A Hint of Spring

Today it was warm - nearly 45º and we took advantage of the break from winter to hose out the garage. The car had tracked in a lot of sand and grim from the recent snow, and the garage floor was filthy as a result. With Sibylle manning the hose and me using a large push broom we were able to get most if not all of the gunk out of the garage.

It’s funny how little things like cleaning the garage make you feel like a home owner.

Frosty Explained

The first two days of this week we were caught at the edge of the major winter storm that covered most of the eastern United States. In addition to freezing rain and snow, we had bitterly cold temperatures, perhaps as low as -10º. On Tuesday morning Sibylle discovered frost on the ceilings in both front bedrooms. We immediately contacted our builder as the house has a warranty.

His theory is that the insulation in the attic isn’t properly distributed and that the small areas of frost that we saw are a result of very cold air on one side of the drywall, and considerably warmer and moister air on the other side. He doesn’t think that there is any leak or that snow was blown into the attic space through the soffit vents. His insulation crew was going to stop at the house on Friday to correct things but their previous job took longer than expected. Our builder tells us that they’ll be back in this area next week and will visit then.

His explanation makes sense and is backed up by the pattern of frost we saw. It was primarily in the corners of the room, where it might be harder to insure blown-in insulation was properly deep. The forecast for this week includes more bitter cold air and the potential for more snow. Hopefully this time we won’t have enough temperature difference to generate frost inside the house.

New Iron

The desktop computer I was assigned at work two years ago, was three years old when I inherited it. Even with a recent memory upgrade, it’s getting a little long in the tooth. When I was given a green light to spec out a replacement machine I looked at both another Mac Pro and at a 27" iMac.

The configuration I’ve had on my desk for two years now was three 20" Cinema displays coupled to a Mac Pro sporting 12 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. A new Mac Pro was only going to bump up the processor speed a little, and increase the hard disk size. Looking at an iMac, with its lower initial cost, allowed me to add a solid-state hard drive - something I’ve wanted to experiment with for some time now.

Three 20" displays side-by-side make for a very wide work surface. I tended to work on the center display with odd windows or palettes on the right and left displays. Having a very large primary display and a slightly smaller secondary display seemed like a better idea.

Wednesday at 4 pm the iMac arrived and I’ve spent the time since then transferring my account from the Mac Pro and rearranging my physical desk. I stood the one remaining 20" Cinema screen on end, giving me a tall narrow secondary display. My idea is to use this screen for email, terminal windows, and other ancillary things, while keeping the vast 27" display for my primary tools. After just a short use I think this is going to work beautifully. Eventually I’d like to get a monitor arm and mount for the 20" display so that it isn’t just balanced on it’s edge.

Frosty

Like most of the continental United States we were caught up in the major winter storm system over the past two days. We were right at the western edge of the worst of it, I think, so we didn’t get much snow, but we do have icy conditions as the storm started with freezing rain.

Air temperatures were down to about 2º this morning and are forecast to be -12º tomorrow morning. Thus far our house has weathered the storm fairly well with one exception - there’s frost on the ceiling in both front (north-facing) bedrooms.

We’ve contacted the builder and are waiting to find out what’s covered in the warranty and, perhaps more importantly, what can be done to prevent this from happening in the future. There’s at least one storm like this one every winter - with strong winds, blowing snow, and bitter cold temperatures - and we don’t want this to be a recurring “feature” of the house. Moisture like this left unchecked can develop into far nastier problems like mold.

I have to keep telling myself that it’s a new house, not a perfect house.

Sigh.

Now With Daily Publishing

Starting with the beginning of the new year I have published something to zanshin.net every day. This is not to say that there has been new content everyday, rather there is a new posting published for each day of January. Twice now I’ve not gotten something up in time and had to back date the publish date.

I don’t know how long daily publishing will last but for now it feels good to be devoting some time to my site again. Feel free to reply in the comments to this posting if there is anything in particular you’d like me to write about.

Snow Day

The university where I work was closed today in anticipation of a major snow storm. So far, with just an hour of the day left, the storm hasn’t amounted to anything. There’s a bit of ice from some early morning freezing drizzle, but no snow.

The forecast for tomorrow is far worse than the one for today was, so I will be surprised if we are at work tomorrow. However, campus hasn’t been officially closed yet. I’ll have to set the alarm for the usual 6:20 am and check my messages to find out.

Mouse Hunt

One evening, about a week ago, Bootstrap was sitting on one of the pianos staring up at the ceiling. This isn’t normal behavior for him, but we didn’t really pursue it. A few evenings later Sibylle was working at the table in the studio when Bootstrap became interesting in the corner of the room there. She could hear faint scrabbling sounds from the wall.

Uh oh.

This morning I observed him very intently stalking the bottom step of the stairs. I went and stood behind him and I could hear the scrabbling sound too.

Crap.

We’ve got mice.

It is entirely possible that we moved a mouse with us from the Frey Street house as there was evidence of mice in that garage, which was full of boxes. Boxes which are now in our unfinished basement. It is also possible that we got mice along with the house. The area was only recently developed and still has large fields that are likely teeming with critters.

Sibylle did some reading on what approaches work best and we bought some spring traps today. If we are still catching mice a few days from now it means there’s some sort of access for them into the house. At that point we’ll call the pest control people. Until then I’ll put three or four traps in the garage and the rest in the unfinished portion of the basement to see what I catch.

Hopefully we can eliminate this problem quickly and with out too much trouble.

Homeowner

This afternoon I replaced two light switched in our bathroom, which made me feel like a true homeowner.

The original switches were fine except that they were what stopped the linen cabinet door when it was opened all the way. We were afraid that over time the door would become marred from contact with the switches so we replaced them with the flat style ones.

It took three tries to find the right circuit breaker in the garage to turn off. In the switch labeled “master” was the one that I needed; it also took out all the lights in the master bedroom. Eventually I’ll want to redo the labeling in the junction box as it was done with a thick-point permanent pen and is hard to read.

With the electricity off I was able to remove the old switches but I had to work at getting the wires off, or rather out. The switches have some kind of hole in the back that lets the electrician just shove the bare wire end in and he’s done. There is a release tab but it proved to be difficult to reach and operate.  I was able to remove three of the four wires and had to cut the fourth.

The new switches were easy to install, and work beautifully. Now we can open the door with out fear of denting or marring the finish. And I feel more like it’s our house since I’ve made changes to it without electrocuting myself.

Creatures of Habit

The music theory class I’m taking this spring occurs in a general purpose room in the music department. The class before us has all the xylophones out, and there’s a jazz band that meets there immediately following our class. Consequently there are no fixed chairs in the room. Instead there are stacks of plastic chairs in the back.

At the start of my class, as the xylophones are being wheeled away, we all grab a chair and find a place to sit. Since the jazz band needs chairs we don’t have to put things away afterwards. What I find fascinating about this ad-hoc arrangement is that after just one week we are all sitting in pretty much the same place every class period. No assigned seating, and no fixed chairs, and yet we all gravitate to the same general spot from one day to the next.

If I weren’t such a Taurus I’d deliberately sit in a new place each class period just to observe the impact on the people around me. Whereby “Taurus” I mean stubborn creature of habit.

Whole House Humidification

With a house full of instruments, two 7-foot concert grand pianos and a violoncello being the primary ones, we have a keen interest in maintaining a good humidity level here at Casa Mark y Sibylle.

The pianos in particular would like a fairly constant 40% humidity year round. Here in central Kansas humidity is abundant in the summer months but rather scarce in the heating months. Forced air heating systems only dry the already parched air even more. For the first few weeks we tried a small room-sized humidifier that really couldn’t begin to raise the humidity in the studio space, much less the whole house.

The studio is roughly 20 by 30 with a nine foot ceiling so there is a lot of air volume in just that one space to keep moist. We decided to get a whole house humidifier installed. My father has had a General attached to his furnace for several decades, and he knows of several other people who had the same model in their house. We called the local plumber/heating/ventilation guy and they recommended a General 1099, based on the size of our house.

The install took about three hours one afternoon last week. Midway through the process the installer mentioned that newer houses, which are well insulated and sealed, tend to not run the furnace as often and therefore won’t run the humidifier as often. He offered to wire the control up to the fan as well as the furnace so that humidification would happen any time the fan was running regardless of whether the heat was also running.

We’ve run the fan for most of the day several times and managed to eek the humidity level up to about 40%, although it tends to hover a percent or two lower than that most of the time. The fan noise isn’t terrible but one is aware of it droning on in the background after a while - especially at night when the house is quiet. We are willing to put up with the constant fan sound however, as without it we wouldn’t be able to raise the humidity at all. With the solar gain today the house was a good 4º warmer than the thermostat setting and the furnace never ran.

Time will tell if we are able to continue to raise the average humidity level so that it never dips below 40%. For now it’s good that we are able to keep things in that ballpark.