Snow? In Oakland? MooOOoo!

We got back yesterday from a quick pre-Christmas trip. As reported on another Oakland blog, City Homestead, it snowed here while we were gone. It's not that unusual for a little snowfall every couple of years here in the East Bay hills (we're at about 1200 feet), but our neighbor reported that the snow stuck around for a while, and that is unusual. They even had a couple of icy patches in their driveway. The Oakland Tribune site has pictures of kids building a snowman in Tilden Park in Berkeley. The good news is that we're getting snow in the mountains, too, where most of the state's water comes from in summer.

So far, we've missed all the excitement. We were in Michigan and Florida visiting family, and managed to miss the major storm that's hitting the Midwest. We did get to see my sister and her family in Michigan, including my nephew Jimmy,

fun with trains in Michigan

and some aunts, uncles and cousins, and the worst weather we faced was some freezing rain one night when we weren't going anywhere. It was hecka cold compared with what we're used to, though. I got a chance to show K the library where my great aunt worked, and we got a tour at the historical museum across the street. It's in a beautiful Victorian built in 1896, 20 years after Oakland's Camron-Stanford House. It's in even better shape than CS House because it only had a few owners, was never neglected as badly as CS House was after the city museum was moved out of it, and never had any structural changes made to it. We stayed at my sister's beautiful 1930's arts and crafts home. She and my brother-in-law and parents have been slowly restoring it to its former splendor, too. I'll post some pics of that later.

canoeing in Florida

After a quick stay in Michigan, we went to Florida to visit my parents. Not surprisingly, the weather was much nicer there. It did rain hard the first night, but other than that it was lovely. A visit to Fairchild Botanical Gardens, some canoeing, catching up, and of course lots of eating made for a delightful stay with them.

snow in LA

Our return trip took us through LAX. We obviously hadn't been paying attention to the national weather and news, because we were surprised at the amount of snow around LA. Snow isn't uncommon in the mountains there, but the sheer amount of it was. It was gorgeous, too.

As always, it was great to get home. Even if the weather isn't as nice as it was in Florida. The kitties were delighted to see us, too, although our neighbor took great care of them while we were gone (thanks, Michelle!).

We Have Monkeys!

With a new router, some help from some friendly folks over at ChurchMedia.net and another visit over to Camron-Stanford House, the upstairs office there now has a reliable (and speedy) network connection. Faster than what we've got here, in fact. Packets were a-flyin'. I even got the old computer in the CSH house office hooked up to the Internet, and retrieved some data off the HDD of a dying laptop (dead battery, dead cooling fan, flakey memory, and runs Windows 98) that belongs to one of the office tenants. Some good technology mojo going.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, so I had the day off media-wise even though there was a service. But I went over to RLC to do one of my new-found favorite activities, cutting holes in walls. A member of the church is married to a guy who designs speakers for a living and he designed and helped us build some subwoofers for the sanctuary. (Apparently he even designed and built custom speakers for their wedding reception...this is someone who's serious about sound.) These bad boys aren't pretty to look at, but can communicate with elephants, and are going to give us some real low end, both for the organ in the traditional service and the bass in the contemporary service.

The intended location for the new subwoofers is in the loft above the cryroom. There's plenty of room to fit them...or would be, if I hadn't been stuffing unused pews and other stuff up there for the last year or two. So I cut a hole in the wall to loft above the choir room, so we can move the pews and other stuff over there to make room for the subwoofers. I still have some work to do like putting trim around the opening, but we'll have even more room for storage even once the subwoofers are in place. All in all, a good day of cutting holes in things.

Despite all that, raising money for the Habitat build-a-thon, working on stuff for Thrivent Builds, and a plateful of other stuff, I have managed to get some stuff done on the house. The short-term goals are all working towards demolishing the kitchen, and minimizing the amount of time we're without a working kitchen. But because of the required order of operations, some of the stuff seems odd to be working on. That said, I now have space in the basement to set up both the table saw and the chop saw, and I can once again walk past the dryer. There's still a lot of work to do to straighten things out, and once I can easily move around down there I'll be adding a new sub-panel so I can rewire various things, but progress is being made.

Historical Artifacts

"No touching the historical artifacts!"
- Mrs. MacReady, The Chronicles of Narnia

So pulling them apart and drilling holes in them is probably out, too, I guess. Good thing Edmund didn't have access to power tools.

The Cat5 was successfully pulled at CSH...and there was much rejoicing. What took me a long time was getting the network card on the PC in question to work. The PC was on its second wireless card (actually an external USB widget), but it wasn't clear when the built-in NIC had last been used, if ever. Windows didn't even see it (BIOS had it enabled, but was otherwise mum on the subject), so it was kind of hard to configure. Updated drivers didn't help. I finally ended up re-flashing the BIOS with the latest version, and lo and behold, Windows finally saw it. A new router for the CSH house office is on order, and soon the packets will be a-flyin' like the monkeys in Oz.

Another Day...

No work on the house today, and still no word on exactly what that insulation I found yesterday is. I worked on church media and other bits and pieces this morning, and donated blood platelets this afternoon.

Tomorrow I'm off to Camron-Stanford House to pull some more Cat5 cable. The other cable I pulled has been a major blessing -- I haven't had a single call about connection problems since then. So I'll be spreading more joy in the form of TCP/IP packets, this time to reach one of the upstairs offices.

Yesterday I cut open the new doorway from the center hallway to the living room, and stuck a stud in the old doorway from the center hallway to the entry hall (which will now be part of the kitchen). It's going to take Katarina and I a while to get used to the change, even though it only moved the door 3' or less. But it's going to have some much bigger impacts in light and air moving through the house. With the change, it's possible to see from the kitchen all the way across the house out my office window, and from Katarina's office out the living room windows. More light, and nice cross ventilation for summertime.

Camron-Stanford House

The last couple of weeks have been busy. Given that I'm moving my office from the dining room to our old bedroom, it's no surprise I've spent time drilling holes, pulling wires, and painting and the like. What is surprising is that the work wasn't in our house, but in this little number:

It's Camron-Stanford House, a Victorian house on Lake Merritt. I've been volunteering there for a couple of years doing tech support. Via slow upgrades and a lot of work, the computer system is now in pretty good shape. (The database is still a mess, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)

The last weak link has been the Internet connection. It's a historical house, so drilling holes to pull cables or having *gasp* exposed cables are no-nos. So we've been using a wireless setup to connect to one of the law offices upstairs (office rents and renting the house for weddings and other events are how they pay for the upkeep of the house) where the DSL modem is. But given the vintage of the house, it has hecka thick walls (in the basement at least, 8" interior and 12" exterior), fat cast-iron plumbing and radiators, and uses plaster and lath instead of drywall as is done in more modern houses. Those things added up to pretty bad wireless connectivity, so we'd added an external antenna, repeaters, etc. I only occasionally had problems with it, and re-trying always fixed the problem. But the woman who used it to handle e-mail inquiries about renting the house for an event had frequent problems, which meant frequent phone calls to me, which meant frequent increases in my blood pressure. Not to mention an election-time like aversion to answering the phone.

But on my last I-can't-connect-please-come-down-here visit, the lawyer in the office upstairs and I figured out a way I might be able to run a network cable with no exposed cables, and (mostly) using existing holes by following other cables for things like the telephone lines and security system. A quick trip to CompUSA (yrch!) for some cable and home for some tools, and I spent most of the day fishing a Cat5 cable from office to office. I did have to enlarge one hole a little, and I had to cut off a connector to get the cable fished through. So today I re-terminated the cable, tacked it up discretely below a faux beam in the office (and painted it brown to match), and there's now a connection to the DSL modem that is as close to 100% as any can be. Which means fewer calls, and lower blood pressure.

Woohoo! Of course, we've now figured out a possible way to connect one of the problematic 2nd floor offices by fishing a cable through an old fireplace, so my adventures in really old houses is not over... And then there's the graphic design work I do for them, too...