Iron Man and his sidekick, Cardboard Lass.
five years of castle frostbite.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of our move to Upper Cryogenica and the purchase of Castle Frostbite. When we loaded up the moving truck in Knoxville in December of 2007, Quinn was not quite three and Lyra just seven months old.
In the beginning, I had a love-hate relationship with the new Castle. Robin had bought it after going up to NH by herself for a few days and looking at houses. The first time I got to see the place in person was when I unlocked the door on the evening of our arrival, a few hours after signing the paperwork at the real estate agent’s office, and immediately after getting the moving truck stuck at the bottom of the driveway in the first major snow of the winter. Then I moved the kids into what was to be their room, only to notice a water bubble forming under the ceiling paint. That started the lengthy “hate” portion of that love-hate relationship.
(We got taken a bit in the purchase. The same agency represented both the buyer and the seller, and once everyone had cashed their checks, we were left holding the bag, with no help forthcoming from anyone once we discovered that the ceiling was leaking, and that the house had other–naturally undisclosed–isssues.)
Five years hence, and we’ve fixed all the critical issues and most of the cosmetic/minor items, and the place really feels like we’ve made it our own. Since we moved in, we have done the following:
–Replaced the shitty sheet metal roof with a Sarnafil PVC roof
–Replaced one of the two wood stoves with a pellet stove
–Replaced all the kitchen appliances and both washer and dryer
–Had the entire entry and porch area completely rebuilt (because the structure underneath had rotted away)
–Rebuilt the patio
–Fenced in the backyard with 5′ chain link fencing
–Put up a playhouse/slide set for the kids in the backyard
–Had the garage rebuilt and reinforced from the inside
–Turned one large, difficult-to-heat room into two smaller ones, increasing the bedroom count of the Castle by one
–Repaired all the water damage from the leaking ceiling (thankfully covered by homeowners’ insurance)
–Removed half a dozen questionable trees in proximity of the house to prevent storm damage from falling trees
–Built a chicken house and run on the front acreage of the property
–Remodeled the living room wall into an in-wall media cabinet
–Removed one of the two propane furnaces from the house and remodeled the space into a combination pantry/laundry room
–Resurfaced the driveway with hardpack gravel
–Upgraded the Internet connection from dial-up to satellite to WLAN to DSL
–…and half a dozen smaller projects I’m probably forgetting right now.
It’s a really nice little compound now, sitting as it does on ten very private acres in a rural little New Hampshire town conveniently close to big town amenities if we have the need for them. We have lots of space in the house and on the property, there are no direct neighbors nearby, the wooded lot means privacy, and the town services are reliable. There are far worse spots to live and raise kids, that’s for sure. But man, did it take a lot of elbow grease to get to this spot. I only wish I could give the previous owners a tour of the place as it is now. I hope the house they bought in nearby Grantham has lots of undisclosed structural issues that cost them a lot of cash and work to fix…
africa for norway.
I love this so much, I can hardly put it into words. The perfect send-up of self-congratulatory, condescending Bono-type soy latte activism:
poor wittle mass murderer.
Anders Breivik, the Norwegian crackpot who massacred 77 people last year, isn’t happy about the conditions at his new residence at Ila Prison near Oslo. Apparently he doesn’t get enough butter for his bread, and the handcuffs they put on him when he gets moved around are “too sharp for his wrists.”
Let me just get out my really tiny violin case for the appropriate music.
It’s amazing how concerned with human rights and existential comforts someone can get who snuffed out seventy-seven lives without any concern whatsoever for their human rights. His Viking ancestors would have treated his offenses rather more harshly, to put it mildly.
historically speaking, peace in europe is an aberration.
Politicians in Hungary are calling for a list of prominent Jews in the country. Greece has been rioting pretty much for the last two years over austerity cuts. Spain and Italy are circling the same bankruptcy drain. France just lowered the retirement age for some workers to 62, while Germany—the country that pays off the rest of the Eurozone’s credit cards—raised theirs to 67.
I’m pretty sure some people over there are starting to have reservations about their various countries having reduced their armed forces to National Coast Guard & Railway Police levels. I mean, Britain has no floating bird farms anymore with which to project power if, say, the Argentinians make a move for the Malvinas Falklands again, and Germany has reduced its armored divisions from six to two (and their army’s total strength from twelve to three divisions). Because the Cold War is over, Europe is one big happy family, and nobody’s ever going to distract from domestic troubles by pointing fingers at Jews or foreign agitators again, right? Right?
zweipad.
One of our heavy-rotation pieces of technology is the iPad we got two years ago, shortly after they first came out. Robin uses it for therapy with her patients, the kids play games on it, and I find it handy for watching movies in the evening.
With our upcoming trip to Germany, we figured that we should get a second iPad. The kids fight over our current one at home enough as it is, and a transatlantic flight basically requires two of these wonderful attention-absorbing devices so we don’t have battles over whether to watch Iron Man or My Little Pony at 30,000 feet. So Robin went out and got a new iPad mini the other day.
I will admit to skepticism when they revealed the iPad mini. We already have iPhones and the larger iPad, and the mini didn’t really sound like it would fit a niche in our household. But now that I’ve had a chance to play with it for a few days, I find that I enjoy it more than the bigger model. There’s a CNet review of it that says the mini is “shockingly nice to hold”, and that pretty much nails it. It’s the size of a Kindle Fire, but much thinner, and the texture and the tapered edges are—in typical Apple/Jony Ive fashion—just right in the hand. Technologically, it doesn’t have much that our old iPad lacks, aside from the rather nice built-in cameras, but the form factor is ever so much easier to use when you use the thing as an ebook reader or movie player or a handheld video console for kids.
We got the 64GB WiFi version (our Verizon iPhones can function as hotspots for the iPads if we need that capability on the road), and overall I like it much more than I expected. Hand it to Apple—they know how to make some slick gadgets.
it’s not like it’s their money, right?
I am so fucking glad that my tax money is being spent on the Pentagon having a workshop that discusses whether Jesus died for space aliens too.
lovecraft OS.
Here’s a clever and disturbing Tumblr page with Windows 95 Tips & Tricks.
(God, do those Windows 95 dialog boxes ever give me a flashback to my mid-90s tech support days.)
the surveillance state eats its own.
Here’s an excellent Salon.com article on the most worrisome and least-addressed aspect of the Petraeus affair—the fact that the Feds were able to dig up what they did without evidence of a crime, and without any warrants.
Money quote:
“Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.”
One assumes General Petraeus fully supports the current reach of the surveillance state in much the same way post-Reconstruction whites supported gun control—it’s all fine and dandy as long as the Sheriffs remember that it’s just supposed to be used against Those People. But if the director of the CIA can have his emails snooped without a warrant or evidence of a crime, I doubt that looking through mine or yours would give the FBI even a twinge of civil liberties concerns.
dadcation again, and a request for a friend.
I get to spend a good chunk of today’s Dadcation at the tire place while letting them perform the biannual ritual known in New England as the Changing of the Tires. Because the all-seasons on there are down to “questionable” status after almost five years, I’m having snow tires put on, which means my wallet will be lighter by about $450 when I get out of here.
Luckily, we have the change budgeted in, and we usually don’t break out into cold sweats when we have to replace some essential item in the household. We also have killer health insurance—benefit of the wife’s position at a local hospital—so medical expenses are never really in the back of our minds either. That makes us pretty lucky in today’s economy. (Gold-plated health plans are a pretty rare thing to have for writer-types.)
Some people don’t have great health insurance, or indeed any insurance at all. My friend Tamara recently came down with basal cell carcinoma, and her health insurance is pretty much a sticky note on her laptop that says “Don’t get sick.” I know that a lot of the folks reading this blog also read Tamara’s blog over at View From The Porch, so I’m going to put out a request for you to go over there and see if you have some change in the couch cushions that you can dump in her PayPal account to help her cover the expenses that go with being restored to cancer-free status. There’s a “Donate” tip jar button there, so it’s quick and easy to contribute a few dollars to repair the Snarkolator and keep the snark flowing.
(Like my friend Matt says: if you have enjoyed Tam’s wit over the years, you’d take her out for a dinner if you had her in the neighborhood, right? Just buy her the dinner in advance to make sure she’ll be around.)
I thank you in advance. More later, when I’m not dying a slow heat death in an overheated tire store lounge. At least they have WiFi so I can publically document my slow desiccation.