The Dungeon

On Thursday I spent nearly 5 hours in the rather tight space under our bathroom ripping out & replacing a good percentage of our old plumbing. The crawlspace under the bathroom is barely tall enough to allow me to sit up with my head between the rafters collecting cobwebs. But with all the criss-cross of various plumbing, I had to spend a good bit of that time on my back. Dad was fortunate enough to "get" to stay in the much more spacious crawlspace under the kitchen, where he got to work on his knees for most of that 5 hours. I'm not sure which of us drew the short straw that morning. By the end of the day Thursday we had everything completed under the bathroom and were ready to start the run under the kitchen.

Dad & I got a quick start Friday morning and were rolling by 8. We got the tie-ins under the kitchen sink knocked out fairly quickly and with mostly long straight runs left in the crawlspace, we were moving good. Before morning was out we had extracted ourselves from the crawlspace and were working on tying everything into the main supply, the water heater, & the boiler (radiator system). This is when we started getting stupid. We'd been working rather efficiently to this point and had been making good time. But for some reason, the last little bit of detail work to tie everything in at the water heater, required us to solder several of the joints multiple times. We'd either forget to put something on, or put on the wrong kind of joint, or measure a length wrong. Whatever it was, we were kicking ourselves a lot there at the end. We ended up getting stuck on the unions to the water heater. We had several different kinds to choose from, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. So, with the girls & kids expected home soon, we decided to delay finishing that, and test the cold lines out. After fixing a bad solder connection and a loose union, the cold water seemed tight in the basement. Unfortunately, half the fixtures in the house seemed to be clogged from all the sediment that the changeover had shot through the system. So, as the girls & kids were coming through the door, Dad was heading to the store to find a better part for the water heater while I was scrambling around trying to clean out/fix all of the fixtures that weren't working right. After a fill-tube replacement on one toilet and cleaning the screens on several faucets, everything seemed to be working good. Only now we noticed a small leak under the kitchen sink.

Over the rest of that evening and parts of Sat. & Sun., Dad and/or I made several more trips to the hardware store before we finally got everything under the kitchen sink tight and the water heater connections solid. But with the last union soldered on and tested earlier this afternoon, the task is now complete. Everything except the downstairs bathroom is solid copper from the well tie-in to the fixture, and that bathroom only has old galvanized for the last bit of pipe going up through the walls. Also, we now have a working hose faucet on the outside of the house. When we bought the place, neither hose faucet worked and the previous owners had run a hose through the coal chute to the faucet for the old washtub in the basement. So we were finally able to disconnect that mess and seal up the coal chute a little better. Yeah! After so much time in the crawlspace (aka dungeon) and nearly 10 trips to various hardware stores, its finally done. Our water pressure is significantly improved at several fixtures and the iron deposits we were getting on our sinks and toilets should be a thing of the past now. Boy am I glad this one's behind us now.

Let the Plumbing Begin

Well, now that Christmas is behind us and we've mostly recovered from our excessive food & eggnog intake, its time for the projects to commence. This week the big project is to redo the plumbing in the basement. Most of the downstairs plumbing is fed by a mangled mess of old galvanized piping that's starting to slow drip in places. The upstairs has copper lines running up through the walls, but, of course, it ties into the mangled mess in the basement. So today, as Sarah, my mom, & the kids run for shelter at Sarah's parents' home for a couple days, Dad and I will begin the arduous task of ripping out a large percentage of the piping in the basement and replacing it with copper. This task is only complicated by the fact that most of the plumbing mess is actually in a crawlspace area instead of the basement proper. So while we're wriggling around in the dust under the house trying to improve a rather hateful plumbing mess, think of us and send a few prayers our way that we'll be able to complete this task quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Merry Christmas!

We've, of course, been busy with family and such the last several days. But I wanted to take a quick moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! I hope ya'll had a great Christmas. We enjoyed a fun Christmas with my folks here, though I have to say this warm weather they brought with them seems a little odd for late Decemeber. I suppose we can still hope for a white New Years, right? Speaking of which, we also wish everyone a happy and safe New Years!

Sarah's Christmas Wishlist

I was recently asked what I wanted for Christmas. Here were some of my ideas:

I wish for Paul to be potty trained.
I wish for Julia to crawl.
I wish for dinner out with Steve.
I wish for getting through the season without anymore child related Christmas ornament incidents.
I wish for to staying up late watching a movie rental, and then getting to sleep solidly until 9 in the morning.
I wish for 3 foot drifts of snow and nowhere to go.
I wish for lipstick in a color that I like that doesn't smear on my children, husband, or food.
Ditto on mascara.
I wish for a hot tub.
I wish for a bathroom big enough for a hot tub.
Who am I kidding, I'd be thrilled to get plumbing that doesn't turn the water orange. (I think I'm actually getting this one before January is gone.)
I wish for warm feet and hands.
I wish for long brunette hair that DOES NOT come out all over the place and clog the drains.
I wish for broccoli that tastes like butterscotch pudding.
I wish for 3 solid weeks of childcare so I can make my house look gorgeous.
I wish to remove enough clutter from my house so that I have places to take pictures of my family without be embarrassed by what is in the background.
I wish to speak Czech. Fluently.
I suppose that is enough for now.

She's Moving

Julia is scooting. No, she's not crawling. She's not even belly crawling. But we have found that if we sit her on a blanket on the floor, and then look back in about 5 minutes that she will be somewhere else on the blanket. Still sitting. By leaning and stretching and twisting, she can slowly turn herself around and travel across the blanket. Fun times.

She has also started moving *forward* in her little Jeep walker. Fun times! When Paul was little, he would circle the kitchen in the walker and grin while he pulled all the hand towels down from the drawer handles. We would set up hand towels all around the kitchen just for him to find and pull down. Earlier this week Julia sidled up to a hand towel and started reaching for it. It made me smile.

In other news, when asked how many fingers he has, Paul now answers, "Eweven." In "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" one of the characters counts his fingers, "...eight, nine, ten, he has eleven. Eleven this is something new, I wish I had eleven too." And Paul cannot be convinced that he has only 10 fingers. Thank you Dr Suess.

Homemade Bio-diesel

It had been awhile since I perused the Backwoods Home Magazine website, so I decided to see what kind of new articles were up during some free time yesterday afternoon. One of the last couple of issues had an article titled "Make your own biodiesel for $0.80 per gallon", which caught my eye. I drive a diesel (TDI) Volkswagon over 60 miles a day during the week, and my little tractor is, of course, diesel. And given the current ~$2.50/gallon I'm paying for the stuff, you can see why I might be a little interested. After reading the article, I have to say it doesn't really look that economically feasible. I mean, sure, if you can get a free and geographically close source of waste vegetable oil, and you don't count the capital investment, I expect you probably could make your own for less than $1/gallon. But the kits this fellow talks about start at $1800 and go up from there. Plus the cost of a large tank for the back of a pickup truck or trailer to retrieve the spent oil. At the rate that my vehicles consume diesel on average, it would take me at least 2 years to make up the capital costs alone, not to mention my time investment. I could see this being worthwhile if maybe a couple neighboring farmers got together to do this. And if you've got the spare time and like these kinds of projects you could probably duplicate some of the kits cheaper. But, much to my wife's relief, I don't think this is a project/hobby I'll be looking to take on anytime soon. An interesting read, nonetheless, at least if you're a bored engineer.

Somehow Appropriate

After all the time I've spent talking-up our home-made eggnog recently, some good friends ran across this comic and thought of me. Enjoy!

Brewin' Time Again

It appears that everything's a go for cooking my next round of brew tomorrow. This time up I'm planning on an Oatmeal Stout, a good wintertime chewin' beer with a little more sweetness than, say, a Guinness. At this point I'm planning just to go with the Listermann's oatmeal stout kit, but I'm planning to do the next batch without a kit. Since I've recently finished reading Papazian's The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, I've learned a couple things in my brewing process to correct, and several things to improve. So my plan now is to do this one last kit with my new & improved brewing process, and then move on to working with recipes and buying the individual ingredients. To recap my past brews:

1. New Freckled Rooster English Ale - Brewed at Albright's house with his stuff; excellent brew

2. Belgian White - My first brew at the farm with my stuff; decent, but some cidery off-flavors that have mostly mellowed out in the bottle

3. Honey Brown - My second brew at the farm and my first solo brew; decent, but some slight off-flavors

Hopefully, my new & improved brewing process will help eliminate the off-flavors seen in my first two Kuhlman farm attempts. So in about 5-6 weeks, stop on by and give one a try...they should be bottled, well-carbonated, and ready to enjoy.

Fun out of doors

Yesterday the weather was pleasantly warm (it got up to 50) and dry. Steve suggested that I take every opportunity to take Paul outside and "run him like crazy" because it is supposed to be wet the rest of the week. So we had a good time outside. In the morning we played out of doors while Julia slept, and we took a bucket of vegetable peelings out for the chickens.

In the afternoon, Julia came out with us. Paul spent some time attacking a large maple tree with a stick, and Julia enjoyed sitting on my lap while I straddled a swing and swung us back and forth. Then we went down to the barn to collect eggs. This is always a dicey proposition with Paul running loose. And I had Julia in one of my arms. So I was collecting eggs one handed and trying to put them in the carton fast enough that I could also let Paul hand me the eggs he nabbed before he accidentally dropped one or tried knocking two of them together. Then I heard splat. I looked at Paul's feet, but there was no egg there. It was about 3 feet away from him. "Paul, do NOT throw the eggs!" And with an 18 pound baby in one arm, I scooped up the yolk with the shell and disposed of it.

Steve came home a little later and I let Paul run down the driveway to greet him. Steve carried Paul back up to the house and entered saying, "Paul's been telling me stories. I asked him if he had a fun time outside, and he didn't say much. I asked him if he played on his swing set, and he didn't say much. Then I asked him if he helped feed the chickens. He got sort of excited and started saying, 'Chickens! Throw egg. Broken it egg. Mommy no. Juicy. Mommy pick up.'"

At which point I tried really hard to put on my stern mommy face and say, "That's right. No throwing eggs." But I had to turn away because I was busting up with laughter.

Fine Nog

Over Thanksgiving we went to visit Sarah's folks, and her Dad asked us to bring a couple dozen eggs with us. Her Dad had a hankerin' for some homemade eggnog, so all 2-dozen went into that recipe. Well just the thought of that was intriguing to me, but then I tasted and was pretty well hooked. So with a couple different get-togethers this past weekend, I decided to make a batch (~1 gallon) using that same recipe:
Combine 24 eggs & 3 cups of powdered sugar in a large mixing bowl and mix until smooth. Add 3 quarts of half-n-half & 2.5 tbsps of vanilla & mix lightly until consistent. Refridgerate & serve.
Man, that is some fine nog. And of course, I had to take at least a portion of it and make it official Kuhlman eggnog by adding Apricot Brandy & Kahlua to it. Nothing like some Kuhlman eggnog made with fresh Kuhlman eggs on a cold wintry night. Enjoy!

Its Good to be Early

I'm dreaming of a white....Thursday!? The forecasters had been speculating the past couple days on the chance of snow overnight last night and during the day today. So I had braced myself for waking up to a good snow shower and slick roads. But when I left the house just before 6 this morning, everything was still dry and there were just a few flakes floating around in the air. In fact, most of my half-hour commute to work saw little more than a bit of snow floating around here and there. So I get to work and go back in my windowless hidey-hole for about an hour when another team member arrives, complaining loudly about the snow. Now I'm a bit curious, so I wander on out to a window and what do I see, but the cars & ground with a growing blanket of snow on them. Just another reason its good to get in early and beat the rush.

Doggy App

As you may recall from earlier posts, and is probably still somewhat obvious from our poll, we're looking to get a dog sometime soon. We've decided, pretty much, on trying to get a Miniature Schnauzer (pure or mix) from a shelter or rescue. We started looking seriously on petfinder.com a few weeks ago to see what was available, but there weren't really any in the area that looked like a good fit. Not really knowing how fast the listings at petfinder turn over, I waited a couple weeks to search again. This time, right at the top of the list, a ~6 month old male showed up that's pretty local and looks like a great fit, potentially. So now we start the application process. I'm sure there are some of you out there who have tried adopting a dog or cat recently that are familiar with this, but I'm rather surprised by the amount of information some of these places want to collect on you. I don't recall having to do anything like this before having children. I mean, I understand that they're trying to place these animals in good homes, but all of this stuff seems over the top. On the plus side, so far the rescue group where this puppy is doesn't seem to be quite as psycho as some of the other ones. But we'll see how it goes. With any luck we'll have a dog before the year's out.

New Cookie Recipe

Over the weekend we decided to get the Christmas cookie machine a'rollin'. We had recently bought several oranges for one recipe that required a little orange zest, but we had several oranges left from which we could zest quite a bit more. So we decided we'd try to make some kind of orange cookies. My mom often makes an Orange Drop cookie recipe around the holidays, so that was one of the candidates. But this white chocolate chip orange recipe caught our eye and looked pretty good, so we decided to try something new. Well, I have to say that they turned out absolutely great and this recipe is a definite keeper. In fact, I brought a bunch into work on Monday and they were gone before lunch, with several folks asking for the recipe. And, oddly enough, it turns out that today is "Share a Christmas Cookie Recipe" day, so isn't that just convenient. Enjoy!

Going to Lose

The weather was particularly fine last Monday, so I made a point to spend some time playing out of doors with the kids. Since I had forgotten that the clock in the garage is still on daylight savings time, we had eaten a very early lunch, and I wanted to kill some time before putting Paul down for his nap, so we went outside for a little while. Julia fell asleep in her stroller, and Paul and I collected weeds to toss to the chickens.

I decided to circle the barn to find some thicker patches of weeds and to check on Julia, who was dozing inside the barn. By the time I got back to the side with the chicken fence, Paul had wandered down to the ditch/creek near the edge of our property.

He hadn't stepped into the muddy ditch/creek yet.

"Paul, come to Mommy."
He stops.
"Come to Mommy, Paul."
He looks at me.
"One...Two..."
And I can see from 50 yards away that he is performing a little toddler cost benefit analysis. He can step into the muddy creek and get in trouble. Or he can come to Mommy, and not get into trouble. And I know from 50 yards away, that I have already lost this one.
"Three."
Stomp Stomp Splat!