The Battle for Suburbia!

Posted by Kevin.........

Everyone knows we work hard on improving and maintaining our home. We have been working on remodeling the bathroom for a month, and finishing the basement has been a year long project now. But the grounds surrounding our house get my almost daily attention.



While putting up our Christmas decorations Saturday (subtle and tasteful of course) I notice the vast destruction to our flower beds. These beds contain over fifty tulip bulbs specially imported from Holland (via the garden super center north of town) I carefully planted them over a month ago. Some of these flower beds are covered in chicken wire with stones holding down the corners!














Folks have indicated to me that squirrels are simply burying nuts for the winter. But I found the chicken wire had been pulled up, and several deep holes where bulbs had been.

Today, I caught this guy on camera and video digging deep into our flower beds. I don't think he actually got down to the bulbs. I put the camera down and ran out the back door and chased him away.

I returned to the house and informed Stace of what had happened. "The only nut in that backyard is you. Maybe the squirrels should bury you right next to your tulips."

That's nice.

More of My Photography

Posted by Kevin.........
People seem to like these photos a lot, so here they are:

These and many other photographs are available as blank greeting cards from Stace. You can also contact her about getting the high resolution originals blown up for framing.



My photography is copyrighted and federal laws prohibit it's used by without permission (U.S. CFR Title 37) .


My favorite subjects are our garden, old buildings, our cats, wind turbines, geese, and just about anything else around Northfield!

Please leave a comment below if you like these, or e-mail us and we can show you the rest of my gallery!

Grab some Hot Dogs!

Posted by Kevin.....

A small scare for me in Dubuque, IA yesterday. When I hit the start button on the left engine I was not surprised to see a little flame coming out of the exhaust pipe.

This is caused by too much fuel going into an engine. Normally, once the engine starts the fire goes out. However, too much extra fuel was actually preventing the engine from starting.

As the engine cranked, more fuel trickled out of the tail pipe. The flames grew larger, and started coming up over the sides of the engine. I was kicking myself now. I needed to get this engine started to put out the fire, but the more I tried to start it the more fire comes out of the exhaust pipe!

It wasn't going to start and I stopped cranking. The fire underneath my left engine continued to burn. Two ground crew guys came running over with fire extinguishers yelling, "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!"

I shut off the fuel selector and the master switches. I opened the cockpit escape door (which is on the LEFT SIDE!) and stepped onto the wing. There was no need to panic.

Smoke was rising from under my feet, and I jumped down onto the ground next to the engine.

I stopped and opened the engine access doors and looked in. There was no fire in the engine compartment.

"STEP BACK!" yelled one of the ground crew. I looked down and small flames were next to my stomach.

I had taken three steps backwards to look under the engine when the whole world exploded into a white cloud!

It was a fire extinguisher! Dry chemical shot across the underside of the wing onto the tail pipe and all over the side of the plane. I ducked to avoid getting a face full of fire retardant. My black jacket was covered with white powder.

The crash truck pulled up and parked in an upwind position, but the fire was out.
"This seems like a bit of an over reaction!" I said. But I thanked everyone, and had a mechanic inspect the engine compartment while we joked about it.

He confirmed that the engine compartment was undamaged. The fire had been minor and left soot in about a two foot circle around the exhaust pipe. The paint did not even burn.

After a few checks and an engine run, we cowled the engine up and I took off.

Let's review: The checklist tells the pilot that if the engines are still hot from a previous flight, boost the fuel pressure with the electric fuel boost pumps and the mixtures closed, then hit the starter.

I never do this.......except this time I did.

The result was too much fuel in the engine and it just trickled down the hot exhaust pipe where it caught fire. Why is this in our checklist?

First Big Snow

Here are some photos I took today. We are enjoying our first real snow of the season. It's a clear sunny day, about 25 degrees.






We walked down to the Goodbye Blue Monday Coffeeshop around 9:00 am and ran into some friends who had already been out all morning cross country skiing!

Stayin' Alive

Written by Stace - dedicated to Jane, who is wonderful, good, and yes, practical. And to Amie, who swore that in fact, she would be happy to pull the plug.


"Be nice to me," I say to my new husband shortly after returning home from Ohio following our wedding, "I am making you my beneficiary."

I was completing HR work for my new job, and it was inspiring me to talk about future planning (which quite frankly, doesn't take much - as Kevin is always complaining that I am always planning for the future and not living in the here and now).

It is morning, we are drinking coffee at the kitchen table. "Do you want to be buried in Ohio?" He asks me.
"I don't want to be buried at all, honey. Sprinkle me in the back yard or something."
"Well," he says, looking slightly put out, "what if I move?"
Clearly, I haven't thought this through. I guess I neglected to realize that if I died his life would go on. Humph. Why would he leave our wonderful home, I wonder.
"Okay, go ahead and send me to Ohio. You could sprinkle me in the rose gardens in Clintonville, I guess. That would be nice."

He thinks for a minute, then tells me how he would like his ahes to be on the Peaks of Otter in Virginia.
"We're going to be apart?" I question. Geez, we just got married and already we're spending eternity apart. Then Kevin launches into how he could fly over Peaks of Otter and throw my ashes out the airplane window. I hate flying. None of this is sounding very good to me anymore. I protest.

He comes up with a brilliant plan of combining ashes and having someone make 2 dumps - one in Ohio, and one on Peaks of Otter. Oh, and we will have to pour in Emma's ashes too, 'cause she can't be left alone. It's beginning to sound a lot better, albeit complicated. We sit quietly and drink our coffee. I am thinking. The conversation takes another turn.

"I don't think I can make you my power of attorney, honey." I say.
"What? Why not?" Kevin says, putting down the paper he is reading.
"Well Kev, you're going to want to keep me alive. I need someone who can do the job - if it comes to that."
"Can't I at least ask the doctor for your pancreas so that I have something to remember you by?"

I shake my head, we need to get a lawyer. "This is what I am talking about. Maybe Amie... no, not Amie, she will be too distraught. Jane. I need Jane to do it."
Kevin vehemently puts his paper down and stands up, "Jane?! Jane's a plugpuller!!"
My mind is made up immediately. Clearly, I made the right choice. "Exactly. She won't get bogged down with sentiment. Jane is smart, pragmatic, and practical. She won't allow you to keep me nourished by a tube."

Kevin looks deflated. Quickly, he looks strong and as he walks past me on his way out of the room he says, "I'm going to have you kept alive by robots."

An Evening with my Niece

Posted by Stace.......

It was bedtime, Kevin and I were babysitting our niecelet, Hannah. She was loaded with black raspberry ice cream and mashed potatoes, and was going down slowly. We had already read the two books Aunt Stace had committed to. And Aunt Stace has very firm boundaries.

Then she asked for a story about Rapunzel, as she is very much into princessi right now. I felt a twinge - from deep down - what is that, I wondered. Again she asked for a Rapunzel story - but "without the scarwy parts" - and I thought, why, I remember nothing "scarwy" about Rapunzel, my dear friend ------- and in no time it flooded back to me, and nearly brought a tear to my eye. This is how the story goes:

Rapunzel and Aunt Stace were dear friends many years ago as children. I knew her and her family quite well, and we used to play together daily. In fact, that whole "hair ladder" thing originated from us climbing trees together. She was an avid climber, that Rapunzel, and I, not being as swift in the trees as she, would be at the base of the tree, contemplating my route, when down her hair would come and I would just grab ahold. She was a strong girl, with beautiful long hair, and a good friend.

(My niecelet is sensitive about "scarwy" stuff - and I knew I would have to appropriately address that whole "locked away" part of the story - which quite frankly, got blown way out of proportion in the fairy tale world - so I decided to just explain what really happened, even if it isn't very exciting...) The reality is that in fact, Rapunzel did get locked in the top of her castle house, next to mine in Cleveland, Ohio, but it was completely by accident. Her younger brother Ralph, who had ADHD, was playing hide and seek with her when he forgot about the game and became easily distracted by something else. So, one thing led to another as things often do with a big family living in a castle, and the door was locked with her on the inside. (!) Oh No! Well, as luck would have it, she was within the part of the castle that served as a studio apartment (it is a castle after all, and they are a large family, so they might have chosen at any time to take on a college boarder, or nannie...), so she was well equipped with a refrigerator and bed, thankfully.

"And a bathroom?" inquired Hannah rightly. I thought that was very thoughtful of her. She also took this opportunity to inform me that in fact, dancers use studios - this was amazingly insightful foreshadowing on her behalf, I thought.

Well, luckily, she wasn't "locked" long, and once her mother discovered that she had been missing for a few days, she made Ralph apologize and unlockd the door. But by then Rapunzel, my dear friend, had decided she liked her new peaceful spot and started to spend more and more time there on her own where she would read and paint and play (and quite frankly, between you and me, if it took her family a few days to notice her absence - she was better off up there). And, I would often join her. It was pretty cool.

Then one day a nice looking boy just happened to ride his horse up to her seeing her way up in the window. They talked, his name was Charles, and he was nice. Eventually Charles started coming around more often as they built a friendship, then one day he came around looking quite dashing. Well, I happened to be in the back yard at the time, and I heard him ask her to court him. Rapunzel, being quite practical, informed him that quite frankly, she had an awful lot on her plate and really didn't have time for courting, but would enjoy his continued friendship. So, she and Chuck became good buddies. For many years after that, Rapunzel, Chuck and I would hang out together up in her apartment, and everytime we would go over we just shimmied right up her silky, golden ladder.

"Did they get married?" Hannah asked all giggly. But they did not, to my knowledge, and quite frankly, I expect I would know. Rapunzel is now a dancer with the Cleveland Ballet, and Chuck, being a good and loyal friend, supports her by going to see her perform every Saturday night.

Now, I think it's time for bed. Goodnight.

Kevin The Cable Guy

Posted by Kevin.....

Since I had an unexpected day off, I decided not to do anything of real importance today. I worked on fixing and cleaning old bicycle parts. I ate left over Halloween candy. I read about candidates on the ballot for the election. I watched a documentary on the modern day search for missing Egyptian mummies.

About 2:00 PM, my boring day had just shifted into extreme tedium when two dudes in hard hats jumped the fence into my back yard. I scrutinized their activities for the amount of time it took me to unwrap some more Halloween candy. Moments later, they were looking around and pointing a lot.

As I walked out my back door, it was obvious the hard hat guys were very interested in my trees in the far back edge of the yard.

"Hey guys, howya doin?" I said. They glanced at me like I didn't need to know what was happening. The taller guy was surly, with a red beard and tattoos. The shorter guy just ignored me as he held a tangle of rope. They were stringing what looked like a new power line through our backyard trees.

"You guys need me to cut some branches away so you can get through there?" I asked. "Yeah, that would help, thanks." said the taller guy, who wasn't so surly after all.

My excitement grew as I climbed my ladder into the trees with my branch lopper and my saw. I felt like I was actually working with these guys and I had become some kind of high voltage lineman / lumberjack all in one. I secretly wished I had a hard hat.

"What kind of line is this?" I asked before cutting anything. "We're repairing the cable TV line." said Red Beard.

I froze. I instantly flashed back to one day last month when I was cutting down a tree in my back yard and a branch had snagged on the cable TV line.

I tried to compose myself. "Here? In this yard?" I asked in as nonchalant a squeak as I could muster. "Everywhere. The hail did a number in these lines. They're banged up." said Red Beard.

I lopped off a couple of branches and then started sawing a thick branch right where the new cable was resting. "Aren't you guys nervous that I'm cutting right next to your new line?" I joked. "No." said the shorter guy. Red Beard laughed, "We got lots more cable in the truck!" he said.

After I cleared a path through the branches, the shorter guy climbed the telephone pole on the corner of my property and pulled the line tight. As a walked away with my ladder I heard a couple of muffled bangs. I spun around expecting to see a broken power line whipping towards me ready to chop me in half.

Instead the guy on the pole was loudly securing some kind of fitting to the pole. Then both hard hat dudes departed, leaving behind a heap of disconnected cable TV line extending off the telephone pole down onto the ground toward the next pole. "Must be quittin' time" I thought to myself.

I went back inside and plopped down in front of the TV. "Good thing I have satellite" I said.

Black and Tan - Part 2

From Kevin......





In a previous post, I mentioned I was working on the Black and Tan bike project this past weekend.

Shortly after putting the first coat of tan paint over the primer coat on the front fender, I thought I had suddenly slipped into some weird "bizarro world" where paint dries instantaneously. I therefore made a conscious decision to pick up the wet fender and move it to a safe place!

Just like Joe Theismann braking his leg, it played over and over in my mind in painfully slow motion:

We see me put my gloved finger under the fender and lift it......

next we see the fender teeter-totter like a see-saw (or vice versa).......

then there is that brief moment of me wondering what I was planning to do next......

followed by my disbelief as the fender slips ever so slowly off my rubber glove.....

it flips on it's back (a deliberate act on it's part I might add) and falls an agonizing three feet to the floor......

There is silence. Leaves rustle in the wind. A dog barks in the distance.....

There comes a time in every man's life when he must step up and face undesired consequences of his actions. This was my moment, and how I dealt with it would speak volumes about who I am.

I threw the fender into the street as a bus was passing.

That that's not entirely true. I made it up. Sorry.

Actually the first thing I did was go into denial:
"The paint can't be that bad. A bit of dirt here, some cat hair there. A bit of saw dust.....a wood screw .....walnuts.....raisins....and colorful sprinkles."

Then came anger:
"NOOOOOO!" Birds flew away as church bells rang, and several old women fell to their knees in the middle of the street screaming, "Why God? Why? Why hath thou wrought such tragedy upon this kind, young, athletic man. A man whose only infraction was to believe that he could, perchance, paint a bicycle fender!!!"

Next, bargaining:
"Oh lord, please. If I can just save the primer coat beneath this paint, I promise not to sand this fender all the way down to bare metal and spray primer coat on it again and then sand that and then spray more tan paint over that EVER AGAIN! Thank you in advance."

Followed by depression:
"Hmm. This kinda sucks."

Finally, acceptance:
"GREAT! Now I'm working backwards! I'm stripping fresh paint and primer off of this stupid fender. What a mess. OH! And NOW I'm actually out of tan paint. That's just great! Maybe I should just start stripping paint off all my other bikes.......or the car, huh? Maybe when I paint our house I can then remove all the fresh paint off that as well."

Once over my desire to live in a paint free world, I went inside and showed Stace the fender.

"I'm sorry I let you down", I said.

She consoled me. "It's fine, you'll just redo it. You know you're enjoying this."

And there it was......reality. I actually enjoy working on this bike (not to the point where I'm trying to make extra work for myself). I love the preparation and painting, rebuilding wheels, cleaning old parts, installing new brake cables, polishing the chrome, and making this bike look nice again.

I love the fact that I created a unique look for this bike, and that when I ride it around town, folks will point and say, "There goes Kevin The Bike Builder on his Black And Tan Bike. Is that cat hair on the fender?"