pardon the lag...

...but I've not had time to post.

We have a contract on our current house! Hooray! Closing is now Oct 13 2006 so our new house has to be ready before that. Dave the Builder is running as much as he can concurrently. It looks like a scene from The Money Pit, with contractors running about like The Crusades or something.

We've picked furniture, tiles, carpet, doors, handles, lights, fans, paint, walkways, insulation (placement), cabinets, pulls, countertops, mantel, hearth, and drains. And that was just this week. Siding comes next week and painting should be finished then too. Photos to come when the siding is done.

This weekend is the big bike swap meet. Daren couldn't come from England due to flying standby being a trip to purgatory, so we will soldier on without him. No bike ride the night before so photos will be minimal.

Katie attended freshman orientation at EHS. I'm sure she will like the place once she gets used to it.

I am planning to post my latest story on a website if they agree. I've had mixed reactions to it so I want to see how the webmasters like it. I like the updates to the Writer's Digest website and have done some exercises from their magazine.

Tax waivers arrived for the estate from NJ, so I have started converting assets into Katie and my name. That's a full-time job in itself for a few weeks.

We gave the attorneys in Florida 90 days to come up with an accounting of the Crouse wills and trusts. I hope this gets things out in the open and leads to a resolution soon.

Later.

Katie at the beach

Here's Katie in the old classic caddy at the beach house.

Northampton bike ride tonight - pics to come.

this and that again

No new pics of our house yet. I'll wait for the siding to go on, which is about 2 weeks away.

Wrote a letter to the editor of the JI about global warming. I need to edit it down to fit. When published, I'll post a link.

Here is a pic of Wanda on her new Honda for the TSI MS ride (sorry you can't see her behind the helmet):

Ancestor photo

From Wanda's side:

Genius types

Interesting to see from the latest Wired mag that Daniel Pink (author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age) claims that there are 2 kinds of geniuses - the early bloomer and the late bloomer. More at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

And a great commentary on writing for Wired is here: http://www.pauldifilippo.com/glass_preface.pdf

Here is an excerpt:


Here's what I believe was done to my original story to bring it into a state of
supreme Wiredness. I think than anyone willing to read both the version here and the
version that appeared in Wired will second these assertions.
* All references to "the little people" were eliminated. The elite world that
matters according to Wired is full of Big Actors. Whether professor, millionaire, artist,
manager, engineer, hacker, or eccentric, they are all Important People. The grunts and--
God perish the thought!--the "unwired" who actually keep things running are unnamed,
invisible and unworthy of attention.
* Ambiguity was minimized. Everything in the Wired universe is known with
certainty. This is good for you, that is bad. You're part of the Movement, or you're out in
the cold. No dissenters from the reigning cyber-Babbitry are allowed, no grey areas
permitted.
* Facts were cloaked in "hipness." It's not enough to convey the information,
but it must be delivered in such a way as to inculcate the feeling that both the writer and
his readers are already intellectually above whatever scene is being described, more
expert than the experts. This results in a prose that reads as if written by a team of
Austin Powers and Dustin Hoffman's Rainman character, and paradoxically gives the
majority of Wired articles a curious sense of "been there, done that" even if the topic is
brand new.
* The past was dismissed as unimportant. History does not matter except as
prelude to the future. Even the present is merely a waystation toward Technotopia.
* Quotidian matters were de-emphasized. Boredom does not exist in the
Wired cosmos. Only "peak" experiences count. The immense amounts of hard work
involved in getting from conception to reality--work which can even have its own simple
meditative pleasures--is just something to skip blithely over.
* Drama was injected into basically undramatic situations. This is a corollary
to the previous problem, and perhaps the one flaw in this list shared by magazines in
general. "Why are we devoting space to this story? Because it's exciting!" Are we
having fun yet? We'd better be, or our advertisers won't feel they're getting their money's
worth!
I'm not paranoid enough to imagine that any of these dicta exist as a written
stylesheet. If quizzed, Wired editors would probably deny that they had any agenda other
than to present "cool" stuff to their audience. But when a well-funded, image-conscious
juggernaut like Wired gets rolling, it's inevitable that all of the harnessed team has to pull
in unison. The corporate attitude becomes just something in the air, inhaled like
Strontium-90 and passed down from veteran to novice to freelancer.
For a few bleak days, I toyed with having my lobotomized story published under a
pseudonym. "J. Ives Turnkey" was going to be my choice. I thought the byline would
leap out fairly effectively as "jive turkey," a kind of analogy to Cordwainer Bird. But in
the end, I chose to go with my own name.

House is weathertight

The shingling is done except for the porch, and the windows and sliders in.
The floors of the garage and basement poured yesterday.
Pics to come this weekend.

david copperfield's reverse mugging

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - David Copperfield has magically escaped getting robbed.
The 49-year-old illusionist was walking with two female assistants to their tour bus after his show Sunday at a performing arts center when four teens pulled up in a black car, a police report said.
Two armed robbers allegedly got out of the car and demanded the group's belongings. One woman handed over $400 from her pockets and the other gave up her purse with 200 euros, $100, her passport, plane tickets and a cell phone. Copperfield refused to empty his pockets, the report said.
Copperfield says he turned his pockets inside out to reveal nothing in them, even though he was carrying his passport, wallet and cell phone.
"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield told The Palm Beach Post for Wednesday's editions.
Copperfield read the license plate number of the car to an assistant while she called 911, the report said.
Four teenagers were arrested and charged with armed robbery. They were held without bond, police said. The women's property was recovered.
See his site at http://www.dcopperfield.com

danolight

Check out the danolight at http://www.danolight.com
Highly recommended, great price, light weight.
Dan, the lead guitarist of The Clams (http://www.geocities.com/wedontsing, designed the light to be much less expensive than competing xenon lights. As they say, the definition of an engineer is someone who can do for $1 what everyone else does for $2.

We have shingles!

And the ponds are draining...no rain today.

the front is fixed

The dormer between the main house and garage was set back flush with the first story, and needed to be extended out 4 feet.

Katie's horse drawing

We all like this one!

Some technical problems with blogspot

I'm working on moving to my own site soon. Please be patient.

some more pics

Here is the front with the roof:

And here is the start of the deck:


Beach vacation next 2 weeks!

Lyre bird

This was voted the best nature clip of all time:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/tvandsoap.html?in_page_id=1887&in_article_id=385372

Katie honored at capitol

Here she is with her drawing:

Second floor

Here are some second floor shots:

splash!

Here's a truck in the pond in Newington.

first floor

Here are some pics of our new house that actually look like something. Prior to this, all we had was a foundation.
The framers had to place a beam over the garage entryway and hallway to carry the load that was to have been supported by the half bath. The too small bath and the too small hallway were gladly given up to give us more space.

we now have a basement...

Pics to come when we have a frame.

I stood where our deck was to go and enjoyed the sun yesterday for a minute.

Had a great week in spite of my back spasms. Went to book discussion at library, and went out twice having a great time both times.

Later.

Frodo

Saw a great bumper sticker this morning: Frodo failedBush has the ring. OMFG.

Still housecleaning in anticipation of listing. The fill piles on our lot are growing. Digging should start soon.

Later.