A Queer Mobile

Our big Christmas present

We had a great Christmas at home, but we weren't dozing much. Last year we'd planned to redo the back building (John's former shop space) as our library/great room. The flood intervened, and the project waited until late November and early December. 

We got a great deal on some used industrial steel shelving that John resurfaced. He cleaned up and polished the concrete floor, and we installed five units, each eight feet tall and eight feet high. 

John's been moving books from his cache inside the house for a week or so. I've been so busy wrapping up projects at work for the year that the first chance I had to work on the library was Christmas Eve.

And work we did! We moved our literature library and several sets of old encyclopedias (John collects 'em). I moved part of my metaphysical library; the rest of it I've completely reorganized inside my office inside the house.

The obvious question is: how do you ever find anything here? The answer: we catalog everything with some software that'll read ISBN number bar codes from books, look up the information from Amazon.com, and store everything – including location information - in the database. I've been recoding books like mad, because when I reshelve books I want to have current location information. For you trivia folks: we have about 5100 books under management so far, not counting multivolume sets like encyclopedias.

Here we're looking back from the far side of the new library space. The room is huge - maybe 800 square feet. We'll move out the big TV and the sound system. I had thought to move my piano out, too, but I'm now considering other plans for my music studio.

Sending our Yule greetings!

I began my Yule celebration tonight. For those not used to my doings, we never have a Christmas tree. Instead, I decorate a wreath with apples, which signify the passage of the seasons. I burn candles each night and hold some simple meditations on the passage of the year.

Rather than buy a wreath this year, I fashioned my own from yew and juniper branches from our garden. The apples are Rome Beauty from our garden. I was feeling a little badly about not getting any decoration before now. I'm very glad I waited for the inspiration to use our own evergreens for the season.

Our best Yule greetings to all! 

John's part in rebuilding the African-American Museum of Iowa

John's been a strong supporter of the African American Museum of Iowa here in Cedar Rapids. He built two benches for the Museum's main exhibition space several years ago. Unfortunately the Museum was badly damaged in last year's floods, and the benches largely ruined.

John built two new benches for the Museum's recent opening. I took a quick snap of the new work before he installed it – just a day before the opening. We were invited to the opening, and had a chance to tour the restored – and significantly enhanced exhibits. Sadly, the Museum's curator, Susan Kuecker, said her farewell at the party; she's joining her husband who moved to Pittsburgh for a great new gig. We'll miss Susan, but John's looking forward to collaborating with the new curator.

Ham dinner

We picked up a ham this morning from our good friends at Forest Hill Farms. Their superb eggs and chickens were my initial draw, but we've been feasting on more of their home grown products. They pasture-raise all their animals, and they take tremendous care with all their products. So I ordered half a Christmas ham and shared it tonight with friends: one of the very best hams I've ever eaten.

I braised the ham in a mixture of 

1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup chopped onions
1 tsp peppercorns
2 bay leaves
handful of sage
enough chicken stock to come up about 1" on the ham.

The ham went in a 325F oven covered until it registered 140F on my instant read thermometer. (The house was filled with the most wonderful smells...) The whole operation took about 3 hours. 

I let the ham rest at room temperature for an hour or so before serving. In the mean time I filtered off the ham stock for the following sauce:

Mix together

2 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp dijon mustard
2 tsp (or so) port wine

and add to 1 cup ham stock. Bring to the boil and check for proper thickness. The sauce was amazingly wonderful with thin slices of ham. Alongside I served braised spinach with sun-dried tomatoes and scalloped potatoes.

Scrumptious!

Visiting my father

I took another trip last week back to North Carolina to visit my father and my sister's family. My posting last November told of Dad making it home from a rehab facility after recovering from a broken knee.

Unfortunately that's not all the story. In early November Dad was hospitalized with a bowel obstruction. Surgery to correct the problem (scar tissue) was successful, but he's just not thrived after the second surgery in four months. My sister and I were hoping that he might make it home, but he is still very frail. I thought I'd pay him a quick visit. Along the way my sister and I managed to work through some tax and estate issues - I'm doing a bit of homework with one of my CPA friends on questions that arose.

I suspect I'll head back to see him around his birthday in mid-March: he'll be 90.

Another new sculpture

This beauty is another new work coming out of the temporary shop space. The black material is a man-made composite called PaperStone: it's formed from recycled newspaper and natural resins. It's so waterproof that it survived being submerged in flood waters for days with no effect at all. John shaped these sensuous forms from slabs of the material, and then mounted a polished wooden ball. It looks unstable and completely improbable, but it's actually rock-solid.

John's new show

John has a new show at Legion Arts here in Cedar Rapids that opens next week. Legion Arts was severely damaged by the floods last year, but they're now running full-steam.

John created this new eight foot standing sculpture entirely from materials recovered from the summer floods. 

John's thank-you gifts...

So many people helped us in the flood recovery effort. The first project John took on after getting his new temporary shop running was to take selected materials that we recovered from the flood waters and to create sculptures for our helpers. Here you can see an array of the sculptures before he played Santa in January last week. Each work is unique, but all have similar designs.

John's new (temporary) shop is in full swing

With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.

The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.

John's new (temporary) shop is in full swing

With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.

The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.

John's lumber is outta here!

The big news is that John's gotten all the big lumber pieces moved from our Annex building (a 1200 square foot structure just in back of our home) to the place where his new shop will eventually be, in the Cherry Building - about ten blocks from our home. The lumber storage area is on the third floor of the Cherry Building where it'll be high and dry if any more flood waters come our way.

John's shop will eventually be on the first floor of the Cherry Building in an annex area that's filled with great light. The first floor of the Cherry Building was completely wiped out in the June floods. As with many projects around Cedar Rapids, reconstruction after the flood is taking much longer than one could have imagined. Because no one knows exactly when John may be able to occupy his new shop space, he's setting up temporary quarters back in the Annex where the lumber used to be. There's 800 square foot of clear work area, and he's assembling the tools he'll need to get going again.

Wolcum, Yule!

It's the beginning of the return of light! (Though you wouldn't know it here in Siberian Iowa where the wind chill is below -20F.) This is my Yule wreath for this year. Taking an old English custom, I decorate a wreath with apples to symbolize the equinoxes and solstices.

All the best to you in 2009!

John's cleared to start moving lumber!

John and his landlord worked out the details on some temporary storage space in the building where he'll have his shop. The first floor of that building was damaged by the June floods, but John now has storage space on the third floor. He'll lay out the new space and then begin moving the stacks of lumber that we've had stored here after the floods.

No word yet on when he'll have access to the new shop space. That space will be on the first floor of the same building - in a very stylish brick annex where he'll mostly be by himself. I suspect the final renovation of the shop space will now run well into 2009, but at least John can begin getting his lumber and equipment staged and organized.

Super Turkey Day

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: it's all about food and friends. I love cooking for T-Day, and this year was just a slight variation. Usually I do a disassembled turkey breast roasted per Julia Child's instructions. This year I did one of those and I smoked a breast on the grill with cherry wood. John's brother Jay and his wife Janece came, as did his sister Jane and her husband Roger and kids Jacob and Rachel. Our friends David and Mary Taylor and Rick Hahn rounded out our eleven folks.

We were swimming in food - and I had one surprise: almost all the turkey vanished. The smoked stuff was a real hit!

Some great customer service

Two great customer service tales:

1. Last summer I tried using the window in my office. It opened fine, but it wouldn't close. John finally pushed it shut from the outside, and we contacted the Pella Window folks to come take a look. Their inspector found dry rot in the windows and conducted a complete inspection of every window in the house. (John will only use Pella windows, by the way.) The inspector said the company would be back to us with quote and schedule to replace the four defective windows.

Turns out there was no quote - just someone from the Pella factory calling to replace all the windows free-of-charge. He did the job in about an hour, and I'm a happy camper.

2. I've sworn by Shure in-ear headphones for years: sonically they're impeccably good, and they're just wonderful for blocking ambient noise. My SE530's developed a real problem: the earpiece cracked so I couldn't put the left element in my ear.

Not to worry: I sent 'em back to Shure under their two year full warranty. About a week later I got a complete new package, factory sealed and perfect in every way.