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Showing posts from 2013

Moving Day and Tim Duffrin has Left the Building!

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We're still waiting for our Forester to be fixed. The service department at Miller Hill Subaru originally said we could expect it to be done this past Thursday but the motorhead they received from the parts dealer had a warped valve-something-or-other and they couldn't use it. Christmas week isn't a good week for ordering anything and expecting it to be expedited. And so we wait. Hopefully, sometime this coming week we'll have our car back. We had our quietest Christmas ever in the more than 14 years we've been married. Tammy was working in her office while Rachel was at her dad's house. I threw my bike in the back of my truck and headed down to the river for a few hours of fun  on the trails. I fell so many times trying to establish new tracks in the 3 inches of snow we'd gotten Christmas Eve. They were easy falls that mostly happened because I couldn't unclip from my pedals fast enough to get a foot down to keep from falling. After trading notes with

"Okay Google Now, Find the Nearest Subaru Dealer"

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I've stumbled onto a fun design I've been playing with in the glassblowing studio. They're simple tealight candle holders with a thick clear bottom done in various colors. There's nothing particularly difficult about them unless I'm trying to make a few the same size, then it takes a little more skill. I've posted a couple photos of them on my Facebook page and received some nice comments leading me to think about doing a bunch more before changing my focus. Tammy has been working on perfecting her smaller bud-vases . She's been having fun with them. I encourage her to work a little larger but this is what she enjoys. Our Christmas cards won't be going out until Monday and for a few of you, that means they'll be a little late. In keeping with our tradition of doing something original in our cards most years, Rachel came up with a New York theme based on our trip to move her out there last August for a semester of school. Rachel did the drawing an

Farewell to the Sky

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I've had my Droid Maxx for 4 months and it continues to impress me, especially its battery life. I'm on my phone a fair amount in a typical day, playing games, surfing and editing photos. In the 4 months I've had the phone, I've yet to need to recharge it during the day. I typically put it in its dock at night with more than 50% power still remaining. It's impressive how much better this phone is than my previous Droid. With my last Droid, after a system update, the phone would be noticeably more sluggish. I've had one upgrade so far with my Maxx and I haven't noticed anything diminished about its performance. Also, I'd gotten in the habit of rebooting my Droid Bionic every day to help it run smoother. I find that I'm going weeks without restarting my Maxx. Like I said, impressive! Speaking of editing photos with my phone: I've installed and uninstalled several free photo editing apps in the last couple of weeks and kept a few. They do an okay

Traffic-Jam Trivia, Peter Zelle and Winter Riding

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My fascination with Candy Crush Saga has come to a close after I would guess 5+ months of off-and-on play. I hadn't been playing the game much over the last month and when I did open it up recently I realized that it no longer held my interest at all. My avatar will forever remain positioned at level 257 on the Candy Crush highway. Winter weather settled in over much the country this last week. We're coping with double-digit below zero temps at night and temperatures that struggle to get much above zero during the day. Having this cold air descend on us after a wet snowfall didn't help because so many of the roads were left quite slick and unaffected by deicers. Not good for biking but of course I wasn't going to let that keep me down. We had a fun 3 hours in the studio on Friday morning. Traffic was backed up on our way there because of a multi-car collision. In our conversation to kill time the name  Herman Munster from The Munsters oddly enough came up. Tammy di

Thanksgiving Weekend, 2013

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We had a relaxing Thanksgiving weekend. Tammy had to work until 7:30 Thanksgiving night but she still managed to put together a delicious meal for the two of us. I'm not much of a cook but I hope to change that in retirement. Speaking of retirement. We were talking this past week about things we'd both like to do together when we reach that point. Tammy mentioned loaning out our services to elderly people to help them with cleaning and yard work. I think that's a really good idea and something I would enjoy doing. We've also talked about working with at-risk inner-city kids in whatever ways we could be used. We'll begin to narrow our focus once we get closer to actually making the leap. Pope Francis has my attention. I've never in my life been interested in anything the Popes have had to say over the years but this guy is different. I very much appreciate his mindset and his approach to life. But can his words change the strong convictions of those who disa

A Small World and a Shawn Mullins Evening

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I received a Facebook friend request Sunday night along with a short message: "Last night, my niece and I were going to try making lefse for the first time. (I inherited my moms lefse making equipment, but had never made lefse with her). Since we didn't really know what we were doing, I sent Ashley to the computer to find us a YouTube video to watch. She found one and we watched it. When we were finished, I checked to see who made it. Low and behold, it was your lefse making video. There are scores of lefse making videos out there, and we watched the one made by the guy across the street. How funny is that! Jenny" It sure can be a small world at times! Here's the video Jenny was referring to. I've been battling a sinus infection for weeks. I finally broke down yesterday and went in to be seen and walked away with a prescription for Amoxicillin. I'm happy to finally be on the mend. This thing has been kicking my butt the past week. I'm sit

Going Back on a Promise, Riding and Road Trips

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My Candy Crush fixation has begun to wane after a few months of diligent play. I'm on level 257 and finding that the game doesn't intrigue me the way it once did. It's been a good run but perhaps it's time to find another distraction. Hmmm. I'm considering reinstalling Wordfeud on my phone. I was quite sure I wouldn't be putting up Christmas lights this holiday season, in fact, I promised myself that last year would be the end of the tradition. I'm a softy. Over the last week or so my resolve to go into these holidays in a less than festive mood is weakening and the idea of involving our new addition in our outdoor light display has been gaining momentum; so much so that I went out to Fleet Farm yesterday and bought a bunch more LED light sets. I've sort of wanted to lay some off-white lights over the top of our pergola so this will be the motivation I need to get out there and do it. I took yesterday off from work so I could get a head-start on the

Tony Campolo, Lefse Party and Indulging My Inner Child

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I was driving home from work recently, flipping through stations on the radio until stopping on a Christian station that at one time in my life not all that long ago I would occasionally listen to. The person hosting the show was laying into Jehovah's Witnesses and how they're all going to hell because they're not interpreting the Bible the way he thinks they should. When he finished bashing them, he turned his attention to the practice of judging other people while encouraging his listeners to be more judgmental of one another and to not follow the trend in some circles of society where being judgmental is frowned on. He said the Bible calls on us to judge one another and that we should be doing this constantly throughout the day. Great. Let's all do that. I'd like to begin by judging him but really, I've got better things to do. I reached toward the radio and said something I shouldn't have before turning to NPR, upset with the thought that this guy has

A Full Weekend and a Full Life...(but she's aiming for 90!...she told me)

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When Tammy was in college she took a watercolor painting class as an elective study. She put together a nice portfolio of work during the class but in the 18 or so years since then, she hasn't taken the time to dabble in the art. I've tried over the years to encourage her to get back into it but I'm not one to nag. But she's finally going to! She signed up for a watercolor class taught by a local artist and will work with her over the next month. She's excited about it and so am I. I told her that I can totally see her setting up out in the sun-porch with her materials; it will be a perfect spot. She has a birthday coming up next month and I think I'd like to get her an easel. Rachel is in Maryland this weekend for another ballroom dance competition. I got a text from her Friday afternoon as they passed near New York on their way: "NYC doesn't scare me anymore" "you know how it can be a bit intimidating at first? I can handle it now&quo

Note to Self: Do Not Screw This Up!

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"I got a text from Rachel a few days ago: "Soooo the amazing race...are we gonna make it happen?" The Amazing Race is a program on CBS that we've been following since it first aired in 2001. It's a 'reality tv' show where contestants complete challenges as they race around the world. We've been talking about trying out for the show for at least the last six years . They're taking applications now for the cast/participants of the next race which is planned for this coming spring and summer. It would work for Rachel's schedule but not mine...unless I retire. Hmmm. The show is as much about relationships as it is about a race and they've never had a stepfather/stepdaughter combination. We've always thought that could work to our advantage. Rachel said she'd compile a storyboard of our lives together for a video submission from us. We'll see. I finally made it out to the mountain bike trails at Murphy Hanrehan Park about 6 m

Politics Now and Then

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Politics. I sometimes enjoy kicking around political topics on forums and Facebook but I'm growing weary of it. Maybe it was all of the venomous political back-and-forth associated with the government shutdown the previous two weeks that sapped my desire for it. I was in one conversation where a woman was ranting about 260 billion Muslims and how 10% of them are terrorists and blah blah blah. I had to ask her several times to please explain what she was referring to because she wasn't making sense and did she have a link? She condescendingly told me that the information is online and that all I had to do was Google it. I replied that there are only just a little over 7 billion people on the planet and her 260 billion number was confusing me to which she replied: "my bad, lol". It's that sort of thing that has me questioning why I bother to try. I doubt I'll throw in the towel but I think I'll be more selective about who I engage with. Politics 'now'

Changing of the Guard

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My life is one that is sometimes conflicted because my actions don't always reflect what's in my heart. I'm an animal lover but yet I eat meat. I confess that I'm a hypocrite in that regard. Maybe you saw the video a few weeks ago of some NRA lobbyist killing an elephant. I was troubled by it as were many others. Elephants are being illegally killed for their ivory at an unsustainable rate yet this is allowed to happen. How does someone justify that? I can only guess that the big-game hunter is seriously lacking in some other area of his life. With that video fresh in my mind I saw this  and it brought the previous video into an even more sobering perspective. It really touched me. To think that their bond had survived all those years is just so moving. We've had a changing of the guard . The guy who delivered our new mower took one look at the mower I was trading in and said: "we get maybe 1 in 50 that look that nice!" That was nice to hear because I

Was I The One Who Lost My Way?

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This was the year of the Cicadas as they emerged above ground as adults from their 17 years of life underground as nymphs where they fed on sap from plant roots. I'd seen them often this summer but wasn't sure what they were until Rachel saw a video I'd posted and clued me in. I found this one crawling across our garage floor looking like it was nearing the end of its life. I found a flower in our garden for it to drift away on. My MacBook Pro is beginning to show its age at a little over 3 years old. It hesitates now in a way it never used to and the PC side of it that I power with VMware has become painfully slow. I upgraded to the latest OS (Mountain Lion) in hopes that it would help but it doesn't really appear to have. I also updated my VMware from version 3 to version 6 but no change there either. I brought my Mac into the Apple Store at Mall of America and the guy at the Genius Bar ran some diagnostics on it but could find nothing wrong with the hard-drive ot

A Faith Walk and Talk and Some Funny Stuff!

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I got a message on my Droid yesterday alerting me to a shipment I'd be receiving from Amazon: Mechanical Bull has shipped and is due to arrive on Tuesday. Say what? What did I or Tammy inadvertently place an order for? I've never ridden a mechanical bull and I'm not about to start now, besides, we don't have room for one! Cruising Facebook a few hours later I see a post from Kings of Leon. Mechanical Bull hits the stores today! That explains it. I'd pre-ordered the CD but didn't remember the title. I'm listening to it now on my Amazon Cloud Player. So far, so very good! We finally made it back to Foci last Thursday for the first time in more than two months but we only stayed an hour. There's a crack in the crucible we gather from and because of that, the glass level is much lower than usual, meaning, it get's really hot when you try and reach in to gather glass. Tammy, not being very tall is at a real disadvantage. I made a couple of tumblers befo

Let Fall Begin!

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It's been a nice, lazy, relaxing day at home. We had plans to spend the afternoon at the Renaissance Festival in Shakopee but I had to cancel so I can give my body a chance to recover from some aches I acquired over the past few days beginning with a fall onto some landscape rocks on the side of our house. A fall that no doubt must've looked hilarious or painful or both had anyone been there to witness it. I had my Husqvarna trimmer in hand as I walked back toward the garage to put it away when suddenly my feet came out from under me and I fell on my right side bruising at least a couple ribs. I think I tripped over some landscape edging but I'm not sure. I got up, a little stunned and noticed that my trimmer fared worse than I did as it's now in need of a new handle. Tammy was concerned because of my Factor V Leiden condition and the risk of clotting from an impact such as that but what can I do? I didn't let my sore ribs deter me from my main project this week

Tune-ups, Adrift and a Pool Solution

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There's a ballroom dance team at Stony Brook University and Rachel couldn't be happier. She met with them Thursday night for the first time and called us afterward, all pumped that there are so many talented people in the group. She was most excited about an offer she accepted from one of their dancers to be his partner in an upcoming competition. He's really good too she said so that kind of tells me that she must've made an impression on him at least. This is such an important part of her life and who she is. I love that she will always be a dancer. I just don't see her ever not being involved in dance. She's still without a set of wheels other than her bike(s). She's frustrated that the only convenient place to park her bike near her dorm at SBU is within range of a lawn sprinkler that routinely sprays all of the bikes in the rack causing them to prematurely rust . My guess is that some of the bikes in the rack have been abandoned but still, it's

This Was to be the Day

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Today was to have been my last day as an air traffic controller. I was to come in this morning, turn in my headset, sign my retirement papers and be on my way because I'd turned 56 the previous month (mandatory retirement age for controllers). But because of some time spent in Flight Service early on in my career (Flight Service was then one of three control options within the FAA) I have a waiver to work as long as I want. The exception makes no sense to me but I'm not questioning it. I think I'll hang around a little longer with no apologies to the few that are troubled by this. When we were out in NYC last week we stopped at a Verizon store where Rachel and I upgraded our phones to the Droid Maxx which was just released. I haven't yet taken the time to sit down with mine and become totally familiar with it but so far I like what I've seen. It moves between applications and web pages very fast which had become a real problem with my two-year-old Droid Bionic. Th

It Was a Friday to Remember!

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We got back from NYC on Sunday morning. What a fun trip that was! I only had one full day in the city but with Tammy's planning skills we were able to make the most of it. She and Rachel arrived there earlier in the week having taken a little over two days to drive there. I've mentioned in a previous post that Rachel will be spending the first semester of her senior year out there at Stony Brook College on Long Island. Tammy arranged for us to take a 5-hour bus tour of the borough of Manhattan (it's not a city). It was a great idea. We got to see so much of Manhattan while at the same time not spending the entire day on our feet. The tour guide was so good. She knew all sorts of interesting trivia that she sprinkled throughout her talk as she guided us along. While walking the streets of Manhattan it dawned on me that the rude and obnoxious people of NYC that I fully expected to be surrounded by were avoiding me. Even behind the wheel in traffic, they were keeping their