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Category Archives: Home
Finishing up 2009
There’s not been much action here in my personal blogosphere in the last few weeks since December has been exceptionally busy. I had two domestic business trips plus a week in Tunisia in North Africa, then followed by the holidays. … Continue reading
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Lake effect night snow in low rez
Photo of Lake Ontario lake effect snow on a cold December evening, Nazareth College, Pittsford, NY.
First big snow of December, 2009
We’ve had some snow already this year, including very blustery weather yesterday, but overnight we had the first big snow. Here’s what the vegetable garden looked like this morning.
First snow, November, 2009
I woke up this morning to 28 degrees F and snow on the ground. Though we’ve had flurries before, this was the first of the white stuff that really stuck. Here are some photos from around the yard this morning.
A catch-up weekend
I’m sitting here on Sunday night watching the NY Yankees play the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 3 of the 2009 baseball World Series. I usually only watch the Series if the Yankees are in it, and then only when they … Continue reading
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The pepper harvest
The nights are starting to get quite cold here in northwest New York State and it’s likely we’ll have a frost soon. After work this evening I went out to the garden to pick the remaining peppers before they got … Continue reading
All quiet on the western porch
Almost every summer I seem to spend quite a lot of time working on one of our porches, from building a new porch from scratch off our kitchen door in 2006, to building new screens for the upstairs northern porch … Continue reading
Wooden screens: complete and installed
In a series of blog entries, I’ve been documenting a small project to build two new wooden screens for a sleeping porch on our house. Though I only needed to construct a couple of screens, they were large, hence awkward, … Continue reading
Wooden screens: Starting construction
In my previous entry on this topic, I talked about how I was building two new wooden screens to put on windows on a second floor sleeping porch. In this entry I’ll discuss how I started putting them together. First … Continue reading
Wooden porch screens: The setup
We have several porches around our 1820 Federal style house, and no two of them are the same. Off the driveway we have an entrance porch, which I largely rebuilt last year (photo), and above that is a classic sleeping … Continue reading
Life with Vegetables: The mid-July garden
I’m taking today off as a vacation day, so among the other odds and ends I’m doing I decided to capture a photo update of the state of the vegetable garden, new this year. I previously discussed the garden in … Continue reading
Our visitor shows her face
This week my son and I completed putting up a fence around our new vegetable garden. This was in response to some critter or other chewing off the leaves on several tomato plants. The morning after I posted the previous … Continue reading
Half a fence
As I have reported on previously, I’m doing a vegetable garden for the first time in several years. Everything was in the ground by the end of May, and it’s clear that I’ll be battling weeds all season. This is … Continue reading
An upside down start to planting this year
As I’ve mentioned in several other posts, I’m doing a vegetable garden again this year. This involved a lot of clearing out of weeds and brush from the plots and then tilling. Today I went to the best of the … Continue reading
May flowers (and gardens)
At various times during the year I like to walk around the yard and see what’s blooming. Spring is especially exciting here because we can have up to five months between the first and last snow falls in winter. We … Continue reading
Reclaiming the vegetable garden
For much of my life, there’s been some sort of vegetable garden in the back yard. This goes back to my mother growing tomatoes and some pumpkins when I was a teenager, to the time I planted 36 tomato plants … Continue reading
April and chionadoxa
Every April in our neck of the woods here in northwestern New York State, we’re treated to thousands of blooms of chionadoxa, a aggressively naturalizing bulb that heralds the end of our snow season. Evidently this plant is native to … Continue reading
Almost Spring
It’s been a while since I added much of substance here since this was such a busy week. We at IBM hosted an analyst meeting on Linux and open source in Stamford, CT, and between preparing for that and actually … Continue reading
Saturday morning housekeeping: my basement and CSS
I slept in a bit this morning since it was an exceptionally long work week. Much to the frustration of others in my family, I sometimes wake up on Saturdays with an annoying urge to get more efficient and to … Continue reading
DSL fixed?
About four years ago we switched our house off Internet service via cable to service provided via DSL. The cable service was very unreliable and would often be down. In contrast, the DSL service was up almost all the time … Continue reading
Cold in January
I took these shots last night. I didn’t venture too far off the beaten paths.
Daily Links 12/23/2008 (p.m.) [Appetizer and Side Dish Edition]
Mashed Potatoes with Parsnip and Horseradish | Williams-Sonoma “An underappreciated root vegetable, the parsnip looks like a white carrot and has a slightly sweet flavor. Parsnips can be cooked in the same way you cook carrots, boiled, steamed, roasted or … Continue reading
Images of a December snow storm
This has been one of the snowiest early winters I can remember here in northwest New York State, and technically it’s not even winter yet! Today we’re in the midst of a big snow storm that has dropped five inches … Continue reading
Saturday afternoon
Today is the Saturday of the long Thanksgiving weekend. It’s nearly the end of November, and weather-wise the month is living up to its reputation: it is just above freezing, damp, and constantly threaten to rain, sleet or snow. I’m … Continue reading
Cookbooks for Thanksgiving, again
This is primarily a link to an entry I did a year ago with suggestions for cookbooks for Thanksgiving. The three books I mentioned there are still on the top of my list for Thanksgiving as well as other family … Continue reading
First serious snow of the season
Today we had the first snow of the season that amounted to more than a dusting. It made it slightly more difficult to get my son to school this morning as I had to deal both with people being overly … Continue reading
A rose and two goofballs
The weather up here in northwestern New York has been pretty dreary the last few days. It’s been cold and wet, the forecast for the weekend is the same, but today it’s 60 F and sunny. I took advantage of … Continue reading
One less tree, for now
The village government where I live is responsible for the care of the trees in the boulevard out front, the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street. It’s a tough life for a tree, especially given the salt they … Continue reading
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Wrong number
Just happened. RING “Hi, is Terrence there?” “Sorry, you have the wrong number.” “Oh! Sorry!” HANGUP RING “Hi, is Terrence there?” “Wrong number again.” “Well, this is the number he gave me, so if he is home, give him the … Continue reading
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On why the side porch tilts
A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about how I rented a jackhammer and removed some brick steps on our side porch. This is different from the kitchen porch which I built a couple of years ago and … Continue reading
