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Taxes, painting and stuff
It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, mainly because I have been swamped at work, getting ready for a presentation next week at Educause, my first foray into public speaking since, oh, 1995 or so. That was back in the days of transparencies, so it’s been a while. And I do have to…
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Today in review
Today marked the start of the 2-week Christmas break. I actually managed to get a few things done. First off, I came up with a temporary fix for the house’s grounding system, which faithful readers may recall was interrupted when we had our copper water main replaced with plastic. I realized that we had a…
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Big Dig, brewing update, etc
Today was the Big Dig at our house, where we had our old, leaky water line replaced with a brand, shiny new one. The new line is polyethylene. It has the advantage of being lots cheaper than copper, and it’s a single, continuous run of approximately 250′ from the house to the meter. We got…
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O.C.
Here we are in lovely Ocean City, MD for Thanksgiving. You know you’re getting older when it becomes more appealing to go to O.C. this time of year than in the summer. It’s nice and laid-back here, although not surprisingly, a lot of the seasonal places are closed. Can’t wait to see what Avon, N.C.…
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Saturday update
Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover. I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide. The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect. Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped. Anyways, tomorrow…
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Time to brew!
It’s been a long time since we’ve brewed a beer. Going by my financial software (which is going to be indispensable when I write my memoirs), the last time I bought homebrew ingredients was June 21, 2000, and according to Oracle Calendar, we brewed an Amber Ale on the following Saturday, the 24th. That’s practically…
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Bedroom wiring finished
Finished up the master bedroom fan switch wiring this weekend. It turns out that after I removed the downstream wiring from the box, I was able to fit the switch in the box just fine. No need to muck around in the attic pulling new wire. Five years ago, when I had more time on…
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Wiring: Plan B
As is often the case with these things, I hit a snag trying to fish wire from the attic to the basement for my bedroom rewiring project. I encountered some horizontal blocking in the stud cavity which prevented me from running the wire all the way through. That basically left me with three choices: Press…
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Not a bad year for the pool
We had a pretty good 2007 swimming season. We opened up on Memorial Day weekend and were swimming soon thereafter. And we set a new record for latest day in the pool — October 9. As a matter of fact, the pool got pretty regular use in late September and the first week of October…
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End-of-season outdoor work drones on
I’m still having no end of fun working on the usual mid-November chores of leaf removal, and winterization of the pool and lawn equipment. Saturday, I finished up with the pool, following my own instructions, and it went smoothly. I did forget to backwash the filter before shutting it down, but it wasn’t too dirty…