#138 - Initial Impressions of the Appalachian Trail - March 30, 2013

One of the things that I was very excited about when I first started researching moving to this part of New York was our proximity to the Appalachian Trail.  This trail stretches almost the length of the Eastern Seaboard.  My house is less than 10 miles from the AT, and there is a certain mystique for me. It brings images of rural Kentucky to me (or how I imagine it to be) and here it is in my own back yard!

One of my Boy Scouts recommended that we camp at a place on the AT, so that's where we set out to go.  Directions were not hard to find, and we set out on a short hike at 6:15pm.  The parking area (in Oregon it would be a Trailhead) was at an old cemetery.  Some of the headstones show death dates in the early 1800s, so the area has been inhabited by Europeans for a while.

We walked across the road and 100ft down a gentle hill and there we were: the mythical AT, previously only known to me by legend.  The entire area here is heavily wooded.  So this is just one more heavily wooded hillside, like many that I drive by every day on the way to or from work.  The trail follows a gentle switchback.  The woods in the Winter (and the forest has not fully woken from its Winter slumber yet) are lifeless and brown.  The only green is a little bit of moss, and some ferns flattened by snow that have not risen above the leaf layer yet.

You can walk any way you want through the forest.  There is no undergrowth to slow you down, nothing to impede your progress.  Although the area is completely natural, you would think it is carefully cleared.  A hillside such as this one in Western Oregon would be nearly impossible to plow through.  You would sink into 6 inches of detritus, stumble over hidden logs, slip on moss and ferns, and find yourself stopped by impenetrable bushes.

We arrived at our camp site in about 15 minutes.  It was only a quarter mile.  The site was 3 sites under one name.  A smaller site just East of the shelter that has a large platform for a tent and a fire ring, the shelter with its wood pile and stone cooking area, and a larger site with a larger fire ring close to the edge of the hill.  There is a spring, and a well attached to it (although the well pump is currently out of order), and a composting outhouse.  The outhouse is required, because there is no cover for a person to get some privacy.  It's a very foreign environment.

The shelter has a plastic box with a log book and some pens, and another with emergency supplies.  It's wonderful.  Water, food, shelter, and privacy for bodily functions.

The forest was quiet, but we didn't notice this so much until the morning.  An owl hooted all night, but we heard nothing.  Our dirty dishes were not touched all night.  No animal made itself known to us at all.  We made breakfast, broke camp, and got ourselves ready to leave.   Then we headed on a day hike, to explore.  We ended up following a trail marked by white paint on the bark of trees.  It wound around and over hills, over creeks, crossing roads, and sometimes in sight of houses.  The whole morning, we saw nothing that moved.  No squirrels, no snakes, nothing.  We found some raccoon tracks, deer tracks, a dead frog, woodpecker holes.   But nothing alive.  It was eery.

On the way back we spotted a hawk circling, and heard another bird, but it was so little life.  Almost a Silent Spring.  It would not have to change much.

I think, though, that the area will be nearly unrecognizable in a couple weeks, once leaves have come on the trees.  The Pacific Crest Trail has many long sections, and they are not accessible by car.  The AT has short sections (1-2 miles) that are accessible by car.  I think that over time, I'll be able to hike a large portion of the AT with Christian and Jake and my brother Tim.  It's going to be a good accomplishment.  Maybe I'll do all of NY first, then get Connecticut, then move to New Jersey.  Fun stuff.

#137 Reflections on a year in NY March 4, 2013

I started work in NY on Feb 5, 2012.  The past year has brought a massive amount of change in my personal and professional life.

Firstly, I did not fully appreciate the difference between the suburban sprawl lifestyle we had and the rural sprawl lifestyle we now enjoy.  I call it rural sprawl because there's woods everywhere, and the land has been cut into 1-5 acre lots for miles around.  Where the land is flat and the farming is reasonable, there are farms.  Most of the land is a shallow layer of soil on top of shale or granite.  It's deep enough for trees to take root, and seriously unbelievably rocky.  No wonder the first Europeans headed west, where the farming was easier.

We now have to think about the grocery store.  My work commute brings me right past a grocery store.  It's not the cheapest around, but it'll do for milk, eggs, fresh veggies, and meat when it's on sale.  As I leave the house in the morning, I take a quick obvious inventory and make a mental note.  On the way home, I'll stop in if needed.  All of our non-grocery purchases either go through Amazon or to special trips to town.  And even that is consolidated with the weekly major grocery trip to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.  Our life is much less commerce oriented, and that is refreshing.

Instead of doing whatever it was we were doing in the evenings in the suburbs, we spend our evenings either out with the church youth group (Katrina and I both do that now), or at home.  The kids play in the lego room, do homework, sled, read, work on projects, and sometimes play video games or watch TV.  In the summer, there are fires in the firepit, swimming, and exploring the forest we live in.  I've been working on house projects.  The most recent is sorting and organizing our basement detritus.  Some of that stuff moved with us from California 9 years ago, and I just sorted through it.  Now that is complete, and spring is nearly here, I'm transitioning to trimming, raking, and doing some other early outdoor maintenance.  Because out house is in the middle of 2 wooded acres, I can use power tools in my garage all night long and nobody notices.  Not even in the house, because we've built the pantry between the garage and the house and the bedrooms are on the far end of the house.  It's wonderfully freeing.

Katrina, after a frantic few months of moving in and getting organized and having family here for Christmas, jumped into college, and she's been doing homework most evenings.  It's a pleasant life - not lazy.  Certainly not lazy.  But a life that is less driven by outside rhythms and more by internal rhythms.  Is Aria in a show?  Are the kids' friends coming over?  Did something in the house break and need fixed?  Conversely, is there an improvement project that needs doing?  Those get queued up and done, one by one, as time allows.  It's nice.

The kids have grown immensely in too many ways to document fully.  Liberty is still fully in transition.  She has a very good friend at school, but she really misses Oregon.  Jacob is fully acclimated to life here - he loves the outdoors, the Lego room, and the freedom he has here to go outside, scream, and run around.  Christian is coming around.  He has become much more responsible with his homework, and now chooses to spend his free time with books or Legos instead of the TV when he has the chance.  He is making life choices confidently, and that's encouraging to see.  Aria jumped into school, did 2 plays, and had made the honor roll every term.  Her last report card was straight As, and she's very passionate about doing well at school.  She's an amazing person.  A seriously impressive individual.

I suppose that's enough for this post.  I owe more detail and more frequency.  We'll see.  I have a busy Spring lined up, and things to accomplish!

#136 - A new year, snow and peace - Jan 3, 2013

Thursday.

So it's been a few months.  Sue me.

We haven't missed many beats so far - Aria performed in her first drama, then auditioned for and was cast in the Wizard of Oz at her junior high.  Christian has come around to recognizing the value of his strict teacher.  Jakers has learned to read, and now rarely wets the bed as long as his evening liquid intake is regulated.  Libby is now baptized, our first Christmas in this house has passed, the ward choir did a fabulous job in our Christmas devotional, Katrina registered for school, my brother might buy a house and move relatively close to us, and my sister might come out here for an internship.

So that's the short version.

We've had wonderful weather - a long a warm fall, cooling nicely as it got to winter, and snow on Christmas Eve and Christmas day.  It's been very cold since, and we got 2 more snowfalls on the 26th and 29th.  This morning my car said it was 12 degrees when I got in it.  There is a mountain of snow in the parking lot at work - maybe 12' high.  The forest floor around the house is blanketed in snow, still soft and crunchy where it has been undisturbed.  Our pool has frozen over, and if you look in the forest you can see raccoon tracks. We saw a fox skirting our fence last week.

We've all been sick for a couple weeks, too.  This year's cold is nasty.  I've had it for a few weeks, and although I have my energy back, I'm still dealing with a very clogged nose.  No fun at all.  My parents and Katrina's mom came to visit and all got sick as well.  So we've spent nearly their entire vacation sitting around and feeling sorry for ourselves.  I've been going to work most days while the family slept.

Work continues to be interesting and evolve.  I've taken charge of my team, and we're making solid forward progress.  The team is made up of smart, hard-working guys, who are relatively new to working in a corporate environment.  It's my goal to help them become better engineers and to also be able to navigate the corporate environment better.  It's a completely foreign skill set to most people, and must be learned organically.  So I've put some structure to it, and we're starting to make progress.  It's good stuff.

I also expect to get 4 other people to join my team in the near future.  Things have been progressing in a certain way for a while, and I expect some people to make decisions soon that will make this happen.  It means I'll gain responsibility for another facet of our operation here, and I'm excited about it.  It's going to be a good thing.  A good thing for sure.

I have a million pictures - here are a couple from November: our first snow of the year.  Enough for sledding before it melted in the morning, and Katrina volunteering to help with recovery from Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island.

#135 - Laboring with love - October 16, 2012

Tuesday.

Aria got sick last night about midnight.  She didn’t go to school today. 

The rain cleared off in the morning.  I got up early, took out the garbage, burned a ton of cardboard that was overfilling our recycle bin, took the recycle bin out, and worked on reviews.  They were due last week, but I still had a few to do.  I took the kids to the bus while Aria slept.  I got a couple done, then it was time for Katrina and I to learn about my company’s changing benefits plan.

We know which plan we won’t choose, but we’re undecided on which HSA plan will be better for us.  So we have to do some analysis on our family’s likely medical usage and make a choice in the next couple weeks. 

I got home and evicted some woodpeckers from our house.  Katrina noticed a woodpecker pecking at our house a week or so ago.  The hole is large enough for the bird to easily get in and out of.  Today, Aria noticed that the woodpecker was pecking on the sheetrock now, trying to get into the house.  It was time to take action.  She did some research online and found that woodpeckers don’t like tinfoil.  So I took a rolled up pie tin and stuck it in the hole.  While I was up there, I found 2 more woodpecker holes, so I put tin foil in those.  And then we looked around the other corner of the house and found 2 more woodpecker holes.  It appears I have some patching to do. 

Then it was time to clean up leaves.  We have a push broom that I bought when we first moved in to sweep the driveway.  The leaves have been down for a while, and it was time to sweep them off.  So I spent about an hour out there with the push broom and got most of the driveway done.  I had forgotten how wide it actually is.  It was nice to be out there working up a sweat on a cool fall evening.

And I realized that I enjoy working on this house.  Our house in Beaverton was a lot of work to maintain – everything grew with abandon, and it was manicured.  So you would notice if something was untended for a while.  And there was the fact that that house did not feel large enough for us after we’d been in it for a year.  Katrina hated the tile floor in the kitchen, the kids were sharing cramped rooms, and our office was always clogged with stuff. 

This house is different.  I enjoy cutting and hauling wood.  I have enjoyed building the pantry.  I enjoyed taking care of the pool.  Katrina has been working piece by piece to make the house beautiful – 6’ high family trees on the wall, fall decorations on the partial walls around the kitchen, figurines in the display case by the dining table, new lights for the front porch.  She likes this house.  And even though the kitchen floor is tile, we don’t complain about it.  It’s on our list of things to do, just not quite yet. 

I will admit that I don’t like bringing wood inside.  I like cutting, hauling, stacking, and building a fire.  Just not the between part.  I don’t know why.  But living here is a labor of love.  I will trim the bushes back in a few weeks, but I have time to do that.  And I’ll do a million other things, too, as it gets colder outside and I have to turn the focus inside to finish unpacking the house and organizing the basement into usable space.  Much of it is still clogged with boxes that need sorting.

But what a nice day it was.  As evening fell, we ate dinner and I went up to the bedroom instead of watching the debate.  I was hoping that Obama would come out swinging.  But I read the second book in Aria’s series instead.  “Pretties” (by Scott Westerfield) is a better book than the first.  I’ve enjoyed it.  And before I went to sleep, I was nearly done.

#134 – Reading in the Autumn rain - October 15, 2012

Monday.

It rained all day today.  A hard, uncompromising downpour.  On my way home from work, I stopped twice to pick up garbage in the middle of the road that was making cars swerve.  I got home, soaked to the skin in my purple shirt. 

I spent the evening finishing “Uglies”.  A good book – some kissing and hugging, but not too much.  Certainly not too much for a teenage girl.  It certainly was interesting and a little offensive to hear the characters talk about one girl stealing the other’s boyfriend.  As if you can steal a person.  I have never understood that dynamic.  If you’re married, sure.  If you’re not even engaged?  In that case, nobody has made a commitment.  Fair game.  And it was not even intentional.

It was a warm evening, so at first I sat on the porch, reading with the rain stripping the leaves off the trees.  After dinner it was too cold for that, so I settled into the recliner by the fire and read there as the rain beat down on the skylight.

A very simple day.  I did not accomplish anything special today – a normal day at work, and a relaxing evening.  My back was sore all day, probably due to the lumberjacking on Saturday and Sunday.  So taking the evening off was logical and extremely enjoyable.

As an important side note, Katrina has been awesome the past few weeks.  I’ve been focused on building and home maintenance.  After I did a full weekend of laundry with our louse problem, I haven’t done a single load, but Katrina has been making progress every day.  She has planned and made meals for the most part.  I made tuna melts tonight, but she has been putting everything else together.  So I’ve been free to accomplish things.  It has made my progress on these projects much faster, and has encouraged me to get them done. 

Thanks, babe.  You’re the best.

#133 - Cutting up trees and reading ink on wood fibers - October 14, 2012

Sunday.

I made waffles this morning, and we got out the door to church.  Primary is fun – I’m comfortable behind the piano now.  Not that I’m good yet, but I’m getting better and I’m comfortable with my badness.  I can take all the improv the music leader throws at me, and it’s okay.  I took the time during the sharing time lesson to put some choir music into Noteworthy format.  It was nice to make some real progress.

Choir practice was okay.  I’m not quite comfortable there yet, but I’m getting better.  There’s certainly a learning curve to leading a choir.

After church we decompressed.  I played on the computer a little, ate lunch.   The kids played.  Katrina went in to take a nap, and I went out to finish the pantry wall.  Which I did.  We now have a complete room.  There is a door from the garage into the pantry, and from the pantry into the house.  No more walking through empty framing.  The room is 70% sheetrocked.  The other 30% has exterior siding and tar paper.  I have to do a little electrical work and then I can finish those walls.  And then I need to insulate the ceiling (it goes to an unheated attic) and insulate the walls between the pantry and the garage.

Then it was time for the chainsaw.  I took it out, refilled the oil and gas reservoirs, grabbed my safety glasses, and walked out to the Taconic side of our property.  The saw started up easily (much more easily than yesterday), and I sawed through 80 feet of tree.   I also got the piece that was leaning on another tree all the way to the ground and cut it up.  I’ve got a lot of maple to burn now.  I also took a walk to the edges of our property.  I found 2 large downed trunks that need to be cut up and hauled to the house.  I cut one in the middle and I’d guess it’s from the Halloween storm last year.  There’s a knoll toward the neighbor’s house, and I wondered where the property line was in relation to that knoll.  Turns out the brush fence (we have a line of fallen tree limbs that serves as our property line marker) gives us a whole new area that I hadn’t seen yet.  And there’s a great tree house tree and another tree that fell over on the October storm.  This one twisted about 15 feet up, and as it fell it hit a few more trees.  So none of them are on the ground, but this one is clearly dead.  It will need to be cleared. 

And there are a few other trees that need clearing as well.  So now I have a chainsaw, and reasons to use it.  Exciting.  I don’t mind the work – it’s cathartic, good muscle work.  Lots of thinking required, but it’s good sweaty work.  It just feels good. 

I threw the logs I cut up down the knoll, and went inside.  Light was fading, it was 5pm, time to relax.  So I sat down with a book that Aria just finished and read for a few hours.  The Giants were playing the 49ers, which is an important game for them this season, so I put the game on my iPhone on the armchair next to me and read.  Jake came to sit with me, and he pointed out words he could read.  He sat there with me for an hour, maybe more.  It was really nice.  We watched the game sometimes, we read sometimes, we talked sometimes.  He’s irrepressible. 

The book is good.  It’s called “Uglies”, and is set in a post-apocalyptic America in California.  Technology allows small pockets of people to live extremely easy lives, but the rest of the land has reverted to nature.  But along with the technology comes certain 1984-esque rules, and some people opt out of the easy life and run away to live more simply.  It’s an interesting premise, and Aria is well into the second book of the series.   There is entirely too much “kissing and lovey-lovey stuff” for her.  I haven’t seen any of that yet, but I’m only halfway through book 1.

I've been exploring better ways to start the fireplace.  I tried lighter fluid on the half-burned wood I had, but it didn't work out well.  I had a couple hot spots, but it was going to die.  So I added 5 charcoal briquettes, and blew on them until I could tell there were going to go.  An hour later, the fire was beautiful.  Hot, smokeless, lovely.  Briquettes  are so much easier than paper and cardboard.  Pretty cheap, too.  I think I found a winner.

And then it was time for bed.  It’s a good life.

A couple pictures.  We can see our neighbors now.

The sun sets left of the pool now.   This is about 5pm, looking
over the meadow.  The neighborhood below us on Gina lane
is visible through the trees.  

#132 - Some words about my dad - October 13, 2012

Saturday.

Today I just want to write some things about my dad. 

When my dad was 37, the year was 1978.  He had 3 little kids, and he and my mom were doing the young-married “let’s move a lot” thing.  The next year, they bought a house at 24680 S Barlow Rd, Canby Oregon 97013.  This address is how I learned to count by 2s when I was 4 or 5.  The house was a one-room, but I remember it being a studio when we moved in.  You walked up the steps to the front door, and when you opened the door, there was a low table with a little TV.  Looking straight ahead, there was a couch facing the TV, and then my parents’ bed.  Step in a couple feet and turn left, and that was the kitchen.  Turn left a little more and you could see the bathroom door, and the stairs that led to the attic that my brother and I slept in.  I don’t remember where my sister slept in those early years.

I loved that house.  It did not bother me that it was small, because, of course, I did not know different.  It was my house, and that was enough.  As soon as we moved in, my dad went to work on it.  I was seldom asked to help, as I recall.  I was 4 when we moved in, and 7 I think by the time the major work was done.  In the meantime, I watched my father frame walls, put in plumbing, put on siding, roofing, split wood, add wiring, texture ceilings, wallpaper, paint.  My mom did a lot of this, too, but the building part belonged to my dad.  When we sold that house, it was a 5-bedroom, 2-bath home with a large kitchen, living room, family room, 2 covered porches, and a truly massive 2-car garage. 

I was aware that it was a big job.  Dad spent all of his non-work time building it.  What I did not realize was how crazy it was to take on such a huge project all by himself. 

We moved to another home in 1986, a 1917 Victorian that could have been listed on Canby’s list of historic places if we hadn’t ripped the whole thing apart and reconfigured all of it.  I watched this project as a teenager.  Again, dad took the lead and didn’t ask for much help.  I helped put up a layer of insulation outside the house, and put up the blue vinyl siding that was all the rage at the time.  I helped clean up lathe and plaster walls that dad had taken down.  I helped carry a huge cast iron clawfoot tub down a flight of stairs and out to the driveway.   But I didn’t do much.  Not in comparison to my father.

But I learned a lot by watching my father.  I learned, most importantly, to never be afraid of the size of the task before me or its complexity.  We have never had this conversation.  He never sat me down and said, “Son, never be afraid of any task’s size or complexity.”  My did simply saw a 1917 house, and remodeled all 3 floors of it as a matter of course.  Don’t like the main floor?  We’ll rip out every single wall on the main floor, replumb and reconfigure the entire thing.  Lots of work?  Sure!  Big deal?  Nope. 

While I was serving a mission in Japan, my father took on another remodel job.  This one included jacking up an entire house, pouring a foundation under it, and setting the house back down.  Among a few other little odds and ends.

My father just lived his life that way.  Still does.  I have never heard him say that something was beyond my ability.  I have heard him speak of his own limitations, but there aren’t many of them. 

While we lived in Beaverton, I got to work with my dad on quite a few projects.  We converted a garden shed into a powered, insulated office.  We replumbed under my house to convert from cast iron to PVC piping, and separated the drain lines so the kitchen and washer drained separately and we wouldn’t have leaks in the laundry room any more.  We embarked on an aborted attempt to reconfigure my house so it would be better for the kids.  We roofed his new house together. 

Through all of this, I’ve learned some common sense about building.  Measure twice, cut once.  Perpendicularity is important.  Non-load bearing walls leave a lot of flexibility for configuration.  Check level and alignment a few times.  Then screw it in when you’re sure.  Some trim will hide almost anything.   Basic electrician’s work consists of matching the black wire to the black wire, and not a whole lot else.  Be careful in everything you do – the big project is not a risk, but not doing the job right is a risk.

The past 9 days have seen me permanently install a wall air conditioner above the freezer in our new pantry, frame a door in that pantry, and finish the other framing in the room.  It saw me buy a chain saw, read the manual, start it up and fell a tree in the woods around my house.  They saw me assign bringing in firewood as a chore to my son, take apart the filter unit for the pool to store it for winter, and build fires to keep my heating costs down. 

A teacher who has taught a child to read can be given credit for the words the child can read.  When the child is in med school, learning things the teacher will never know, the teacher still deserves the credit for giving that child the tools she needed to get through med school.

My father taught me to build in much the same way.  I know what’s important, what can wait, what I need to have a pro come and do.  And I know, because of what my dad taught me, that I can do this man thing ok.   I can chop wood, start a fire in my fireplace, add a pantry to my house, replace doors, saw up trees, play ping-pong, read a book my kid recommends, and laugh a lot. 

I love my father.  I have a ton of respect for him.  And he has made my life as a man more complete, and enabled me to do the same for my kids.  Thanks for not handicapping me, dad.  I needed to know all of this stuff.  It’s important.