All posts by warren

Gimme a call

Family, Thoughts,

My baby boy is growing up!  It seems like just yesterday he was born and here we are preparing to send the boy off to that wasteland that is middle school.  I grew up in BFE so we had k-6 in one school and 7-12 in another.  It was somewhat terrifying because of that age span but there were a lot fewer kids and most everyone’s family knew everyone else’s family so trouble was somewhat minimized.  Anyhow, Isaac will soon be headed to “real” middle school where there are hundreds of kids…my little baby!

As a sort of “nerve pill” for Emily and me, we decided that we wanted Isaac to be able to reach us at any time.  So, we ventured out to the mobile phone store and were thrilled by the technological spectacle that presented itself.  Well, actually, we were flabbergasted by the price of phones and mobile plans.  Holy cow!  Anyhow, we decided that with soccer practice starting soon, Isaac needed to be able to contact us and, more importantly, contact his friends.

Isaac put up quite a sales pitch for a full-blown smart-phone.  The sales guy was all too willing to help Isaac make his case.  Fortunately, we held our ground and got Isaac a poverty-level phone…you know, one with calling and texting only.  I sure hope he can survive.  My poor baby!

I know, lots of people made it through middle school without phones.  I don’t care.  Technology is around us and we embrace it.  We are trying to be sensible though and are using this as a way to teach responsibility.  Any time I see a way to expand communication, I am for it!

None of us is too worried about middle school.  We are building it up so we all have positive expectations of the next school year.  A little bit of trepidation crops up now and then in the back of my head, but I know it is going to be alright.  Heck, my baby boy is only a phone call away!

Getting tanked

Land

I got tanked on Monday…twice.  I remember most of it though so let me tell you about the adventure!  You see, our property is raw.  There are no amenities on the property…no water, no bathrooms, no air conditioned living rooms.  Just grass and trees and chiggers!  Oh my word are there chiggers.  Anyhow, on Monday, we took the first step towards making the place a little more comfortable.

Field lines

We called around and found a local guy who agreed to set us up with a licensed septic system and an in-ground cistern.  His crew started early Monday morning clearing the space where we wanted the septic field and went to work.

Our first toilet!

Over the course of the day,  they found rock here and there and had to adjust their plans several times.  Despite that, they were excellent and friendly, even in 95 degree humid air.  I know I drank over a gallon of water and I am certain that they each did too!

It’s hard to get excited about a septic system but there are a few things that just amazed me.  The guys dug significant holes for the septic tank and the cistern tank.  In each case, they adjusted and dug here and there and fussed, but both tanks laid in their holes were perfectly level.  I couldn’t believe it!  The installers checked it and so did the health inspector.  It’s a requirement but dang if they didn’t get it first time!

Bottom half of the cistern
That poor guy mixed cement with his hands and laid it in manually to seal between the cistern halves

Each tank came in in halves so the bottom half had to be placed and then a top half had to be fit just right into the sealant that was applied to the bottom.  These tanks were huge but those guys hit it just perfectly on both tanks.  It’s a requirement but dang if they didn’t get it first time!  If I heard them right, the cistern weighed over 13,000 pounds when it was all done.  It was no trivial thing to manipulate!

When it was all said and done, they graded the area very well and I think it actually looks better now than it did when they started.  That’s rare I know but I now have perfect spots to set up lawn chairs and watch the leaves flutter in the breeze.  That’s hard to beat!  Getting tanked (twice) was a great thing and really made my Monday!

Our car…the worm edition

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature,

So a few days ago, I told you all about the fun we had with crows on our honeymoon.  You may recall that my brother and a friend had put a bunch of birdseed into our suitcases as well as in the car.  By “in the car” I mean inside the car…literally.  There was birdseed in the dashboard, in the heater vents, down in the seats, floorboards, and even more in the dashboard.  Well, you get the point.  Anytime we drove around and hit a bump, even months later, birdseed would fall through the dash and onto the floor.

The start of the birdseed saga!

Jump ahead to our move to Kentucky for graduate school.  We were in marital bliss.  I suppose we didn’t see the world around us very clearly as we missed some obvious things…you’ll see in a second.  So, we were poor and all that but it was cool being married.  Emily seems to remember a rough few years as she attempted to train and civilize me.  Once she gave up, things got much better.  Anyhow, part-way through school, we moved to an apartment above a funeral home (more on that in another post!).

We noticed some wormy things in the backseat one day while unpacking groceries or something at the funeral home.  I didn’t think much of it.  I squished them and went on with my business.  Days later, we noticed them again…and again and again.  It started to get serious pretty quickly.

The car...already doomed!

I got a wild hair and decided to remove the back set of the car to see what was going on.  Why oh why didn’t I just remain ignorant?!  The entire back seat was infested with meal worms!  I don’t just mean there were a few crawling around.  Oh no, the foam in the seat was full.  The carpet in the floor was infested.  It was a regular larval zoo in our car!

I often deal with things like that with extreme overkill.  We had a Chevy Celebrity which, incidentally, was the best car ever made!  I loved that car!  Emily and I sanded the thing down in the weeks before our wedding so we could get it painted.  We wanted to make a flashy exit from the wedding ceremony.  Anyhow, back to overkill.  A Chevy Celebrity has maybe 30 sq ft of cabin space.  An insect bomb for a 2000 sq ft house seemed about right.  Makes sense, right?  If some is good, more is better!

On two separate occasions, I set off house-sized insect bombs in our little car.  The worms remained.  It’s a wonder we remained!  I am certain that a concentration of insecticide like that was not all that good for us.  After losing on the second bomb, I just re-installed the back seat and we looked no more.

How did we finally deal with the issue, you may ask?  Well, we traded that car in for a Chevy Prizm, the second best car ever made!  It was new and worm-free!  I blame those worms on the birdseed.  I have no doubt that the seed had meal worms in it.  They lived a good life for a couple of years on all of the birdseed in the car.  That wedding birdseed was the gift that kept on giving!

Our honeymoon…the crow edition

Adventure, Fun, WV,

Emily and I were at a party for grown-ups (it rarely happens) when we got to telling stories.  Emily is a champion story-teller and she decided to spring our honeymoon story on folks.  It goes something like this…

We had just graduated college and were preparing for graduate school.  In translation, that means we were beyond poor when we got married.  We had just plunked down our security deposit on our 350 sq ft apartment and had moved what stuff we had a week before.  Our wedding was excellent and it was a super great occasion.  I cried when I saw Emily come down the aisle.  I am not opposed to crying, but I rarely do it.  Anyhow, it was a beautiful wedding.

After the wedding, we greeted guests and ended up with perma-grins on our faces from all of the smiling we did in the photo shoots.  We were definitely ready to head off on our honeymoon.  I planned it all and didn’t tell Emily where we were going.  I, uh, figured it didn’t really matter as just needed some time to get used to the idea of being married.  I booked us a room at the Mountain Creek Lodge at Pipestem Resort in southern West Virginia.

Little did I know, that my brother and one of our friends had filled our luggage and car with a ton of birdseed while we were cutting cake and smiling.  Honestly, it had to be close to a ton.  So, we got to the room and were exhausted.  We ate and half unpacked our stuff.  Without thinking, I just dumped the ton of birdseed from our suitcases outside in the yard just beyond the edge of our first story patio.  We went straight to bed, dead-tired and desperate for rest and calm.

Around daylight, let’s say 6 am the following day, we were startled from bed by the cawing of a family of crows.  That is, crows, right outside our window.  Crows cawing a mere 4 feet or so from our bed.  Yeah, crows.  I scared them off a few times but it was hopeless.  Sleeping in was not to be on our honeymoon.

There are a few more tails from that week of adventure but I’ll leave Emily to tell them another time.  But before I go, I have to tell you that the crows were not the end of the birdseed story.  Oh no, dear friends, there is more.   I will tell the rest of the story in my next post.

 

Thank you berry much

Food, Nature,

We have been busy as cats in a sandbox and it seems that we haven’t had time to do anything, much less anything interesting.  Every now and then, though, we get a chance to take a few minutes to do something simple.  Since it’s July (holy cow!  It’s July?!), something simple means berry picking for us.

 

We have an excellent raspberry patch at the house so I can stumble out in my pjs and grab a handful of berries.  Our patch makes many more than a handful though so we pick and freeze berries every day.  Our raspberry patch is pretty interesting.  Of course there are berries, but the new feral kittens hide out in there too (anyone want a kitten?  Energetic.  Free to a good home).   I have seen all manner of bugs and spiders also.  Honestly, our raspberry patch is a biology lesson (in a good way) waiting to happen!  I love picking berries just to see what will pop out next!

Black raspberries...not the same as blackberries

By the way, did you know you can spread berries out in a single layer on a plate, freeze them, and then put them in freezer bags.  The individual berries remain intact so you don’t end up with a berry blob.

Blackberries!

Anyhow, raspberries are easy for us.  It’s the blackberries that are painful.  I think they have to be that way for folks to appreciate their awesomeness and I am willing to let Emily make the sacrifice.  We all pick them actually.  By “we”, I mean Emily and I pick them.  The kids always seem to wander off into the woods at our secret blackberry location to “look for more berries”.  Uh huh.

Sweet reward! Blackberry pie!

So, blackberries are especially good right now and I love blackberry pies more than any other pie (except maybe Emily’s strawberry pies).  I have an excellent wife who not only helps pick the berries, but also makes me pies!  Thanks you berry much!  You are my favorite wife, Emily!

Making steps…

Tinkering,

When we first bought our house, there were many issues with the place.  Like a fool, I thought I wanted an old fixer upper.  I am smarter now but no less obligated to pay the mortgage so I press onward with the repairs.  Anyhow, one of the first things that needed to be fixed was the ladder steps that led to the front door.  There were a number of concrete pads embedded into the vertical dirt wall leading up the patio.  I kid you not, we had to turn our feet sideways and sort of hold on to get up to the door.

The old perches
That shovel is the only thing holding me up
That's a pile of block!

So, when we first bought the place, Emily and the kids remained in Nashville finishing out her job.  I started to work on the new place without their help.  My Dad came down and we went to town.  The steps were the first order of business.  I plucked the concrete pads from the wall and started digging.

Foundation...
Almost done!

The fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to get new, permanent steps in place was to form them from cement blocks.  Dad hauled numerous tons of block with his truck and we made our block steps.

 

Those steps served us well for 5+ years but eventually, the winter rains got into the block and froze, causing some of the blocks to crumble and break.  After near death (several times…I didn’t want to over-react afterall), we decided that the steps needed some work.  The kids and I chipped out the old block.  We had to cut sections out of some blocks, but most were pretty ok.  Abigail in particular seemed to enjoy the hammer and chisel so I see a possible career path for her if leader of the universe doesn’t work out.

I took a day off last week to form up frames so we could pour new concrete over the remaining blocks.  It was sort of difficult that way because we didn’t have a lot of extra room to make the steps bigger.  Too high and no one would be able to reach the first step, etc.  So, we poured another 1.5 inches or so on top of the old block.  I hand-mixed 17 bags of concrete on the hottest day I could find.   I didn’t think the van could handle carrying all 17 bags at once so I started mixing the third that I had and sent Emily on two more trips to get more concrete.

The framing waiting for concrete
Ahhh...music to my...feet? Arms and legs? Well, it was like music anyhow

We waited and fretted and finally unveiled the new steps sans framing.  The new steps are beautiful and hopefully will avert life-and-death situations for folks coming to visit.  After all of the work, we noticed that we forgot to write our initials in the concrete.  I figure we’ll revisit everything in 5 years or so anyhow, so maybe we can do it right the next time around!

Super Proud

Awesome, Family, ,

It’s hard to believe how time has flown (is it almost July?!) but I have been meaning to write about Isaac’s 5th grade graduation.  His school had a special catered presentation at one of the big hotels in Charleston.  They had everything fancied up so it would be special for the kids.  We knew there would be awards and speeches and typical graduation stuff but we didn’t know what to expect.

After we ate, they started with the awards.  There were awards for various things and initially, Isaac didn’t seem to be called for anything.  He was not the best singer in the chorus or the best at archery.  We didn’t know what to expect but, as parents, we just wanted him to get some award so he could walk up in front of everyone to receive some applause.

Finally they called his name.  He marched up sort of shyly and shook hands.  We were relieved.  Then they called him again…and again…and again.  All told, Isaac ended up receiving 9 certificates of various types including the American Citizenship award, the National Young Scholars Award, the DAR Good Citizen award, the President’s Award for Academic Achievement (which included a letter signed by President Obama…very exciting for Isaac!) and the technology student of the year award.  I was so worried that he would just receive some award and he blew me out of the water!  By the end, his face beamed!  He wasn’t arrogant at all.  In fact he was a little embarrassed by his repeated trips up to the front.  To me, that was all the more indication that he truly deserved every award he received.  I could not be more proud!

Jump forward to this weekend.  Isaac tested for his blue belt in tae kwon do.  The blue belt is the last step before black belt.  The testing gets a lot more serious and the number of students testing thins a lot.  There were only a few people testing so the the spotlight was really on those folks to perform.  Each person did their forms (basically, a routine that shows skills such as balance, focus, etc).  Isaac did his cleanly and without problem.

The part of TKD that always worries me is the sparring portion of the instruction and testing.  Of course, a large part of TKD is fighting.  I mentioned before that it’s a weird feeling that sort of comes over me when I watch my son fight.  I want him to be disciplined and focussed and also prepared for things out in the real world.  Still, I would much rather he never have to be in any sort of threatening situation.

So, Isaac was paired up for sparring and they started the fight.  He quickly landed several punches and kicks.  At one point, he knocked his opponent to the ground.  It shocked me a little but the boy jumped back up and they continued.  Sparring is pretty much full contact.  No head shots and no blood are allowed but otherwise, there is quite a bit of freedom.  He has gained so much confidence and so many skills in TKD and that was evident as he sparred.  I was so proud to see him fight and watch as he just did what he needed to do to fend off the other boy.

I am so proud of my boy!

Coopers Rock

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, WV, , , , ,

A few weekends ago, we went on a little getaway vacation to Coopers Rock State Park in Bruceton Mills, WV.  I was mainly excited for the cabin in which we were staying and the hot tub it advertised on the back deck.  Never did I imagine how cool the park would be.  More about that later.

So, we got to the cabin after navigating the Grand Canyon road back to the place.  The cabin itself was nice and did in fact have a hot tub.  The kids jumped right in as Emily and I unpacked and prepared for supper.  I am not sure why, but the power went out and we were without water or AC.  When you are not prepared, both are pretty important.  Anyhow, several hours later, it came back on and all was well…even the well.  We could shower and do dishes, etc.

On Saturday morning, we gorged on cheap powdered sugar donuts and Doritos then headed to Coopers Rock (it seems like there should be an apostrophe in there but there isn’t).  Little did we know, but there was a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the park.  The place was teeming with things to do as all sorts of groups offered nature talks, projects,  and hikes.

The kids built cool birdhouses and painted rocks.  We played on the play ground (where I tried my best to dislocate my shoulder).  We saw rescued birds of prey from the West Virginia Raptor Rescue Center and even got to touch a red tailed hawk who was very friendly.  It turns out, she was essentially raised in captivity so was not bothered by people.  The other rescued hawk and owl were not so friendly.  Still, they were awesome!

I think the best part of the park though, was walking the trails under the rocks.  We explored some and saw great rock formations.  The kids and I walked into a cave/tunnel and went all “Dora the Explorer”.  Abigail fell in the dirt and got muddy.  It was perfect and cool and a great time to be together as a family.

If you ever pass through the northern part of WV, stop in at Coopers Rock.  Its views are breathtaking and there is all sorts of fun to be had there.  It turns out that the hot tub was very popular, but it paled in comparison (for me at least) to the beauty of our state, just as it is!

Fire the missiles!

Adventure, Family, Fun, WV, , ,

Lest you think we are all work and no play when we go to our land in the country, I figured I should report on our war games…er…model rocket launching fun this weekend. We did work some but that bit seems like an old tune now. The kids were pretty much over the non-fun stuff so they explored some in the woods and found a new “hide-out” while I did the rest of what I had to do before play time. I have no idea what sort of cave, bramble or whiskey still they happened upon but they had an awesome time!

Preparing for launch!

Anyhow, we finished up with all of that and we headed to the top of the hay field to prep our launch area. There were a bunch of kids at the next house over so I think our position was as much an advertisement as it was anything else. So we launched a few rockets. It must have been the humidity or something because the nose cones were on so tight that they never discharged the parachutes. And what is a model rocket without a parachute as it heads back to earth? It’s a freakin’ bullet! Run!

Mission Control

Isaac and Abigail decided to invite the neighbor kids over and they brought some cousins so there were at least 6 kids…more targets! Just kidding. We were very careful to keep everyone safe. Everyone got a chance to push the launch button, which I thought would be the thrill. I was wrong. The real fun was racing across the field to recover the rockets! Who knew exercise was so fun!

The rocket!
10...9...8...7...

One boy said he had always wanted to launch rockets but his Mom wouldn’t let them (for safety reasons I bet!) I think I found our new role on the hill. We are the people who let you do all the stuff your parents won’t let you do!

Click to play the launch movie

(click here if your computer cannot play the movie above)

By the time we were through, we had a bunch of the parents up there too. We have met so many people and everyone has been so nice. I suspect most everyone confirmed that we are the unstable, crazy ones up on that hill. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

Driving in the hay field

Adventure, Family, Fun, ,

So yesterday, I mentioned that we went camping last weekend.  The spot where we camped is on the back side of our hay field which lays on a bit of a slope.  We drove both vehicles down to the edge of the woods and left them there overnight so we could have easy access to the junk that remained in them.

This was a month ago...before the grass really grew!

Since we knew it was to get hot, we decided to get an early start.  I am so glad there are no near-neighbors because I started the chainsaw at 6:30 am.  Anyhow, we packed up camp and planned to move the car and van to the end of the hay field where I am erecting my bear-deterring fence for the bees.  Emily started up the Subaru and drove right off though the thigh-high grass in the field.  The van did not fare so well.  The tires spun but the van never moved.

It was clear to me that we were not going to simply drive out so we had to go to plan b.  And then it struck me.  My friend Maria over at Chicken Blog sent me a cool book last year called Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do).  One of the things the book suggests is to let your kids drive a car.

So, I climbed out of the van and hollered at Isaac.  He’s 11 (and a year older than I was when I first drove a car).  I told him to get in and drive.  He looked at me with that, “Yeah right” look but I opened the door and pointed.  He climbed in and was terrified.  I think that was the proper response.  We did a crash-course on driving and then I went behind the van.  I planned to nudge it to get it moving while he drove it slowly and steadily across the field.  He started off ok, but when it didn’t immediately move, he gunned it.  White smoke rolled from under the tires.

“Dad, the speedometer showed 60!”  I have no doubt about it.  Isaac drove the car 60 mph in the hay field but didn’t move an inch!  We re-visited our driving lesson and on try #2, he successfully drove the van right across the hay field and up to the dirt road.  The boy was so excited and could not have been prouder of himself.  Although his friends did not believe him when he got back to school on Tuesday, he will probably always remember the first time he got to drive a car.  Sometimes a little (controlled) danger can be a good thing!