly, a cohesive narrative, one that is consistent with the individual episodes, and one in which the writers clearly have thought everything through ahead of time. If you grew up reading Stephen King short stories, you’re likely to enjoy this show.

Ghost Stories: Spooked

If you need straight up ghost stories told by real people - for Halloween, maybe - the Snap Judgment produced Spooked is your huckleberry. The quality of the stories varies pretty widely, but the natural, “regular person” deliveries definitely gives these a bump.

History: Slow Burn

With apologies to perennial favorites - but already massively popular - history shows like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History or Mike Duncan’s Revolutions, my favorite new history podcast is one with a subject of more recent vintage. Slow Burn is produced by Slate, and is a show that revisits Watergate. Even if you’re familiar with the history, as I (falsely) believed I was prior to listening to the show, you’ll learn something new. The host Leon Neyfakh and team have done an excellent job sourcing original material, and then interviewing the original participants in the affair. In between John Chancellor segments from the NBC Nightly News are interviews with people such as Bob Woodward, Dick Cavett, and Leslie Stahl. This is one of the podcasts I most look forward to listening to, even if the events - such as those covered in the episode “Why Did So Many People Stand With Richard Nixon For So Long?” - are sadly relevant today.

Home Improvement: Fine Homebuilding

If you spend any time working on your house, this show is for you. The three hosts discuss everything from tool reviews and recommendations, thoughts on various building materials, recommended construction approaches and even field questions from the audience. It’s not fancy, and it’s definitely geared towards people with some familiarity with terminology, but I’ve gotten quite a bit out of it.

Media: Recode Media with Peter Kafka

I’m not much for media watching in general, except in cases where it reads on other concerns of mine such as politics or the technology industry, but this show is worth it for the interviews alone. I skip celebrities ones like Jimmy Kimmel, but Kafka’s interview with Ken Burns, for example, was fascinating. Having the opportunity to hear the documentary filmmaker discuss everything from how the Vietnam documentary was made to why he continues to choose PBS as an outlet educates me on issues and topics I hadn’t realized existed.

National Security: Bombshell

In a perfect world, or even the world a few years ago, podcasts like Bombshell or Lawfare wouldn’t be - at least for me, an ordinary citizen - a must listen. For the world we live in, however, they are. Bombshell in particular has carved out a spot in my top podcasts list, both because it brings me up to speed on issues of national security, foreign relations and military strategy and because it does so in style. Hosted by three highly competent women - and regularly featuring strictly female subject matter expert guests, with an emphasis on the expert - the average show might cover everything from our changing relationship with Pakistan and its impact on the logistical challenges of supplying Afghanistan to high quality bourbon selections. Also? Two thirds of the hosts are stat geeks. It’s sad that the world we live in demands a heightened understanding of the topics covered on this show, but that’s where we are.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight

As with technology podcasts, I have a generally low tolerance for their political counterparts. Some are too strident, others are more opinion than fact and still others are functionally equivalent to powerful sedatives. The FiveThirtyEight show generally manages to avoid the hot takes common to the genre while remaining fairly objective, fact based and dispassionate - if slightly too contrarian for my taste at times. For me, it’s an opportunity to get a rational take on today’s irrational events, often with a dose of hard polling numbers along with the appropriate caveats about sample sizes or likely regression. If you’re looking for context and an objective take on the political news of the month, day or sometimes, hour, this is a pretty good bet.

Survival: Outside Magazine

This one’s kind of morbid, but I’ve found the Outside Magazine podcast’s Science of Survival series riveting. From being adrift on a surf board out at sea to freezing to death to backcountry falls to being treed by a jaguar, the stories are part adventure story, part cautionary tale and part survival training. If you’ve ever been curious at how the body and the mind handle extreme conditions or injury, this podcast is for you. Many of the shows interviews are excellent as well: Ep. 11 “Doc Parsley Solves Your Sleep Crisis” changed the way I thought about the importance of sleep, for example.

I Have Squandered My Days With Plans of Many Things

Sat, 16 Sep 2017 23:40:59 -0400

This summer’s vacation was unpredictable, as could have been predicted. Rather than the usual three week stretch to close out the summer, it was one off at a cottage up north, a week back in the office, than two more of staycation, where staycation means working as a general contractor on our house. And as with most best laid plans, things didn’t quite go according to schedule thanks to some fun daycare viruses.

For all that, however, it was a great break, one that allowed me to recharge the batteries with the Monktoberfest looming and the usual fall travel slate right on its heels. I didn’t get to about half of my to do’s, and the world beyond the great state of Maine had a rough few weeks as is typical, but any vacation that ends without a trip to the ER is a good one in my book.

Here’s how things went.

For week one, we rented a cottage just around the corner from where our wedding reception was and across the street from the Atlantic.

Just across the water on the other side of the peninsula from us was Coveside, one of our favorite restaurants on the water. And by on the water, I mean that while sitting at the bar you get to hear the hostess scrambling to find out a new mooring for an incoming vessel over marine radio because someone was parked in the wrong place.

One peninsula over is Pemaquid Beach, which reminds me a bit of the beaches I grew up going to on the Cape, just with thousands fewer people.

While, unlike the cape, there are no white sharks at Pemaquid (yet), we weren’t completely lacking in sharks.

If you’re up that way, visiting places like Fort William Henry is a nice combo of colonial history with a lot of room for kids to run around.

And as long as you’re there, might as well eat out on the dock at the Contented Sole which is less than half a mile away.

After a week up north that went too fast, as it always does, it was back to work for a week. Though to be fair, some of that work involved visiting breweries, so it wasn’t all bad. Either way, the following Saturday I headed down to Fenway to see the Red Sox play the Yankees. It was the first time I’ve seen Chris Sale throw live.

The game was the same day as the massive anti-Nazi counter-protests in Boston, which if I’d had time I would have come down early for. As it was, however, the TV trucks were out in force wrapping things up when I walked over to Fenway from South Station along the south side of the Commons.

While at Fenway, I secured my annual replacement hat. Fun bit of SOG Trivia: any Red Sox hat you see on my head was bought at the park. There has never been an exception to this rule.

Bright and early Monday morning, I made the first of several trips to Home Depot to pick up lumber.

First up was ripping out the crappy wire shelves in our kitchen pantry and replacing them with slightly less crappy melamine coated alternatives. Because a kitchen remodel is on the table at some point, we didn’t go nuts with anything terribly fancy (though the sliding shelves I looked at were cool), just something basic that would be better than what we had originally.

Next up was a closet organizer for the bedroom. As with the kitchen, the bedroom is likely to get torn up at some point so we kept the plans simple. The good news is that I learned from last year’s disaster which nearly cost me the tip of a finger, and things went much more smoothly this time around.

Not least because I finally saved up enough to buy a very pricy, but safe, SawStop tablesaw a few months ago. The larger cabinet models have a lot of advantages over the jobsite model I got, but there’s not much that beats working outside in the summer, so portability is huge.

While I didn’t injure myself this year, assuming a minor burn with an iron doesn’t count, my execution was not without incident. While cutting the dadoes (read: grooves) for the closet organizer shelves, an enormous wasp landed on my arm. I jerked the arm, the arm knocked the guide for the router and, well, it didn’t end well. Except that I didn’t get stung, which was nice.

But as these shelves are not intended to be permanent, I didn’t sweat it and just put a shelf right above it. Note that after last year’s debacle, I have a far more reasonable number of clamps for assembly.

The final product is not going to win any awards, but makes far better use of the tiny closet than the single bar and shelf that were in there previously.

In the market for some new deck chairs but short on time, I turned to a simple design based on regular old dimensional lumber. These are dead simple to build, to the point that you could knock several out in an afternoon pretty easily. We’ll see how the pine holds up outdoors, but the plan is to pickle and then seal them with poly and epoxy feet. Worst case and they don’t hold up, I’m out less than fifty bucks worth of lumber and an afternoon. Best case is that I have two new roomy deck chairs for less than a hundred bucks.

The last home improvement project I was able to get to was one that has been planned for years. One of the first things we did when we bought our house was rip out an unfortunately located closet that was smack in the middle of the living room. With the help of our friend Corey, we demoed the closet and later sealed it up with sheetrock. We’d ignored the strips of missing flooring, however, punting on that and leaving holes like this one.

The first problem with patching the floor was finding someone who would sell me less than dozens of square feet of flooring. I eventually ended up at Lumber Liquidators, where they had a lot of oak flooring in the right size for $8 or so. After purchase, however, they apparently discovered that they didn’t actually have a lot that small, so shipped me four times as much as I ordered. The good news is that it was still $8. The bad news is that I have a shitload of 3/4" x 2 1/4" oak flooring left over that I don’t need.

But either way, I was relieved to finally, years after ripping out the closet, be able to cross “patch flooring” off of my house projects to do list. And before someone says “why didn’t you try and match the existing flooring, that looks ugly AF,” note that a) the majority of these patches are covered by carpeting and b) if we relocate the stairs as we expect to this is all going to get torn up anyway.

Lest you think it was staycation was all DIY all the time, I did manage to get out and about. My brother and his kids were up the first week, which was awesome. My parents have saved literally everything everything Nick and I played with as kids.

Along with her cousins, Eleanor got to pick fresh blueberries from my parents garden. Not too many actually made it back to the house, but she enjoyed it.

The day before my brother and his family headed home, we all went over to the former naval airbase in Brunswick because the Blue Angels were in town.

But while I got to see my favorite aircraft of all time, it turns out that toddlers that refuse to wear their hearing protection are not super excited about jets that roar past a hundred feet off the deck. Our time there, then, was regrettably brief.

We also got the chance to visit Five Islands while my brother was up. It’s always rated as one of the best lobster pounds in Maine, and is picturesque enough that it’s been featured in a couple of national commercials. It’s also a couple of miles from where my parents live.

One of the days Eleanor was out from daycare, we got to visit her happy place.

On the second to last day of my vacation, I got to visit mine. Temps were in the mid-sixties rather than the eighties that characterize my visits usually, but as an O’Grady I’m obligated to swim regardless of what the air or water temps are. Cold or not, there’s nothing like closing out the summer by drying yourself on a rock next to a waterfall drinking a nice craft beer.

Time to start planning for Summer 2018.

My 2016 in Pictures

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 23:41:22 -0500

I’m a bit behind this year as my Christmas and New Year’s week holidays were erased by a variety of illnesses - none major, fortunately - that swept our household. But late being preferable to never, it’s time for my annual year in pictures post. It’s always a useful exercise for me, as I can revisit a year easily and quickly. And by doing it in pictures, I’m not required to invest time I don’t have.

On balance, 2016 was a fine year for me personally, and a year of many, many firsts (kid-related, mostly). The fact that it was an abject disaster from a macro, geopolitical perspective takes some of that shine off, however. Election or no, however, I’m still here, my family and friends are still here and we’re all committed to soldiering on. So I’m grateful for that.

Before we get to the pictures, however: a couple of statistics from 2016.

Travel

2016 was a second consecutive year of improvement, travel-wise. My mileage was way down, as I flew less this year than I have since 2008. Only 2013 is close. Most years I qualify for JetBlue’s Mosaic program in May or June. This year, it was during my last trip in December (though admittedly some of that delay is that Virgin has poached most of my travel to and from San Francisco from JetBlue thanks to a better loyalty program). I’m unlikely to sustain quite this slow a pace of travel as a fair bit of the downturn was due to one time events like missing the Monki Gras due to paternity leave. Some of it, however, is attributable to having another analyst on board, changes in where conferences are hosted (Austin being closer than Portland, as one example) and so on. Which implies that I should be able to maintain a slightly reduced travel schedule at a minimum.

In the meantime, a few other tidbits courtesy of Cemre’s TripIt Year in Review tool and Openflights.org.

Distance: I flew 68,365 miles, down 25% or so from 2016.
100K: This was the third time in six years I failed to reach 100,000 miles. Love it.
Carrier: 41 segments were on JetBlue. Virgin was up to 12 this year thanks to the aforementioned loyalty program. Thanks to some client engagements in non-standard locations as well, I flew Delta a dozen times as well for the first time in years.
Airport: Thanks in part to Virgin, I ended up flying out of Boston (35) more than Portland (21) again this year.
First Time: Had never been to Tahoe before, but I can cross that off the list. Reno as well.
Where To: Was San Francisco, most frequently. I spent more than twice as many miles headed there as to the second most popular destination, Las Vegas, where I found myself (again) far more than I’d like to be.

Personal Stats

My Top 5 non search-engine referrers to the work blog were 1) Hacker News 2) Twitter, 3) Reddit, 4) Wired, 5) Facebook.
Looks like I drove between 500 and a thousand refererrals over to Amazon for specifically referenced items. It’s too bad that Amazon and Maine don’t get along so I can’t get referral commissions on that traffic.
Per FitBit, I took 3.2 million steps in 2016, up over 500,000 from last year. My daily average was up ~1800 per day to 8710. This was largely a function of Eleanor getting older, and our enjoyment of taking her for walks around the neighborhood, but after two consecutive down years of steps it was also something I was paying attention to. Love to get that number up again next year.

With that, on to the pictures.

January 1

https://www.instagram.com/p/__r3hTPUkU/
Got an early start on the year, as the Graveyard Shift after the baby came home was mine. I’d stay up until 5 or 6 AM, then Kate would clock back in and I’d sleep until 9 or 10. I don’t miss that sleep schedule.

January 2

One of the pieces of advice we got as new parents was to take the baby out as early as possible, the theory being that they get used to be in public spaces and will therefore learn how to behave while out. We’ve tried to practice this, and pretty much the entire staff at our local place, the Broad Arrow Tavern, has known Eleanor since this first trip out.

January 9

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAVN0ilvUt3/
Baby’s first brewery? Allagash, naturally.

January 14

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAh0YBuvUmW/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Our first time leaving the baby in the care of someone other than ourselves or the hospital staff, Kate and I popped out to the theater to take in Star Wars while my parents babysat for us. All the nostalgia.

January 15

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAlMxQZvUnU/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Baby’s first trip to Oxbow. Unfortunately, she fell asleep and missed a visit from the brewery cat.

February 21

https://www.instagram.com/p/BE4Tt2SvUvv/?taken-by=stephenogrady
For my birthday this year, Kate commissioned a painting of my grandmother’s house. This was the scene of some of my happiest childhood memories, and a house that had been in our family for well over a hundred years. Just this picture brought a few family members to tears.

March 11

Got out for a little stroll at Winslow State Park.

March 21

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDOLNZVvUrL/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Second day of spring. Not joking.

April 2

Finished building a (cheap) workbench. Nothing but 2x4s, 4x4s and some birch ply. I took it from this side because the lumber on the back side was so warped it looks like a pretzel.

May 9

Filed under things I wish I hadn’t had to learn, but it turns out that you can get a passport turned around in Boston in around 90 minutes as long as you’re willing to live with a passport photo taken by CVS up around the road. How long ago had my old passport expired? Six days.

June 7

Courtesy the gentleman and scholar known as Brady Murray, made my first trip ever - I know, I’m as surprised as you are - to AT&T park to see the Giants play the Sox. Beautiful venue.

June 10

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGfaZIcPUrO/?taken-by=stephenogrady
About a month prior to this, I got the devastating news that my beloved Volvo S40 - my friend and companion on many adventures - was living on borrowed time, with a head gasket that was ruptured. This began the search for a potential replacement, and while I would have happily bought the exact same car, Volvo killed off the model and no longer sells cars with manual transmissions. I ended up with a truck.

July 8

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHnj6kRhlcL/?taken-by=stephenogrady
I don’t remember my first trip to Fenway as well as I’d like, and Eleanor won’t either because she spent most of it in her stroller asleep. But she’ll have pictures.

July 12

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHyD7cZB-1U/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Winter is coming.

July 14

https://www.instagram.com/p/BH28X3Shq9z/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Some “work trips” are easier than others.

July 29

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIdm9yChdTT/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Way up north in Lubec for a wedding, got to visit the easternmost point in the US.

July 30

This was the scene from said wedding. Not too shabby.

August 12

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJBvzF3hCo0/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Turns out that when it’s hot and humid it’s hard to run the white noise machine and fan that help your baby sleep. The good news is that my annual preventative maintenance on the generator worked and it fired up immediately.

August 17

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJOa2d_hI-Q/?taken-by=stephenogrady
The long national nightmare that began when one of the other dads at daycare inexplicably walked off in my flip-flops - which looked literally nothing like his - was over 24 hours later when he returned them.

August 24

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJgkLjeBASF/?taken-by=stephenogrady
My first effort at building furniture was…uneven. Literally.

August 26

Great seats, courtesy my brother-in-law. Even better? The other two in our section didn’t show up.

August 30

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJu7UBmh378/?taken-by=stephenogrady
With the leftover wood from the table, I built a bench. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of showing Kate one of the fancier YouTube builds which she preferred to the simpler one I had in mind.

August 31

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJx0VxdhONJ/?taken-by=stephenogrady
It would seem impossible to nearly lose the tip of a finger due to plywood, but I nearly managed it. Four plus months later my nail is mostly grown back.

September 1

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJ1e5AjBuaE/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Annual pilgrimage to my happy place.

September 3

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJ6S622hGXV/?taken-by=stephenogrady
After a year’s hiatus, made it back to Chamberlain for our summer vacation.

September 8

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKHZ7yBhAQn/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Where life was hard.

September 9

Never miss a chance to visit Monhegan Island.

September 14

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKWvnlTBm63/?taken-by=stephenogrady
We do sunsets ok in this state.

September 20

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKl9sMfBlB6/?taken-by=stephenogrady
This project, as you might be able to see from the picture, was a tire fire. First, it almost cost me a fingertip. Then, it was setback after setback. Eventually I got the thing built, however, and while it’s terrible to look at, it mostly works.

September 24

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKwiKxeAdP0/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Winter wasn’t here, fired up the stove anyway.

October 1

https://www.instagram.com/p/BLWGSwPF3pm/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Everyone loves the Monktoberfest.

October 2

I was very happy that Eleanor was awake and mostly willing to sit and watch the celebration of Big Papi’s career. He was the author of more happy Red Sox memories for me than anyone, and one of the best hitters I ever saw wear a Red Sox uniform. It was an honor and a privilege to watch him play, and I’m pleased that my daughter can (technically) say the same thing.

October 6

Survived the Monktoberfest yet again. No biblical flooding this year definitely helped.

October 20

https://www.instagram.com/p/BLyR0pslhmO/?taken-by=stephenogrady
It wasn’t. Unfortunately.

October 31

Best Halloween costume ever.

November 3

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/794041872096239617

Aside from the years the Red Sox were in it and won it, which I prefer for obvious reasons, this was the best World Series of my lifetime. I had a very difficult time choosing a favorite, as either outcome had its positives. In the end, it had been longer for Chicago so I was content. The best part about this series, however, was the fact that I happened to be in Denver and got to watch it with my BFF and his family.

November 6

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMfhrX5FJU3/?taken-by=stephenogrady
We try to get outside and hike as a family regularly. Feedback varies.

November 12

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMt-MExl7ih/?taken-by=stephenogrady
The outcome wasn’t ideal, but Eleanor enjoyed her first Biggest Little Game in America.

November 23

With this big oak dead and dropping branches everywhere, we were forced to have it felled. I’ve still got a ton of log splitting to do.

November 25

Until I had a child, I’d never heard of the Polar Express. But at least we learned that Santa is her worst enemy.

November 28

https://www.instagram.com/p/BNXB6RRF4V3/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Today’s PSA: if you hate beards and don’t want to have one, do not under any circumstances let your significant other see you in one. Because you may have to keep it. Who would have thought that a Halloween costume of Benny from Stranger Things could have backfired so badly?

December 19

Popped down to Atlantic Hardwoods in Portland and picked up some rough 8/4 walnut stock.

December 28

And turned it into a pair of end grain cutting boards, Christmas gifts for both sets of parents. Cutting boards, as it turns out, are sort of a Woodworking 101 project, but learning how to mill raw lumber as part of this process led to some, ah, imperfections. As always.

December 28

https://www.instagram.com/p/BOkY5R7l0Qg/?taken-by=stephenogrady
A short bed pickup can hold more than you think.

December 29

https://www.instagram.com/p/BOnnwxsllTP/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Enough to build these storage shelves, at least.

December 30

https://www.instagram.com/p/BOpd7NMlpAg/?taken-by=stephenogrady
The day before New Year’s Eve, we were expected to get a mere dusting.

December 30

https://www.instagram.com/p/BOqAXu5l9Wd/?taken-by=stephenogrady
I spent it swapping out a garbage disposal. For once, I didn’t get electrocuted or cut, nothing got broken or flooded, and everything more or less went according to plan.

If Destruction Be Our Lot

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 11:33:40 -0500

“Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes.”

Those words could have been written yesterday, but they were actually spoken by Maine Senator (R) Margaret Chase Smith on June 1st, 1950. Her famous address, The Declaration of Conscience, was a response to the tactics of Wisconsin Senator (R) Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Senators McCarthy and Smith were members of the same party, Smith’s conscience compelled her to reject the behavior and tactics of her colleague, even should it should cost her party the election.

I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.

Though her stand was ultimately ineffectual, as it took this country another four years to master its fear and repudiate McCarthyism (thanks in large part to Joseph Welch), it was no less brave for this. It is, in these dark times, sadly incredible to see a politician willing to put her country before her party.

Everyone reading this knows why I bring this up. Since founding RedMonk fourteen years ago, with the exception of my advocacy for same sex marriage in my home state, I have never publicly commented on political matters before. Ever. This is, however, the most important election of my lifetime. This country is at the kind of crossroads it has not known since 1860, and if you think comparisons to the Civil War are mere hyperbole, I would respectfully suggest that you have not been paying close enough attention.

Much of this fraught election has been driven by fear. Fear of immigrants, fear of minorities, fear of terrorists, fear of people that are different. There are always, in every era, legitimate reasons for the United States to be concerned. There is, at this moment, no reason for this country to be afraid from external threats.

Twenty-two years before he assumed the presidency in that similarly troubled year of 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838. Although it has come to be known as the Lyceum Address, it was in fact titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” In it, the man who would become the greatest President this country has ever known said the following:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

I sincerely hope that this nation of free men and women shall live through all time.

If you are reading this and you are a US citizen, please vote.

Things To Know About Closet Organizers

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 22:38:37 -0400

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKl9sMfBlB6/

I’d never really thought much about closets, to be honest. Whether that’s because I don’t generally wear things that need to be hung up, or that even if I did I wouldn’t, isn’t important right now. What happened was that I ran across a closet organizer product and showed it to Kate. In my defense, recreating one didn’t look that hard at the time. And probably isn’t, actually, if you have the right tools and know what you’re doing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The basic idea of a closet organizer is that most closets don’t use their space efficiently. Hangers, for example, are typically at a height to accommodate longer garments. Have mostly shirts? Too bad, it’s wasted space.

If you have a lot of closets, or if you don’t have much worth hanging up, this isn’t a particular concern. In our case, the fact that we were wasting maybe a third of the available space in our closets was less than ideal.

Most people, if they care about their closet space at all, will just buy a solution.

We had a complicating factor in our testbed, otherwise known as the second bedroom, however. The entrance to the attic happens to be in that closet’s ceiling. Which meant that a closet organizer either needed to be designed with that in mind, or be entirely removable. Neither of which described most of the commercial closet organization products, so we were doomed to a custom job whether we liked it or not.

Rather than starting from scratch, I borrowed ideas from other closet organizer systems - hanging two rows of dress shirts, one on top of another, for example. I didn’t think building one of these would be that hard, which is almost funny in retrospect. I won’t go into detail on how to build one, because anyone who’s handy can figure that out. Basically you build a narrower bookshelf with fewer shelves, then hang things off its side. No big deal, right?

Well, there are a number of things I wish I had known ahead of the project.

Melamine Plywood is Heavy. Also, Sharp. Some people build closet organizers out of expensive hardwoods, but given the fact that we didn’t know how long it’d be in there as we are planning on remodeling, we were going with plywood from day one. Given that, we opted for melamine - a white plasticky material - coated plywood. The good news is that it looks clean, is easy to maintain and you don’t have to paint it. The bad news is that a 3/4” 4x8 sheet of melamine plywood is heavy. Heavy and unwieldy enough that if you’re working by yourself, as I usually am, it’s a pain to even get a full sheet up on to sawhorses for the initial cuts. As for the sharpness, let’s talk about clamps.
You Need a Lot of Clamps I have a fair number of clamps, but most of them are smaller and of no use in clamping bigger projects. In total, I had three 36” clamps that I could use to build the center console which was six or so feet high and had seven shelves. Ideally, each shelf would be clamped front and back during the glue in - 14 clamps in my case. When you have three clamps total, you’re looking at two to three days minimum just to glue in the shelves with three clamps - time which I did not have. Instead I tried using my three clamps to glue up the completed console - twice. The first time, the lack of clamps holding everything in place meant that it collapsed, knocked over a sawhorse and snapped one half of the console in half (which was the cause of much later woe). The second time, it was still unstable and collapsed again. This time I couldn’t get my hand out in time and four shelves and half of the console fell on the tip of my index finger, with the sharp melamine edge slicing the nail on my right index finger in half. I was fortunate to not lose the tip of my finger entirely, though I still don’t have much feeling in it. Melamine is sharp. The third time, I bought a few more clamps and was successful. Depending on your definition of “successful.” Basically, have all the clamps.
Check Your Router Bit Width While I initially considered using a jig to drill holes for pins to make the shelving movable, given the requirement that the shelving system be removable in case of a need to access the attic, I decided on a fixed central console for the closet organizer. To accomplish this, I decided to cut dados (“a groove cut in the face of a board, into which the edge of another board is fixed”) and glue the structure together. Given that the melamine plywood was 3/4” thick, this meant I’d need a 3/4” router bit, which I ordered from Amazon. It showed up, and I cut a few dados with no issue. Trouble was, it was actually 11/16” - a sixteenth shy of what I needed. Generally when people have issues with router bit sizes for dados, it’s that the bit is larger because the plywood is actually smaller than claimed. This was the opposite. I ended up having to drive down to Rockler to get another 3/4” router bit, and recutting the dados. Sometimes this worked. Other times, the second pass cut was slightly too big as you can see in the picture above.
A Table Saw is Helpful The workroom in our basement is tiny, which is why I haven’t prioritized a tablesaw. For this project, that would have been much simpler. I have a homemade cutting guide that I can use, but making straight eight foot cuts into plywood with a circular saw is a pain even with a guide. Add in all of the repetitive smaller cuts you have to make for things like shelves and it’s would have been a lot easier and faster if I had a table saw. You can make it work with just a circular saw, at least to my level of dubious competence, but I don’t recommend it.
Glue Goes Through Drop Cloths One of the few things I did correctly on this project was realize before I started that if I’d assembled the bulk of the closet organizer in my tiny basement shop, I would never be able to get it out of there. Between its small size and the fact that it’s at the end of a long narrow hall, anything large built in there stays in there. Instead, I did the glue up in our upstairs hall. Which has a nice carpet in it. A carpet that I responsibly protected with two layers of our painting dropcloth. Which wasn’t enough, as it turns out, because - surprise! - glue goes right through dropcloths. This is where I’m at with that issue. If anyone has suggestions for removing glue from a carpet that don’t involve cutting it (that’s been forbidden), I’m all ears.

The bad news is that the resulting project is charitably described as a mess. More than usual, I mean. Two of the dados were cut too wide thanks to the router bit issue, so the shelves don’t fit tightly. Two other shelves seated improperly thanks to a lack of clamps and aren’t flush, which looks weird. The good news is that, functionally speaking, none of that matters particularly. The shelves will still work fine, as will the clothing rods. Also, the closet has doors - which we took the opportunity to paint - which help conceal my shame. All of which in turn means that our closet will be much more efficient at utilizing the available space, and if you don’t look at it too closely you might not notice how poor the implementation was.

The big question now is the master bedroom closet. Was the lesson a) building this is dumb and a waste of time, just buy one or b) building the first one gives me the experience to get it right the second time around? The answer? TBD.

I Have Squandered My Days With Plans of Many Things

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 17:45:45 -0400

All good things must come to an end, and in spite of another home improvement injury (no hospital this time), a multi-day storm without historical precedent, and the fact that I spent the majority of my time off from work working with my hands, it was a good vacation.I may have negatively impacted my ability to make fun of my parents for being the world’s worst retired people based on their inability to stop actually working, however.

As is usual, the world spun on without me. Also as is usual, things in the technology world went bonkers in ways large and small. Sooner or later, those craving stability are going to relent and pay me to never go on vacation. Though admittedly my weather-blackmail scheme shows more immediate promise.

The plan going in to my mutiple weeks off was to take the downtime and leverage the bulk of it on projects in and around the house. The good news is that I completed 13 of my vacation To Do’s. The bad news is that the original list had 28 items on it. Part of the poor completion rate was project setbacks, part of it was injury, but mostly it was the fact that a bunch of the work consisted of doing things I’d never had the opportunity to do before. Which made for a great learning experience, but terrible efficiency.

Lest all work and no play make me a dull boy, I took a day off from hurting myself for a road trip, then closed out my vacation with a week in a cottage up north with the family. And by up north, I mean within an easy driving distance. The best part about living in Maine is that I don’t have to get on a plane to visit amazing places, which is fortunate because I spend so much time on planes for work that literally the last thing I want to do in my free time is fly.

Anyway, the following is my report on what I did on my summer vacation.

With a bunch of construction projects looming, we tested the hearing protection for my shop assistant. She wasn’t terribly enthused, but we’ll work on that.

After watching dozens of YouTube videos to look at how other people did it and optimize my technique, I used everything from a simple prybar to a sawzall to deconstruct six or eight pallets I found in Portland on Craiglist for free.

This yielded a fair amount of “reclaimable” wood, which is another way of saying wood with a shitload of nails in it.

The first project with the pallet wood was building a patio table to replace the glass one that was shattered by a freak gust of wind. If you’re interested, here’s more on how to do that.

Building the table was the first of many days spent wearing a respirator.

Though it turns out that a shop-vac makes a reasonable dust collection system for a random orbital sander.

For this and my follow up project, I bought a used but perfectly functional lunchbox planer off Craigslist. The seller’s story was interesting: a former master electrician, he and his wife were headed out to California to work for the National Park Service. His first post? Death Valley.

With the wood left over from the table, I built a companion bench. This would have been a somewhat easier task, but I made the mistake of showing Kate a video of a substantially more complicated model than the one I had planned on building which she preferred.

Thanks to a very kind brother-in-law, made my ~~first~~ second appearance at Fenway this season. The knuckleball giveth, but it also taketh away.

Next up after the bench was building a closet organizer, which was going swimmingly until a saw horse collapsed and snapped one of my two center panels. This required some in project adjustments and compromises that resulted in a center portion that is, well, let’s just say mistakes were made.

To be fair, if someone had given me a choice between being injured by one of the many power tools I used over my vacation or plywood, I would have taken the latter. That being said, it’s amazing how much damage several thick and heavy sheets of melamine coated plywood can do if they drop suddenly. If you’re not squeamish, this is my finger eight days after the initial injury.

Taking advantage of a break in the weather, I picked a good day to take a road trip through some beautiful country.

My destination was a place I try and visit every summer, one of the few swimming holes with a waterfall I have a shot at having to myself.

A day after that, the whole family packed up and headed up north to one of our favorite towns in Maine. Town being a somewhat generous term in this instance.

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/772152725639430150

We took up a full size station wagon and a midsize pickup truck. Both were absolutely packed. Traveling with kids is no joke.

The view out of our cottage was not too bad.

The view from the deck of the cottage was also better than average.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJ_gi_1hKWH/

Eventually, I more or less gave up taking pictures because Kate was getting shots like this one.

Because Poseidon hates me, the better part of the week was characterized by truly massive surf, the ancillary effects from Hermine, a truly unique storm system. The swells were big enough, in fact, that when they impacted the granite ledge the cottage sat on, you could feel it.

When we weren’t at the beach, out on a seal watch, or walking the neighborhood, life was hard.

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/773195654151671808

Exhibit A: Wednesday, we had a family outing to Oxbow.

On Friday, we returned to Monhegan Island. Two things made this trip stand out. First, it was by far the roughest crossing I’ve ever had out to the island thanks to Hermine. I didn’t get seasick, thankfully, but it’s the first time in a long time where it seemed like a possibility.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKJIdb4ho8g/

The other first for this trip was that I’d never visited the island as a dad before.

Importantly, we also verified that the Monhegan Brewery is a) still there and b) still delicious.

While the weather was both colder and foggier over our week than was originally forecast - thanks again, Poseidon - it was, as ever, a great and relaxing week. We were also gifted with a very nice sunset to close out our time up in Chamberlain.

Now it’s time to get back to work, but I’m already looking forward to next year.

About the Truck

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 23:11:28 -0400

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGfaZIcPUrO/

Friday afternoon, I got out of work a couple hours early and bought a truck. Or more accurately, I leased a truck, but I’ll come back to that. A lot of people have had questions about the truck, beginning with: why did you get a truck? So that seems like a good place to start.

Why a Truck?

The answer is mostly: our house. That’s not the only reason, of course - I spent almost a half hour trying to shoehorn our stroller into the passenger seat of my Volvo S40 last weekend because it didn’t fit in the trunk, for example. But it’s mostly the house. As has been documented here many, many times previously, we have done and will continue to do quite a bit of work on our home. It’s a lot better than it was when we bought it, but there’s a lot left to do.

Which means picking up everything from plywood to drywall to solid core doors to gravel to 8’ weather treated 4x4’s to fill. Taking construction debris to the dump. Picking up random free pallets to build a pallet wall. Trailering down my father-in-law’s Kubota. And on and on.

To his credit, my Dad’s been fantastic about driving down with his F-150 whenever we’ve needed him. But I could honestly have him down here two or three times a week, which is a bit much to ask given that he’s forty minutes up the road and that my parents have a schedule of their own (they are literally the world’s worst retired people).

A truck, then, is something we’ll get a lot of use out of. Having sadly failed to persuade Kate to get one when we replaced her car, then, the job fell to me. Even though I hate driving trucks and have always driven sports cars (Mustang/Thunderbird) or sportier sedans (Taurus SHO/S40).

Why not an SUV?

This is the second most common question I got. The short answer is that there are enough things I need to pick up (e.g. plywood sheets) that either a) wouldn’t fit or would be awkward to fit in an SUV or b) would destroy a carpeted rear cargo area (e.g. fill or gravel), that an SUV is optimal only for a subset of what we need it to do. A cargo space not constrained by a roof that I can clean with a hose has advantages for what I need it for.

Conversely, as a two adult and one baby household that also has a station wagon, we’re not in desperate need of additional interior storage space. The versatility of an open bed, therefore, was preferable.

Why a Midsize?

Theoretically I get better marginally better mileage, but really it’s the size. As someone who drives to and parks in Portland a lot, I was in the market for the smallest pickup that would work for what I need, and the midsize (Chevy Colorado/GMC Canyon, Honda Ridgeline, Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier) are basically as small as it gets.

My Dad’s full size F-150 counterintuitively helped sell me on a midsize. His has a short bed - around the same length as my own - but still could handle 4x8 sheets that we braced and hung over the tailgate. Seeing that I could generally get what I needed in a more compact footprint made a midsize pickup seem like a reasonable option.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that the midsize trucks start at eight or ten grand less than their full size counterparts.

Why a Tacoma?

When I first started looking, I really thought I’d end up with a Chevy Colorado, as that is getting the best reviews in the class at present. But it was narrowly edging the Tacoma, for the most part, and Toyota’s truck offered two things the Colorado didn’t: a manual transmission option on any engine, and a moonroof.

The latter sounds dumb, but I’ve really grown accustomed to having an open roof, and it’s not available on the Colorado at all. Even on Chevy’s full size Silverado, the moonroofs are available only on models that start at $50,000 - far more than I wanted to spend on a pickup.

As for the stick, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find a manual transmission on anything these days. Basically zero full size trucks come with one, and the Chevy Colorado comes with a stick but only on the most basic models with a tiny four cylinder engine. Outside of Subaru, Toyota is one of the few vendors selling a standard on any engine you like - though it’s not available on their highest end Tacoma model, the Limited.

Car people will tell you that automatic transmissions have come a long way in reliability and efficiency, and that they are now superior to humans with manual transmissions in both aspects. I have no doubt that they are correct. For me, however, there is something profoundly enjoyable about how a manual transmission involves me in the driving process in a way that an automatic or even manual paddle shifters never could.

So yeah, I might be able to do without a moonroof, but once I found out I could get a stick with the Tacoma’s V-6, I was pretty much sold.

Do You Hate the Environment?

I don’t, and it’s unfortunate that the mileage on a pickup isn’t better. But the work that needs to get done on our house is going to be done by a truck, whether we own it or not, so the net loss to the environment by a truck sitting in our driveway is marginal. That being said, if Tesla ever gets around to making a pickup - a prospect which is reportedly not as crazy as it sounds given that electric motors apparently can produce virtually infinite torque - I’ll be first in line.

One other helpful development: bus service from Freeport down to Portland starts this Thursday, so wherever and whenever possible, I’ll be taking public transportation.

What Don’t I like?

Apart from the fact that Toyota puts reverse on the other side of the gearbox from Volvo, which means that I keep stalling out the truck while trying to back up because it’s in 6th, the most unfortunate thing about the Tacoma so far is its electronics package. GM has wisely, in my opinion, punted and acknowledged that they are probably not as good at developing consumer electronics systems as Apple or Google, so they support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Toyota, meanwhile, has borrowed from Ford’s playbook and is attempting to outcompete the consumer tech giants. The result is Entune, a poorly reviewed - to put it charitably - app that patches your phone into the Tacoma’s electronics package, allowing the passthrough of apps like Pandora. It’s not Ford Sync bad, but it’s not great.

The good news for Toyota is that my S40 was literally the last model Volvo ever made that was incompatible with an iPhone adapters, so I’ve been patching my phone into my car stereo with clumsy Monoprice FM radio adapters forever. By comparison, Entune - warts and all - is a godsend.

Why a Lease?

Generally speaking, my preference is to buy a car, both because I have no interest in always driving a new car and because the years without car payments are really enjoyable. In this case, however, I’m leasing for three reasons. First, because my brother who’s in finance ran the numbers for me and told me to lease. Second, because I have no idea whether or not I’m going to be able to adapt to driving a pickup after spending years driving things that actually handled well, so limiting my commitment to three years makes sense. Last, because a lease allows me to hedge against factors I can’t predict right now. What’s the trajectory of gas prices three years from now? How much progress have electric vehicles made in that span? And so on. If I buy, particularly given the unnaturally long lifespans of Toyotas, I’m locked into the Tacoma for a decade plus. With a lease, I can reassess the landscape in three years and re-up if that makes sense, or head in an entirely different direction if gas costs $4 a gallon again and electric vehicles can make it from Maine to Fenway and back on a single charge.

What Did You Do With Your S40?

Normally it’s bad news when they don’t offer you much for your trade-in. In my case, it was something of a relief. I get to hang on to my S40 for a little longer, providing it continues to run, and hope against hope for some sort of last minute miracle that restores it to working order so we don’t have to donate it to charity.

As Kate said today, people may think it’s a little weird that the first thing I’d do upon winning Powerball would be to fully restore my ten year old car with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it, but those people have never driven my car.

How Did Our Heating Upgrades Pan Out?

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 23:23:09 -0400

One of the things you do when you’re an analyst is try to turn everything into numbers. Which you can then analyze. If anything, this tendency has gotten worse since becoming a parent, because I find myself up late but not in a position to watch one of my movies which typically involve explosions, a lot of yelling or both.

The latest target of this unhealthy fixation on metrics is our heating costs.

By way of background, our house is a modestly-sized single floor ranch built in the 1970’s. When we bought it, we believed that the house had both adequate attic insulation and an oil burning furnace of a relatively recent vintage. Both of these things were later proved to be untrue. Which is how we ended up paying around $2,800 to heat our house two winters ago.

Part of that was oil that cost two dollars more a gallon than it did this winter, but still, that’s bad for a house of our size, even in a climate like Maine’s. Terrible, actually. Worse was the fact that we’re using the word heat very loosely. Up until this past winter, we kept our house cold: heat set to 50 the majority of the day, bringing it up to 60 during the morning when we left for work and for a few hours when we were making dinner.

Humans really are adaptable creatures, so this felt normal to us. Friends wore mittens when they came over. This, for almost $3,000.

So we did the logical thing: we contacted an energy auditor. He had a lot of recommendations, new attic insulation among them. What we thought was adequate was actually somewhere around R17 versus the recommendation for new construction of R49. Thankfully, when we got bids for attic insulation, they came within a reasonable enough margin of the DIY cost, so I didn’t have to crawl around our attic with a respirator getting stuck with tiny shards of fiberglass. I have legitimately never been more relieved than when the winning bid came in.

One of the other recommendations from our auditor was ductless minisplit heat pumps, which are hyperefficient relative to our old and inefficient oil furnace. Not believing the technology was quite ready, we instead swapped out our fireplace for a fireplace insert (a Jøtul Rockland 550, specifically). If you’re unfamiliar with the product, it basically crams a woodstove into an existing fireplace. Wood is not a perfect heat source and has its environmental drawbacks, obviously, but given that the new EPA approved model wood stoves burn much cleaner and that after loading all of the costs oil doesn’t look too good we didn’t have much debate about the insert.

We made many other smaller changes to the house - I hung storms on two windows that were so leaky we used to get snow inside, we sealed cracks with spray foam and so on - but the major changes were the new layer of insulation in the attic and the stove. The question was: were they worth it?

Having run the numbers, the answer is an unambiguous yes - in spite of the cratering of price of oil.

Examples:

As mentioned above, in 2013 we spent $2,821.29 on heating oil. In 2015, we spent $610.62.
The huge difference is not attributable to any single factor, of course. The average temperature was a few degrees warmer this year, and most obviously, oil cost a lot more in 2013. But the savings would be massive even without the huge price drop: at 2013 prices, we would have spent $1,368.29 on oil.
We would have spent less than half as much because we used less than half as much oil. In 2013, we bought 827.6 gallons of oil. This year, that number was down to 401.4.

The pricing numbers are slightly misleading, however, because a wood stove obviously requires fuel of its own. We spent a little less than a thousand on wood. If we take that thousand, then, and add it to what we would have paid for oil if it cost as much it did in 2013 we’d come out just shy of $2,400.00. A savings of better than $400 over our 2013 costs, but substantially less impressive. Except for the real wild card in all of this.

Remember how I said we kept our house cold? We did not - could not - do that this winter, because we came home from the hospital with a tiny human in December. What this meant in practical terms was first that we needed to keep the house a lot warmer than we usually do, and second that we needed to heat it essentially round the clock while we were home with the baby. So instead of heating the house to 60 for a few hours a day, we had to keep it at 68 or higher from December through March, 24 hours a day. All of a sudden, the numbers look a lot more impressive.

The analyst side of me desperately wants to extract and assign the precise savings per investment - the fireplace insert saved us X, the insulation Y - but even if that’s possible with any degree of precision, it’s not worth worth it. It’s enough to know that the combined investments have the potential to save us hundreds (potentially thousands) a year while allowing us to make the house much more comfortable for a child. The insert is also an excellent hedge against fluctuations in the market price of heating oil.

All in all, it’s money well spent. And when we build a fire now, it actually heats the room.

My 2015 in Pictures

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 15:36:08 -0500

As I’ve fallen into the habit of doing, it’s time to wrap up the year with a pictures post. This is where I walk through the events of the calendar year via pictures along with the occasional tweet or screenshot. I write less words that way, which is less words for you to read. Everybody wins.

Every year has its ups and downs, but the peak was considerably higher this year than in years past. Unfortunately, however, the valleys were commensurately lower. As is the practice in my family, however, you take the bad with the good and make the best of what you’re given. Anything else is a waste of time.

Now before we get to the pictures, a quick look at some of the data that describes my 2015.

Travel

2015 was an improvement travel-wise. I still traveled more than I’d like to (i.e. basically not at all). But my mileage was down over 13K from the year prior, my status-match fueled affair with Virgin America actually saw me get a few cost effective upgrades to first class for red eyes and I finally got around to getting an AMEX Platinum card - which was worth the price for the automatic Starwood Gold and 4 PM checkouts alone. With circumstances changed at home - we’ll get to that shortly - I’ll be more strict about travel in the year ahead, so we’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime, a few other tidbits courtesy of Cemre’s TripIt Year in Review tool and Openflights.org.

Distance-wise, I flew 90,023 miles, or 13% less than last year (the pre-baby travel blackout helped).
This was the second time in six years I failed to reach 100,000 miles.
44 of my 60 segments were on JetBlue. 9, however, were on Virgin America which is likely to steal some of JetBlue’s business thanks to a better loyalty program.
Partially because of my time on VA, I was more likely to fly out of Boston (25) than Portland (17).
Interestingly, however, I was in SFO as much as PWM.
I spent over 9 days on planes.
My most popular route again was between JFK and SFO at just under 30,000 miles.

Personal Stats

My Top 5 non search-engine referrers to the work blog were 1) Twitter 2) Facebook, 3) Reddit, 4) Heise.de, 5) Google+. Yes, Google+. Seriously.
Seven of the top ten searches on my personal site for the year were about building your own Netflix. The other three were about kegerators.
Per FitBit, I took 2.6 million steps in 2015, the second year in a row that number has been down. Some of that was a lot of time spent at the hospital, more of it was issues using the treadmill desk at the office which led me to relocate it to the home office. Still, work to do.
Per ThinkUp, I tweeted 47,678 words last year, or 17K words more than Hamlet, 18K more than Of Mice and Men and 21K more than The Old Man and the Sea. All I can say is: I’m sorry.

With that, on to the pictures.

January 3

Kate and I brewed our first beer of the year, a Heady Topper clone. It wasn’t Heady Topper, but even fake Heady Topper is delicious. Plus the dry hopping made the house smell amazing.

January 4

Finally got frustrated enough with my tool situation to go out and get pegboard and start hanging everything up. Still not finished, but it worked well enough that I’ve looked up how to do this on concrete walls for my Dad’s basement.

January 28

Got a bit of snow, which meant we were not flying to London.

January 29

Flew to London, just in time for the Monki Gras. As always, amazing.

January 30

Never miss a chance to visit Au Bon Vieux Temps. Won’t be there this year, unfortunately, but given the reason, I’m ok with it.

February 3

Kate and I had both been to Ireland, but never together. Fixed that.

February 5

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/565976963459084288
When we got home from our flight around 10 PM that night, our driveway was covered in multiple feet of snow. So after getting off a transatlantic flight, I had to dig out enough space to get our cars off the road and then get up the next morning and finish the job. Decided that I’d prefer not to repeat this and started looking at snowblowers.

February 7

For the first time in my life, we had so much snow that we had to rake off our roof for fear of it collapsing. I wasn’t alone - the snow rake I bought from Home Depot was the last one in stock.

February 8

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/566007483702185984

Remember how the snow was so bad I had to rake our roof off? It got worse.

This was looking straight out of the bedroom window. On the positive side, the bedroom stayed very dark during the day which made for good napping.

February 9

The Rockport House, where I spent many happy summers and which had been in my Dad’s family for over a hundred years, was sold.

February 20

My best friend flew in from Denver for my 40th birthday.

Not shockingly, he was delayed.

February 21

My brother drove five hours to be there as well.

Some randos showed up too.

What followed was absolutely insane. Kate rented a small bus, crammed all of us in it, and we were driven from brewery to distillery to brewery for tours and fine libations.

When we got back to the house, the big reveal was a custom built bar made from reclaimed wood, fully stocked with a little help from our friends.

If you’re going to turn 40, this is how you do it.

March 5

Made it through one more offseason.

March 14

Celebrated Pi Day with friends. And Sasuga.

April 13

We replaced an inefficient fireplace with a hyper-efficient fireplace insert. We’ve turned the furnace on maybe three or four days this winter.

April 24

Already panicked about what to get Kate for her birthday, Rachel blew me out of the water before I knew what had happened.

April 25

Because I’m incompetent, friends helped me prepare for Kate’s bday.

May 9

https://www.instagram.com/p/2e_s7DvUuU/

With Kate off alcohol for the best reason there is, Ryan and I went to the Allagash / Cantillon / Russian River event at Allagash. It was easily the best beer event I’ve been to.

May 19

Had never been to Vancouver. Once there, my only question was: why? Every tech event that will fit in their conference center should be in Vancouver. Gorgeous city.

June 3

My second book, The Software Paradox, was published by O’Reilly.

June 13

Our hop plants - Cascade and Centennial - sprouted.

June 20

With wood playing a more primary role in our winter heating plans, started construction on a woodshed.

June 24

Scratched “watch game from the Green Monster and a private box at Fenway” off the bucket list.

June 30

Firewood dropoff.

July 7

One of our favorite people in the world was in town for her birthday.

July 19

My best friend’s dog Floyd - who once was flown to LA to be on Pet Stars, hosted by Mario Lopez, where he (playfully) mauled Joan Rivers’ daughter - passed away. People who don’t have pets might not understand it, but this was devastating. He was not my dog, but I had known Floyd since he was a puppy.

I’d been all over Colorado with him, and remember him long before he was the biggest lab I’ve ever seen. My friend and I used to drive up into the mountains with Floyd, and along the way he’d take turns trying to lie on top of us as if we were mattresses. Once we got there, he’d be diving through snow drifts like a porpoise. He always slept very well up there.

It was time, and he had a great life, but that didn’t make it any easier. RIP Floyd.

July 31

Baxter State Park is nice.

August 3

Woodshed was both finished and loaded.

The best part of the project was using chisels that had been polished smooth by my grandfather before me.

August 13

I really don’t mind staycations at our house.

August 20

https://www.instagram.com/p/6oSWNXvUlX/?taken-by=stephenogrady
Made the annual pilgrimage to Houston Brook Falls.

August 25

Kate and I rented a little place on the water up north for a week. Quiet, beautiful and local(ish). Perfect.

August 28

Made the annual pilgrimage to Monhegan Island (and the now annual visit to the Monhegan Brewery).

September 6

Camping with friends. Having learned from last time, we didn’t try and hike a jockey box, ice and keg in a half mile.

September 21

Yet another birthday celebrated at the O’Grady Compound.

September 28

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/648573799743520768
As many of you already know, my friend Alex King passed away after a battle with cancer. I was able to visit him a few weeks before, and we got to sit and watch baseball. Red Sox/Yankees, even. I got to tell him in person that Kate was pregnant, and to pick his brain on what it’s like being the father of a daughter.

He was still fighting when last I saw him.

I got the news via a personal Slack instance that we were all on together. I was coming out of the South Portland post office on a pre-Monktoberfest errand. I typed “oh god,” then sat silent in my car for a while. I called Kate, but couldn’t really talk. I was no better a few days later at the Monktoberfest.

To be honest, I’m not much better now. Pretty much every day I read something about technology, baseball or half a dozen other things and think, “I have to ping Alex.” I remember a second too late. I know from experience that this will get less difficult. But not soon.

Alex was my friend, and he is missed.

October 1

The fifth Monktoberfest. Still can’t believe I’ve survived five of them.

October 24

Remember when I said I didn’t care to repeat last winter’s experience?

October 24

One of my favorite events every year. Great beer, great setting. It’s good to be outside on a gorgeous Fall day drinking something nice.

November 6

With our new arrival looming, snuck in a last minute visit with my best friend. First task was getting Kate situated in her hospital room.

November 15

Stupidly rushing because I was splitting my time between home and the hospital, I almost put the router I was using to mortice the hinges on the door to the baby’s room through my palm. Instead, I caught it in time, disaster was averted and the nursery was now an actual room with a door.

November 26

That time we had Thanksgiving at the hospital. That’s Allagash Tiarna, in case anyone’s curious.

November 30

The morning of our big day.

An hour later.

I will never have a more important day than November 30, 2015.

December 7

The O’Grady Family heads home for the first time.

December 26

Kate got a new baby-friendly ride.

December 31

New Year’s Eve was a little quieter this year for some reason.

From other similar year end accounts, I know many of you had up and down 2015’s as well. Here’s hoping the new year treats us all well.

Enjoy your time.

How We Leased a New Car Without Setting Foot in the Dealership

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 19:51:18 -0500

https://www.flickr.com/photos/volvocarsouthafrica/4604115498/in/photolist-81Ri8G-B7T2oZ-4ppLYD-edsToM-bxJwDy-fDYMtm-fDYND7-bLDfp8-rZQjyU-pPaQQv-qaVPuL-pxZxeN-hwo6AS-4gHFYF-4gMJxC-4gMh6o-yfVcwp-BWstYa-4gHGCg-dRgCbi-qHaAki-qF3uvd-pLyhX8-pLkdoW-pLkdjh-4dNtsb-cfJzcf-4dNt4U-pLkdx3-qHaAcH-9QTFbE-2reR4N-dRgCU6-9QTFDN-6RVYHS-3SopB-7Y5bzU-x2AvZB-3uTr1v-4tR5kK-3uTwx2-7LgJaA-DfKZZ-4tR5at-81N8he-6NrMzf-81Rhb9-7KL4K3-BU9F21-89BFja

After a quick mention on Twitter, a number of people have asked how we managed to buy a car without visiting the dealership we bought it from. The answer is pretty simple: email.

With Kate’s old car, a 2002 Volvo S60, having crossed the 210,000 mile mark with a relatively expensive exhaust system repair looming, we’ve been in the market for some time. My efforts at convincing her to replace it with a pickup truck having failed miserably, another Volvo was the default choice. We’ve both been very happy with the reliability and maintenance record of our Volvos, and this is the second in a row for Kate that’s eclipsed 200,000 miles.

So we headed to our local dealership to test drive two models with a little more space than her S60 (new baby, new priorities): the XC60 and XC70. Kate had no real preference, so I went to work finding the best deal we could on either.

Step one was tracking down every Volvo dealership within a reasonable driving distance: 110 miles or so. I would have stretched it further to include Boston-area dealerships, but with a new baby time is at a premium. Interestingly, Google Maps was less than helpful for this exercise, including as it did a host of service stations that weren’t relevant for this search. Volvo’s website gave me a list, however, and I emailed five dealerships in New Hampshire and Maine with basic information: the two models we were considering, the lease terms we expected, the details of our trade-in, and so on. I (eventually) got five replies.

From there, I simply negotiated over email, taking the best offers and seeing whether or not other dealers would match or beat them. It took a couple of rounds of this, because a few of the dealerships were more traditional and wanted to do things over the phone or in person, but eventually one of them (Portland Volvo) was willing to go the extra mile and give us a higher end model at our price target and we were done.

Even better for us, Portland Volvo has a drop off delivery option. The first time I spoke to anyone on the phone was the day before Christmas Eve to put down a deposit. Three days later, I called their finance department to provide the necessary information for the credit application and the car was dropped off at our house an hour later. The driver brought all the necessary paperwork, which we signed and then he drove back to the dealership in our trade-in.

All in all, that’s about as painless a buying process as you’ll find, with the possible exception of Tesla. Not every dealership will drop off the vehicle, of course, but there’s no reason apart from test drives at this point to visit a dealership to talk price. It’s much more efficient to stick to email, engage a number of dealerships and let them compete with one another. If you’re working with one that has an internet sales department, as well, expect them to be much more efficient.

So that’s how we leased our new car without setting foot in the dealership.

November 30

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:27:50 -0500

Many things have happened on November 30th over the years. In 1782, the preliminary peace articles that would later be known as the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War, were signed. In 1954, in the only documented case in the Western Hemisphere of a human being hit by a rock from space, Ann Elizabeth Hodges was struck by a meteorite while taking an afternoon nap. After it was slowed by the roof, she was bruised but otherwise fine. In 1980, Shane Victorino was born. This later became very relevant. Two years after Victorino was born, Thriller was released on November 30th and went on to become the best selling album of all time.

Shane Victorino or no, however, 2015’s November 30th will always be the best November 30th for us. At 8:33 AM, we welcomed Eleanor Gilman O’Grady into the world. Our first child, and one who brought her share of complications, we are grateful beyond words that she arrived happy and healthy. Well, healthy, anyway. She was a little grumpy post-delivery. She got here a little late for Thanksgiving, but as she was five weeks early (as Kate says, she’s already an O’Grady) we can’t really hold that against her.

Kate and I are adapting to the life of parents of a newborn, which is to say we’re adapting to a life where you measure sleep in minutes rather than hours. Exhausted as we are, though, what pretty much every parent told us has proven true: it’s all worth it. It always was.

November 30th, 2015 was a good day.

The News

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 11:11:00 -0400

There is news and there is news. The former is never in short supply. Anyone who’s ever caught up with an acquaintance understands this kind of news. Promotions. Trips. Moves. Stories about friends being trapped in hotel stairwells in Brussels. This kind of news is not mundane, exactly. As Raymond Carver put it, “There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature.”

But there are other moments. Moments you may only experience once in a lifetime. If you’re lucky. This is one of those moments, that other kind of news.

Kate is pregnant. We are expecting a baby daughter in early December.

The proximity of that date may surprise some of you. It certainly surprises the hell out of us when we actually sit down and count the weeks between now and then. We are making this news public at a date later than might be typical in part because we are both superstitious (I blame baseball, not sure what her excuse is). But while we’re all of the adjectives that mean excited, we’re also cautious because it’s taken us a long time to get to this point, and there are many, many hurdles yet to be cleared.

If all goes well, there will be other times and other posts and far too many words to discuss, among other things, how as the product of a household with one brother and zero sisters I am completely and utterly unprepared for a daughter. But for now, we just wanted to share this news with everyone, because there’s news and there is news.

Hopefully we’ll have more of that last kind soon, but in the meantime keep your fingers crossed for us if you would.

How to Build a Woodshed

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 22:24:42 -0400

When Kate and I bought our house, we knew going in that it had two primary heat sources: an oil furnace and a fireplace. We weren’t thrilled about the former due to the cost of heating oil and a host of environmental concerns, and while we both enjoy a roaring fire, the unfortunate reality is that fireplaces are by and large better aesthetically than they are at actually serving as a heat source. Taken together, our heating situation was less than ideal.

To address this, we first invested in making the house more efficient at retaining the heat it did have. We had blown insulation installed in the attic, we tore out and replaced the existing insulation in our basement, ripped out an old front door and sealed it, replaced the remaining entryway with a new efficient model, installed storm windows where they were lacking and more. This did have the desired effect of cutting our oil consumption substantially - anywhere from a half gallon to gallon per day during the winter heating season. Which was a good start. But it didn’t address the core problem that our heating system - systems plural if you want to count the fireplace - was extremely inefficient. And so we set to evaluating a wide variety of heating options.

Why Wood?

Natural gas, the option involving the fewest compromises both economically and environmentally, is unfortunately not going to be coming to our neighborhood. The cost of a propane-based alternative wasn’t prohibitive, but the payback period versus our existing oil infrastructure was lengthy. My preferred option of a ductless minisplit heat pump, meanwhile, was interesting, but given that they’re less viable in extreme cold and more problematically will not integrate into an existing thermostat system, they’re not quite ready in our eyes. We’ll probably go down the heat pump route eventually, but only when they’re guaranteed to play nicely with our Nest units.

With gas, propane and heat pumps out, we were left looking at wood. Which in turn led us to look at converting the fireplace into something more efficient - both as a heat source and environmentally. After a lengthy research process, we ended up buying a new EPA certified Jøtul fireplace insert - the Rockland 550, specifically. Manufactured here in Maine, they essentially convert your existing leaky fireplace into a woodstove, which a) is capable of heating an entire floor and b) burns wood far, far more efficiently.

Like every other heat source, wood comes with environmental tradeoffs, but it’s the best choice for us at present.

What Does it Mean to Heat with Wood?

Most obviously, you need wood to burn. Given that stacking it inside is impractical for a variety of reasons ranging from space to insects, it also means that you’re going to be making regular trips outside in the winter cold to bring in wood for the stove. Which in turn implies that you have somewhere to store the wood outside, preferably someplace close to a door.

In years past we’ve made do with makeshift wood racks that consist of two metal frames that you attach to the end of a pair of 2x4’s. Given the more primary role wood will play in this winter’s heating plan, however, we needed more wood than was practical to store in this manner. This much wood, in fact.

We needed a wood shed, in other words.

What Kind of Shed?

One of the things you figure out quickly when you Google “woodshed” or “firewood shed” is that there are a lot of woodshed plans online. Many hardware stores, in fact, sell packaged shed kits that you assemble like a piece of Ikea furniture. Both because none of these quite fit our needs and because I wanted something a little more challenging, I eventually ended up basing my shed plans on this post and beam design I found on Popular Mechanics.

This design involves a bit of actual carpentry such as cutting notches in the posts to seat beams, which made it more interesting than putting together some pre-drilled lego-style pieces. It also gave me a chance to use a set of hand tools like the chisels below that belonged to my grandfather and have been passed down to me to complete the project. This made the experience special for me in a way that something more straightforward would not have been.

As a side note for anyone interested, the Popular Mechanics link does not include the PDF plans, and as they’re not mine I can’t post them here, but the PDF schematic which includes a detailed lumber shopping list isn’t too hard to find.

How to Build It?

Particularly if, like me, you’ve never built anything like this the natural question is where to start. The answer, as always with DIY projects, is YouTube. I watched a dozen or more different videos about building sheds. No matter what your question is, from foundation to roof, there is a YouTube video that covers it. For this project, as an example, I wanted to put on an asphalt shingle roof instead of the corrugated metal one the plans called for. The tricky part was that while I worked construction in high school and college, I’d never so much as looked at a shingle previously. Thanks to videos like iCreatables’ “How To Build A Lean To Shed - Part 7 - Roofing Install,” however, it wasn’t as technically difficult as I expected. It was much, much worse in other ways, but we’ll come back to that.

The other important recommendation is that advance planning is your friend. Even with plans in hand, it’s necessary to work out a host of details - and doing them ahead of time is far preferable to trying to working them out while you’re scrambling around on a roof, for example.

It’s nice to have a cutlist, for example, so that you’re not cutting each piece one by one in the middle of the project. Understanding the precise spacing between beams, joists, posts and rafters is also important. I also liked to have a diagram for myself not just of how pieces fit together, but with which fasteners. 3" screws? 16d nails? How many per location? The plans I had included a list, but having them laid out on a diagram is much easier to refer to while in the middle of things.

It’s also useful to have a wife patient enough to let you turn her kitchen table into a construction site for a month.

How Long Does it Take?

It depends in part on your skill level: I had to figure out how to do several of the steps from scratch which took longer. The tools you have on hand also make a difference, as does the site choice. Also, weather is a huge factor, because standing on a 12’ metal contractors’ ladder holding thin sheets of aluminum is not what you want to be doing when a typical summer pop up thunderstorm rolls overhead.

All told, this project took me the better part of three weekends, with a bunch of lunch hours and evenings thrown in as well. Your mileage may vary, however.

Lessons Learned

Without walking through the entire construction process, which would be tedious even for me, here are a couple of notes for anyone else who builds this or something similar. It’s also worth getting these down for my own benefit, because while they’ll likely come in handy on other projects later I’m unlikely to remember all of this by that point.

Don’t Do This On Your Own

I picked a bad time to build my shed, as the friends who would normally be up for this kind of thing were either traveling for work or away at the usual summer slate of weddings and so on. And while either my father or my father-in-law would have been happy to help if asked, it’s a longish drive for both of them and the weather was unpredictable enough with sudden thunderstorms so as to make that impractical.

Which is how I ended up building this by myself. I figured out how to do the things that were hardest solo, as I’ll talk about below, but I don’t recommend it. If only because it’s more boring.

Foundation Choices

Basically, you have two choices: on-grade (i.e. concrete blocks or similar seated on the ground) or poured concrete footings. While I had to go the former route due to zoning restrictions, I highly, highly recommend you not do the same. Poured concrete footings are substantially easier to level, less vulnerable to things like frost heaves, etc. Speaking of leveling.

Leveling Sucks

There’s a reason they always skip over the leveling process in YouTube videos, and the reason is that leveling sucks. In my case, I was working with six concrete footings. One of the videos I watched, unfortunately, recommended leveling down from your highest point to the middle footing and then to other end. This, as it turns out, is idiotic. If you’re working with six footings, Level your four corners and figure the middle out later. You should also be prepared to work hard, have everything level, and have all of that thrown away instantly when you add a new post, move a foundational piece slightly or similar.

How to Notch Posts and Rafters

As mentioned above, this was a post and beam type project, and so the roof beams actually sit in notches cut into the posts themselves. The simplest way to notch a post, I’ve found, is to set a circular saw to the appropriate depth (1.5", for example, if you’re seating a 2xX piece) and make a straight (shoulder) cut at the bottom of where you want the notch. Then simply use the circular saw to make a dozen or more cuts above it at the same depth. The remaining thin strips of post are then easily removed with a chisel.

You can kind of do the same thing in notching the bird’s mouth of rafters, but it’s tricky. Make sure you have spare lumber on hand.

How to Hang End Rafters Solo

This seemed challenging because the end rafters were pressure treated 2x6 strips that weren’t light, and not only needed to be fastened to the shed wall but at a particular angle and height to match the rafters. Even solo, however, this was pretty easy: use two clamps to attach them to the wall, adjust as necessary, tighten the clamps and fasten them permanently.

How to Hang a 2x8x12 Fascia

When writing up the instructions for this step the night before I was to hang the fascia, the last bullet was “How?” I couldn’t figure how - or even if - I was going to be able to haul a heavy pressure treated 2x8 over 12 feet long and hang it levelly between two end rafters 12 feet off the ground. After several failed attempts and one crushed pinky, I worked out how to do this. Using two clamps, create a stand or brace of sorts perpendicular to your fascia using a spare 2x4 or similar in the middle of the shed. Make it as close to your ideal height as possible. Then, when you haul the 2x8 up to temporarily fasten it to one rafter, you rest it on the foundation that’s a foot or two shorter than your rafter and you have one end temporarily attached and held up by your 2x4. The stand you’ve created acts sort of like a second set of hands would, holding the fascia up. Then when you move the ladder down to the other end of the structure, the fascia is already near the height you need and thus easy to level and attach.

Simpler still, of course, is simply having someone help you. But if you have to do it this way, it is possible.

Shingling is Awful

After watching all the YouTube videos, I mistakenly thought shingling wouldn’t be all that bad. I was seriously mistaken. It isn’t technically that difficult, as mentioned above. Once you get the idea, the pattern, shingling is straightforward. But there are a few problems. First, the pitch on my roof was greater than in the videos, so I couldn’t walk around like they did and casually use a nail gun to attach the shingles. And not just because I don’t have a nailgun. Best I could do was crab walk around, and then sit sideways on one leg while nailing in a shingle.

There are two more problems, however. First, shingles are like large pieces of sandpaper. By the time I figured this out, I’d sanded most of the leg hair and some skin off my left leg, and I had a fair amount of asphalt embedded in it. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, as you can throw on jeans and be done with it. Because it was pushing 90, however, I opted out of that plan and instead made myself some leg armor using cardboard boxes and duct tape. The other problem with asphalt shingles is that they are deep, deep black, as was the felt building paper under them. So the roof is exceptionally hot as well as painful. Also dangerous, if you were to fall off. Which is why shingling is awful.

Pay Attention to Weather

This is especially true for me, but really for anyone who doesn’t want to be caught holding electrical power tools in the rain, paying very close attention to the forecast and weather radar is important. Otherwise you end up trying to cover the unshingled plywood roof with a giant tarp in 30 MPH winds and driving rain. Not recommended.

The End Product

A leanto firewood shed certainly isn’t going to win any design awards or be featured in architecture magazines. This is especially true of this one, about which the best that can be said is: “mistakes were made.” As one of my friends observed after looking at it for thirty seconds: “little shy on this end?”

But mistakes or no, there’s something satisfying about building things with your hands. Particularly when using tools with handles worn smooth by years of your grandfather’s usage. More to the point, even if it’s not perfect, as another friend put it, its only job is to keep rain and snow off of a pile of wood. So far tonight, it’s been up to the task.

This one’s for you, Gramp.

Three Days in Dublin

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 23:42:40 -0400

Hunting for a picture earlier, it occurred to me that I have thus far neglected to document the trip Kate and I took to Ireland back in February. After quick stops in London and Brussels for the Monki Gras and FOSDEM, we tacked on a quick three day jaunt in Dublin. We’ve both been to Ireland before, but we’d never been with each other. Our original idea was to tour the west and see more of the country, but given the compressed timeframe Dublin was easier to manage.

It was an especially interesting visit for me, because the last time I was in the city - aside from stopovers at the airport - was as a student. One summer in college, I was over for six weeks to take a course at Trinity on Irish history. Unsurprisingly, I loved my time in Dublin. The class, too.

Here are a few of the things Kate and I saw while we were over.

The Trinity campus was as impressive as I remembered, and we were staying at a Westin that was a short walk away.

Turning around, we headed over to see the book of Kells.

Pictures are prohibited of the book itself, but the Old Library you pass through on the way out is at least as impressive. They just don’t make rooms like this anymore.

After the book of Kells, we took a walk down to the Pavilion. It was quiet, almost empty, but the summer I was over it was always packed. A couple of us students would get pints and sit out on the deck to watch cricket played on this field.

I had no idea then and still have no idea now how cricket is played, but sitting outside in the sun watching it, Guinness in hand, while old men yelled obscure cricket taunts at one team or the other was not bad at all.

A short walk from there was the Oscar Wilde memorial, a fitting tribute.

We also visited the Michael Collins memorial, which was important to us as some of Kate’s family fought with him.

The picture’s terrible, but in the other direction, we walked through the Dubhlinn Garden behind Dublin Castle.

The administrative buildings built off the castle end up in this courtyard.

For its part, the castle has been almost subsumed by the city around it.

We made sure to catch some live music as well. Catching Irish acts is always fun, as I grew up on the music. At the same time, it always reminds me of an absent friend.

You are missed, Sean.

No trip to Dublin, of course, is complete without a visit to the Temple Bar.

But while the traditional venues remain fantastic, it’s nice to see craft focused venues springing up. After striking out when one prospective lunch venue was closed, we wandered down one street and ended up at P.Macs. The servers were great, and knew their craft beer.

Overall, it was a great trip, if too short. Look forward to getting back over, and I hope I don’t have to wait as long this time.

Blue About JetBlue

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 22:53:55 -0400

I fly JetBlue a lot. According to Openflights.org, I’m at 34 segments and 48,497 miles so far this year. From 2010 through 2014, I’ve averaged a bit over 86,000 miles a year on the carrier. For the second year in a row, I qualified for JetBlue’s frequent flyer program, Mosaic, by June. With the exception of the odd international trip here and there, the majority of my air travel is domestic which is how I’m able to standardize on JetBlue.

As to why I’ve standardized on JetBlue, that question is just as easy to answer: legroom. There are a lot of reasons to like JetBlue: the planes are in reasonable shape, the staff is friendly and helpful, and they are typically cost competitive. But for me, it’s always been about the legroom. Of all of the major domestic carriers, JetBlue is the only one with regular economy seats that don’t require me to be shorter. My knees will brush the front of the seat in front of me, but I have just enough room that flying coach is not the excruciating experience that it is on, say, United.

At least for now.

It’s possible, however, that 2015 could be my last year as a JetBlue regular - my earned 2016 Mosaic status notwithstanding. The carrier has two problems. First, they’re taking away some of the core features that made flying JetBlue a different, more pleasant experience. Second, their rewards program for those of us who fly a lot isn’t particularly competitive.

In the airline’s defense, it’s not their fault they’re about to get worse - it’s Wall Street’s. Equity analysts covering the carrier got tired of Chief Executive Dave Barger being “overly concerned” with minutiae like passenger comfort and eschewing the nickel-and-diming approach of its competitors. Which is presumably part of the reason why he got to add “Former” to his job title. Under the leadership of Barger’s replacement, former British Airways executive Robin Hayes, JetBlue customers can now look forward to additional baggage fees and 15 additional seats per plane - which is another way of saying less legroom.

This might be acceptable if JetBlue took care of those who flew the airline the most, but its Mosaic program is relatively benefit free. It eliminates change fees, which does save me a few hundred dollars a year when schedules change. Mosaic also allows me to board first, but the extra fee Even More Legroom seats I typically purchase for longer flights board early as well. The program waives checked baggage fees, but if you fly enough to qualify for Mosaic you should know better than to check bags. I certainly don’t.

Nowhere in there, noticeably, is any mention of upgrades. Most frequent flyer programs include the ability to earn upgrades to first class, or the ability to purchase them at a discount. Virgin America, for example, lets its Gold and Silver flyers upgrade to the equivalent of Economy Plus for free, and purchase unsold first class inventory at a fraction of the retail cost. One friend tells me he regularly upgrades to first class on flights in and out of Boston for $200 or less. JetBlue, by contrast, offered six complimentary upgrades to Even More Legroom seats for Mosaic members the first year of the program (which you could not redeem online or at the airport), then quietly eliminated that offering. And there is no formal upgrade path whatsoever - free or paid - to their new first class Mint seats.

Which leaves us with an airline that by all accounts is poised to substantially downgrade its customer experience, removing much of its competitive differentiation in the process. Worse, the carrier is without a competitive loyalty program for frequent flyers to compensate for the reductions in service.

I really have enjoyed flying JetBlue over the years, but it’s about to get harder to find reasons to not give my business to alternatives like Virgin. I’ll be watching how the company behaves through the end of the year, but for the first time in years I’m evaluating my options for standard carriers in 2016 (non-United suggestions welcome). If I’m going to have to shoehorn myself into a seat regardless of where I fly, I might as well pick an airline that will at least give me a shot at the sweet, sweet legroom of first class.

Still, my first choice would be to keep flying JetBlue, provided they can get their act together. You guys listening?

How to Use an Electrical Pump to Make Homebrewing Easier

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 16:31:37 -0500

Because I like beer, I have over the years dabbled in trying to make it. At no point have I had much success. My first attempt came in college, where not having control over the temperature of the dorm, as it turns out, is a problem. Attempts to artificially create the correct temperature with a cracked window in winter led to two cases of frozen beer and very small glass shards everywhere. Subsequent efforts first in Maine and then in Denver were less destructive but best described as not provably toxic.

My willingness and ability to improve, however, was always limited by the soul-killing tedium of bottling. Each time I’d brew a batch, I’d remember why it had been so long since the last time: I absolutely hate bottling. It wasn’t until a conversation with Devin a month or two ago that I remembered that, as the owner of a kegerator, I had an option other than bottling: kegging.

Hence last weekend’s brew day:

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/551574842840186880

The good news is that kegging is substantially lower effort than bottling. The bad news is that it comes with some additional costs in terms of maintenance. To assist with these as well as the brewing process itself, I decided to invest in an electrical pump. Here’s how we use it.

The Basics

Are not very complicated. The basic idea is to use an electrical pump wherever moving water is required, whether for cleaning, cooling or both. After looking around, and one aborted selection of a non-submersible utility pump, with the assistance of homebrewtalk.com user @Mike_kever_kombi I settled on a Flotec 1/6 HP submersible utility pump, model # FP0S1300X. It’s available for $83.28 at Home Depot, which was considerably cheaper than the base ~$165 price I’d seen quoted for wort chilling pumps.

There aren’t too many rules associated with the pump; basically you drop it in, turn it on and it pumps water. But obviously be careful because you’re dealing with electricty and water, never a great combination. Besides the safety concerns, pay attention to the hose diameters on both sides. In my experience, the pump will not operate with 5/16" tubing - common to many wort chillers - but is fine with slightly larger 3/8" lines, in spite of what the user manual claims. It’s also critically important not to run the pump dry; pay very close attention, in other words, if you’re doing something other than recirculating water.

Other than that, it’s pretty straightforward. On to the specifics of how we use it.

Wort Chilling

Whenever I’ve used our copper wort chiller in the past, I’ve always plugged it into a standard garden hose spigot and used your basic cold tap water to bring down the temperature of the wort after a boil. In Maine, in the winter, this is less practical, particularly during brew days like ours where the outside temperature is twenty degrees below freezing. Which is where the pump comes in.

In order to chill the wort, I take a piece of 3/8" line and connect a standard garden hose connection (see above) to one end, hose clamp it, and clamp the other end to input of the wort chiller. A second 3/8" line, meanwhile, is clamped to the output. The standard garden hose connection is then attached to the Flotec pump, and pump and output line from the chiller are both added to a six gallon bucket filled with cold water and a ten pound bag of ice.

Fifteen minutes or so before then end of your boil, you add the chiller to your brew kettle to sanitize it as usual. When it’s time to chill the wort, then, you merely plug the pump in. More or less instantly the ice cold water will be pumped into the chiller, which absorbs the heat and recirculates the heated waste water back into the bucket full of ice water. As a closed system, there’s not much to worry about here, and it works very well. We cooled our boiled wort down to the pitch temp in less than twenty minutes thanks to the pump.

When you’re done, simply unhook the garden hose connection, drain the pump, and you’re ready to use it for cleaning.

Kegerator or Jockey Box Cleaning

In addition to using the pump to chill wort, it’s highly useful in cleaning the lines of whatever you’re using to serve your kegs. Basically, I do this in three stages. The idea is to clean the lines, rinse them, then rinse them again.

Detergent Clean: Mix 4 tablespoons with 2 gallons hot water in five gallon bucket (~$3 at Home Depot), recirculate (input and output lines both in the same bucket) through lines for 3-5 minutes. When complete, dump mixture and drain pump.
Recirculating Rinse: In empty bucket, add two gallons of hot clean water. Recirculate this through the lines for 3-5 minutes. When complete, dump mixture and drain pump.
Cleansing Rinse: In empty bucket, add one gallon hot clean water. Pump through lines outputting to sink or other drain until complete, watching carefully not to allow pump to run dry.

What You Need

To make all of the above work, you’ll need a different connector depending on what you’re cleaning. One end of your input line should keep the garden hose connection mentioned above to connect to the pump. If you’re cleaning a jockey box, then, you’ll simply need a 3/8" barb (middle above) along with a standard 7/8" hex nut coupler (left above) - the same one you use for keg couplers. Attach and clamp this to your hose, then screw it on to the back of your jockey box as if it was a beer input line.

If you’re cleaning kegerator lines, it may or may not be the same setup. For our usage, we use a male fitting that is the same threading as the tap mechanism (right above). This is fitted to the 3/8" barb and attached to the other end of the line with the garden hose attachment. We then unscrew our tap assembly using a tap wrench like this one:

With that off, we use the above fitting to attach the tap tower to the pump, and proceed through the steps mentioned above. Apart from the different fittings, the process is essentially identical.

Caveats

In general using a pump is fairly straightforward. Remember, however, that the pump valve is open at all times, and can act as a siphon even when powered off. Be careful of accidentally draining the pump bucket if your lines are hanging down lower than the bucket, in other words.

Also, use the provided handles to lift and move the pump; do not lift it by its electrical cord.

Questions? Make sense?

How to Build a French Drain

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:47:53 -0500

When we bought our house, it was pretty apparent that the basement had at one time been finished, and at another time subsequent to being finished, seen a lot of water. Though damp basements are far from unusual in Maine, they are less than optimal. Our inspector, eyeing the three or four inch trench dug along one side of the foundation by falling water, thought the culprit might be a lack of gutters. So leading up to our closing, we scheduled a gutter installation. The week before the gutters were installed, we had a massive thunderstorm and a lot of water in the basement. The week after the gutters went in, bigger storm, no water.

Problem solved. We thought.

As it turned out, our gutters work perfectly at keeping our basement dry when the ground isn’t frozen. When the ground is frozen, not so much. Unable to soak into the ground, meltwater from the roof and elsewhere pooled in front of our basement door, then poured through it. Which is why every so often last winter I’d blow up on Twitter about how much I loved hauling a 12 gallon (at 8.34 lbs/gallon) shop-vac full of near freezing water out the door, ten feet away from our foundation to be dumped down a hill. It’s also why my back hurt for most of last winter.

Rather than deal with this for a second winter, we looked at our options and eventually settled on what’s commonly referred to as a French drain (named after a person, not the country), or more specifically a curtain drain which is a fancy way of saying “French drain with a pipe in it.”

The theory behind this is simple: when water pools outside our basement door, we give it somewhere more convenient to go than into our basement - water being, after all, inherently lazy. I say theory because we’re not able to test the drain until a) the ground is frozen and b) we have a lot of water. We can simulate B with a hose, but A is a little harder. We have absolutely no idea if this is going to work, in other words.

In the meantime, however, I thought I’d document the process of creating one for any of you that might have drainage issues. It could also be a useful reminder for myself if this plan fails and I have to dig several more of these when things thaw out in the spring, but I’m trying not to think about that too much.

So, how to build a French Drain.

Step 1

Download this article from Fine Homebuilding (which is an awesome magazine, by the way). Seriously, it’s enormously helpful.

Step 1A

Call DigSafe. Unless you want to accidentally cut a power line, a water or waste pipe or - worse - you internet feed, call DigSafe. It’s free and they’ll make sure your path is clear.

True, they missed our Spectrum coax cable at the new house, but at least the mistake was on them.

Step 2

Get a tractor. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Sure, you can dig the ditch yourself, but when was the last time you dug a trench that was two feet deep and twenty or more feet in length? In the heat? Through tree roots, rocks and clay soil? Do yourself a favor and beg, borrow, rent or steal a tractor. We got lucky, as my father-in-law jointly owns one with a friend.

Step 3

Start digging your trench. I dug out away from the foundation, and this worked reasonably well. It’s also worth noting that I dug maybe a foot down, then went back and got to the necessary 2’ depth. This was dumb. Dig to the 2’ depth from the start, because going back over a narrow trench with a tractor to dig deeper the second time is a pain in the ass.

Step 4

Position your gravel fill (you want 3/4 crushed rock) as close to the trench as possible. Because your back.

Pickup truck sold separately.

Step 5

Don’t dig your trench right before a major rainstorm is about to hit. Just trust me on this.

Step 6

Get PVC pipe in the appropriate length - I used schedule 40 which is easy to find at Home Depot. Try not to get the flexible plastic kind, unless you want to destroy it when you eventually have to scour out the pipe. Which reminds me, get a sanitary T-connector or similar so that you can blast out the pipe with water easily later. Attached to the head of your pipe, you can dig it up later and snake your drainage pipe if it gets clogged.

The other thing you need to do - unless you can find PVC that’s pre-drilled - is put a bunch of holes in one side of it. I used a 1/4" or 3/8" drillbit, I think. I never did find a conclusive answer on how many holes were required, but I probably put in half a dozen per six to eight inches. Enough to allow water entry, but not weaken the pipe.

PVC Protip: deal with PVC cement as little as possible, and do not - under any circumstances - open it indoors.

Step 7

With your trench dug, it’s time to get the trench liner ready; I used this stuff. Basically the purpose of this is to keep as much sediment out of the crushed rock and PVC pipe as possible.

Step 8

Use your tractor to lay down an inch or two of crushed rock, then position the PVC pipe slanted away from your foundation. Point the holes downward. You need a drop of 1/8" per linear foot, apparently. And no, I have no idea how you’re supposed to measure that if you’re not a surveyor. I just made sure it slanted down, hard.

Articles like the Fine Homebuilding one will tell you to use the gravel to adjust the pitch appropriately, and that’s what you have to do, but it’s a pain in the ass. Just FYI.

Step 9

Cement pipe segments together as necessary. If you thought adjusting the pitch of one segment was a bitch, wait until you try it with two. Also, PVC cement sucks.

Step 10

Once you have the pitch correct, begin backfilling the trench with crushed rock. Don’t drop in too much at a time because you’ll mess up the pitch, or if you were dumb and didn’t go with the rigid PVC, you’ll damage the pipe. Once you’re near the top, you can begin folding the fabric over. If you’re an idiot and you dug one section of the trench too wide like I did and you’re short on fabric, just find something heavy to hold the fabric in place. Cinderblock, the giant fucking rocks the goddammned tractor refused to pull up so you had to dig out by hand, whatever.

Step 11

Once you’ve filled the trench, and sealed the top by folding over the typar fabric, you can begin covering everything up with topsoil. Tamp it down tightly or it will all wash away with the first good rain that you get. Or so I’ve heard. I used one of these.

Step 12

Unless you enjoy the Frankenstein-like scar on your lawn, you might want to plant some grass seed when you’re done. Sadly, Scott’s made the terrible decision to no longer sell Fenway grass seed. We used this instead, and while it’s a completely different shade of green from the rest of our lawn, at least we have grass there now.

Step 13

In our case at least, Step 13 is to pray. This project cost us a couple of hundred bucks, several weekends of effort and some blood - though admittedly much less than in our “get rid of closet debris” debacle that landed me in the hospital. In spite of all of that, we have no idea if it’s actually going to work or not.

If it doesn’t, I’m sure I’ll have some equally harebrained scheme to share with you next winter. In the meantime, hope this helps.

Oxbowzakaya!

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:54:18 +0000

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red sky

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:22:56 +0000

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