For at least the second time, ice dams on our roof have caused leaks in the first-floor kitchen (and I suspect the second-floor master bedroom, too).

We have a slate roof, and a roof rake, and obviously these are not sufficient.

Anyone have particular experiences or recommendations to share?

Multiple unmistakable ones, as she laid across my lap and we played peekaboo.

It's times like these that keep us from exposing her on a hillside. (Today's been fine, but the night was a bit . . . awake.)

In other news, our thermostat (1) thought it was 5 degrees warmer than it actually is, which (2) was still 2 degrees under the setpoint. Running ( Read more... )

Our home renovation project is now done, done, done. The contractor installed the cabinet doors yesterday (sooner than we expected) and did a last little thing outside today. I should probably have waited for daylight, but I couldn't resist taking pictures tonight once I'd finished (some of) the other things I needed to do:

( Pictures! )

I've been pretty scarce lately because I've been busy and haven't had a lot of spare brain capacity, what with Chad being away for most of last week, travel for a baby shower last weekend, and work. But today I had an oral argument, the prep for which had been consuming a lot of that brain capacity, and so I'm letting myself relax a bit now.

Thus ( Read more... )

It was a nice cool cloudy day when I got home from work, and I actually had some energy for a change, so I went and attacked that triffid in the backyard.

(Actual gardeners probably don't want to look at these pictures.)

( four pictures )

This weekend I have contributed to the household by hacking back a set of overgrown shrubs in the backyard (and marking for Imminent Death a vicious triffid that snuck up on me; as soon as I get a pair of gloves, it is gone) and stuffing some high-density foam into the squooshed-by-use couch cushions.

This, however, is pretty much the extent of my ( Read more... )

Chad's put up a post with day-by-day pictures of the garage remodeling. Note the enormous frickin' hole in the front, where two egress-sized windows will going. (The contractors are just coming in and out through that each day, and bypassing the actual doors completely.)

The rest of the house is to the left in these pictures. A new door into the ( Read more... )

Went to a wedding this weekend of a couple who have the best how-they-met story I know. Shortly after my friend met her now-husband, she told the story of how she was going on a cruise for a cousin's wedding, and was asked to room with a friend of the family: yeah, it would be awkward to room with a strange guy, but it wasn't a fixup, they just ( Read more... )

We spent Tuesday through Friday in D.C.; I was there for a workshop (which was great), and Chad came with to make it a bit of a vacation. He wrote up the cultural part of the trip over at his blog-visiting the Sackler & Freer Museums, wandering the mall, and going to the Zoo. He also has a picture of the imperturbable mandarin ducks, and will be ( Read more... )

We saw comedian Stephen Wright perform here in Albany two weeks ago. Since I bought our tickets at the last minute, we ended up in orchestra seats, fifth row, which made more of a difference than I would have expected. (The man does, actually, smile on occasion.) The structure of the show alternated between strings of apparently-random one-liners ( Read more... )