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.