The Elephant's Child

I Win!

I just laugh when people complain about the "terrible" windows they've got on their house.  I win the pity party, every time.

The top window pictured to the left is one of the two windows on our stair landing.  The grey gook you see is dusty silicone caulk, which is what is holding the glass in the frame.  The upper sash rail is held in place by virtue of having been screwed tight to the top of the lower sash. This is the window that had a 2" open gap when when we moved into the house. The glazing compound had long since fallen off, and the glass had slid down the frame, following the rotted sash rail, leaving a large gap at the top which no one had attempted to fix.  In fact, in our first year here, that rail actually fell off the window and down to the ground.  

The lower picture is the window behind our headboard.  What you see is my entire finger stuck into the space between the sash and the side jamb.  At some point, the sash was replaced, but it was replaced by the whiz-bang maintenance people at the church who owned the house with a sash that is about 1" too narrow.  I can almost pull the sash out of the frame without removing any trim.  Because of how loose it is, it clatters and bangs in the wind.  Fun stuff. We'll likely caulk it shut this winter. 

I know you're wondering something, though. "Why on earth haven't you replaced the windows already?"  Because we want to replace the entire window, not just the sashes. And that's expensive. Very expensive.  What's sold as "replacement windows" is often simply a sash replacement set.  That doesn't do anything for rotted frames or for all the empty, uninsulated space that's within the frame of an 89-year-old window.  (The channels where the sash cords and weights hang, for starters.) To replace the entire window, we have to take the 60's era steel siding off, and we're not ready to do that and re-paint the clapboards yet. We can't do it ourselves at the moment, and we can't afford to pay someone, either.  So we wait.

Meanwhile, I've got the trump card when people start complaining about the "bad windows" in their house.  Bwahahahaha!

Sacred Harp: That Much Fun Shouldn't Be Legal.

Mad Musician and I saw "Awake, My Soul" this weekend. We've sung a few Sacred Harp pieces here and there over the years, and have some CD's, but we've never been to a singing. I think we need to go!

The Hoosier Cabinet.

Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa G, for letting us take this wonderful cabinet home with us.  We absolutely love it.

Waste and Ruin.

Abandoned Detroit, with good accompanying essays.  Stark, shocking, and sickening. Beautiful, too, in the particular way that abandoned, empty, exotic places have.

Router Rooter, Where Are You?

We continue to have router trouble.  If I power off the router and plug it back in, I can get 10 minutes to about 45 minutes of internet usage before it goes blooey. (That's the technical term.)  I can either walk downstairs, unplug and re-plug the router, go back upstairs, wait, and then maybe enjoy a few more minutes of internet connexion before it goes blooey again or I can wait several hours, after which it seems to work for about half an hour or so.

My internet connexion itself seems to be just fine. If I connect Mad Musician's six year old laptop directly  to the internet cable, it works beautifully.  Wow, and fast, too!  Guess I knew that the wireless slows things down, but I didn't realise it was THAT bad.

The wireless signal from the router to my computer seems to be fine, as I can get a local connexion without trouble.  If we plug the laptop into the router with a cable, we have the trouble as described above, so it's not related to the wireless aspect of the setup.

Is my router just dead?  We did a reset with a paperclip, set it back to the factory defaults, re-configured our user name, password and SSID, after which we got, yup, about 45 minutes of internet connexion and then it went blooey again.

Help me out. I've done as much forum-trawling  ("FIRST!" "No, i'm FIRST"  "u suck!" "dude, look at my cat!" "RTFM, moron!") as I can stand, and that taught me to check if there was a "firmware" (note: that is not a supportive undergarment) update for my router. Nope. I looked.  The router is four years old.  Couldn't find an update.

Now, this would all be moot if I could get a wire up to the second floor easily.  I'd prefer the desktop computer to be wired anyway. We set it up wirelessly simply to save drilling holes in floors, wrestling with fish tape and all that fun stuff.  We're not hardcore gamers, so lightening speed wasn't a huge issue.

Apparently, we've just enough of a nerd-point rating to know to lock down the network and change the default password and SSID, but not ONE single nerd-point more than that. 

Suggestions?  I'd rather not go out and buy another router until I'm sure this one is completely bricked.  And I'd rather not start squatting my blogging life on the six-year old laptop downstairs. I've gotten quite comfortable up here with this big stash of RAM and this large, sparkly clean flat panel monitor!

When?

When will stuff work, right away, without digging through help menus and forums? When will it be possible to purchase something and not have to spend hours of annoying frustration tearing your hair out just to get the stupid thing to work?

Why is this so hard?

No Pietists* Allowed.

Pipe: a primarily masculine symbol with authoritarian overtones but also indicative of reliability and contentment.  -The Dictionary of Visual Language, 1980

"I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs."  -Albert Einstein.

I was going to wait until Christmas to  give Mad Musician his new pipe, but I realized that many fine Autumn evenings perfect for a smoke on the porch would pass by, unused, between now and December.  I couldn't let that happen. So I presented him with the two pipes purchased at an estate sale earlier this summer. One, the one pictured here, has proven to be a good fit.  The other one has a taller bowl and hasn't worked out as well, at least with this tobacco. 

(Read this if you're concerned about the health effects of an occasional pipe. A pipe a few times a month is not anything to be overly concerned about.)

*Here's a good description of what a modern-day Pietist is, if you were wondering.

For Whom The (Recording of a) Bell Tolls

We have come into possession of a Bong-A-Tron... oops! I mean a fine electronic Schulmerich Carillon, of our very own. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for hauling it for us!) Included is a stack of tapes (they look something like the carts that radio stations used to use) with all sorts of hymn selections. We've got several "General Protestant" collections, a tape of Lenten Hymns, Advent Hymns, The Hymns of Martin Luther, a tape of a Funeral Toll (creepy!), Easter Hymns, and a standard church bell toll. There are four programs which you set by moving metal pegs on that dial, rather like a simple lamp timer. The audio outputs through a sturdy amp which used to drive some very large bullhorn speakers up in the tower of the church where this came from, but for now we're playing it by running the sound through a small boombox. We hope to install shelves in the lower part of the cabinet for the rest of our stereo equipment and have the "bells" play through our full-size speakers. Mad Musician has taken to using words I don't understand like "ohms" and "watts" whilst pouring over 40 year old blueprints of wiring diagrams.

According to the nifty mimeographed catalog included in a nice pocket in the back door of the cabinet, there was available (in the late 60's) a tape with Syrian Orthodox hymns (sold separately) Now that would freak out the neighborhood and have everyone calling Homeland Security.

I realise that maybe only Thursday's Child and Bi-Coloured Python Rock Snake understand what I mean, so I'll explain. To Western ears, the liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox church sounds uncannily like the Call to Prayer heard from a Mosque. Listen to an example. The language of that liturgy is what happened to the Aramaic that Christ spoke in the intervening 2,000 years since his Ressurection. My linguist brother and linguist sister-in-law can comment on how closely related Syriac and Aramaic are; I can't.

First Round of Pesto.

I bought the wide-mouth half-pint jars this year, even though I'm not going to can the pesto, just freeze it.  I couldn't bring myself to pack the pesto in plastic, especially as I don't have any little containers.  The nice thing about canning jars is that they're glass, and they don't stain and don't pick up odors.  They also last forever.  Some of my quart Mason jars were my great-grandmother's. Yes, some of them are blue.  Applesauce looks real pretty in the blue ones.

That's my 30-year old Oster Kitchen Center in the background. Eat your heart out.  It's all mine, and it still works.  I've been lucky enough to find parts at garage sales - that's where I found the brand-new food processor attachment I used to make this pesto.   And once I was casually strolling down an alleyway (*cough, cough* I was NOT garbage picking - I wasn't! Stop saying that!) and spotted a box full of kitchen stuff out for garbage pick-up.  Lo and behold, inside was a perfectly fine motor base for an Oster, a few years newer than this one, and with a little less wear on the motor, too.  It's packed away up in the attic against the day this one dies.  If it ever does.

This is Not a Tractor.

This is a behemoth. What kind of mileage do you suppose it gets?  I'm sure it's quite useful for farming large acreage, but it's hardly charming, is it?