My search for the ideal travel tripod is never-ending. Innovative designs and improved materials have led to increasingly compact and lightweight offerings. Over the years I have bought and sold something like twenty tripods. At any given time, I usually own two; an ultra-lightweight one for hiking/travel and a more substantial one that I use for everything else. It has been several years since I last investigated the market for new entrants and I went down that rabbit hole again this weekend. Ultimately, I ordered two new tripods. The Ulanzi & Coman pictured above features an integrated inverted ball head design and very ergonomic controls. It weighs 2.46 pounds and may replace my 3.21 pound Really Right Stuff Ascend. Pictured below, is a very unique tripod that I found on Kickstarter from a new company called Heipi. It features a tripod within a tripod design that offers great versatility and superior center column rigidity. It is expected to begin shipping early next year.

On the soccer pitch this morning, my team lost 2-1 . Our only goal came in the final few minutes of play and was extremely satisfying. With a comfortable 2-0 lead, their goalie was using every opportunity to kill the clock. His teammates would play the ball back to his feet and he would just stand there and wait for one of us to approach and force him to put the ball into play. This is a standard tactic for a team sitting on a lead. In this case, however, each time I would chase the ball down, the keeper would taunt me telling me that I would never get the ball away from him. The taunting only served to amplify my motivation. With the clock almost expired and the goalie killing more time, I began another approach but this time correctly guessed where he was going to play the ball out. I intercepted the pass, beat my defender, and crossed the ball into the box where a teammate tapped it in. I could not resist thanking the goalie for the motivation to make that play. He had nothing to say in response.

I returned home for a belated birthday brunch featuring frittatas and rice pudding. Nico tested positive for Covid yesterday and was not able to join the rest of the family.

Maya joined Kyle and me to work on his basement renovation project this morning. Even though she is nursing a torn rotator cuff, Maya proved very helpful. Of great amusement to me was listening and watching as the two tried to work out the placement of the recessed lighting that will be installed in the kitchen. After nearly an hour of discussion, mathematic calculations, and measurements, they realized the assignment was no more complicated than selecting which joist bays would get the light fixtures and roughing in wiring to those locations. We knocked off earlier than usual so I could catch the last Head of the Charles race of the day. I used my drone for a new photographic perspective of the action. In the evening, Jeanine and I attended the Conantum (name of our neighborhood) Harvest Dinner, a delightful pitch-in hosted in the barn of a nearby benefactor. It was a great opportunity to better get to know some of our neighbors.

I had several work meetings this morning, spent the early afternoon organizing and cleaning up the River House work site, and the late afternoon with Jeanine on a nice 2.2-mile hike at the Great Hill Recreation Area. We finished up back at the River House where we found the garage foundation wall backfill completed and the river aglow with the reflection of sunlit trees on the other side of the water. Below is a photo taken through the future window of our exercise room.

One of the companies that I consult for is Amide Technologies. Yesterday we took our first official company photo. The company has grown substantially since I joined in December of last year. At that time I was the fifth member of the team. The work continues to be really exciting and the team is a joy to work with.

Many followers of this blog know that I have what some might describe as an obsession with high-quality flashlights. My collection includes about two dozen or so high-end lithium-ion battery-powered LED lights. I keep one of these in my car at all times and today it paid for itself 100 times over. Scheduled for 2 pm today was the concrete pour for the garage foundation walls on the River House. A crew arrived earlier to strip the footing forms and set up the wall forms. Everything was ready according to schedule and all that remained was to pour the concrete. I will spare you the insanely frustrating details and skip forward three and a half hours to when the concrete finally arrives at 5:36 pm. The three-man crew had to wait idle the entire time and two of them had just left to grab some food and coffee when the mixer truck pulled up. Fortunately, they passed it on the road and circled back. I was on site from 4 pm and enjoyed watching golden light develop on the trees across the river from us as the sun began to set. If not for the calming effect of this view, my blood would have been boiling since I knew that sunset was at 5:57 pm. So the concrete arrives and we have 21 minutes to pour the walls before we are in darkness. The crew jumps into action. They work feverishly to get the concrete into the forms finishing by the headlights of the mixer truck. When the truck leaves they pull up a car to illuminate the work zone but it is far from sufficient. This is when my 1000 lumen Nitecore SRT6 flashlight saved the day, or rather extended the daylight. Under its illumination, the crew was able to trim the straightness of the walls, complete the trowel work, install the anchor bolts, and embed the hurricane straps in the concrete. After they left, I used it to see while fine tuning all of the above since these critical steps had been done hastily and not to my standard of execution. Unfortunately, this experience has only increased my appreciation for the value of a great flashlight and will only make it that much easier to justify future such purchases.

The next phase of our River House project is the foundation for the attached garage. It will be poured as a separate structure from the house connecting along the west wall. The new walls will be poured directly up to the concrete of the house foundation where rebar was left protruding to anchor this connection. I spent several hours yesterday, much of it in the rain, neatly hogging out two 8-inch wide, 10-foot channels from the exterior ICF insulation to expose the concrete for the interface. I thought this would be an easy job and was amazed by how tenaciously the EPS foam adhered to the concrete and how strong it was. The black material covering the insulation is Tuff-n-Dri waterproofing. The orange material is Warm-n-Dri, an insulating, water drainage, and protection board. It was necessary to complete this work in advance of the garage footing pour which happened today. It took less time, for a crew of three, to build the forms and pour the footings than it did for me to prep the walls.

While we were in Turkey, Matt Risinger and our architect Steve Baczek put together this YouTube video covering our ICF foundation and Glavel insulation.

Followers of this blog are aware that I have a chronic problem with kidney stones and that I have correlated the triggering of their passage with flying. Shortly after returning from Turkey a week ago, I began experiencing pain which has increased every day since. Last night, I decided that I would seek medical intervention on Monday if the pain did not subside. Mercifully, I passed the pictured stone this morning. It measured 5.6 x 4.5 mm, one of the largest for me so far. I apologize for including this topic on my blog but I do so to chronicle my history with stones which is helpful when discussing the topic with my doctors.

I spent the day working with Kyle on his basement renovation project. We managed to complete all the remaining framing work and did a provisional layout of the kitchen counters and appliances. I paused en route to his house to enjoy the fall colors which are approaching peak in our area. After working, I met up with my sister Alissa for dinner. She is passing through Boston on her way to California for a work function.

Jeanine has sent me several lovely photos from Belgium and it sounds like she is having a wonderful time. I look forward to her return and will invite her to complete this post with the details of her visit.

Guest Blogger: Jeanine Calabria

Forty years ago Frances Verstraete spent a year living with my family attending my local high school and graduating with the class of 1981.  I spent one month with her family in August of 1984 accompanying them on a car trip to Stockholm from Leuven where I learned how to drive a standard transmission and then spent time with my own Swedish relatives on their farm.  So this visit was long overdue and it was wonderful to see each of her siblings this time. Instead of launching their studies/careers they were retiring and tending grandchildren!   I enjoyed spending time touring Leuven by foot and electric bike and appreciated her taking me to the nearby Flemish historic towns of Bruges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges) and Mechlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechelen).  After my barrage of questions about historic buildings, she invited her sister Benedicte, who is a local guide of the city and former high school history teacher, to accompany us by e-bike .  Most notably, I learned that the city of Leuven is transforming all the old breweries/factories, military barracks and significant historic sites into housing – complete with affordable options for students and refugees.  Major destruction included the French Revolutionists that removed all religious statues and World WW I & II bombing of entire neighborhoods.  The University of Leuven Library was burned down in WW I and US higher education institutes were the major financial backers of the reconstruction. I recognized many universities that family or friends have attend; University of Cincinnati, Union College, Indiana University, and the Middlesex Boarding School (in Concord!) inscribed into the stonework.  I felt proud that my country had assisted with the rebuilding of this amazing structure. The tributes to victims of the Holocaust were sobering as I contemplate today’s rise in violent racist acts.  My favorite part of my week with her family was playing with her new grandson “Fil” and taking our morning walk with Bélan, her 10-year old Vizla rescue hound!  I left inspired by the complete transformation of the transportation system to promote biking over cars and how universal childcare subsidies makes a two-parent-working-family possible.

There are some things one does not expect to see in a grocery store. I think a shopper dressed as a chicken qualifies as one of them. At first, I thought the chicken was part of some kind of promotion. After trailing it for some time, I concluded that it was simply at the store to buy groceries. What I found most entertaining was how other shoppers were not the least bit curious about the chicken and went about their business as if there was nothing unusual about the situation.

After catching up on some work items for one of my clients, I jumped in the car and took off on a three-state road trip. Fall foliage and weather conditions were near perfect although the sky clouded over by late afternoon which diminished the color intensity of many of the photographs. Fall color closer to home should reach its peak this weekend giving Jeanine a chance to enjoy it when she returns from Belgium.

The effects of jet lag caught up with me today and I decided to take it easy. I spent a little time working on the River House and took a break to enjoy the fall color. In a future year, I will use the time-lapse camera I am using now to document construction to capture the entire fall foliage season as seen from our home.

While we were in Turkey, progress on the house continued. The basement walls were waterproofed for a second time; the first application did not have time to cure before rain washed some of it away. Drainage tile was installed around the exterior and interior perimeters of the foundation, the later terminating in a sump pump basin. The initial plan was to connect these loops to each other and to have a sump pump discharge to a location outside the 100 foot river boundary (per stipulations of our natural resources permit), not a very elegant solution. After excavation, however, we discovered that the foundation will be surrounded by clay on three sides and sand on the river side. Clay, I have learned, is almost entirely impermeable which means that three sides of our foundation, if properly graded, should never come into contact with water. The fourth side will naturally drain through the sand into the river. Due to these conditions, we have decided that it will not be necessary to install a sump pump at all. The exterior loop will drain any water that makes its way past the clay down to the river side where it will filter through the sand and down to the river. This is a very ideal passive drainage system. There is, however, one scenario we needed to plan for. During a severe flooding event, should the river rise above the level of the basement floor, it will pass through the sand in the other direction and start to exert hydraulic pressure on the slab which, at some point, could cause it to buckle. In this case, water will enter the interior drainage loop and come up through the sump basin which will serve as a pressure relief valve. This will protect the slab at the expense of letting water into the basement. This may seem counter intuitive, but repairing water damage is far easier than repairing a failed foundation slab. Should the river ever reach this level, which is 22 inches above the 100-year floodplain, we will use a high capacity gas powered pump (20,000 GPH) to evacuate the sump basin. This should buy us another several inches, possibly a foot of margin. Hopefully, we will never have to find out how much. In a time of global climate change, however, it only makes sense to plan for more severe flooding events. Also completed while we were away was the installation and compacting of the Glavel base on which the 6″ basement slap will be poured. This morning I visited the site and insulated any remaining gaps in the ICF while excavation for the garage foundation was completed.