Family Trip to Washington D.C.

For our big vacation trip of 2013, we hitched up the Airstream and, over the course of two days, drove to a campground in College Park, Maryland where the Overlander was parked for a week while we took in the sites & museums of the D.C. area.

The campground was nice that, in addition to two pools, it had bus service to D.C.’s subway system.  This trip marked a first in that this was the first time Jared, Daniel or I had ever negotiated a subway system.  The Metrorail was old hat to Kim because she used to travel to Maryland on business all the time.

The Air and Space Museum is almost mind boggling with the amount of stuff it has.  It was great finally seeing a lot of stuff that I had, in the past, read, “…and it now resides in Smithsonian Institution”.

The interactive displays were neat -Everyone appeared to get something out of them.

We drove the truck back & forth to the campground’s bus stop every day.  While the truck cannot hold as much stuff as the Suburban, it did do a good job of keeping the dirty clothes basket out of the Airstream.  But at one point, the basket got so heavy that we just decided it could ride shotgun while I chauffeured everyone.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:  If you look closely in the window above the door, you can see the President waving at us.

Visiting Arlington Cemetery certainly put a perspective on how many American lives have been lost in war.

While we were hoping to see the changing of the guard at the tomb of the Unknowns, there was apparently another event happening there at the same time, and due to the sheer number of people, we could not get close enough to see anything.

Through Kim’s careful pre-planning, we got to meet Mo Brooks, one of our Representatives.

His Interns then took us on a tour of the Capitol.

We had lunch at whatever was convenient to the day’s activities.  Breakfast was enjoyed at the Airstream as well as supper on most nights.  The little Weber grill purchased for the Florida Keys trip has turned out to work well when it is just the four of us.

While I have seen countless pictures of the Lincoln Memorial, it is a wholly new experience to see it in real life.

 

The Natural History Museum was great.  I was impressed at how friendly some of the exhibits were.

Since I am somewhat of a minor league WWII naval history buff, I thought the WWII memorial’s layout was neat.

Both the Vietnam and Korean War Veterans Memorials were other sobering reminders of the human cost of war.

I really wish we had been able to tour the Washington Monument.  But it is still closed for earthquake repairs.

The morning of our final day found us at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore.  I love steam locomotives, and this museum did not disappoint.  The HO scale model train layout was a pleasant surprise – It was extremely well done.

The museum also had a kiddie train ride through the land of Choo Choo Blueville that Jared probably would have enjoyed had the ride not been closed due to rain.

But the rain did not hamper one of my personal highlights of this vacation – I got to meet professional Airstream Restorer Frank Yensan whom I have known via Internet forums and phone conversations for years, but had never met in person.

Frank motored down in bad weather to sit under my Overlander’s awning, and talk shop & drink beer with me.  He’s a super talented person.

But all great trips must come to an end, and breaking camp started after Saturday’s breakfast.  While the overall trip had been great, we had a little black ant problem the first couple of days which surprised me because I had sprayed the entire trailer at the start of warm weather this year.  I ended up having to spray bug spray inside the fridge/stove countertop cabinet (I usually only spray at floor level) to resolve the issue.

I think I found the ant’s nest just before we left town – While winding up the power cord, ants came swarming out of the electrical connector.

Actually, they only swarmed in the time it took me to retrieve the Raid.  After that the ants immediately became a study in still life.

The weather was beautiful at our Wytheville, Virginia layover stop.  It was perfect for drying the previous day’s rain off of the awning.

We left really early the next morning, and made it home before lunch.

It was a fantastic trip, and undeniably one of our best-ever vacations.


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Draining The Yard - Take 3

Ever since adding an addition on to the back of our house, we have had issues with rainwater draining out of the backyard.  The water gets high enough to flood the sidewalk on one side of the shop, and seep under the boat bay's big door on the driveway side.  Until recently, this was a brief annoyance during spring flooding.  But we have had unusually wet weather the last few years lasting well into summer, and I'm now tired of the continual mud & flooded walkways.

The root problem is that water from both our yard and a neighbor's now wants to drain down the Shop-side of the house instead of most of it gravitating to the opposite side and draining without consequence like it originally did.  To make matters worse, we lost a huge hackberry tree in the backyard several years ago which used to absorb a lot of the groundwater.

Around three years ago I had a crew come in with a track loader, and scrape a better drainage path in front of the shop.  Although their efforts somewhat improved the drainage situation, the manner in which the scraped-up dirt was redistributed around the side & back yards caused other problems. This was particularly annoying because I had spent a lot of time discussing how much dirt to put where with them, and the conversation had obviously been forgotten by the time they came back to do the work.

So, just before the next year’s growing season, I rented a small backhoe/loader, and put the dirt where I wanted it.

After that, peat moss was tilled in before running an improvised drag harrow across the area to smooth & de-lump the soil.

The subsequently seeded fescue grew remarkably well, and for a while it appeared all was well.

But in time, the water started rising around the shop again.  After standing in the rain… again… trying to figure out a permanent solution, I found the silt that was accumulating in the drain paths was coming from two separate locations.  The first and easiest to deal with was from the north side of the shop where the shade of two oak trees does not allow much grass to grow.  This has actually been a problem for a long time, and I apparently thought magic grass would sprout one day and keep the dirt in check.  After waking up to reality, I built a retaining wall like I should have done long ago:

I was happy to have the blocks already sitting around because, believe it or not, that short length of wall is made of $65 worth of block at today’s prices.  The “settled” look the wall attained in a short time was realized by sprigging it with weeds pulled out of the driveway & sidewalk.

The second water/silt entry point was from my neighbor’s yard.  I believe when her house was built in in the early seventies, most of the yard’s rainwater drained into the ditch which runs along my side yard.  But over time, as evidenced by the dirt held back by the chain-link fence I had built in ’95, erosion had taken its toll, and the runoff found a shorter path by draining into the middle of my yard.

As a first step, Daniel & I built a low retaining wall alongside the fence which spanned the length of the erosion.  The effort spanned about 80 feet.

As expected, though, after shooting a few elevations, it was obvious that the wall in itself was not going to resolve the drainage issue.  Both my yard and my neighbor’s yard had changed too much over the years.  A drainage pipe from the retaining wall to the ditch was going to be necessary.

During the wall’s construction, I noticed the lowest spot corresponded with where the tree we lost had stood.  With that location as a starting point, the ditch as the destination, and a goal of avoiding major tree roots, a six-inch corrugated drainage pipe was laid out.

After confirming the start point was higher than the end point (slope was 0.2 inches/foot), the pipe’s 110 foot path was marked with spray paint.

I headed off to the rental yard with the intent of coming home with a small backhoe like the one I used last time.  But the yard also had a track hoe/loader for rent, and the man at the front desk agreed it was probably more suitable for my task.  The down-side was that the machine is controlled by joysticks instead of levers and a steering wheel like I was used to.  But I eventually got the hang of it.

Although you cannot tell from this picture, the trench’s depth got down to 26 inches at one point

Oddly, none of the home improvement stores had a pre-made storm grate/catch basin for sale.  My solution was to cut a hole in the side of a thick plastic planting pot for the pipe and concrete the buried pot in place.

The concrete was cast just high enough to support the lower course of block on level.  Plans are to cast a concrete, semicircle-shaped cap to cover the basin.  Hopefully, the chain link fence will be adequate for keeping big chunks of stuff/varmints out of the pipe.

Even though a reasonable amount of time was taken studying close-out photos of the yard’s sprinkler installation, I still snagged one of the zone feeder pipes with the track hoe, and ruptured it in three places.  Since the repair, I’ve been running that zone fairly often in an attempt to get the dirt to settle on in the trench.

While the focus of the day’s effort was getting the drainage pipe buried, there was enough time left in the day to scrape some of the excess dirt up from various places around the shop.  In the image below, my back is to the small retaining wall.

I snagged a sprinkler line there, too… So much for MY advance planning.  Plans are to roto-till the scraped areas before smoothing & seeding.

While there is still much to do, I’m happy to say that we had a gully washer a few days ago everything drained great.  The long retaining wall at the fence channeled water to the new pipe where it drained smoothly into the ditch.  The shop driveway drained nothing but clear water, and in spite of how hard it rained, water never got close to the boat bay door.

Hopefully this will be the last time drainage will be addressed in my yard.



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Bought Fluorescent Tubes In Bulk Lately?

My shop is illuminated by a total of 16, eight-foot-long, fluorescent tubes plus task lighting where necessary.  Long ago I made a rule to always replace the tubes EN MASSE when the first fixture went dark simply because I know the lights have a pre-determined life span, and I did not care to be CONSTANTLY repacing bulbs mounted on a 10-foot-high ceiling.  This plan has worked well for me since I get six to seven years of tube life between changeouts.

A light went out last week.

Unrelated, Kim handed me a five-dollar-off coupon the other day that was good at the orange home improvement store until tomorrow on purchaces over $50. I opted to spend the windfall on new tubes.

While I already knew there were at least six intensities of fluorescent light, the store's selection puzzled me due to the phenomenal amount of obviously returned product. I assumed everyone had returned home with the wrong color of light.  Not a problem here - I was there for my shop's original design goal of Cool-White light.

Due to prices always going up I ended up paying $89 for a 16-count box of Cool-White tubes.  No problem; the tubes' subsequent installation was supposed to be the end of this tale and not the price.

But after opening the box of new lighting, I found "they" have introduced a new kind of 8' bulb connector which does not not work with my shop's fixtures.  Apparently, my shop's lighting NOW falls under the "commercial" category.  Fortunately, the store took the product back, and refunded my credit card.  I then went to the blue home improvement store.

The blue home improvement store had a much better layout. Sadly, there were puzzles there too.  In addition to all the open, vertical displays of individual fluorescent tube offerings, there were boxes of "Contractor-Sale-Only" boxes of the tube which fit my shop's needs lying prone on the floor.  The problem was that each box only had 15 tubes instead of the 16 needed.  Go figure since fluorescent lights usually follow The Rule of Two doctrine, (known as Chwayatyun in Sith language and also called the Banite system).

But the Contractor Box of 15 was only $49, a marked difference from $89.  A pack of two more IDENTICAL lights was only another nine dollars for a roughly $30 dollar savings over the other store.  I can throw away the extra bulb, should I want to, and still save money over buying a box of 16 tubes from anyone.

To summarize, I saved ~$30 by purchasing the product needed to illuminate my shop since I could get over a variety of packaging.

Modern marketing just plain stupefies me.

Tom


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Northern Ribs

Slowly but surely, I'm trying to get better at smoking meat on my Brinkmann water smoker.  It's a pleasant challenge because so many different things will affect the final product.  While the prevailing wisdom around here is to smoke food with hickory wood, the Internet told me that Yankees prefer oak.  Since some of my best Internet friends are from up there, I decided to try it.

A freshly sharpened, antique blade of very few carbide teeth on the RAS made short work of creating chunks of white oak for the effort.

Up till now, ribs have been problematic because they fit a Brinkmann smoker poorly.  Fortunately there's Facebook - Candy, one of my friends from way back, posted a picture of a  simple concept that had eluded me until now - wrap the ribs with cotton string in a circle.

Between my latest sugar-based dry rub, and Candy's technique the ribs were outstanding.

Can't wait to smoke ribs with the right wood - I may just hit the competition circuit!

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Not A Dull Blade In The Place

I started serious woodworking around the mid-eighties around the time carbide-tipped saw blades were becoming affordable to the average Tom.  Back then I just took it for granted that a man who lived not too far from me could sharpen my dull blades to keep the operation fiscally responsible.

After the Boyz were born, my Shop's activities shifted more toward furniture restoration (baby-bed, bunk-beds & the chests-O-drawers from MY early days) than general construction.  As a consequence, my trips to the man with the blade sharpening tools on Toftoy Drive stopped.

Four or five years ago, when the Shop found me building more cabinets, I decided to ask Santa to bring me some new saw blades just so I would have a blade of the right capability to use while the dull one was being sharpened.

A couple of months ago, after finding a bountiful collection of saw blades needing attention & deciding there was no need to purchase anything new, I phoned The Man on Toftoy Drive only to hear Ma Bell's tones followed by "This number is no longer in service".

After poking around the Internet & not finding an alternative I liked, I got my bride to check around here.  Success! Although The New Man was on the north side of town, Kim had PTA business in the general area, and was able to drop-off & pickup the tools for me.

176 teeth total sharpened for $50 - No complaints there; Any one of the four blades purchased new would have cost more than that.

Between Kim's help, and the seven years elapsed time, it's probably now time to make Project Big Tub's laundry room cabinet doors.  But if nothing else, it's cool to be ready for what comes next.



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Dave’s Pastrami

Earlier this year Dave, over at Dave’s Cupboard blogged a recipe for transforming corned beef into pastrami.  Click here to read it.  Dave used to blog a lot about home charcuterie, and between that & my love of pastrami I knew this would have to be the recipe to try.

The immediate problem for me in making the dish, though, was that I did not have a proper slicer.  Since there was no way I was going to slice it thin enough by hand, plans to make my own pastrami were pushed to the back burner.

Last month when Mrs. Claus hit me up for a Christmas list, “meat slicer” popped into my mind.  From past fast food experience I knew that nice slicers are expensive.  But the Internet now lists several brands of home-duty slicers all for around $100 each.  While I knew Dave already had a nice slicer, and probably little current knowledge of cheap slicers, I emailed him anyway and asked his opinion.  He replied back with some brand names to stay away from, and a brand name he would try if he was in my situation.  Christmas day found me unwrapping a new ChefsChoice slicer.

Only corned beef points were available at the stores I visited, and the pieces were kind of small after allowing for shrinkage.  So I ended up buying 6-1/3 pounds of meat in two bags at a reasonable $2.88/pound.

The Internet also listed another blog of someone who had made pastrami from corned beef.  That poster said he skipped the step of soaking the corned beef overnight to soak out some of the salt.  Even though I generally like a lot of salt, I stuck to Dave’s directions and soaked the corned beef overnight..

The spices were coarsely ground Friday night so that everyone would not have to listen to the spice mill at 3:00 a.m. Saturday when the points were rinsed, patted dry, and pressed with Dave’s public blend of six herbs & spices.

The beef was allowed to come to room temperature until it was loaded into my Brinkmann smoker around 6:00 a.m.  While my preference for an outside temperature would have been for something higher than that morning’s 35 degrees, you can’t always get what you want.  Maple wood was used for smoke.

Around four hours later the meat temperature hit the wall at around 160 degrees.  After wrapping in aluminum foil the beef was finished off in a slow house oven.  After hitting ~165 degrees the meat was pulled out and allowed to rest until its temperature started dropping.

Since it was so cold outside, the pastrami was moved to the cold gas grill and set underneath a fan out of an older ceramic heater to get it chilled enough for easy slicing.

The pastrami was just plain perfect!

The meat looked fantastic, and tasted even better.  The soak was warranted – I thought my first pastrami had the perfect amount of salt.  The Boyz & I enjoyed it warmed with rye bread, onion rolls, provolone cheese, and spicy mustard.  Kim enjoyed watching us eat it as she feasted on something else.

While I would not want to run a deli with this particular meat slicer, for occasional home use I think it is a good unit to have around.  It had sufficient power to cut the meat, and cleaned easily.  It does have a lot of plastic parts, so I had to be careful about pushing the meat flat against the fence as rigidity is not its strong suit.

I got tickled, though, the first time it was switched on.  The unit has a universal motor, and the blade hooks up to it via a geared reduction box.  So until you look & see the blade spinning considerably slower than a commercial unit’s, the motor’s noise makes for a fairly intimidating presentation.  But it got the job done.  As long as the blade stays sharp for a reasonable amount of time, I am going to consider the slicer a good deal for the money.

On the flip side, the slicer will probably be worn out by slicing Dave’s pastrami on a frequent basis.  Should that happen it will be replaced with a sturdier unit – Dave’s pastrami is worth it.



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Only 3 Years from Receipt to Installation

Listening to my CD jukebox or news radio is important to me when I’m working with my hands.  To make sure nothing is missed, there are speakers in the kitchen, in the soffits near the patio, and in my shop which can all be set to provide a continuous trail of sound while I move around from one activity to another.

Three Christmases ago, I noticed a dead zone between the patio and my shop.  So Santa was asked for a set of 6X9 coaxial automobile speakers to install in the shop soffit closest to the area.  In what was poor planning on my part, I had the shop’s attic blown full of insulation before the speakers were installed.  Having no desire to tromp around in the insulation running wires, the speakers languished on the wood vise bench until a way of running the wiring without getting in the attic dawned on me the other day.

Cutting the holes in the soffit was supposed to be the easy part.  Thinking the soffit’s plywood seams all ended on rafter tails, after referencing off of a seam, I got halfway through the left-hand speaker’s hole before finding a rafter tail in my way.  Oops.  But after scabbing the wood back in & slathering the boo-boo with wood filler, the outcome of round two was matching oval holes.

Part of the plan had always been to cut a hole in the inside wall above the existing receiver connection to access the new wires.

If this was a home improvement show, the host would tell you to simply fish the wires from the oval holes to the square hole with an electrician’s wire snake.  Through the magic of TV wires would then appear where needed in mere seconds.

But this is real life, and it is not that easy when a soffit is involved.  Fortunately, in my case, there was a soffit vent located halfway between the speakers almost in front of the hole in the inside wall.  Removing it allowed for really easy wire access.

The next hurdle was how to fasten down the installed speakers & grilles.  Since the plan had always been for the speaker to rest on top of the soffit’s plywood, nuts & washers were hot-glued on before the speakers were set in place.

Since the garish grills that came with the speakers obviously provided no protection against mud daubers, Santa also brought me a more suitable set.

But in dry-fitting everything together, the hole patterns were found to not line up.  Fortunately, my toy box had a set of used, bland grills whose hole patterns were more accommodating.

Painting was the next step.  Normally I spray paint outside of the shop.  But a new water heater installed a day or two earlier came wrapped in a phenomenal amount of cardboard which made a great spray booth for the four items needing paint.

The speaker project itself turned out looking & sounding good.

The downside was the new paint covering up the boo-boo reminded me the shop’s original paint is now over 13 years old.  I think I know what one of next spring’s blog posts is going to be about.



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