Strings, Rings, and Other Things

After two years, I've finally managed to download photos from my phone's camera. So here are a handful of random images that seemed interesting:

A few years back, Harvey Mudd advertized the upcoming reunion weekend by sending us a set of word magnets for the refrigerator. We haven't had a set of our own (maybe we should), so there were only so many sentences we could form with them. Here's the one that's been on our fridge for the past couple of years:

For a few months, Kim and I saw this billboard every time we drove to Lansing, and it always made us laugh: we thought it would work much better if we snuck out one night and changed the "L" to an "R".

( And a few more... )

Maybe I'll eventually track down some new baby pictures, too. :)

The world here had begun to warm up and start looking like spring, but a few days ago Winter decided that it wouldn't go away without throwing one last, nasty punch. So we got a layer of ice, then a layer of wet, heavy snow, then another layer of ice, and finally another layer of wet, heavy snow. That made clearing the sidewalks and driveway a real pain: doing any shoveling by hand was hard because of the solid ice layer in the middle (and on the bottom), and even our pretty spiffy snowblower usually needed two passes or more to clear the ground. (It would often start by just plowing on top of the middle ice layer.)

But the worst victims were the plants. The initial coating of ice was a perfect surface for heavy snow to accumulate on, and the second ice layer just served to lock the snow in place. The weight proved to be too much for an old tree in our front yard. Toward the end of the storm, it ended up splitting down the middle. A big segment fell across the sidewalk, and the rest fell to the side, crushing the fence and the neighbor's bushes. Here's a picture taken after I'd already gotten the sidewalk clear:

For comparison, here's what the tree looked like (from another angle) when we bought the house: ( I'll tuck the other pictures away off of your Friends pages... )

I'm not a libertarian. But there's still something oddly creepy when your local government gets into the business of regulating trick-or-treating in what seem like crazy ways. This year in Alma, the city's approved Trick-or-Treat hours are 5:30-7:30 p.m. on October 30.

First of all, why in the world is this not on Halloween? I mean, yes, I can imagine that some days would be more convenient than others in principle, but we don't reschedule Christmas and New Years when the timing's bad. (Or at least, I hope we don't! I was out of town for the winter holidays last year.) I remember one year growing up when Lincoln, NE rescheduled trick-or-treating for a different night, but that was because there was a blizzard just before Halloween.

And second, what's up with those hours? The scheduled time runs from one hour before sunset to right around twilight (at 7:30 it will still be light enough to see the general shapes of things even without streetlights). When I was a kid, a significant aspect of Halloween was the spooky atmosphere. I have fond memories of houses with cool jack-o'-lanterns and some fairly intricate scary scenes in their yards, and as I got older I had fun jumping out of the shadows by our porch in costume to scare trick-or-treaters. Absolutely none of that works if the sun hasn't even set when the kids show up! Last year, by the time it was dark enough to see the candles in our pumpkins (7pm or so), practically nobody was still out in the neighborhood. (It's pretty clear from the timing that this is some "Think of the children!" safety measure, but I'm curious to know how much harm it actually prevents. Is it a big enough benefit to make it worth gutting the holiday this way?)

I had always hoped that when I finally owned my own house, I could eventually do cool stuff for Halloween. Sadly, the way things work here I don't think there would be much point.

(I really have to wonder why that city trick-or-treating message bothers to suggest reflective costumes: won't sunlight on all that reflective gear blind passing motorists? Flashlights would have been useless for most of our trick-or-treaters last year, too.)

In my last post, I shared a picture of the cat who was visiting our porch:

He's still been around today, and Kim made a surprising connection. Waaaaaay back when, we posted pictures that we'd taken of the house when we were still deciding whether to buy it, including these:

Those pictures include Gilbert, the cat who belonged to the previous owners of the house. It's pretty convincing that this is him, but I have absolutely no idea how he made his way here. (Maybe he came with the house after all!)

In fact, Kim just called our neighbors, who have now peered out their window and confirmed that it is indeed Gilbert. They're going to see if they can get in touch with the previous owners' daughter, who lives not far away. Meanwhile, we've put out some water: it's hot today!

Our house came with an attractive ivy covered wall in back:

But last fall I discovered that the ivy was doing horrible things to bricks, so we decided it would have to go. (The really bad brick damage was only around the garden plot next to the car in that picture, but we didn't want wait until the same thing happened to the house.)

We wanted to kill the climbing vines before trying to remove them from the wall, so a few weeks ago I went out with shears and severed all their links to the ground. They eventually shriveled up substantially, and last weekend we managed to get the walls all clear (happily without too much damage):

It was a pretty substantial job (we filled up six or seven big yard waste bags with the debris), and we're glad to have it done.

( So just how much can you hide in a wall of ivy? )

Kim and I had a fun Halloween, though a lot of it came together at the last minute. We started the festivities with a trip to "Halloweekends" at the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio along with some friends from Alma. Some of the haunted houses there were pretty neat (Club Blood was well done with good atmosphere, and the Toy Factory was alternately creepy and uncomfortably funny). The outdoor "scare zones" weren't so much creepy as they were startling or, um, insulting. (I was followed through part of the "Fright Faire" by a medieval-looking zombie who said that with longer hair I could be one of the Monkees, since I was the whitest thing he'd seen since the moon went behind the clouds.) I'm told Cedar Point has some good roller coasters, too.

The downside of that trip was that we got back mid-afternoon Saturday, and we weren't entirely ready for Halloween yet. We'd done the essentials: Kim had already bought candy, and we carved pumpkins Thursday night:

( Halloween pictures and details behind the cut... )

We were completely taken off guard by the number of trick-or-treaters. Our house is apparently in the very middle of the most popular trick-or-treating spot in the county: kids from the whole region come to our street. We'd been told to expect something like 300-400 kids during the city's official 5:30-7:30 trick-or-treating hours, so Kim bought about 575 pieces of candy to make sure we were safe. We gave them out one at a time, and Kim ran out at 6:38. Seeing the situation, I'd run out to the store a few minutes earlier to resupply; we opened back up at about 6:45, and I'd say we ended up giving candy to about 700 kids by the end of the evening. (We actually gave out more like 775 pieces of candy, but I started doubling up for the last 20-30 minutes when it was clear that the rate of kids was dwindling.)

If anyone out there has suggestions on how to choose decent paint colors for our living room and dining room, I'd really, really love to hear them. I've been staring at paint website color-picker tools for a while now, and not only are my eyes beginning to bug out but I keep feeling irritated when the user interfaces don't work quite the way I want them to. (Of course, what I really ultimately want from them would probably require black magic.)

The thing I really lack is a good way to make sure that I pick colors that look good together (including our existing dark blue couch). Kim and I would rather not default to generic neutral beige walls: we actually want some sort of color if we can manage it, though nothing too bright and bold.

Ideally, what I want is a tool that will let me build a palette one color at a time and gradually restrict my choices as I add additional colors to the list. I'd start with the couch color, which by itself probably wouldn't narrow the possibilities much, and then once I picked a second reasonable color (the main wall color, say) I'd be left with a much shorter list of possibilities for an additional accent color or two. Once I had a complete list, changing any one color would simultaneously update the others if necessary to keep the set looking good (unless a color was "locked", like the couch). In a perfect world, I could watch the effects of these changes in real time on a sample picture of a room similar to ours.

As noted, a tool like that probably doesn't exist, so at this point I'd be content with just general ideas on how to avoid major blunders while choosing colors by eye. I don't really trust my sense of style enough to risk a major painting excursion on it without some sort of outside support. (Kim has a better sense of these things than I do, but I very much want to be able to contribute intelligently to the conversation.)

So, just out of random curiosity, how does one safely remove a small bat that's hanging asleep from a curtain rod in one's living room?

No reason.


Update: My curiosity on this topic has abated.

I can happily endorse the "quickly wrap it in a towel" approach (even in awkward spaces), as long as that's coupled with leather gloves and a few other precautions. Apparently, the space between the downspout and the wall outside makes a perfectly adequate substitute for a curtain rod. Meanwhile, our bedroom doors were closed last night, so we're pretty sure he wasn't in there with us. I think we're safe.

I'm apparently still on Eastern time, so here are two entirely unrelated notes on psychology inspired by our recent house hunting trip:

• I seem to have no intuitive sense of the value of money in amounts over a few thousand dollars. Amounts up to $100 or so are fine: I have at least a rough feel for how many books or CDs I could buy for that, or how nice of a meal. I can extrapolate up to a few hundred reasonably well. Above that I start relying on travel to give me a sense of scale, but travel prices vary wildly from year to year and thus don't help as much. Above a couple thousand dollars, I completely lose track.

  In particular, amounts $10,000 and up feel basically like play money to me: I recognize intellectually that they're huge and important, but pricing anything at that point feels more like a game than an actual computation of value. Negotiating for a salary or a house becomes just a matter of maximizing my score. If the starting point of the overall market had been $10,000 higher or lower, I don't know that I'd recognize the difference (but I'd still play the negotiation game). Maybe in poker it's a good thing to "play the person, not the cards", but it always feels like a crazy way to interact with such significant amounts of money.

• Small, rural towns in America have been struggling for a long time, and that leads to a much stronger dedication to the local community than I'm used to in larger cities. Whether in conversations about banking or on signs in downtown stores, people from the area clearly disapprove of dealing with national chains if there's a local alternative. And the owners of our B&B were glad that we were moving into town; they said that on occasions when a new professor came to the college and opted to commute in from one of the bigger cities 45 minutes away, those folks seemed to be saying "we're too good for you". I certainly sympathize, but it will take some getting used to: you don't see many people here in Upland with that perspective. (Even growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska didn't really have that feel, though I was very aware of it in the smaller towns nearby.)