Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: around the house

Maybury Sanitorium and Broken Plate

Published May 16, 2010

Today while making dinner I screwed up, didn’t latch one of the side tables on the BBQ correctly, and sent a plate and pretzel roll crashing to the ground. It appears that it held briefly, but a slight jostling when I lifted the lid sent the plate on its way to doom. I’m probably going to try and find some more on eBay, but I need to be sure that they are of the Pfaltzgraff USA vintage so that the patterns match exactly. It appears that the brand was sold in 2005 and after that made in China. I’ve found that the new Chinese-made patterns don’t quite match the old designs (less defined geometric shapes, for example, in modern versions of the Midnight Sun pattern that I have) and want to be sure I get the old USA versions. There are a number of these plates on eBay right now, so I’m waiting for a response about the origin of manufacture and if they are the USA versions I’m hoping to buy a four or eight of them.

Earlier today I headed out to Trail’s Edge to check out the Mega Sale and help if I could, but with plenty of help on hand I ended up heading over to Maybury State Park to ride the mountain bike trails there with Carlos (previously pictured here). I’d only been there once before, back on Easter Monday of last year with Bob and Jon, and I was looking forward to checking it out again. This park is on the grounds of the Maybury Sanatorium, an old tuberculosis sanatorium and has this nifty sign over the entrance. Throughout its life it was known first as Detroit Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Spring Hill Sanatorium, and then Maybury Sanatorium. If you are interested in the history of this place, be sure to check out the Maybury Sanatorium website as it contains a whole bunch of great historical info about the place.

Despite the nice area today’s ride didn’t go quite as well as it could have. After really pushing myself on the three laps of yesterday’s race my legs were quite wobbly and telling me that I should take it easy and head back to the car. So, after one lap Carlos and I bid each other farewell and I headed back to the car while he headed off back on to the trail. Ah well, a day of rest should do me well.

Leave a Comment

Busy, busy, busy!

Published April 26, 2010

I haven’t posted anything in roughly 20 days, mostly because I’ve been busy traveling Europe and generally being busy with stuff. I arrived home today, and I’ll post more about that later after I’ve sorted through the photos. Instead I’ll just mention the brief things that my day held:

· Waking at 4:30am UK time to catch a flight. Thus I’ve been up almost 23 hours straight and traveled by a car (on the left and right side of the road), train, bus, and airplane.
· Replacing a hard drive in banstyle.nuxx.net on the way home, as my mom waited in the car. I was very thankful for this, as it kept me from having to drive back to Southfield during rush hour.
· Got a replacement SIM card to put in my replacement Nexus One. My other one was lost / stolen (I’m really not sure which) in the airport on the way to the UK.
· Finished setting up a rigid fork on my Specialized 26″ hard tail, getting it ready to be used as a commuter / light trail bike complete with rack and new rear blinky light.
· Went for a 20-ish mile test ride mixing single track, two track, and pavement. The fork works well and I like it, so I stopped for frozen custard at Custard Spot. I don’t know the distance because the bike doesn’t have a computer on it.
· Washed sheets and showered to remove mud from me, and started other laundry.
· Downloaded all the queued work email so I can begin reading it tomorrow morning.

Now I think it’s time for bed. It was a really excellent trip filled with good friends and lots of nice people, but I must admit that I’m a bit glad to be home.

Sleep will be needed, because I suspect work is going to get quite busy as soon as I return tomorrow morning.

Leave a Comment

Macomb Orchard Trail in March

Published March 15, 2010

Since the trails are still thawing and thus generally unridable, a group of us got together tonight to ride the Macomb Orchard Trail from Onyx Ice Arena to the bridge over M-53 and back. Instead of driving up Jon and I decided to leave from my house to add a few more miles on it. The result ended up being 2:41:45 of moving time to cover 37.2 miles, for an average of 13.7 MPH. Peak speed was 24.6 MPH, likely achieved on the hill down from the bridge over M-53, even though there are times when I knew I was above 20 MPH on flat ground with the wind at my back.

Despite being a bit cold and with a 15 MPH headwind on the way out, with particularly chilly spots near the still-frozen low-laying swampy areas, it was a really nice ride. I didn’t eat enough and ran out of energy a few times, but small handfuls of granola and a bottle of double-strength HEED helped with that.

I also gave the aforementioned sample contact lenses a try tonight with some clear-lens protective glasses and they worked out very well. Without astigmatism-correcting lenses my vision wasn’t as perfect as it could be, my eyes weren’t dry and I could see quite well. I’ll wear another pair some other time this week and be sure that it’s not a fluke, but I’m pretty sure that these worked out well.

Now, off to get some more to eat, but only after figuring out why my furnace won’t light.

Leave a Comment

Multi-wood Coasters

Published February 28, 2010

After some friends headed to Belize a few weeks ago for some sailing and general relaxing they brought me back this really, really cool set of coasters. With each being made out of four strips of different woods (mahogany, black poison, red wood, and billy webb, as illustrated in this photo) they are quite neat looking. I just added four rubber feet to each and now they re in the living room ready for use. They look particularly great on the tables in there.

Leave a Comment

Snow Day II

Published February 22, 2010

Here’s the view from my office as Winter Green II, our landscaping company, cleared the parking lot around my condo. There is now an 8′ pile of snow at the end of each parking spot, and a small strip next to Danielle’s car which I’ll have to shovel off. I believe that we’ve received 4″ – 5″ of snow thus far today.

Good thing my network connection is staying up solidly, as working from home is a much better option than a couple hours of driving through slushy, icy crap.

Leave a Comment

Off The Rails

Published February 11, 2010

Danielle’s driver side window ended up coming out of the track at the front, so she wasn’t able to roll it up without holding it. By unbolting the front rail I was able to get it all aligned, but it seems her window has some wear in front of the lift mechanism. This causes the window to settle into place slightly ajar, requiring a gentle nudge to get it into place. If it was easier to get inside the door I’d look at disassembling the mechanism and fixing the bushing (or whatever), but for now I’ve left the window semi-operational.

On request the handle has been left off of the door panel (and set inside one of the map compartments) so she won’t roll the window down without remembering the slight effort required to fully re-seat it. Properly reinstalling the handle will just require clipping it back in place, but I won’t do so yet.

I suspect that this issue happened when the car was iced over and an attempt to roll down the window was made. The window was probably stuck in place and the force of pulling down on it deformed a bushing or some other part in the front of the mechanism, allowing it to wobble the current 1cm or so.

2 Comments

Snowy Laundry Day

Published February 11, 2010

Working from home on a snow day let me constantly cycle laundry while taking brief breaks from reading and writing documentation. For most of the day from my first 7:30am meeting through now the washer and dryer have been doing their thing, removing skin oil and flakes, bits of food, and other debris from my clothes. I’d been a bit remiss in laundry-doing lately, so I had to do loads for socks, underwear, work clothes, towels/robe, t-shirts, jeans, bike clothes, sheets, rags, and a few other things. The final load, towels/robe, is only now drying. This evening I also decided to donate a some clothes that I haven’t worn in years to the Salvation Army, so I had a full load of those to wash, as few years worth of dust on the clothes likely wouldn’t be appreciated.

The result is this nice, clean closet with everything folded and put away. Socks, bike clothes, and various other bits are in drawers. Now to get some sleep and get back to working in the office tomorrow. This will be nice as I’m not terribly fond of working from home, particularly when the weather dictates the preceding and following evenings also involve sitting at home. I do like my house, but work is a very nice change of venue.

Leave a Comment

RedPlum Be Gone!

Published January 26, 2010

Are you one of the millions like me who receive RedPlum physical spam almost daily in your mailbox? If you are, and you too wish to stop receiving the wasteful physical embodiment of e-blasts, head on over to this Valassis Communications page and step through the menus to unsubscribe and avoid the RedPlum processed pork firehose.

Since I receive very little other mail, my daily trips to the mailbox are usually just to pick up this rag and transport it to the recycling box. I’ve also found real mail lost (tucked?) inside of this dreck, so hopefully getting off the mailing list will cut down on lost mail too. Just last month a water bill seemingly never arrived and currently a notification that I’m anticipating receiving from the post office for an international delivery seems quite late. I wouldn’t be surprised if it too was lost.

Leave a Comment