How old do I look? A new Microsoft program (How-Old.net)

After my 30 mile bike ride today, which resulted in a total of 94 hilly miles this week, I decided to try a new Microsoft program called:  "How old do I look?"
You provide a photo and the program does its calculations.  I couldn't wait!  53?  59 maybe?  I was so excited.

Here are the results:

Seventy-nine and forty-six?  I look 33 years older than my wife?  

Thank you Microsoft.  

Tomorrow, instead of riding 30 miles on my bike, I'm going to play Bingo.

This one is a little better, I guess.

Holy crap!!!!

A few days later I did some more. This is my favorite.  My brother in law didn't even register as a face!  I can't wait to tell him about this.  My sister was almost exactly the correct age.  I am finally younger than my wife Vicky, by a whopping nine years.

But the best is that the mesquite plant was forty-three years old.

Mystery of the kinky dollhouse

In 1976, for my son Jules' Christmas present, I built him a dollhouse.

I built it to be very sturdy.  The idea was that a child could stand on it and it would not be destroyed.

He played with it, then my daughter Emily played with it, then it sat lonely and unplayed with for several years until grandchildren came along.

And then it got new life.  Ian, Adam, and Soren all have played with it, although all have now grown out of it.  Sebastian probably will too when he comes.

And so do our granddaughters.

Last Sunday we had them out to the house, and the oldest carefully re-arranged the furniture, as she so often does after the "boys mess it up."

And this is what she found.  The momma doll in handcuffs!

Now, how weird is that?

The weirdest part is that I have no idea who put these handcuffs on the momma doll.  Nor do we have any idea where they came from.

Somebody played a wonderful joke.  We'd like to know who, but maybe not knowing is just as fun.

Vicky and I talked today about how the dollhouse might be played with for another three or so years, and then it will once again sit lonely until maybe, in some 20 years or so, great grandchildren might come along and want to arrange the furniture.  That made both of us so happy to think about.

Summer Project #3: Moving the propane tanks

When I purchased our home on Whidbey Island nine years ago (nine years?  It has been nine years?), it needed a new furnace.  Because electric heat was much more expensive than heating with gas in Bloomington, IL, where I lived, I had a propane furnace installed, using the (erroneous) logic that it was just a different form of gas and would be relatively inexpensive like gas was in Bloomington.  Wrong.

Heating with propane is not like heating with natural gas.  It is WAY more expensive.

But, that's what you get when you live on an island.  There aren't ways of transporting natural gas to an island.  Everyone here uses either propane or electricity or, if you have access to free wood and want to deal with putting wood on a fire all day, with wood stoves. 

Thankfully I had two wood-burning stoves installed so that most of the heat for the house could be produced by the trees that fell in our yard.  We like heating with wood.  It gives a warm feeling in addition to a warm feeling.  And oddly, it feels a little healthier, because we have to expend energy moving wood to the porch and then to the stoves.  Every little bit of exercise helps I think.

When the propane system was installed I was still living in Bloomington.  The large tanks were placed right outside the entrance to the home.  These two large steel barrels.  Very unattractive.  Even the large plants that were grown to hide them didn't work.  So there they were, nine years later, except rustier and even less attractive.

Time for them to be moved.  Summer Project #3.

Where to?

One option was to the back of the house.  But we didn't like that solution because we spend most of our time looking at the back of our house.  We decided they should go as far away from our views as possible, and still be close enough that the hoses that filled them could reach.

We also got freshly-painted tanks.  

Looks finished, but not.  The spot where the tanks had been needed cleaning up and repainting.

There was a vent for the crawlspace behind the tanks.  This vent needed to be closed for safety reasons.  We could have patched it from the outside, but that would have looked cheap.  So this meant patching it from under the house.

Patching this vent was a two-person job.  My job was to crawl, commando style, under the house with the tools, through cobwebs, my knees being skinned on rocks, being scratched with fiberglass insulation, working at an impossibly difficult angle.

Vicky's job was to take photos of my butt.

The new pipes needed painting.

The final piece was that the blue lids just had to go.

Finis!  

Doesn't it look so much better to have them hidden!

On to the next project!

Summer Project #2: Gravel for the driveway

Part of living on Whidbey Island is dealing with driveway issues.

I don't think many people have something called "driveway issues," but when you live in a rural area surrounded by Douglas Fir trees you have driveway issues.  Specifically, every few years the gravel gets buried underneath the debris that the Douglas Fir trees produce.  Cutting back on a number of these trees constituted Summer Project #1.  Trees are our special friends on Whidbey Island, but they also require a great deal of maintenance (and they also require patience as frequently they fall and knock out our power).

When I moved to Whidbey Island eight years ago (can it really be that long ago?) I had the driveway re-graveled.  Eight years later, much of it needed to be redone.  I guess it is an every seven-eight year thing.

So we had gravel brought in and spread. Looks so nice.  On to Summer Project #3!