I recently purchased a device that monitors and records carbon dioxide, temperature, and humidity levels. I am using it to improve air quality and comfort in our home. The top chart shows CO2 levels measured hourly over five days in our bedroom, while the bottom chart displays temperature. The CO2 pattern peaks every morning at 7 AM, driven by our respiration in the closed room. Optimal levels of CO2 are in the range of 400-800 ppm. Based on this information, I have programmed our ventilation system to increase fresh air from 5 AM to 7 AM. The reason for not leaving the system turned up all day is that it wastes energy. I will remeasure CO2 levels over the next week and refine the ventilation schedule as needed.
The temperature chart reflects the summertime programming of our HVAC system during a week with outdoor temps in the 90s. The AC starts running at 8 PM and cools the house to 66°F by bedtime (our optimal sleeping temperature). At 4 AM, it turns off, and the temperature ramps up to 71°F over the next 12 hours or so.
NERD ALERT: When I get some time, I will use this data to see how accurate my HVAC design calculations were.
Armed with a new 10 cubic foot yard cart that I picked up this morning, I set out to attack the first of four wood chip piles that now grace our property. It took twelve 5-gallon buckets to fill the cart, which equals 8 cubic feet. So much for the Gorilla brand marketing claim of ten. The density of Red Pine wood chips is ~33 pounds per cubic foot, making the cart total ~264 pounds. After an hour of work, I managed to install 8 carts’ worth of wood chips and was ready to call it a day. This puts my installation rate at one ton per hour. At this pace, it will take me 20 more days to conquer all four piles. When temperatures begin to drop a bit, I suspect I will be able to work for more than an hour a day. If nothing else, I should be in pretty good shape by the time my fall soccer season starts.
Our neighbors across the street were having twenty dead or nearly dead Red pines removed from their property today. I asked the tree company if we could have the wood chips. They were more than happy to dump them across the street rather than haul them across the county to their approved site. The darker batch of chips in the photo above came from a different neighbor who was also having tree work done today. In total, we received 15 tons of chips, now located in two massive piles on either side of the top of our driveway. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be getting a good workout as I spread these piles to where they are needed.
UPDATE: Since posting, the tree company asked if we could take another 6 tons, which are now distributed at the edges of our property near the street.
My blog serves many purposes. It is a family journal and archive. It is a creative outlet for my photography and writing. It is a vehicle for sharing ideas and documenting projects. And sometimes, it serves as a medical record. For this, I apologize to visitors who were hoping to find something else today. Recently, I documented Maya’s broken fifth metatarsal x-rays, and today, I am memorializing my passing of yet another kidney stone. This stone measured 1.5 x 1.0 mm and caused minimal pain. I added it to my collection of passed stones, numbering in the hundreds, but not before breaking it in half to examine the structure inside. What I discovered reminded me a little of a geode, the most common type of mineral formations with hollow insides. They are typically hollow, globular rock structures lined with crystals.
33 years ago today, I experienced more joy and happiness than I imagined possible. I had become a father. Having found the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, my greatest desire was to have a child with her. I was secretly hoping for a girl, but the instant the doctor announced Kyle’s gender, I could imagine nothing more perfect. I envisioned the future we would have together. I would teach him to build things, wrestle, play soccer, and share my love of camping and hiking. Looking back, we have done all those things and more.
An excellent student, athlete, and an entrepreneur at heart, he started his own company while still in high school and reinvented himself as a data engineer when the field of finance proved unsatisfying. Now he is beginning to generate passive income from a home rental business while dipping a toe in the sphere of AI engineering. All this, while traveling the world as a digital nomad working remotely from all over the globe. I could not be more proud of him for all he has achieved.
For two years, Kyle was the center of our world. Normally, a second child receives less attention because they have to share their parents with a sibling. In our case, Nico received a disproportionate amount of our focus as we attended to his special circumstance. Even at his very young age, Kyle seemed to understand this, and what’s more, he was a fierce advocate for and defender of his baby brother and remains his biggest supporter. When Maya arrived, Jeanine and I had had more than our fill of “boy energy” and were so ready to welcome a little girl to the family. To be honest, she became the focal point for everyone. Once again, Kyle was a doting big brother which is not to say that he did not occasionally torment his siblings as is the prerogative of all first born.
Although Kyle grew up during the most demanding period of my professional career, I always found time to attend his soccer matches and enjoyed the flair with which he played the game. Even more memorable were the three father-son adventures we embarked on together. The first, to Belize when he was 13. There we went spelunking, snorkeling, underground river rafting, and kite surfing in a tropical paradise. The second time, when he was 20, we trekked through Chile’s Torres Del Paine National Park, and then hiked Argentina’s Mount Fitz Roy and visited the Perito Moreno glacier, ending our trip in Buenos Aires. Finally, the year we spent working together on weekends to renovate the basement of the home he purchased in Medford. These “journeys,” afforded me a front row seat to Kyle’s evolution from boyhood to manhood and I will forever cherish that time spent together.
This afternoon, it was not too hot, not too sunny, and not too windy. Perfect conditions for a chore that I have been putting off for one of the above reasons for some time now. Window washing was never a priority in any of the other homes we have owned. Here, however, we are constantly looking out the windows, and the experience is made all the better when they are squeaky clean. The tool I use for this has a sponge on one side and a squeegee on the other. I mount it on a short pole for the first-floor windows and a long pole for the second-floor windows. These photos, courtesy of our security camera show the basic operation on our smallest windows. I completed 25 of 37 windows and will have to tackle the remaining dozen another time. It may not look like it, but this task is quite the upper body work out and I was happy to burn off some of the calories I ingested last night during the birthday feast for the boys.
This evening, we did a joint birthday celebration for Kyle (33) and Nico (31). Maya is just back from Norway, and Nico from Binghamton, NY. I cooked some steaks on the grill, and they were mighty fine if I don’t say so myself. Jeanine prepared fresh corn from Verrill Farm, some of the best we have ever had, as well as a tomato salad and chocolate peanut butter mousse for dessert. I am so grateful we can still hang out like this.
Jeanine just shared this photo from last Friday. Lucia is a neighbor who was visiting with her mother, brother, and dog. She took an interest in my shop, and I wound up coaching her in the construction of a swing seat that she hopes to hang in her backyard. I might have used a straight edge to draw the cut line, but I had to admire her method, which was much faster. I taught her how to safely use the miter saw and drill press, the latter required ensuring that her long hair never came close to the spinning chuck. She was quite pleased with her completed project.
My sister’s new book, “The Power of Impact Circles,” is now available. I ordered my copy on Amazon this morning, and it is expected to arrive next week. Our father, himself the author of two books, would be delighted to see that his eldest daughter and daughter-in-law have both joined him as published authors. I am also thinking of writing a book. I will call it “The Stupidity of Blogging for 20 Years – An Exercise in Daily Suffering.” In all seriousness, I have the utmost respect for all the authors in this family and encourage our next generation to carry on the tradition.
Now and again, we see something new on the Sudbury River. Today, a single boat towing 7 canoes passed by the house heading downstream. My guess is that is has something to do with the water chestnut eradication project that has been underway for several weeks. Our neighbor and friend, Dave Witherbee, was skippering the tow boat, and I will ask him about this the next time I see him. I am curious to know how one stops such a flotilla without creating a pileup. I suspect you have to do so very slowly.
Andy is both a teammate and a friend. He makes, repairs, and sells violins and violas professionally. This morning, he came over to use my bandsaw to cut through several $300 slabs of figured maple and a couple of spruce. Much of the work he does involves hand tools, and although he has a bandsaw, it was not large enough for this particular job. It was fun being in the shop again and working with him. I have taken a fairly long break after spending every day for nine months building the cabinetry for the house.
There are a pair of branches that overhang the river just outside our living room window. It is quite common to see all manner of birds perched there throughout the day. Never before, however, have I seen two herons share this prime hunting perch.
I spent nearly the whole day working on my website. I hired a Ukraine-based developer to perform a site-wide software upgrade and theme migration. He completed the work in short order, and I felt good about directing my business to their war-torn economy. He helped me figure out why a 14-month period of my blog is missing all the images (at that time, almost 15 years ago, I was hosting my images on a platform that has since gone belly up). I spent the balance of the day, recovering each of those images and reinserting them into the blog, a very time consuming and tedious job. I repaired 6 months worth in as many hours and hope to complete the job over the next few days.
I challenge observant viewers to identify the main difference between these two scenes. The novice will identify differences in pillow placement and chair orientation. Middle-of-the-road detectives might observe the addition of a wooden box on top of the coffee table. Only a true Sherlock-class sleuth will notice that the couches are different, and only by close examination of the seams.
When this custom-ordered piece was initially delivered back in April, we noticed that one of the three sections was not quite like the others. The color of the thread and orientation of the seam folds were different. It is the kind of thing that you do not notice at first, but once you’ve seen it, you can’t help but see it every time you look at the couch. To their credit, West Elm, the store where we placed the order, offered to give us a BIG refund or replace the set. We opted for the latter, and the replacement couch finally arrived today. This is likely the last couch we will ever own, and I am glad we opted to wait for a properly upholstered one rather that take the refund.
The “butterfly garden” that exists on the common land of our neighborhood has been overtaken by Purple Loosestrife, an invasive plant. While it may not be welcomed, it is certainly delightful to look at.
This evening, just before dusk, Jeanine and I went outside to watch the bats. It is mesmerizing to watch them fly to and fro, guided by their echolocation, darting here and there to capture mosquitoes and other flying insects. At some point, I would like to try photographing one in flight, a goal that will be next to impossible to achieve given their speed and the low light conditions.
For some time now, Jeanine has been wanting to plant a rose bush beneath our bedroom window. Today, after a trip to a local nursery, we satisfied that dream. Digging a suitable-sized hole (16″W x 16″D) in the highly compacted, rock-strewn soil on which our house was built took the better part of half an hour with the aid of a pickaxe. Jeanine is pictured above scooping out the last bits of clay by hand before adding compost and fertilizer. It remains to be seen how the new rose bush will fare in this setting, and all we can do at this point is continue to water and hope for the best.
This website is dedicated to sharing, with family and friends, the day-to-day adventures of the Calabria family.
