This morning, while Jeanine and Kyle were enjoying coffee in the great room, they were treated to a brief visit by an American Mink or River Otter (there is an ongoing debate within the family) who peered in the window at them. I was in my office and missed the encounter, but later pulled up video from one of our security cameras and caught some of the action. The furry creature can be seen entering the frame in the lower left corner (make sure that your viewing window does not crop the bottom of the video). Sixteen seconds later, it makes its way along the picture window on the lower right side of the frame, looks inside to check things out, and then turns around and departs. Please reach out to us if you have a strong opinion as to the identity of our visitor.

In addition to our critter sighting, the scene outside was just magical this morning. Last night’s snowfall left the tree branches frosted, and the bright morning sun quickly turned it into rain.

When a total lunar eclipse occurs during sunrise, a rare celestial phenomenon called a selenelion (or “impossible sunrise”) takes place. During this event, you can see both the totally eclipsed “blood moon” and the rising sun simultaneously on opposite horizons. Of course, you also need clear skies. Early this morning, we enjoyed perfect viewing conditions, though a bit uncomfortable at 10° outside. Photographically speaking, the event is less interesting than a regular lunar eclipse because the rising sun makes it impossible to expose for the “blood moon.” I chose to take a photo shortly before the full eclipse and while it was still dark enough to barely see the outline of the moon. Once the moon was fully in the Earth’s shadow, it completely disappeared from view. It was still above the horizon but simply too dim to be seen in the morning light. This was to the dismay of the 50 or so people gathered at a popular high ground observation point, who did not know this would be the case. Yesterday, the local news made a big deal of this rare event, featuring lovely photos of a blood moon, but failed to mention that in our part of the country, this scene would not be visible. Dozens of people were still driving up as I departed, knowing the show was over.

Ten years ago this month, I spent several weeks traveling through Southeast Asia. While in India, I visited the Taj Mahal and was somewhat disappointed to find it undergoing routine cleaning with scaffolding on three of the four minarets. This was after sprinting to reach the reflecting pool ahead of all others (full story here).

Fast forward a decade, and I was able to remove the distractions with a simple command and artificial intelligence to create the image below. I find this both exciting and disappointing. The fact is that I could now prompt the software to place a picture of me in the scene without ever setting foot in India.

With my upcoming trip to Bolivia on the horizon and all the activity related to the Somerville house purchase, I thought it best to file our taxes early this year. Thankfully, that task is now behind me. While I was taking care of business, Kyle and Mario ran 10 miles with Kyle’s running club, and Jeanine, Maya, and Brooke went for a long hike in Concord. Later, the entire crew met at the new Somerville house, Nicolai and Jeanine for the first time, to look the place over.

Joining us this morning for an extended brunch were more cousins—John, Rachel, and her boyfriend Rob. Jeanine and Maya teamed up to make a perfect batch of popovers, while Brooke prepared a fruit salad that could feed a small army. In between catching up on everybody’s news, we engaged in a raucous game of Hues and Cues.

My nephew, Mario, and his new bride, Brooke, are staying with us for two nights. Mario has business in the Seaport District starting on Monday, and they will stay at a hotel in the area starting on Sunday. Kyle, Nico, and Maya joined us for dinner and a sleepover to spend time with their cousin. Jeanine was pleased to see her new sofa-bed pressed into service with high marks for comfort.

Jeanine and I enjoyed a morning walk around the neighborhood, where we encountered four-foot-high snowbanks and igloos big enough for an adult. It would be safe to say that we have had more than our fair share of snow this winter, but you will find no complaints here. One of the things I love most about living in New England is that we get all four seasons in their full glory.

This morning, our family’s offer to purchase this triplex in the heart of Somerville was accepted by the seller. I say family because this home will be jointly owned by all three kids. Each will own one of the three nearly identical units. Jeanine and I are helping with the down payment, while the kids will cover the rest. Each can choose to live in their unit alone, collect rent from roommates, or generate passive income by renting their entire floor out.

When we started looking for a property last week, this was the only one that met all of our criteria. The 3,816 sqft. home has 9 bedrooms, 6 baths, a huge basement and off-street parking. The closing is scheduled for April 15.

The nice thing about having a really long driveway is that it affords significant privacy. The downside is that it takes a long time to clear snow, especially after a powerful Nor’easter. Last night, we received about 11 inches of fresh snow, and it was the wet and heavy kind. I had an appointment with an orthopedist to evaluate my hip and knees at 8 am, so I had to get an early start on snowblowing the driveway. I have two sets of batteries for my electric snowblower, and I had to use each set twice to complete the job. On the first pass, I cleared a path just wide enough for one of our cars to reach the road. I took care of everything else on the second pass later in the day. I always make an effort to get down to the asphalt when temperatures are below freezing, and more snow is in the forecast. Failure to do so just makes future snowblowing that much more difficult.

Incidentally, I learned that my hips and knees hurt because of decades of wear and tear. The doctor saw no immediate or foreseeable need for replacement joints. The plan is to continue my stretching and strengthening routine and to address pain with Ibuprofen.

Nicolai will be honored by the Soccer Unity Project at their annual fundraiser. The Unity Ball event will be held on April 10th at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. Funds raised will ensure that young people — especially girls and youth of color — can continue to experience the power and joy of sport. Nico will share the spotlight with Miles Robinson, a defender for the US Men’s National Team, and Ally Sentnor, a midfielder/forward for the US Women’s National Team.

This evening, Jeanine and I hosted our second six-course $1000 donation dinner party, with the proceeds going to our church. Our neighbors, Tom and CC made the donation in addition to providing an expert selection of wines and Champagne. They invited two other couples who are long-time friends of CC to share the meal, and we used the occasion to celebrate a pair of birthdays as well.

Last night, we received 3 inches of wet snow, the kind that sticks to tree branches, creating a beautiful winter wonderland. After clearing the driveway, I set out for some aerial photography and a honey-do list of errands. Pictured above is a distant view of the Old North Bridge and Visitor Center. My shopping list included an offset spatula, Portobello mushroom caps, candles, a zucchini, a red onion, and a yellow squash. This mission required stops at three different stores and was not completed to the satisfaction of my boss. I forgot the candles, and apparently, I do not know the difference between a zucchini and an English cucumber. In my defense, I doubt Jeanine knows the difference between a Forstner bit and a brad-point drill bit.

I met Kyle in Lowell to tour a multi-family dwelling he is considering acquiring. He is serious about investing in real estate to create a source of passive income. We then traveled to Somerville to tour a triplex that Jeanine and I are considering purchasing.

Jeanine noticed from the windows of her sanctuary that the roof vent for our cooktop had been dislodged by the ever-so-slowly (think glacially) advancing sheet of snow sliding off the roof. If snow or rain were allowed to enter the exposed exhaust pipe, water would drip down onto our cooktop and potentially damage the fan motor. I decided that an immediate repair was called for. I must admit that the idea of climbing a 20-foot ladder onto an icy and snow-covered metal roof in below-freezing temperatures was not something I was looking forward to in the least. Even so, postponing was not an option. I made one trip up the ladder to assess the situation and a second to return with the necessary tools and hardware to complete the repair. When I completed the work, I decided to take a picture of the river from the rooftop. It did not occur to me to take a picture of the repaired roof vent until I was back on the ground, and at that point, the risk of a third trip up the ladder seemed like a bad idea.

Most evenings, just after dusk, our driveway sensor chimes. When no visitors or deliveries appeared responsible for the alert, we eventually figured out that it was being triggered by members of our local deer herd. Pictured here is one of three that visited last night, as captured by one of our security cameras.

When it came time to install path lighting for the driveway, I opted to install a 300-foot LED rope light along one side. The white light string can be programmed for different types of animation, which makes for a fun greeting to the house. When covered by snow, the lights can still be seen as a soft glow in the snow bank, which is even more fun.

Homeowners often seek to remove heavy snow from their roofs. We designed our home to handle a substantial snow load and selected a low roof pitch, hoping to keep fallen snow in place on top of the house. This is because snow, on average, has an R-value of 1 per inch of snow. That means that our recent 15″ snowfall added R-15 to our R-50 insulated roof, helping to further reduce energy loss from the house. Pictured above is the right side of the garage roof with an entire slab of snow and icicles inching their way off. By design, neither rain nor snow falls over an entrance to the house.

For Christmas, Jeanine gifted Nico two tickets to the world premiere engagement of Wonder: The Musical at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. By all accounts, it was wonderful.

You adore people like your favorite foods,
from varied cultures and corners of the globe;
I gather lenses, flashlights, and tools,
researching them all while still in my robe.

You plant tiny seeds of basil and thyme,
then bask beneath the sun in a state of rapture;
I chase the light through forests and canyons,
the perfect image hoping to capture.

You’re at home where conversations wander,
where shy souls bloom, and joyous hearts sing;
I’m at home with wood shavings on the floor,
and the quiet hum of a well-tuned thing.

You watch hawks circling the tree line,
fox tracks stitched in fresh-fallen snow;
I frame you there in my viewfinder,
the one wild wonder I never outgrow.

We’ve raised three remarkable humans,
each odd and brilliant in their own way;
sometimes I wonder how we pulled it off-
then I remember: you, leading the fray.

You’re the generous friend, the fierce defender,
the one who shows up, casserole in hand;
I’m the nerd checking flight times and weather,
plotting our next half-baked travel adventure.

Yes, we are gloriously different creatures-
you, the warm hearth, me, with my toolbox and charts;
but somewhere between spice jars and spreadsheets,
we learned how to embrace each other’s hearts.

So here’s to our not-yet-written chapter,
to golden years we’ve only just begun:
may we roam new trails, make new stories,
and keep laughing and having fun.

If time is kind and luck holds steady,
there’s still so much mischief left to do:
because, my love, my favorite adventure
has always been simply – growing older with you.

My cousin Vincent, a fellow inventor/maker, just purchased a CNC router and shared some visual simulations of the machine in operation. He cannot set up or use the machine until he moves a car out of his garage. My desire to see the tool in action prompted the following excerpted messages:

Vincent:

Anyway, that’s what I’m chomping through these days. When the snowbank behind the garage melts, we can move the Nissan out, organize the garage, and make a home for the CNC router. 

Carl:

They have a tool now called a shovel. Some are even designed for use with snow. Perhaps you could use such a tool to make space for the Nissan now rather than waiting for the Earth to get closer to the sun.

Vincent:

It seems the entire population adjoining the alleyway behind the garage has conspired to move all their snow, waist-high I might add, to the place where the Nissan needs to go. Since the snow came weeks ago, it has now frozen into a virtually immovable mountain. 

Could it be moved, it could be set afloat in the ocean as a small but impressive iceberg. Failing free access to explosives or a flame thrower, it will have to wait while I investigate this shovel tool you speak of…

Carl:

<I replied with the image above and the following caption>

Have flamethrower. Will travel.

Last week, I thought the migration of my website to a new hosting service provider had been completed without issue. In fact, everything seemed to be working as expected until I tried to make a new post. I received an error message indicating that I had reached the 262,000 file limit for a shared hosting server. My choices were to delete some of my 20-year posting history (not an option) or migrate the site again to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Fortunately, my new service provider did much of the heavy lifting, but even their experts failed to complete the transition without issues. Today, after several interactions with their support team, my site is back online and appears to be functioning normally, fingers crossed.

Jeanine and I are lucky to share a great dentist. In his free time, he relaxes by milling tree trunks into slabs of lumber. Last year, he gifted us a large quantity of spalted beech. Originally, I planned to use the wood to build the desk for Jeanine’s sanctuary, but the exceptional spalting proved too frenetic for such a large piece of furniture in a room meant for meditation and soothing energy. Instead, I used some of it to build a small bench for our mudroom.

As of this moment, my website is being hosted on a new service provider. It has taken me ten days to fully implement the migration, delayed primarily by the release and transfer of my domain name by my previous provider. For most websites, such a migration is not a big deal. Mine, with a twenty-year repository of daily photos, however, is considered quite large (40GB). Moving files of this size proved more than most common tools could handle and often triggered bandwidth or time-out limits on the hosting server. It is difficult to convey the frustration of having a transfer or backup fail after 20 hours of operation, with no clues as to why. I am a hardware engineer by training, and my software skills are modest at best. Suffice it to say that I’m not very comfortable editing PHP files, searching for and replacing old URLs with new ones in my SQL database, or re-indexing the Permalinks on my site. AI proved a helpful guide, but also offered some very questionable recommendations. I hope and trust that I will never have to undertake such a migration ever again.

Update: No sooner than completing the migration, I learned that my website has just exceeded the 262K file limit of a shared hosting environment and must now migrate to a virtual private server (VPS), Please expect several more days of downtime.

Jeanine proudly unveiled her second attempt at an Almond and Espresso Torte with Velvet Chocolate Cream. The first one didn’t make it past the inversion stage; in an instant, it transformed into what she later christened “Mish Mash Moo Super Bowl Dessert.”

As she groaned, “Oh no,” Kyle looked over and asked, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“There’s a problem,” she sighed.

But Nico, ever solution-oriented, jumped in with a quick fix—sprinkling chocolate chips and pecans across the wreckage to make it taste as good as it looked messy. A fine treat while we watched the Super Bowl with the boys.

Undeterred, Jeanine woke up early the next morning, baked the cake again (a little longer this time), and carefully inverted it on the tray before soaking it with espresso syrup. Success.

The torte was made for a band leader who’d flown all the way from California to Malden, Massachusetts, on his birthday, just to perform protest songs for the Malden Reads program. Jeanine, with her friend Barbara Blankenship, has been developing an idea called “Baking for Good,” a mini-nonprofit that brings baked treats to other nonprofits—either to celebrate milestones or to help with fundraising. This was their second “Baking for Good” project, and since the band leader loves almond-mocha cakes, they knew exactly what to make.

This post was contributed by Jeanine.

I worked with Kyle this weekend to help resolve the frozen pipe problem at his home in Medford. We have a multi-phase plan to address the issue. With any luck, we will be able to fix the problem before advancing to the progressively more invasive phases. Phase one involved taking down a kitchen wall cabinet and removing the drywall behind it. This allowed us to inspect the most suspect area where a great number of water pipes come into close contact with the cinder block outside wall of the basement. Opening up the wall allowed us to figure out where all the water lines run, a critical first step for further work. We replaced the wall cabinet but not the insulation. While this increases the amount of lost heat to the outside, it exposes the water lines to more of the interior warmth. When the weather improves, we will add insulation to the outside of the house to regain the lost efficiency and further increase the water line temperatures.

Today I was on assignment for the Concord Bridge, our local newspaper, to photograph the demolition of the White House. Part of the original Emerson Hospital campus, it is being removed to make room for a new emergency room. I shot from both the ground and the air with an eye to establishing the context.

Kyle shared this photo and map of his running group/route after completing their morning workout. Not recorded was the temperature or wind chill, which was brutally cold. We are informed that he followed the run with a long soak in the hot tub at his gym.

With early morning temperatures dipping into negative numbers, it was a good day to spend indoors. I made use of the time to sort out all of the computer and phone tech issues in the house. This involved updating and optimizing five Apple computers, two of which I had to erase and reinstall the operating system, and two iPhones. I easily spent 8 hours involved with the work, with 80% of the time spent waiting for downloads or reboots to complete. Jeanine was the major beneficiary of the effort as she got a new desktop computer with a 34″ ultra-wide, curved screen display for her office.

In the evening, we joined another couple for a movie night to see Hamnet. If you are looking for a feel-good flick, this is not it. If you are in the mood for an emotional rollercoaster about love, loss, and redemption, then this is your ticket, a really well-crafted story with exceptional acting.

I spent the better part of the day setting up and migrating data to a new Mac Studio computer. My laptop has all but run out of its 4TB of storage, and I prefer to keep my entire photo collection on an internal drive. The new computer is configured with 8TB, which should last for some time. My laptop will now be used exclusively for consulting work and travel.

Earlier in the week, I experimented with some photo-to-sketch rendering software and was amazed by the results. It helps to start with a high-quality photo.

Note to Maya: I need to take an updated professional headshot of you.

When I learned that our good friends who live down the street would be returning from the airport at 1 AM, I joined a neighbor to clear the snow from their driveway. I worked the driveway with my snowblower while she handled the walkway with a shovel. Having cleared our own driveway in four passes over two days, this was my first encounter with the full accumulation of the last several days. It pushed my battery-powered machine to the max and left me feeling no need for a trip to the gym.

Strenuous physical activity has a way of motivating my kidney stones to depart their temporary residence in my bladder. This morning, I produced the seven dwarfs pictured above, ranging in size from 1mm to 5.5mm. Passing kidney stones is no fun, but I would much rather have them outside my body than growing larger inside.

Speaking of snow clearing, the last pass on our driveway was done by Jeanine, who wanted to learn how to operate the snowblower. She did a very good job.

Pictured above is the first piece of furniture I ever made, admittedly a rather ambitious project. I was guided by an article and plans I found in Fine Woodworking magazine. During the ensuing 25 years, I would be hard-pressed to single out anything quite so challenging to build.

Last week, my brother sent me the image below of a nearly identical table built by the father of professional photographer Chris Gotz (https://www.chrisgotzphotography.com/). Either he was the author of the article in Fine Woodworking or was similarly inspired by it. My brother made this connection when he purchased some used turning tools from him. What are the odds? His son’s photographs are phenomenal, and I encourage you to visit his website. It appears that we have travelled to virtually all of the same locations in search of natural beauty. As I looked at his photographs, I felt an unexplainable connection to a person whom I had never met. I believe we are kindred spirits and hope to one day make his acquaintance.