Storm's a Comin'

Yesterday was the first day of 2011 that it was warmer outside than it was inside. It was unseasonable warm - 74 F (22 C) - and followed by severe thunderstorms. Ms. Huis was about to go out running when the tornado sirens sounded. The womenfolk scurried into the basement while I watched the storm from the safety of my front door.

At first there was nothing, just clouds that looked like curtain swags, and the occasional bit of lightning. The bats were out feasting on whatever insects were around. It was dead calm. Eventually the bats took shelter and within 20 minutes, the real thunder and lightning started. It was 40 minutes of constant thunder and lightning. The rain came pouring down, but it was still calm. Then the wind came up all of a sudden; sudden enough that I went into the basement. Within 5 minutes it was gone, and the storm passed.

There was no damage by us, but a tornado did touch down close by, and on the way to work there were several missing fences and some twisted road signs. At work I heard stories of neighborhoods that lost siding, trampolines and small trees.

I know that thunderstorms are dangerous, destructive, expensive and life threatening, but I love them.

Spring Is Here

About six weeks ago I was ready to write that Spring was here. The snow was melted, the garden was visible and I was looking at the garden with anticipation. Then we received a foot of snow, along with what felt like months of below freezing weather (I think it was actually 10 days). So I held off. But, I'm happy to report that Spring is here now.

The squill is a bit behind this year, thanks to the late snow storms. Usually we have a sea of blue by tax day (April 15th). I'd say we're a few weeks from that. I tapped our maple trees this year for the first time and they are now done. I pulled almost a gallon of syrup from them in the end. Not bad for just four trees.

I'd mentioned in the past that we had our door refinished. The last post is actually a good before and after picture. The sidelights show how bad the finish was compared to the door. Now I'll have to try and get them finished this year. We have a lot of projects in mind for the year, which I won't enumerate here. I'm not ready to make a list of stressors just yet.

Calling All Wee Folk

I'm a strong believer in the little people. I'm not talking about the Irish (although I do believe in them too). I'm talking about faeries, pixies, sprites, brownies, elves and the like. When we lived in Ireland, we always put out a bowl of milk for the brownies and more times than not, we'd find it empty in the morning.

Lest you think I'm naive, I know that the neighborhood cat would occasionally drink the milk, but what about when it wasn't the cat? Can anyone prove that it wasn't the brownies? With all the work that the House of 42 Doors entails, I'm willing to ask for help from anyone who can provide it. If there were elves who could make shoes, then why can't there be faerie folk who can do carpentry work?

I also know that workers will follow the best working conditions and salaries. This is why putting milk out for the brownies works. You feed them and they come. Available food is a much better working condition than no food. So to that end I've started constructing small tools in hopes of attracting a little assistance with my carpentry work.

I'm hoping this sawhorse will be good for a new roof on the back porch.



I'll let you know if it works.

Double Agent

Our family occasionally eats Boca burgers. For anyone not familiar with them, they are a meatless alternative to hamburgers. They don't really taste like hamburgers and when I've read the ingredients, I've always been a little uneasy. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a lot of processing involved in getting vegetables to look like meat. Still, I do think they taste fine.

Last night we had a new kind of Boca Burger - Grilled Vegetable Boca Burger. The package describes this as "The ultimate veggie patty. Tender chunks of grilled zucchini, bell peppers, and corn with hints of garlic, onion, mozzarella and asiago cheeses."

So let me get this straight - you grind up vegetables and soybeans, add cheese extracts, binders and vegetable oils to make a paste. Then you form this paste into a patty to approximate meat. And then, because presumably, you think that real vegetables taste better? look nicer? are healthier? you add them back into this pretend meat? Is this a product that is vegetables trying to be meat trying to be vegetables? I don't get it. It gets me confused trying to figure out.

Maybe I'll just go have some celery instead.

May December

As I've grown older I've noticed several things about being a man. The older we get, the more delusional we become. This is no more evident than around young women. There can be 20 years difference between a woman and a middle aged man and he'll think he might have a shot at catching her eye. Put 30 years between them, and he'll be convinced.

Where does this hubris come from? Does it come from a society that assigns us more and more responsibility, stoking our egos, until finally we believe the impossible? Don't get me wrong, there is some value here. Without this sort of delusional belief, we wouldn't have conquered small pox, harnessed nuclear power or flown to the moon. And Harrison Ford wouldn't have married Calista Flockhart.

I suppose in the end whether the belief is arrogance or visionary depends upon our ability to achieve it and how it's viewed through the lens of history.

Also, no work has been done on the house for the last three months due to winter and life generally being busy. Blog updates have been and will be spotty for awhile yet.

The Last Page

Winter is good for two things at the House of 42 Doors. First is considering ways to insulate the house. Second is trying to catch up on reading. Most of the books I read are not interesting enough to warrant a post. The most recent two I remember reading were 52 Loaves and Billionaire's Vinegar. I picked them up for $2 a piece and they were well worth that.

At the moment I have a book sitting on my nightstand that keeps staring at me - literally. It's The Last Page by Anthony Huso. I'm having a hard time cracking the cover. Tony and I went to college together and I have fond memories of being part of a role-playing group he put together. I also have many memories (not quite as fond) of Tony beating the pants off of me in countless Magic The Gathering duels (I still have boxes full of cards thank you very much).

One of the things that Tony gave to me in college was a very, very early copy of the Last Page. I read it and thought at the time that it was undoubtedly as good as anything published I'd read. I told him as much and in retrospect, a more critical response probably would have been more helpful. (Sorry Tony).

At the end of our senior year, everyone went around promising to keep in touch and trying to exchange whatever phone numbers or addresses we had, which is to say almost none. Most people were just looking for a job and we were scattering to the four corners of the earth. When I asked Tony for a phone number, an address, or even just a promise to keep in touch, he said to me, "What's the point? We go through life, encounter people, make friends, enjoy the time and then move on. If we run into each other in the future, we'll talk then."

I was put off by this at first, but the more I thought about it, the more wisdom I saw in it. No false promises, no expectations, just the freedom of knowing that time spent together was enjoyed and that if life sees fit for the two of us to meet again, there needn't be any awkwardness.

Tony and I have danced around each other a few times since college. I saw him once in the late 90's for a very short amount of time. We caught up, but I had to run to some other engagement and couldn't stay as long as I wanted. Then he was in France while we were in Ireland, and Ms. Huis and I discussed visiting him, but before we could, he moved back to the States. I've kept tabs on where he is and what he's been up to through mutual friends and his blog.

Now after so many years, I find myself pondering this version of The Last Page. In some ways it appears to be very different from the early copy I read, and yet I can also see from the jacket and from the reviews that it is essentially the same story. For some reason, I've made reading the Last Page into some sort of symbolic act, one that carries a host of past memories, years of lessons learned and ironically, exactly the sort of baggage that Tony's advice was meant to avoid.

New (Old) Car

I'm still playing blog catch up. For anyone following my wife's blog, you'll already know a lot of this. Consider this a first person viewpoint.

I took the Monday after Thanksgiving off for a little extra rest and relaxation. I'd been doing little with the house for most of November. Work had been particularly stressful with a large project culminating on November 13th. I needed the downtime. The Tuesday morning after Thanksgiving was supposed to be back to life as usual. On my way to work though, life decided to try and destroy some of the R & R I had been trying to store up.

It was raining that morning and as I was coming to a busy intersection, the light turned yellow. I could have stopped, if I would have slammed on the brakes. I chose not to, as I was sure that I could clear the intersection before the light turned red. At the same time a woman started turning left. As she drifted towards my lane, it wasn't clear if she was in fact going to complete her turn, or if she was simply creeping forward, waiting for the intersection to clear. Considering that I was going 45 mph, I didn't have a lot of time to decide if I should take the chance that she was only creeping and I should keep going straight, or if I should swerve to avoid her. Just in case, I opted to swerve.

Wet pavement, speed and probably tires that were overdue to get changed all meant that my swerve turned into a skid, and before long, I was pointed the wrong way, trying to thread my way over a sidewalk and between two metal poles on the side of the road. One pole held a solar array, and the other was a traffic management arm, similar to the kind found at railroad crossings.

In my recollection, the whole event took place in three or four iterations of the same swear word. I swerved off the road, clipped the larger of the two poles, sailed over the cat tails in the ditch and thudded into the mud on the other side of the ditch. I took stock of myself, called my wife, work and the police. It was pretty clear that the car (a 2000 Ford Taurus) was probably going to be total loss. I was fine and so was everything else in the car. The metal pole was lying on the side of the road, also a total loss.

My favorite part of the whole experience was when Officer F arrived at the scene. I was in the ditch, on one side of a six foot wide pond of marshy water; he was on the other. After he asked if I was fine, we stared at each other for a few seconds, both looked at the water, then looked up at each other again. Each of us knew what the other was thinking. Then he spoke.

"One of us is getting wet, and I don't have to tell you who it's going to be."

"Well, since I don't fancy spending the rest of the day on this side, I guess I'll come around."

It was just the sort of light-hearted comment I needed to hear at that point. I'd just been in an accident, and I was worrying about getting my dress shoes wet and muddy. That's not so bad. Eventually, I found high ground and the shoes survived intact.

The lady who turned left stopped and gave a statement to police when they arrived. I wasn't there when she gave it to them, which was probably a good thing. "I was waiting to turn left and all of a sudden he just lost control and went in the ditch. I guess it's just slippery." Right. And as I told the officer, "I don't make a habit of making sudden swerves, unless I think someone is going to hit me."

Because the two vehicles didn't collide, the other driver was not at fault. Unfortunately, because our car was so old, we had dropped collision on it within the last year. Insurance would cover the cost of the traffic management arm, but we were on the hook for the car. Assuming no one would have been hurt, I would have been better off hitting her. Then she would have been at fault for failing to yield on a left turn, and our car would have been paid for.

The result of this was a few weeks of stress while we tried to live the life of a two car family (School, dance classes, work, grocery shopping, etc) with only one car. And then of course the joy of finding another car, which is not something my wife and I enjoy or excel at. We did find something, a 2006 Hyundai Sonata, which is really just a car - something to get us from point a to point b. And now plans for some of next year's house projects will need to be re-examined. Depending on a few factors, they may have to wait another year.

At the risk of jinxing myself, I have a week off over Christmas. And this time I'm hoping for some rest and relaxation that ends well.