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12 Dec 2004:
Lynn and I had a weekend "escape" to Florida recently. I spent two weeks in Tampa on a business trip. During the weekend in between, Lynn flew down to meet me and we both headed out to the Marriott resort on Clearwater Beach on the Gulf Coast, a bit north of St. Petersburg. These pictures are from Saturday and Sunday of the weekend.
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27 Nov 2004:
Thanksgiving is over, and the mad Christmas season has begun. What a crazy holiday world we've created. Some folks are trying to take back Christmas from the commercial world, and they may have a good idea here...
We had a great Thanksgiving over at my sister Gerry's house. We alternate hosting, and last year was memorable at our house because the oven broke and dinner was "delayed" a bit! This year was on time - actually early! After dinner we all walked down to the pond to Dad's and Flo's bench for a group photo. We chipped in together and bought a dedication bench down on the parkway around the west side of Horn Pond. The bench dedication says:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
FLORENCE "MIMI" KEHOE
FRANK "GRAMPY" VOGT
This group photo was taken at the bench on Thanksgiving Day (hooray for shutter timers!).... Front Row: David, Gerry, Kate, Megan. Back Row: Gene, Sarah, Lynn, and Pat (a friend of Lynn's from work).
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14 November 2004:
Wow... I've been neglecting this web site lately, haven't I? Time to update the news page, for sure. Let's see, what's been happening... oh yeah... The Red Sox WON! Boy did they ever! Eighty-six years of frustration (only 51 for me) evaporated in the blink of an eye. And the way they did it made it even more sweet. I don't watch much baseball on TV during the regular season; there's too much other stuff to do. So mostly I listen on radio when I'm doing something else (driving, mowing the lawn, etc.) But towards the end of the season, when it gets interesting, I start watching more games on TV when possible, and if the Red Sox make the playoffs I definitely watch. As the season wound down and it became clear that Boston wouldn't catch New York for the AL-East championship, a lot of people were saying that the only meaningful road to the World Series would be through New York, but I wasn't so sure. Lots of New Englanders - myself included - are (or rather WERE) nervous pessimists when it comes to baseball.
The first series - against the Anaheim Angels - was a dream come true. A three-game sweep! Boy was that sweet! Then we had to wait to see who we'd play next; New York or Minnesota. We only had to wait a day, as the hated Yankees beat Twins 3 games to 1. On to New York. After the first three games there was a lot of doom-and-gloom-sayers, myself included. We'd been pre-conditioned for 86 years to expect this. But I kept watching.... and they kept winning. Lose the first 3, then win the next 4 - biggest comeback in the history of baseball (or if you're a Yankees fan, biggest choke/collapse in the history of baseball!). Each of those games (except for the last) was a nail-biter, and it all could've fallen apart at any time, but it didn't. Nervous Pessimists have a terrible time watching games like this, but watch we did (81mg aspirin helps a lot), and win we did! On to the World Series!
After that NY series, the World Series to some felt like an anti-climax, but not to me. I enjoyed every game. Game 1 was a squeaker (or rather a comedy of errors), settled only towards the end. The rest of the games had decent margins of victory, but not for a Red Sox fan who had watched 1967, and 1975, and 1978, and 1986, and 2003. As each game got closer to the 9th inning, I was on the edge of my seat each time... and when Foulke tossed an underhand grapefruit to Mientkiewicz to end the 4th game and win the series, a weight lifted. The Boston Red Sox, ever the bridesmaids, are the 2004 World Champions...
The baseball playoffs consumed a lot of nights and weekends around the Family TreeHouse this fall, but other things were happening as well. Contrary to expectations, the fall colors this year were spectacular. Lots of wet weather for the last half of the summer must make the difference. I also managed to get to a late-season Red Sox game with Megan and a couple of guys from work in September - we saw the Red Sox play the Orioles on September 20th... unfortunately the Red Sox lost, and it was in the heat of their race to catch the Yankees for the AL-East crown, so it was disappointing. We also had an October weekend visit from our great friends from Maine, Martha and Gary, which included a visit to the Franklin Park Zoo. We were also honored to be invited to a 30th anniversary celebration and renewal of vows for our dear friends Peter & Linda from Rhode Island. They asked me to take pictures for them so I did my best. I also spent the week of 25 October in Tullahoma, Tennessee, at a conference. Tullahoma is not far from Lynchburg (the home of Jack Daniel's Distillery), but we didn't make the pilgrimage this trip (we have in the past). And I got home from the TN trip in time to plan and execute our annual Halloween decorations this year - pretty much the same as last year and the years before.
There was a planetary conjunction on the morning of 9 November this year - Venus, Jupiter, and the moon lined up close together early in the morning on the southeastern horizon. I set my alarm for 5am in the morning to see if it was a clear morning, and it was - crisp, cold, and crystal clear. So I dragged the telescope and camera - and my butt - outside. Turns out the telescope was too powerful - I could only get one item at a time in the telescope's field of view - but the plain camera on a tripod was perfect. This shot was taken at 5:49 am using the stock 18-55mm lens set at 31mm, with a 5-second exposure, at f/5.6 aperture. It's looking ESE over a neighbor's chimney. Venus is lowest, then Jupiter, then the moon (duh). The star Gamma Virginis (in the constellation Virgo) is ever-so-faintly visible to the left of Jupiter, same height (it is much more visible on the original - this image is reduced to 33% of the original and uses 25x JPEG compression).
Finally, we got a surprise here at the Family TreeHouse the day after Veteran's Day - snow! About 6-8 inches of it in our area, which was close to the max for the Boston area - we won the snow lottery! It's a little bit early for the white stuff; I didn't have the 2nd half of the garage cleaned out for my car, which also means the snow blower was still buried behind summer tools and clutter, so I removed the white stuff the old-fashioned way - with shovels. Then I spent Saturday and Sunday cleaning and re-arranging the garage so the snow blower is ready and both cars fit inside. That means it won't snow again until March, right?
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12 September 2004:
Pictures from Tim's visit.... Each year (from 1996-1999) for 3 weeks we hosted German exchange students through Megan and Audrey's high school. One of the 1996 exchange students (Tim) has kept in touch over the years and is now doing a 6 month university internship (in Information Technology) in PA. He drove up to Woburn for the weekend to visit. We spent some time in Boston yesterday, and treated him to a New England lobster and steamers feast last night!
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01 September 2004:
We had another troubling incident with our dog Buddy, usually the sweetest mutt in the world. Read about it here...
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01 August 2004:
It took a while, but I finished putting a small subset of our Irish photos on-line. You can read the illustrated and hot-linked journal with picture thumbnails in with the text (click on the thumbnail to get a larger picture) here, or you can view pictures in the scrapbook here. The TRAVEL page has been modified to include my journals from both the 1994 trip to Ireland and the more recent 2004 trip (along with the journals of almost all our travels in Europe during the period 1991-1995 and beyond).
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13 July 2004:
We're back from our anniversary trip to Ireland! We had a WONDERFUL time - didn't want to come home. Lots of stories and memories, visited with lots of cousins and took TONS of pictures (over 1400 - I love digital cameras!). The ScrapBook has the first installment of the trip record. It'll take me a while to compile it all so check back often!
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08 June 2004:
The transit of Venus has arrived! I set up my Celestron F80 EQ WA (here's what it looks like) with a newly purchased solar filter on the deck early this morning, and got treated to a great astronomy show! Pictures are here....
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15 May 2004:
Once again I've been neglectful of the site for far too long. I guess all the spring yard work and traveling for business has kept my mind off things like this.
We threw a party for Megan to celebrate her graduation a few weeks ago. Hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken on the grille, lots of salad and veggies and munchies, a quarter-keg of Sam Adams Lager, and a giant sheet cake from The Sweet Spot bakery. Yum! Though Lynn and I couldn't eat most of the fare - we've started the Atkins diet, which means drastically reduced carbohydrate intake; no beer, no munchies, no cake, no buns for the hamburgers, etc. It's working for me, so far. I've dropped 18 pounds in about 4 weeks.
We've started the landscaping portion of the section of the back yard with the pergola. I dug trenches for the electrical outlets and speaker wires. I'm having Audrey's beau Jake do the electrical work since he knows the code and I would have to look it all up. Then we'll put in the raised beds, truck in a ton of loam, put down patio bricks, then plant flowers and grass.
May is a heavy travel month for me. I was down in Charlottesville VA the first week, then this coming week I'm in McLean VA all week, and the week after I'm in Greenbelt MD for the week.
Megan's heavy on the apartment hunt with her soon-to-be roommate. They're looking for something in NH but are having a tough time finding something in their price range that accepts cats. It's tough to hunt for an apartment when you're working full-time.
Lynn's still having a ball at the Quilt Shop where she works. It feeds her quilting addiction, and she gets paid too! She and I are both excited and gearing up for our trip to Ireland in June & July. I spent most of March and a chunk of April scanning in old slides from my previous trips to Ireland, and there was a lot of repair required because the emulsions had cracked and changed color. I don't want to have to do that again, so we bought a Canon EOS Digital Rebel digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera for the trip. It's far more capable than our ancient Pentax SpotMatic SLRs, and there's no film so no developing, and no slides to wither and age!
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01 Apr 2004:
She made it! It's done! Over! No April Fool's joke! Five and a half years in the making! Megan is now an official Baccalaureate recipient! She has a Bachelor of Music in Sound Recording Technology degree from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, She knew she had completed all the requirements and qualified for a diploma back at the beginning of March, but it took this long (out of cycle, I guess) to get the diploma printed up. Here it is....
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21 Mar 2004:
Wow! Have I been neglectful of this web site or what? Time just got away from me there. It has been a slow and quiet winter, but a few things did transpire..... We've had two birthdays (mine, and Audrey's), Lynn and I traveled to Portland ME to visit friends, I did a business trip to Charlottesville VA during a winter storm (paralyzed Charlottesville even though it was a trivial storm to a New Englander), we hosted our annual St. Valentine's Day couples dinner party (a tradition that goes back at least a few years), and I made another business trip to DC for a seminar (I'm heading to Florida this week for my third business trip of the year).
Lynn and I are also planning our vacation this summer around our 30th wedding anniversary - we're going back to Ireland! This will be Lynn's 3rd time there, and my 5th (1965, 1973, 1984, 1994, 2004, Lynn did the last 3 with me). We'll be staying with relatives in County Kerry, sightseeing and traveling around to touch base with more relatives, do some genealogy research, and find traditional Irish music! We'll tip a few pints of Guinness too, I suspect. And the really fun part is that my sister and her husband will be joining us! It'll be their first trip over so we'll have fun showing them the sights and introducing them to all the relatives.
The weather has been cold but dry this winter at the Family TreeHouse. We had 8-10 inches of snow last week, but that was the first significant snowfall since early December. It has been cold, though. We had a stretch of 2-3 weeks in January and February where it never came close to freezing, and usually stayed at or below zero (Fahrenheit) all day. A few mornings the thermometer on the deck (the north side of the house) registered 13 degrees below zero! Before our snow last week we had had a taste of spring, with one day reaching 60 degrees, before it dropped back in the teens. Spring arrived yesterday according to the calendar, but it doesn't look it yet around these parts.
I've also started upgrading my computer's capabilities so I can start processing video. First I bought a Dazzle Digital Video Creator 150 (DVC 150), which takes analog video input (from a camcorder or a VCR or broadcast video) and digitizes it in real time and stores it on the computer hard disk. It came with software to do digital video editing. Next I bought a DVD burner (Sony DRU-530A). Next I need to get the newer version of the digital video editing software (should be out this month) and then I'll be able to take all our camcorder videos from Europe (or new ones from Ireland this summer) and make them into DVDs!
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09 Jan 2004:
We survived the holidays. Lots of parties, lots of visiting, lots of food, lots of everything! The usual build-up to the day was stressful, but not as stressful as in years past. In a new tradition we've adopted these past few years (now that we're all adults) we tried to go out to the movies on Christmas Eve, but all the cinemas started their last show around 8pm (not last year!) and Megan had to work late, so we stayed home and played Lord of the Rings Edition Trivial Pursuit instead! Christmas Day had its usual leisurely pace (sleep late, do stockings, eat breakfast, do presents one at a time for the rest of the day), and we enjoyed our family's traditional Christmas Day breakfast (lox, bagels, and salmon-flavored cream cheese). We had visitors from Maine & NH around noonish (Lynn's sister and family, and her kids and families), and in the late afternoon we all went to my sister's house down the street.
New Year's was also in tradition - we went to a house party in town hosted by some friends. They've hosted this New Year's Eve party for a number of years now, and we always enjoy ourselves. We bring the entertainment - a VHS video copy of a cult classic German New Year's Eve TV show - Dinner For One.
I had back-to-back 4-day weekends (Thursday holidays, took both Fridays off) and loved every minute of it! It was tough working a full week again!
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2003 |
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18 Dec 2003:
It's here.... the 2003 edition of the VOGT Family Christmas newsletter is on-line...
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05 Dec 2003:
Winter's here. We've had a week of frigid temperatures (10-15 °F in the mornings) with one horrendous morning commute caused by a half inch of snow at exactly the wrong time, unannounced and unexpected so the road crews were caught with the proverbial "pants down." And now, we're looking at a 48 hour storm this weekend, with predictions of up to 20 inches of snow by Sunday afternoon. Time will tell. I'm ready. I had the old snow-blower in for its triennial tune-up back in November, and I pounded my snow stakes in the ground tonight so I know where the driveway and sidewalk edges are in the snow. I also gave all the shovels (and the inside of the snow-blower chamber) a coat of silicone to make things slippery.
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24 Nov 2003:
I think I can declare the pergola complete. I added the vertical "roof" slats so whatever grows up over there can hang on to something, and Lynn and I designed climbing trellises for either end so whatever grows up there can GET up there! Here's what it finally looks like. We'll be re-landscaping the "sand-bar" that it sits on next spring.
We're also gearing up for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, doing some heavy house cleaning (it needed it) and such. Is it me or has Christmas crept into the Halloween season this year? I always thought it was bad but it seems much worse now. Christmas TV ads used to show up Thanksgiving night, but this year I saw some before Halloween! Too much!! We've always been disgusted by the commercialization of Halloween, with people duped into putting up Halloween decorations for the month before the day itself, so much so that we purposefully do not set up our front door decorations and sound system until the day of Halloween - and take them down that night after trick-or-treating is over. Well now Christmas is 10 times worse! Maybe we should wait until Christmas eve to put up our lights and decorations - in protest!
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12 Nov 2003:
Eclipse Pictures! We had a total eclipse of the moon Saturday (8 Nov 2003), so I set up my two telescopes in the driveway to watch the show in style. One of the telescopes (L.L.Bean version of the Celestron FirstScope F80 EQ WA) has a camera adapter that fits my old Pentax SpotMatic 35mm SLR camera (here's what it looks like), so that telescope was set up for picture-taking, and the Meade ETX was set up for eyeball viewing. Various friends and relations stopped by during the show (~6pm through ~9:30pm, with totality occurring around 8pm) and we had an eclipse viewing party out in the driveway in the cold and semi-dark - the streetlight at the end of the driveway gave us more than enough light. I shot five rolls of 800 ASA film (no digital camera to fit the telescope so I had to revert back to old-fashioned film and processing), taking 6-8 snaps at various stages of the eclipse. I varied the shutter speed from 1/15th of a second (during the very beginning of the eclipse) to 8-10 seconds time exposure during totality and near-totality. Here's a sample of the results, in a collage of the best exposures from each of the thirteen stages I captured. Here's what the large collage looks like, and here's what the small one looks like.
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19 Oct 2003:
More visitors. The son of a friend from Germany stayed with us for a few days while he was in the area. Actually, he had quite a trip planned, including attending Bruce Springsteen's last tour concert in Shea Stadium in New York, side trips to Maine, Boston, and other places, and a New York Rangers game in Madison Square Garden! While he was here visiting us, he learned all about baseball as the Red Sox made a good show of it in the American League Championship Series.
Progress on the pergola. After getting all eight posts dug and set, I bought six 10-foot 2x4's for the width-wise braces, and ordered six 20-foot 2x8's for the length-wise braces. I had to have them delivered because I don't have (or have access to) a vehicle that could manage 20-foot boards. Once the width-wise braces were up, Lynn designed a scroll-cut template for the length-wise braces and I marked and cut the design out with a jig-saw (another story there - I had to buy a new jig-saw because my old one was SO old [~30 yrs old] that no-one made blades for it anymore!). With the length-wise boards ready, I hoisted them up on the width-wise braces and bolted them into place. Sounds straight-forward enough, but it took two days to do all this!! Once all was ready, I trimmed the top of the posts to have the same bevel as the posts on our deck and inserted the phantom center post-top in the middle. Now all that is needed are the slats for the top (not sure exactly what we want there, yet) and the two eye-bolts to hold the hammock! Here's what it looks like now. Come spring, we'll begin the landscaping project for the area, which will include raised beds, a bubbling water-thingie, patio bricks under the pergola itself and grass elsewhere. I'm petitioning for a nice shed too, up against the back of the garage...
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03 Oct 2003:
Lynn and I just got back from a quick trip to Colorado. I had business in Colorado Springs, so Lynn came with me and after my meetings we did some sight-seeing (Garden of the Gods, Cave of the Winds) and visited some friends in the Springs. It was a short trip (Sunday - Thursday, with Sunday and Thursday tied up with travel) but it was enjoyable, and we also got to visit with my sister and her family on Sunday and on Wednesday afternoon. I wasn't able to buy tickets on the same flights (or even the same airline) for Lynn, so we flew different routes and planes out there and back. A bit of a bummer, but we're both seasoned travelers so it didn't bother us much.
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23 Sep 2003:
We had visitors! We got a call Sunday from an Irish cousin who was in Boston for the summer and was heading home to the Tralee area after a week's vacation in Mexico. I picked Kathryn and her boyfriend Dave up at the airport Monday night and they came back to the house to meet their extended American family (my sisters and members of their family came over to meet the cousin). They stayed overnight, then the three of us went into Boston Tuesday (I played hookey from work) to visit the John F Kennedy Museum and Library on Columbia Point in Boston. We spent most of the afternoon there (a beautiful museum that does justice to the legacy) and then after an hour or so at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, it was off to the airport again so they could catch their plane home. It was too short a visit, but they were great people and a pleasure to host! We hope they come back to visit soon!!
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21 Sep 2003:
The transformation of the former swimming pool area has begun! What once held a 16x32 foot above ground swimming pool (that fatigued and partially collapsed 2 summers ago and was disassembled and removed) will one day hold a patio with pergola and flower beds and other garden pleasantries. So far I've got six of the eight posts placed and set. Two more and then I can begin the overhead woodwork. Hopefully it'll be done by the time the snow flies. Then in spring we can begin setting the raised flowerbeds and perhaps a koi pool with a fountain or some kind of bubbling water source. Some patio bricks here, some grass there, and no-one would ever know a pool once graced the area!
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01 Sep 2003:
Blowing right by August.... we're into September already! Happy Labor Day! August was mostly a low-key month for us, but we did take a vacation in August that was fun! Lynn, Gene, Megan, and the dog Buddy (Audrey was on vacation with her beau and his family in NH) took a road trip to Prince Edward Island (PEI) in Canada. Pictures and info are in the Scrapbook ...
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27 July 2003:
Hey! Retro is in, right? Well, here's a retro memory if there ever was one. This is a copy of the VOGT Family TreeHouse web site from 1997! This is what the VOGT Family TreeHouse used to look like! Don't expect all the external links to work, or for the email addresses to be up-to-date. All I did was pull it off an archive CD and dump it onto my bulk web site. Enjoy!
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23 July 2003:
I'm so excited! I've been trying to waterproof the new deck since early April (with Thompson's WaterSeal) but with the incredibly wet April-May spring we've had, and then my traveling on business all of June, I haven't been able to get 4 straight days of dry weather - with me at home - to do it (the can instructions say 2 days to dry out the wood first, and 2 more days to let the waterproofing soak in). We finally got it done last weekend, and boy does that rain make beautiful beads!! Lynn did the inside of the railings from the deck side, and I did the outside of the railings from scaffolding made from stepladders and planks. Then I did the deck itself and the latticework with the garden tank pump sprayer (recommended in the instructions on the can, and boy does it work great). Now this week we're back to rain Wed-Fri, so it gets a good workout!
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12 July 2003:
I finally caught up with my network changes here at the Family TreeHouse, and updated the network diagram which is found amongst the computer information on my Computers page. Back last spring (early spring) I completed a consolidation of my house networking distribution system. I bought some new equipment, added some capability, and gathered all the pieces together in one place and mounted it all on a home-grown distribution panel. It made things easier to work on and re-configure when I needed to, and I like the way it came out! Just recently, Comcast (my internet service provider) sent me a new cable modem to replace the old finned '57 Chevy of a cable modem that I was using, so that, plus the changes I had made previously, prompted me to update the network diagram and description.
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04 July 2003:
Happy Independence Day to you! Happy Anniversary to us! Lynn and I were married on the 4th of July 29 years ago. They tell us it was a hot sticky day back in 1974, but neither of us noticed! Twenty-nine years later, its supposed to be hot and sticky again today. 'Tis the season, I guess!
I've just finished the month from hell, as far as traveling goes. Because my beard is gray, I was asked to join a gray-beard team to travel around the country and evaluate sites for placement of some system services. I spent the first week in June (including Sunday the 1st) in DC, then the second week was mostly home, preparing for the visits. The third week started on Sunday again - we flew to Tampa FL, then Miami FL, then Fayetteville NC, then Norfolk VA, and then home. Fourth week also started on Sunday - First to Omaha NE, then Denver CO, then Colorado Springs CO, then back to Denver CO, and then home on Wednesday Out again at 5AM the next day (Thursday) for 2 days in DC, then all this past week in DC as well. Twenty flight segments in the month (9 in one week!).
We also just went through ANOTHER merger resulting in an internet service provider name change..... this time to COMCAST.NET (Highway1 to MediaOne to AT&T to Comcast, all without ever actually switching ISPs). This should have no impact on you - the web site and email addresses remain the same and are tied to my domain name. The only problem people might have is if they were accessing the Family TreeHouse via it's AT&T URL rather than the Family TreeHouse domain name. Be sure to use https://familytreehouse.net and all will be well through any and all name changes.
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31 May 2003:
The end of May already! I've put up the photos from Lynn's Surprise Birthday Party on the Fridge, so you can see how the revelries unfolded! We're also in the midst of about a fortnight of damp wet weather, with no break in sight.... we're supposed to get a Nor'Easter tomorrow, complete with torrential rain and wind. We've had no spring to speak of, we'll probably switch from cold and damp to hot and humid with no break in between! It's been so wet I haven't gotten 4 days in a row without rain to waterproof the new deck (two days to let it dry out, and two days to let the waterproofing dry). Some day!
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23 May 2003:
We survived the double-birthdays! We have two back-to-back birthdays in May (Megan, and Lynn) and we survived them both. Megan's birthday is getting easier to deal with now that she's living away from home. We buy her dinner out and some presents! ;) Lynn turned the big five-oh this year though, so I did my best to arrange a surprise party for her. We all went out to eat as a family, and while we were out my sister and a friend snuck into the house, hid all the clutter (if I had done any tidying up ahead of time it would have given it away), decorated the house, and let all the guests in. Then we returned from dinner and they all yelled surprise! I think we surprised her, but you never know. A great time was had by all. I'll put the pictures up on the fridge in the scrapbook soon.
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11 May 2003:
As Megan winds down her college career, she had her last two choral concerts on last Sunday and this past Friday. I finally got my finicky 1394 (FireWire) board to hold a connection to the camcorder long enough to digitize the Gloria movement from Beethoven's Mass that has Megan's solo in it. These are from Friday night's concert at Durgin Hall at UMass Lowell. Murphy - as in Murphy's Law - struck again (as he often does when I try to tape one of my daughters' performances) - we picked seats on the right side of the auditorium based on our experience from last Sunday's performance in the recital hall, thinking we'd get a clear filming view of Megan during her solo. Wouldn't you know, they switched sides for the solos in the auditorium, so Megan was all the way across the stage from us, and there was this bar thingie in the way too. She knew where we were so she positioned herself as best she could, and the film came out okay... considering.
The first is a 10.8 MB file containing all 9:30 of the Gloria movement in decent (but not highest) fidelity. The second is a higher fidelity 5.9 MB excerpt from above that has just Megan's solo part (1:25). These are hefty-sized files (and they are WMV files, which require the Windows Media Viewer - should come standard with any Windows machine). Because of the size, those without LAN, cable-modem, or high-end DSL internet access may have to wait a bit to download them.
CLICK HERE to download the first file (full Gloria movement, 10.8 MB WMV file). CLICK HERE to download the second file (solo excerpt, 5.9 MB WMV file)
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5 April 2003:
With sadness we tell of the death of Audrey's ferret Oscar last Thursday night. Oscar was Audrey's first ferret, he was about 4 years old. Oscar had developed an intestinal blockage last week, and had surgery to correct that, but during the surgery they found cancerous tumors. He seemed to be recovering from the surgery well, but the tumors were a time bomb. He was in unusual distress Thursday night, and died quietly in Audrey's lap that night.
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30 March 2003:
Happy Spring!! We can officially declare that spring has once again arrived at the Family TreeHouse!! The crocuses were a good hint that spring was on its way, but the spring peepers were heard for the first time last night over in the wetlands across the street!! Soon, the cacophony will be amazing. Spring has officially arrived! Let's hope the peepers don't get frostbite tonight.... it's supposed to snow tonight.... WAAHHHH!!!
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29 March 2003:
It's been a slow end to winter and a slow start to spring at the Family TreeHouse. Our snow has finally melted (though some late season flurries are forecast for this weekend... booo!), and our early crocuses have started to bud and bloom. I raked the beach off the front lawn last weekend - a tough winter's road sand re-located to the front lawn by the snow-blower. I also dropped the lawn-mower of for its pre-season tune-up, ever the optimist I am! I even pulled up the snow stakes at the corners of the driveway and along the front walk and the sidewalk - if it snows again I'll never find the driveway with the snow-blower! All in all, though, I'm tired of dealing with snow and ice and will be glad to get back to yard work.... at least for awhile! I've also moved the What's New entries for 2002 over to the What's New Archives (link to the archives is at the bottom of this page), which shortens this page considerably so it loads quicker. Spring is the time for spring cleaning on the web too!
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23 February 2003:
Not much happening at the Family TreeHouse. We survived the Blizzard of '03 with no problems. Boston got 27.4 inches of snow, breaking the all-time record for snow from one storm by 3-tenths of an inch. The great Blizzard of '78 dumped 27.1 inches, but it had much higher and sustained winds, an enormous high tide causing flooding, and the '78 snow was heavy, wet, and dense, whereas the snow last week was as light and fluffy as I've ever seen it. There really was no comparison between the storms. Click here to see a snapshot of the snow - so fine and dry it was sifting through the gaps in the boards on the deck. Click here to see snow piled along the driveway, taller than the car... (return to top) |
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09 February 2003:
New pictures in the ScrapBook! I finally collected and documented a set of pictures from our recent trip to San Francisco. I had a business trip out there for a week, and Lynn came with me to take a break from the frigid New England winter. It was a great break and we had a great time.
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26 January 2003:
The surprises keep on coming. I had thought my sister and her husband were coming over for cake and ice cream last night. They did, along with about 20 other friends and neighbors. Lots of fun! Lynn had told everyone to bring a six-pack of Dinkel Acker; most did, and we drank most of it last night! We did have cake and ice cream, and a mini-concert by Megan, Audrey, and friends, and a grand time was had by all! Thanks, Lynn!! (return to top) |
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25 January 2003:
The birthday boy turns fifty! As some of you may know, I celebrated my 50th birthday recently. Half a century! Wow! Unlike some folks I know, hitting milestones like 50 don't phase me too much. I miss not having super-sharp eyesight for close-up work any more (presbyopia - the cause of old folks arm-stretching exercises to read things - has claimed my ability to focus in on close things), and my ankles seem to be getting weaker and noisier, but other than that, I'm not really affected yet, at least not mentally! In my mind's eye I'm still about 24 years old, I think. It's just the mirror's eye that disputes that image!
For my birthday I took the family out to that Italian restaurant Lynn and I found in the North End of Boston last year; Trattoria Á Scalinatella. As before, it was a spectacular culinary evening. They have a regular menu to order from, but they also do an Italian-style "tasting" dinner, where you pick a wine, and the chef builds 2 (or 4) meals around the chosen wine. Lynn and I did that last year when we first went to this restaurant, and it was spectacular, so we did the same for the four of us this year. A bit pricey, but you only hit 50 once, right? ;)
We picked a Chianti Classico Vignole for our wine. The appetizers were impressive; I had a venison paté with potatoes, Megan had a lobster torte in a shell with spinach, Lynn had sautéed scallops in bacon, and Audrey had little mini mushroom pies. All yummy. We all shared a pasta course, little hand-made shell pasta in a cream asparagus sauce with asparagus spears on top. Our main meals were equally inventive and yummy; I had medallions of stuffed rabbit wrapped in prosciutto on feather mushrooms, Megan had breast of duck on a quiche-like mushroom stuffing, Lynn had veal tenderloin on a mushroom and potato mix, and Audrey had thin fillets of swordfish on a garlic potato bed. We had no room for dessert!
We're still waiting for the deep-freeze that has engulfed our little corner of New England to let up. We haven't been above freezing for over two weeks, and some mornings recently registered in at -5 to -8 degrees Fahrenheit! That's enough to make you want to jump back under the covers where its warm! It's also been too cold to melt the snow and ice that has a death-grip on all our outdoor Christmas lights. We've unplugged them so they're not lit anymore, but it may take until April before I can coil them up and pack them away for next year!
Buddy's eye problems are well on the way to being cleared up (see 12 January for more info). The vet took his stitches out so he has the use of his eye back, and he seems to have given up licking his paws and rubbing his eyes so he hasn't had to wear the radar dish collar for a few days. Hopefully he has been broken of that habit for good. If not, its back with the radar dish. (return to top) |
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12 January 2003:
Winter has settled in! With a significant snowstorm (1 foot or more) on Christmas Day into the next day, another storm the next week, and nine days straight of 1-2 inches every night, we've now accumulated quite a snowfall at the Family TreeHouse! Looks like we're not set for a repeat of last year's warm and snowless winter. On the pet front, Buddy the Wonder Dog has not had a good start to his new year. As you may or may not know, Buddy has inherited an unusual trait from the Chow side of his heritage; he has double eyelashes. One set of eyelashes is normal, but the other set grows inward, and if left unchecked they scratch and irritate his corneas. So about 3 times a year we have him sedated and the vet goes in with a tweezers and plucks his inner eyelashes. Evidently one escaped the last removal session, and he developed a scratched and ulcerated cornea - again (this happened once before, about 4 years ago). Once it gets this far, the only way to get it to heal is to temporarily sew his eyelids together so the eye stays shut and he can't rub it. So for two weeks or so, he's a one-eyed satellite dish dog, wearing a collar to keep him from scratching at his eye (and to keep him from chewing a treated abrasion on his paw, too). We call him Wink, or maybe Franken-Dog! (return to top) |
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2002 |
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25 Dec 2002:
Merry Christmas! Christmas at the Vogt Family TreeHouse was a smashing success. We've never been early-birds on Christmas morning, even when the girls were little, and this year was no exception. Buddy and I were the first ones to rise, and went for an early morning walk around 7:30. The entire neighborhood was quiet and peaceful, and a light dusting of snow had just fallen. Lynn got up around 8:30, and the girls emerged closer to 9:30. Lynn's sister, her husband, and her nephew came over this morning to share Christmas breakfast with us and have a nice visit. We have our traditions like all families. For us, Christmas breakfast has to include lox and bagels and cream cheese (onions optional), and this year we added real Canadian bacon (courtesy of Cam and Gail), a yummy quiche, and fruit salad. Stockings and gift opening stretched out until mid-afternoon and was very pleasant and relaxing. The rain came down most of the day, and then switched to snow around 4pm or so, and accumulated a bit through the afternoon and evening. We gathered at my sister's house in the evening to see more family and exchange gifts, and by 11pm we had 4-6 inches of snow.
Our 2002 Christmas letter is done, and our Christmas cards will be sent out any minute now (late again). If you can't wait to get yours in the mail, you can read this year's online installment (and past years as well) on the Christmas Newsletter Page.
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05 Dec 2002:
We decided to put more lights on the outside bushes this year to make them look brighter and denser... I lost count of the number of strings, but it was over 40. Looks pretty nice....
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28 Nov 2002:
Beware!! This is what happens when the local newspaper photographer is a friend, and he lives in the same neighborhood as you (he also caught Megan weeding the front gardens a year or so back - ended up in full color on the front page, ABOVE the fold). Don't believe the 2.5 - 3 inches comment; my van shows that it was more like 6 - 8 inches in our neighborhood.
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26 Nov 2002:
Well, I finally got the deck skirt installed. Looks nice. Megan helped me on Sunday - having 2 pair of hands to hold up long boards while they get fastened into place was a lot easier than using only one pair of hands - mine. Thanks, kiddo!! Because I rebuilt an existing deck and used the existing stringers, the old brown stain was very visible on the stringers and frame boards that ran along the three sides of the deck just above the lattice and just below the decking boards (see any of the previous pictures for an example). I covered them up with 1x4 and 1x8 pressure-treated boards. The extra width also covered the metal brackets on the top of the posts nicely. This is probably the last step of the season. I may get a chance to do some additional work on the lattice panels (the end panels are not permanently in place), but then again maybe not - they're talking about 3-6 inches of snow for tomorrow (the day before Thanksgiving)......
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18 Nov 2002:
I've gathered up most of the deck construction photos - and a lot more I didn't share at the time - and organized them into a collection in the Family TreeHouse ScrapBook. Enjoy!
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11 Nov 2002:
Happy Veteran's Day. Today Lynn and I are going to try something we used to do over in Europe; we're hopping on a train for a day-trip! Amtrak runs a train between Boston and Portland called The DownEaster, and its first stop out of Boston is the Anderson Regional Transportation Center in Woburn, so we're hopping on the DownEaster with two friends in Woburn and riding up to Maine for the day. We took the train all over when we lived in Europe, so hopefully this will be as fun and convenient.
The deck is just about finished for the winter. I finished laying the decking boards Saturday, and then bought a new finish blade for my skil-saw and trimmed the edges of the boards to finish it off. Looks pretty nice, if I do say so myself! Here's a closer shot of the decking itself. Last things I hope to do before the snow flies is to put a skirt around the stringer ends to cover up the old brown stain, and finish up the lattice-work. The stairs replacement will wait until spring.
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03 Nov 2002:
Still plugging along on the deck. Its getting tougher to get large chunks of time to work on this - losing daylight savings time means I have to quit around 5pm whereas during the summer I could work until 8:30 or 9. Last weekend I lost an entire day to torrential rain, and today was a very cold and windy day - bright sun but bitter cold - so working on the deck was a challenge. I pulled up all the old decking boards a few weeks ago - that was back-breaking work! Now I'm laying down new decking boards in a diagonal pattern; not as back-breaking as wielding two crowbars to pull up the old boards, but time-consuming and tedious. I'm amazed at how slowly its going!
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01 Nov 2002:
Well, another Halloween has come and gone. I was on a business trip most of the week, but got home just in time to set up the audio equipment and help with the other decorations we do around the front door. The weather report when I left on my business trip was for snow and sleet Halloween night, so I wasn't anticipating many ghoulish visitors, but the weather pattern changed during the week and it was a crisp clear night for the goblins to make their rounds. The music and sound effects were scary, and the additional PA system rigged up to make the witch talk to visitors as they came up the walk made more than a few visitors (big and small) jump. Some little ones went running back out the front walk so fast we had to deliver the candy to the street for them! Initially, we weren't seeing many visitors (they started dribbling in around 6pm), but one wave of clumped trick-or-treaters delivered about 30 costumed little people at once to the front door; they were lined up down the front stairs!
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29 Sep 2002:
Cooler weather has arrived at the Family TreeHouse. It was cool enough this morning for me to break out the first flannel shirt of the season. Flannel shirts are my preferred around-the-treehouse wear for the fall, winter, and early spring months. I'm sure the weather hasn't hit the around-the-clock-flannel temperature, but the mornings can be chilly now, so.... More progress on the deck. I finished the gate at the top of the stairs yesterday, so now I'll put the post brackets on today and then the next step is to rip up the old decking boards and put down the new ones... I even dug out my old roll of tar-paper to put down on the joist tops between the joists and the deck boards. The decking will make a world of difference in the visual appearance of the deck from up topside, obviously.
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22 Sep 2002:
Wow! Summer ends officially early tomorrow (actually, just 55 minutes past midnight), but it seemed to speed by faster than normal this year. Is that one of the symptoms of advancing age?? This weekend, like most weekends recently, was spent working on the deck rebuild. I've finished all the railings, and its looking good. Here is what the whole deck looks like now. Next (after placing the reinforcing brackets on each of the railing posts) I'll build a gate for the top of the stairs that looks like the rest of the railing, and then comes ripping up the deck flooring and replacing it with new decking. The angle of the photo doesn't show how bad the existing deck flooring looks, but its B-A-D. After all that, I'll put a natural wood skirt around the entire deck to cover up the brown-stain outer truss boards, and then I'll take a break for the winter (probably), gearing up to rebuild the stairs next spring. Weekend contractors get teased a lot for taking so much time to finish things, but there's only so much one person can do!!
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09 Sep 2002:
One more day of working on the deck. Sunday was hot and sunny but not too humid. The far edge of the deck truss consists of three 2x8s nailed together, but the nails have let the boards spread away from each other a bit, so I spent most of the morning anchoring lag bolts into the triple-beam to pull it back together. I was able to get all the truss bolts in and the triple-beam looks pretty good now. Once I did that, I was able to attach the north side posts (including a matching tower post for more bird feeders). Here is what the north side of the deck looks like now. I still have to build the railing and mount the balusters....
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08 Sep 2002:
Still working on the deck. I've moved to the upper level, ripping out the old railings and putting in new ones. Here is what the west side of the deck looked like with no railing at all, and here is the new railing in process, and here is the west railing finished. The absurdly tall post in the corner is to accommodate the bird feeders and hanging flowers we have all over the place. Now I move on to the north railing....... I took a break from the deck yesterday and Lynn and I went up to Lowell with some friends to the Banjo and Fiddle Contest they have every year (this was the 23rd). Lots of fun, with a wide array of skills and proficiency, but every one was brave and noble to try.
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17 Aug 2002:
A scorcher day outside, so I worked inside and installed the last of the new kitchen cabinets. Now that the counter top has arrived and has been set, I could install the upper cabinets. This is what it all looks like (the bowed effect is an illusion caused by stitching two images together horizontally). I still have to put the top trim on the upper cabinets, and do the electrical (a power cable is sitting behind the microwave waiting for a box and outlet to be cut in - same in the appliance cabinet), and we have to mark the places where we want the handles and knobs so I can drill and mount them..... then we replace the fluorescent light with some track-lights, and put down new linoleum..... and then start saving our pennies for next year when we do the other side of the kitchen!
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11 Aug 2002:
Discernable progress!! I'm an instant gratification sort of guy. If I can't see progress on a project within a day or so, I tend to get discouraged and disgruntled. Because of that, I have to play other mental tricks with myself when I'm working on long-term projects, like rebuilding a deck. Digging footings and mixing concrete by hand is back-breaking work, and all you have to show for it when you're done is a round piece of concrete that sticks up out of the ground about 4 inches. Only people in the know realize right away that it extends 4 feet or more down into the ground, and it consists of 2-3 80-lb bags of hand-mixed concrete. In short, footings by themselves are not very satisfying psychologically to someone who likes to see discernable progress on a project! Even the 6x6 posts, as impressive as they are, were not all that satisfying to complete (see the 8 August entry for a picture) - after all, they just replaced posts that were already there.... what's the big deal! ;) But now I have something to show for my toils!! I installed the lattice skirt around the deck today. It never had a lattice skirt before, so this is something new, and to me it looks GREAT!! Finally I feel like I have something to show for my toils!! I'm not anywhere near done (I still have to remove the old rails and old decking and replace both with new stuff), but my mind says there is finally something to show for the effort!!
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09 Aug 2002:
Well, we've had the new Lord of the Rings DVD for a couple of days now, long enough to watch the movie and the special extras, and to do some screen snapping. I've built a page of screen snaps from the movie that I have made into Windows Wallpaper. All of these images are feathered to black, so they will look best on your desktop if you first set the desktop color to black. Click on any thumbnail to download a ZIP file containing that bitmap (BMP) file.....
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08 August 2002:
Boy, I've been neglecting to update the web site lately! I've been busy on other things, I guess. The biggest distraction (and the most fun) was a three week visit from my niece's two daughters (my GRAND-nieces!! I feel so OLD!!). They live in Wyoming and have never been back east, so we introduced them to New England, salt water, fresh seafood, and BAHSTIN accents! We had a great time taking them on day trips and overnights to various places. They also went off with my other sisters' families for trips to the mountains (more like little hills to them) and the seashore. I put together a computer CD of digital images, digital video, maps and links for them to take home with them as a souvenir - a scaled-down version is on-line here.
I've also been hard at work on the deck, which is going slowly because there's only one set of hands working on it and I only get weekends and occasional days off to work on it. All the footings are in, and all the replacement posts are in place. Here's what it looks like without the lattice skirt that I'm in the middle of installing. The skirt will ease the strain on the neighbors' eyes for all the construction junque - and other things - that we've piled under the deck.
The special-ordered kitchen cabinet counter also finally came in (took about 6 weeks). I've placed it on the cabinets, but haven't fastened it down to the cabinets yet. It looks pretty nice. Once the counter is fastened down, I'll install the wall cabinets that sit on the counter and make the whole thing look like a hutch. Lynn's pretty excited and likes her choices a lot.
We're also making slow but steady progress with Lynn's Gardens web site. The Front Yard and the West Side Yard pages are populated with images and descriptions. The other pages are there, but just as place-holders for now. We've got pictures ready, we just have to find the time to lay the pages out and label the images.
So, all in all I haven't been sitting on my duff doing nothing for the summer (though right now that sounds kind of appealing!), I just haven't been keeping this What's New page as up-to-date as I could.... C'est la VIE!!
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14 July 2002:
Hey, summer's in full swing, we've had one heat wave and are looking at another this week, and, we're getting ready for our Wyoming visitors!! We're planning trips and visits and figuring out fun things to do and see.... Also, we've started a new web site: Lynn's Gardens! It's still in progress, and may end up to be a lot of work to keep current, but it looks like it will be fun to do... we hope you enjoy it!
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22 June 2002:
Not much happening at the Family TreeHouse. I'm still plugging away at the deck, and our kitchen cabinet install is stalled while we wait for the countertop to be manufactured and delivered. Because it's not a perfect 90 degree angle on the "L," we built a cardboard template of the countertop for the fabricators, now we just have to wait. We're also gearing up for a visit by our grand-nieces from Wyoming this summer. They've never been back east, so it will be great fun showing them around the area. We've also put a counter on the Family TreeHouse (accessible from the Privacy Policy page) to let you know how many people have visited the Family TreeHouse recently.
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04 June 2002:
There's a new set of wheels in the Family TreeHouse driveway.... With three drivers and two vehicles, someone was on the short end of the stick most days, and it was usually Dad, so we started looking for a third set of wheels - not very expensive, just something to get me to work and back. I started out looking for a junker, but even junkers were priced in the thousands to get one that would pass inspection, so when a neighbor told me they were thinking about selling their well-maintained 8 year old Mercury Sable station wagon (loaded with tons of extras - power windows, power seats, tilt-steering, AC, cruise-control, CD player, etc.), I was interested. Its in immaculate shape, and it only had 41k for mileage, so we bit the bullet and bought it. Here's what it looks like. As you can see, its in great shape for an eight-year-old car! Buddy likes riding in the back, too!!
We also finished installing the new base cabinets in the kitchen - what a long slow process, shimming and leveling five cabinets around a corner. It wouldn't have been so bad except for the cabinet in the very corner is a round lazy-susan thingie that is mostly free-standing - doesn't attach to the walls, just the adjoining cabinets - it has to be shimmed and leveled stand-alone, and then you move and attach the side cabinets without disturbing the free-standing corner cabinet..... tricky! Now we're waiting on a counter-top, and then I can install the wall cabinets (the wall cabinets extend all the way down and sit on the counter, so I can't place them until the counter is in place).
During the install we took time out both Saturday and Sunday to watch the aerial exhibition of the USAF Thunderbirds, at the Hanscom AFB air show. We don't have a clear view towards the base from our deck, but its not bad, considering the convenience, and we did get to see some of the acrobatics....
I'm also in full swing on the deck rebuild..... I have the three footings down the middle of the deck dug, poured, and set, and I'm starting on the four outside footings that replace the concrete-filled iron pipes. The iron pipes were placed directly into the ground, and sit on (not in) a massive concrete slab that's about 20 inches below grade. So I'll have to drill some rebar supports into the existing concrete, and extend new footings up above grade where the 6x6 posts will replace the iron pipes. Once those are in place, and a new cross-joist along the entire middle of the deck, I'll start replacing the decking an railings and skirt the entire structure with lattice.
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18 May 2002:
Lots of little things happening this week. On Monday we ordered the cabinets for the kitchen corner we're re-doing (see 02 May entry for more info on that), and also this week we decided to pick up a used car as a third vehicle for the three drivers in the family (Megan's off on her own with her own car now); a neighbor has a 1995 Mercury station wagon for sale that we're going to buy. It's got very low mileage and is in fine shape, and I've been thinking about picking up another car for about six months or so, so all the planets aligned. I've got another sick computer at Dr. Gene's Computer Hospital (my sister's old Pentium-1 166MHz), but she's also about to buy a new machine as a replacement so I think the medical procedure will be limited to an organ (data) transplant.
News Flash!! It's SNOWING here at the Family TreeHouse!! Luckily it's slightly over freezing (but not much!!) so it's not accumulating much, but this has to be a record of some sort!! Here's PROOF
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12 May 2002:
Happy Mother's Day! New Family Portrait is available if you click on the picture window (Get it? A picture behind the picture window??) on the front page with the house in the tree...... and the Landing Lights are in!! We have a long gently curving front walk from the street to our front door, and for about as long as we've owned the house we've always planted annuals - yellow marigolds - along that walk. When the little marigold plants are first put in, they look like a smooth line of lights curving along both sides of the walk - they look for all the world like landing lights along an airport runway. So every Mother's Day for years now, our family tradition has been to have the girls do the ceremonial Planting of the Landing Lights out along the front walk. This year was no different, except that we did it a day early because of the threat of rain on the actual day... Photos of the process are on the fridge in the scrapbook
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02 May 2002:
Not much has been happening lately at the Family TreeHouse. The yard work cycle has started - I spent the entire weekend 2 weekends ago mowing, thatching, raking, and sweeping the lawn.... YUCK! Lynn and I are also working towards installing some new kitchen cabinets. Its amazing how many decisions have to be made just to get some new cabinets in. It takes a lot of mental energy, but there is nothing physical to show for it - yet. If you know our kitchen, we're putting cabinets in the corner where there is none, along the inside wall and the half-wall. Our plan is to re-do the kitchen in stages.... the empty corner this year, then replace what we have in the rest of the kitchen next year, and than phase III may be new appliances (unless the ancient and venerable ones we have give out before then). We also got to spend a week in Colorado recently - me on ½ business and ½ vacation and Lynn on all vacation. That was fun. I also just today got back from most of the week in Washington DC on business. They're further into spring down there than we are!
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30 March 2002:
Happy Easter! Happy Spring!! We can officially declare that spring has once again arrived at the Family TreeHouse!! The crocuses were a good hint that spring was on its way, but the spring peepers were heard for a 2nd night in a row over in the wetlands across the street!! Last night there were about six peepers peeping, tonight there were about twenty. Soon, the cacophony will be amazing. Spring has officially arrived!
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11 March 2002:
Hey, Way Cool! Friend, neighbor, and consummate photographer Joe Brown took a whole series of aerial photos in- and near-Woburn recently, and has posted them on his web site. Lots of fun to look at - try to see if you can recognize places without looking at the captions! He also snapped an aerial photo of the Family TreeHouse (here) while up in one of those death-defying contraptions.... though from this angle you can't hardly see the tree that the house sits in at all! ;)
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10 March 2002:
Still not a lot happening at the Vogt Family TreeHouse. Audrey celebrated her departure from teenager-hood a few days ago - she's 20 now; no longer a teenager. So Lynn and I can truthfully say we don't have any teenagers anymore! ;) We celebrated the day at the Naked Fish restaurant in Billerica..... A fun restaurant!
The change-over at AT&T has soured a bit on a couple of fronts. AT&T still supplies a fast, always-on connection to the internet, but the "extras" that I've come to rely on are being chopped, and its annoying. First off, they've impacted my personal web pages by eliminating FrontPage Extensions. I use Microsoft FrontPage to build and maintain these pages. This affects my ability to easily and conveniently update pages, and it has broken the "last updated" feature that appears on the front page and on every other page at the bottom (until I figure out how to re-implement that, those dates will be suspect). They've also tried to block my legitimate use of a non-AT&T email address as my return address in emails. The only email address I want people to know about and use is my FamilyTreeHouse email address. AT&T is trying to force me to use the attbi email address as my return address on emails. They've also cut off Mobile Access without offering an alternative. When I travel, I need a phone number to dial into so I can connect my laptop to the internet and check my email and surf. MediaOne had an arrangement with UUNet (a subsidiary of WorldCom) so that customers like me could dial into the UUNet system, identify myself as a MediaOne customer, and then be connected to the internet. AT&T has eliminated that service without any alternative (even though they own a UUNet-like service - ATT WorldNet - that could do the same thing), so I can no longer dial in and get access while traveling - I have to carry a separate account with another company for that. Finally, they've walled in my email account so that I cannot get to it using a legitimate email program on a non-AT&T-domain machine. I can check my AT&T email from home because they know my home computer is part of the AT&T domain. When I *do* dial in from a hotel room, or try to use my favorite browser-based email front-end, they won't let me check my email in the normal way because I'm coming in on a "foreign" machine. So, I've had to contract with another company for email service that does what I need it to do. Sheesh! What's next? AT&T has reduced itself for me to being a big pipe, and nothing else; no useful email, no useful web hosting, no dial-in.
And on the seasonal front, spring is beginning to show signs around here. We've had such a crazy winter, not much of a winter at all (we're heading for a drought because of the low snowfall), now with all the warm weather we've had recently (high 60s yesterday) the crocuses (croci?) and other green things are pushing up. Photos of new arrivals are here, here, and here.
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23 February 2002:
Not much happening at the Vogt Family TreeHouse. We seem to have survived the changing of our ISP's domain name (from mediaone.net to attbi.com) unscathed. Everything seems to be working... mostly. I'm not too excited about the restrictive way of accessing email when I'm traveling and not riding the web from an AT&T-connected machine. When I was dialing in from my hotel room, there were some annoying restrictions set that require convoluted work-arounds (email me if you're curious). The biggest pending hassle is that the mobile dial-in capability goes away 28 Feb, and there appears to be no offered replacement. AT&T loudly touts the fact that they offer a web-based interface to my AT&T email, but I have to have someplace to dial into and connect up through before I can make use of that "feature" when I'm traveling. I kept my Spartan CompuServe account that I've had for 12 + years because they have a world-wide network of POP (point of presence) dial-in numbers that work. I've successfully dialed in from all over Europe and the US. Looks like I'll be using that a lot more now.....
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12 February 2002:
Changes afoot at the Vogt Family TreeHouse, and they're not voluntary! If I've done my work well, you should see no change at all at the TreeHouse. There are changes, though. For one, my ISP is morphing domain names (AT&T bought MediaOne over a year ago, but they're just now getting around to changing names) so the main web hosting site for the Vogt Family TreeHouse has moved. Because I own the domain name FAMILYTREEHOUSE.NET you should see no difference because the domain address www.FamilyTreeHouse.net now points to the new home of the Vogt Family TreeHouse automatically. If you're using the old people.ne.mediaone.net web address, that will no longer work after 15 March at the latest. Secondly, the new AT&T web server does not support FrontPage extensions. I use Microsoft FrontPage 2002 to build and maintain these pages, but I don't think I used any of the FrontPage-unique features that would now be broken if I did. If you find something that doesn't seem to work, let me know. Thirdly, with the MediaOne.net domain name disappearing, so does my old email address. If any of you are still using my mediaone.net email address, please delete that and replace it with the same name at familytreehouse.net. That address already forwards to the new AT&T email address, so there's no change for folks using the familytreehouse.net address.
So, In summary:
Always use www.FamilyTreeHouse.net to get here - erase the mediaone.net address
Always use my familytreehouse.net email address to send me email - erase the mediaone.net address
Watch for broken parts of the Vogt Family TreeHouse web site, and let me know if you find any!
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17 January 2002:
How's this for the ultimate in unfulfilled dreams! The Massachusetts State Lottery Commission has a Holiday Cash $2 scratch ticket. For $2 you get two winning numbers, and ten numbers to potentially match against either one of the two winning numbers. Here's a scratch ticket from that game that definitely got the old adrenalin pumping.... Ten out of Ten winners! Click here to see what the prizes actually were. I'll take it - its all free money - but if only the prizes had been from this other scratch ticket that didn't win anything!
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12 January 2002:
The first installment of a fun and unusual Christmas Present I gave to Lynn begins tonight! One of my Christmas Presents to Lynn was a copy of the little green and white book, Rosalie's Guide To Restaurants in the North End of Boston (ISBN #0-9663730-0-6), with four (of an eventual twelve) Post-It® notes, each with a Saturday date on them (one each for January, February, March, and April). Instructions were to read the restaurant descriptions in the book, and put each Post-It® note on a page, and we would go to that restaurant for dinner that night. The first date was January 12th and Lynn picked page 91, Trattoria Á Scalinatella. I'll report on our experience - perhaps as early as tomorrow!
(10pm same day) Forget tomorrow - we can report now - WOW! Trattoria Á Scalinatella (253 Hanover Street in Boston's North End) is one of the best restaurants we've been to in a long long time, Europe included. Not many restaurants rate a "Fantastic!" from Lynn, but this one did! It's a small place, up one flight from a cafe and dessert shop. The restaurant can seat 44 (which is small), mostly at tables for two, and it has a toasty fireplace with a wood fire in the dining room. Very romantic. We each had the Chef's Choice meal, where the chef picks a starter, a prima (pasta) and a secundo course that complements each other. For starters, Lynn had sautéed sea-scallops in a saffron sauce, and I had a Tuscan wild boar stew. Both were incredible. Our prima was the same for each, handmade gnocchi in a lobster sauce with large chunks of lobster meat and snow peas. Wonderful! My secundo was one of the most tender and tasty racks of lamb I've ever had, and Lynn had a melt-in-your-mouth 12 ounce bone-in veal chop grilled over an applewood fire and basted with a Chianti marinate, both on a bed of seasoned mashed potatoes and snow peas. We finished with a plate of cheese and pears. We had a moderate grade bottle of Chianti to go with the meal. This was definitely not a budget restaurant (actually one of the more pricey places we've been to in a while), but the service was impeccable and the food was stupendous! This one's a keeper!!
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01 January 2002:
All of us at the Vogt Family TreeHouse wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
Hey ho! I've been having fun with Windows XP! I think I like it! Lots of things that used to require 3rd-party drivers or utilities are now built-in, like support for my scanner, and the USB device I use to get digital pictures out of the digital camera. Read about my philosophy for upgrading operating systems here..... also, the What's New Archive was getting out of control so I've organized it a bit.....
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| 2001 |
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21 December 2001:
The newest edition of the annual Vogt Family Christmas Newsletter is hot off the presses......
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16 December 2001:
After many years of jury-rigging our Christmas Village display, I decided to build a permanent wired platform for the village. We have a recessed entry to our split-level house, so there is a 7 ft by 2 ft "shelf" over the front door that is visible from the entire living room. It's a perfect location for a static display that doesn't need tending, because although its clearly visible from anywhere in the room, its pretty much inaccessible except by step-ladder. There is power up there, so I built a custom-designed, custom-fitted dual-level platform with installed wiring and lights for the houses. Here are some photos of the process.... Photo #1 is of the platform under construction in the garage... Photo #2 is of the interior wiring..... Photo #3 is of Audrey on the step-ladder putting the final touches on the village..... and Photo #4 is the final setup.
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09 December 2001:
Bada bing, bada boom! It was l-o-n-g delayed on arrival, but winter has finally landed. From 75 degrees and sun to 25 degrees and blizzard in 48 hours...... they were predicting 3-6" (barely) in our area..... looks more like 8-12" to me..... and yet again I sing the praises of STA-BIL® gas treatment for winterizing (or in this case, summerizing) internal combustion engines. The ancient and venerable (27 years old this season) snow-blower fired up *immediately* after sitting all summer............Happy winter!!
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Click here to view a large (86kb jpeg) or small (25kb jpeg) digital image of the front walk light pole decorated for Christmas
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Click here to view a large (42kb jpeg) or small (13kb jpeg) digital image of our small flag by the rhododendron bush out front
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03 December 2001:
Lynn and I just got back from a weekend getaway to Newburyport MA. We stayed in a great B&B up there, and did a lot of shopping (tons of looking, and a little buying) and found some great (and one not so great) restaurants.
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25 November 2001:
Lots of stuff happening around the Vogt Family TreeHouse. Christmas lights are going up outside while the weather is warmish (I hate stringing lights on bushes, but I hate it more when its 20 degrees out!). We won't turn them on for a while (we're not one of those families who fires up the Christmas decorations before the Halloween decorations have come down!). Also, Megan's moving into a rented house near school with three other friends, so she's been hauling furniture and boxes out of her room and up north. I guess this is the next step in the metamorphosis ... and Lynn gets a sewing room upstairs! Also, I've been playing with a Dazzle™ analog-to-digital video converter (called a Hollywood™ DV-Bridge), teaching myself the twin skills of capturing video from a source, and then using the video editing software to clip and insert and add effects for a finished product. I can suck full-motion video off my camcorder or VCR or live broadcast TV and save it to my hard disk for processing and editing later, either keeping it in digital format on the computer or pumping it out in analog format to a VCR. You can see one example of my primitive handiwork available on the 3 November 2001 entry below. Now I know why the hard drives have been getting bigger and bigger..... I captured a 12 minute video of a recent wedding from my Hi-8 camcorder, and it took up 3.5 GB of hard drive space!
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3 November 2001:
We did our usual preparations for Halloween (elaborate front-door decorations, industrial-strength sound system outside playing scary sounds and music, and a nut with a microphone inside giving each little visitor a "personalized" experience). Had to use the pooper scooper a few times to clean up after the frightened trick-or-treaters! Click here to view a small (27kb jpeg) digital image of the front door decorations, and for the first time on the Family TreeHouse, a one-and-a-half minute full-motion audio/video clip of the front door decorations, complete with scary sounds, to give you a full-flavored multimedia experience (1.1 MB Windows Media file).....
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21 October 2001:
LAN Paradise Update.... I've had only one episode of loss of connectivity since the modem was switched out on 5 October, and that episode seemed to be caused by a wider area problem than just at the Family TreeHouse. Things are looking up!
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06 October 2001:
Trouble in LAN Paradise..... My faithful cable modem (3Com CMX) has been less than faithful these last few months. It's been "dropping sync" a lot - daily or more - and for the past few weeks or so it wouldn't re-sync by itself, so I'd have to shut it down for 10 minutes or so, fire it back up, and even then it was a roll of the dice as to whether it would sync up or not. For an always-on connection feeding a whole-house network with 5 or more computers on it at any one time, this stinks! A few days or so ago, I found an obscure snippet of information buried in an article about something else that suggested that somehow (I don't know how - can't confirm the info or find any other references) when the modem encounters a CodeRed scan from another infected computer outside the home, the modem crashes. Be that as it may, as soon as I mentioned that snippet on my daily complaint call to AT&T Broadband Tech Support, they immediately scheduled a service call to swap out the modem! (Coincidence? You decide...) So now I'm back with the same model of cable modem I started out with all those years ago.... a LANCity fin-back doorstop of a beast. This thing will not blow off the shelf in a windstorm! Click here for a small (8k) image of the thing that looks like a '57 Chevy!! It remains to be seen whether or not this old modem can hold sync better than the 3Com one did, but it held all night for one night so far.... I've also updated the network diagram to reflect the change.
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30 September 2001:
The reading room is open. I've opened a library of links that I find informative and interesting. The intent is for it to expand and cover a variety of topics. Right now it focuses on one topic, but that will change with time...
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24 September 2001:
Perhaps some solace in music....
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18 September 2001:
Words may never be enough again.....
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03 September 2001:
I took the plunge. My ancient and venerable computer has served me well over the years (see the computer page for excruciating details on what it is), but it's really having trouble keeping up with all I do with it. I've upgraded the processor (from a 200 MHz Pentium-Pro to a 333 MHz Pentium-II) and the memory (from 64 MB to 192 MB), and the hard drives a couple of times, but it is now five years old and it can't keep up. It's even grossly hesitating and can't keep up as I type this now. And besides, everyone in the house has gotten a new computer at some point during these past years except me, so now it was my turn! So I've ordered a new one, and it is scheduled for delivery tomorrow! The new one is as fast and as powerful as they come (at least this week!) - a 2 GHz (2,000 MHz) Pentium-IV with 256 MB memory, 80 GB hard drive, CDRW, DVD, video capture board, and other accoutrements. This new puppy should qualify as a screamer for at least a while!!
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28 August 2001:
Hey! Megan made the front page of the local paper - and so did Lynn's gardens!! The photographer for the local paper is a friend and lives just up the street, and he managed to snap Megan's photo while she was doing one of her chores - dead-heading our double-row of marigolds that run the length of the front walk (we call them the landing lights). It made the front page of the local paper yesterday! Click here for a small (32k) image of the front page, or click here for a not-so-small (107k) image.
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12 August 2001:
Things for sale! I've built a Garage Sale page on my utility web site (more on that later), listing things we're trying to unload for one reason or another. Check it out - there's definitely some eclectic and unusual stuff there!
Now, about that utility web site..... If you've been reading the What's New(s) page regularly (even if not, just scroll down and read it now!) you know that I've been thwarted in a number of attempts to find free and easy places to store images on the web. AT&T/MediaOne only gives me 10 MB of free storage space for this web site, and the pictures of Europe alone take up about 25 MB, so you can see that I needed an adjunct storage place (or two, or three). For a while I had images scattered all over the world-wide web, using space on CompuServe, plus free space on GeoCities and XOOM and lots of others. When you traversed the pages on the Family TreeHouse and saw pictures on the pages, the page with the text was coming from the main Family TreeHouse web site, but more than likely the images on the page were stored somewhere else and were being assembled on the fly for your viewing pleasure in real time (that's one of the great beauties of the web - things can come together from anywhere and everywhere and you as a web surfer don't have to care a hoot about that, it all gets taken care of for you).
So after getting booted off some of the sites, and having other sites begin charging and/or blocking access to the images without the advertising they want to subject you to, I finally bit the bullet and went looking for cheap web space I could buy, and gather all the images together in one place. I found what I was looking for at WebSolo. I bought their cheapest package (Solo) which gives me 500 MB of Spartan no-frills web space for $6.95 per month. No FrontPage extensions (so I couldn't host the entire Family TreeHouse there), no personal domain name (no need, I already own FamilyTreeHouse.net and a few others, and they point here). Just lots of disk space to store lots of images. I figure I was spending more than $7 per month of my own time just finding and keeping the free web spaces, and then moving images and re-writing web pages when things had to change. Anyway, there are lots of interesting places to host web pages, but WebSolo definitely offers one of the largest, no-frills options out there.
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22 July 2001:
Flash! Budvar is now imported to the United States under a different name - Czechvar! The Czechvar web site has a hilarious explanation of the copyright fights they've been battling, but the bottom line is - it's HERE!! If you live near the Family TreeHouse, Giles Liquors (Cambridge Road, on the Woburn-Winchester line in the Horn Pond Plaza) sells it!!
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19 July 2001:
Some traveling excitement at the TreeHouse..... I've been traveling on business for 20+ years now, but what happened yesterday was a first, at least for me. I was flying back from Washington Dulles into Boston on a noon-time flight, and everything was routine until we approached for landing. Instead of the long descent into Logan that I'm very familiar with, about halfway through we aborted, banked and climbed pretty quickly and headed back for the clouds. Seems the landing gear indicators said that the gear had not descended and locked into place. So the pilot cycled the gear 3-4 times up high, and then flew low and slow over the airport (which in itself was a unique experience), banking the plane so the tower could get a pair of binoculars on the plane and see if the gear looked ok. That was inconclusive, but we had to come down sometime, so they closed the airport, lined the runway with fire, foam and rescue trucks, and up in the plane we were all instructed and checked out on the head-between-the-knees landing position and other specific instructions. At 250 feet were assumed our positions, and were instructed to remain there until the plane had come to a stop (one way or another). The gear held and we landed safely. So nice of United Airlines to provide some impromptu in-flight entertainment for us!! ;) We had to wait out on the runway while maintenance crews pinned the landing gear to make sure it didn't collapse while we were taxiing, but the local TV stations had gotten wind of what had happened, so the camera crews and reporters were waiting in the terminal when we disembarked. I avoided them.
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13 July 2001:
Christmas Cove pictures are in the Scrapbook.....
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10 July 2001:
Quite the networking excitement at the Vogt Family TreeHouse. We had enormously powerful and wet thunderstorms two days in a row on a recent weekend (29 & 30 June), and the first one cooked my cable router (see diagram). Luckily, I bought a good router that has a lifetime warranty, so it was replaced for free by the manufacturer. Once the new router was installed, though, I discovered that three of the six active machines in the house had their network cards cooked at the same time! Those are not covered so we had to buy replacements. Luckily, network cards have come down in price a lot since the last time I bought a separate card!
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9 July 2001:
Escape to Christmas Cove! Lynn and I escaped recently for a long weekend (Wed-Sat) to Christmas Cove Maine, south of Damariscotta on one of the many finger-like peninsulas along the coast there. It was our anniversary (#27) so we decided to sneak away by ourselves. Fun fun fun! We found a place on the web to stay - the Coveside Inn and Marina. It appears to be the only commercial establishment on the cove, everything else is high-priced (how's $1.9 mil sound?) summer homes. Beautiful place! Pictures are in the Scrapbook!
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17 June 2001:
Well this was a Father's Day I could've done without! First off, the remnants of Tropical Storm Allison arrived at the TreeHouse today, dumping about 4 inches of rain on the lawn and gardens. It was raining pretty hard there for a while, and if I hadn't gone around putting extenders on the down-spouts (in the rain - I got soaked), we might have had a flooding problem in the basement. Then, at the height of the rainstorm the 32-foot side brace on the recently-opened-and-filled but not-yet-usable above ground swimming pool ripped off, buckling the long side-wall and decking of the 16' x 32' structure, and basically destroying the pool. This happened 7 years ago on the other side, so I know what it will cost to fix it, and its not worth it. The pool's a goner. Finally, as Megan Audrey and I were watching old video-tapes of their early years and birthdays (it was Father's Day, you know!) the green CRT gun (you know - RGB - red green blue) on the big family-room TV blew, sending the TV to the land of everything purple - and blurry. Where's Barney when you really need him!? Like I said, this was a Father's Day I could've done without! Sigh!
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15 June 2001:
At last - PERFECTION has come to the web........
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12 Jun 2001:
Great news for genealogists..... With the release of the LDS' transcription of the entire 1880 US Federal Census on 56 CD-ROMs (that's not a typo, fifty-six CD-ROMs!!), a final link in the chain that allows researchers to work from their home when using the 1880 census is complete. Prior to this release, there were two on-line tools available, but those two weren't enough. Ancestry.com has scanned images of most (if not all) of the 1880 census available on-line (for a fee). These images are not indexed, and are browsable only, organized first by state, then by county, then by enumeration district. The problem was, enumeration districts could be very large, and could represent 20-100 pages from the census, each page with 50 or more names on it. To make matters worse, a researcher often can't tell what enumeration districts represent what towns. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has the 1880 Census Schedules on-line. These just tell you what town, and what enumeration districts are on what microfilm rolls. But the link back to the on-line images could not be made - until now. With the LDS transcription, each name has recorded with it which film roll and page number the information came from. Now the link can be made. Knowing the film roll, you can go to the NARA site to see what towns and enumeration districts are on that roll. Then, knowing the enumeration district, you can go the Ancestry.com site and pull up the first enumeration district from that town or area, and check the page number from the LDS transcription to know how many pages forward or back you have to jump to get to the page you want! It all works now!! On-line research has made a quantum leap with the release of these CDs!!!
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10 June 2001:
From time to time (fairly frequently and fairly consistently) I get visitors to the Family TreeHouse who are new friends (there's no such thing as a stranger here at the TreeHouse, just friends we haven't met yet!) and they visit primarily for the genealogy information. Often they are new to the hobby, and they send me emails asking for advice or guidance on beginning their search. To help out these new friends looking for tips from me about genealogy, I've put together a page of my pearls of wisdom (I call them acorns of wisdom, because they help to grow trees! ;) on the How To Start genealogy page.....
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09 June 2001:
Not much big news these days. I guess that's a good thing.... I (Gene) just got back from a week-long trip to the McLean VA area. While I was down there I managed to coordinate schedules enough to have an evening free to visit my 2nd cousin (in the VOGT family tree) Dennis Litchfield and his wife Bernadette and daughter Kelly. We had a great time getting acquainted and comparing family notes, and I was treated to a great grilled steak dinner. Lynn's going to summer camp soon! She heads out for knitting camp in upstate New York in a few days! I predict she'll enjoy it a lot! Audrey had to put one of her ferrets (Buzz) down. He developed a cancerous tumor on his spine that paralyzed his hind half, and he was deteriorating rapidly and not having much fun. Something like that is never easy, especially for such a well-behaved and friendly creature as Buzz.
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22 May 2001:
Megan turned 21 yesterday. Pictures from the party are in the Scrapbook.....
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08 May 2001:
I'm trying out a new JAVA-based tool, an outline system, that I'm using for a scrapbook. Click here (since retired) to see what it looks like (it may take a little bit longer than normal to load, please be patient)......
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07 May 2001:
Audrey's back, home from her first year at college and first year away. It wasn't the most successful first year on record, but more on that later. I returned home from a business trip to Tennessee on Thursday, hopped in the van and drove the 460+ miles to Chambersburg PA on Friday, picked up a U-Haul trailer on Saturday morning, and Audrey and I shoveled the contents of her dorm room into the trailer and the back of the van (the van space was mostly taken up by the ferret condominium) and then we drove back, arriving home around 10:30 pm Saturday. Phew! Pictures from the trip are here and here.
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15 April 2001:
Happy Easter to all. Another bright sunny spring day here. Yesterday was gorgeous too. I can never get used to the abruptness of the Winter-Summer switch when it happens, though..... a few weeks ago I was snow-blowing the driveway, then yesterday I thatched the entire lawn (one of the most tiring, boring jobs in the known universe).......... Step-1 fertilizer this morning, and now I wait to mow it! ;) Probably next week....... sheesh!! Anyway - Happy Easter, and Happy Spring!
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07 April 2001:
News on two fronts.... First - we can officially declare that spring has arrived at the Family TreeHouse!! The spring peepers were heard for a 2nd night in a row over in the wetlands across the street!! Last night there were about two peepers peeping, tonight there were about ten. Soon, the cacophony will be amazing. Spring has officially arrived! Second, my not-so-newfound discovery of PhotoPoint (see the 22 September entry below) has turned a bit sour.... I received an email tonight that they will begin charging for storage services beginning in mid-May. Sigh. I'll be re-working the TreeHouse again to move my images somewhere else..... stay tuned.
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06 March 2001:
The whopper storm that wasn't......the terrible winter storm that struck the Northeast wasn't quite as terrible as the weatherman predicted, but it was bad enough. We got 2 feet (~60 cm) of snow here at the Family TreeHouse, north and west of us got as much as 3 feet (~90 cm). Here are some pictures from around the house...... AFTER we cleared out all the snow (and only wore out one snow blower!)..........
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01 March 2001:
Broken Picture Links! Some of my pictures on this web site are stored on my alternate GeoCities web site, but GeoCities has recently implemented an image blocking policy, so I cannot display images from the GeoCities site on pages that are not hosted on GeoCities (you get a red X for thumbnails and a GeoCities error messages for full images). Please bear with me as I move those photos off GeoCities and shut down my account there......
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02 February 2001:
Update from Europe!! I'm actually updating this from a hotel room in London (mostly I wanted to see if it would work from so far away)...... I made some significant advances in the VOGT family research this week!
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17 January 2001:
I've added something that I should have included long ago - a site Table of Contents!! It's on the menu bar at the bottom of the page frame........
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7 January 2001:
I've updated the Computer page to reflect the current state of technology here at the Vogt Family TreeHouse, including a diagram of the home network I've installed.....
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| 2000 |
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31 December 2000: I just couldn't let this milestone slip by without entering something on the Family TreeHouse! Happy New Millennium!! I've been tidying up around the TreeHouse, so if you happen to find a broken link or two, please let me know so that I can fix it.
We've got Christmas photos and others on the new version of The Fridge. (now located in the ScrapBook).......
We've got the Christmas 2000 newsletter online in two formats......
We've off-loaded some more images over to the free PhotoPoint image hosting site I'm becoming more and more fond of.....
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26 November 2000:
Thanksgiving weekend 2000 has come and gone! We had a great Thanksgiving at the VOGT Family TreeHouse! All four VOGTs were home, my sister and her family joined us, and Audrey brought a friend from Northern Ireland home from school in Chambersburg PA, so we had nine around the table (and one under it - Buddy!). Audrey and Jane ("Jay-in" by her pronunciation) arrived Wednesday morning on a commuter flight from Harrisburg airport. Their flight left at 7am (check-in was at 6, and with such a busy travel day one shouldn't be late), and Harrisburg is 75 minutes or more away, so they left the school at 4:30 AM just to be sure. Megan arrived from Lowell in the afternoon, and our busy but relaxing holiday had begun. I stayed up until well after midnight making the famous stuffing that my Dad taught me how to make. Thursday morning was spent getting the house ready, because most of the food preparation was either underway or already finished. Our Thanksgiving feast was wonderful, and after a walking break (Buddy needed his exercise), a second round for dessert was just as wonderful. The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing for Lynn and I, and running around visiting friends for Audrey and Megan. This morning Audrey and Jane took a 9:00 am commuter flight back to Harrisburg (the flight was delayed an hour and a half - yuck - but to be expected on the busiest travel day of the year), and Megan stayed through dinner-time before heading back to Lowell - neither student was anxious to get back to classes and dorm rooms! As usual, I was snapping away on Thursday. Pictures can be found at my PhotoPoint image storage place, low resolution pictures can be found by clicking here, and high resolution pictures can be found here - click once on the thumbnail to see a small version, and click once on the small version to see the full hi-res version.
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04 November 2000:
Its been a long busy time these past few months. There's been no time to take care of essential things around the house, never mind any time for fun things like updating the web site! But we've survived, and I think we'll have a breather for at least a little bit..... long enough for me to bring you all up to date on the goings-on at the Vogt Family TreeHouse.......
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22 September 2000:
I'm experimenting with free places on the web to park images, seeing as I have so many to share and not enough places to store them. You can check out the new Nova Scotia pictures as well as the Amerigo Vespucci / Tall Ships pictures (currently broken on the Fridge) and the Kennedy Space Center pictures at PhotoPoint. Eventually I'll get them up on "The Fridge" but this is a quick-n-dirty way to share them now.......
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04 September 2000:
And now the other one is moved in. Megan packed up her stuff into the van (no trailer needed) and we moved her into Concordia Hall on U-Mass Lowell South Campus. She's got a single room this year so she is real happy. The room is small but is nice, except for the ridiculous, stupid, moronic 1950's style desk that they FORCE her to use. There is no physical way to put a desktop computer monitor on this desk (remember, it was built in the era of slide rules - no, abacuses), but she is forbidden to take it out of her room or replace it with something that is marginally functional! Bureaucracy!! ....... Now with both girls at college its just Lynn, me, and the dog! PARTY!!!
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02 September 2000:
One down, one to go. Well, Audrey is firmly ensconced at Wilson College in Chambersburg PA. We rented a U-Haul trailer, hooked it up to the back of the van, and we all (and I do mean all - even the ferrets and the dog) accompanied her to college. She even brought her ferrets with her to school (one of a few schools that allow pets - must have something to do with the pre-vet curriculum). Buddy had to ride all the way down there sitting beside the ferrets in a travel kennel. By the end of the trip he was finally used to them. We took one day to drive down, one day to move in, and one day to drive back (without the trailer - I dumped it off at the U-Haul center in Chambersburg). As soon as she's back on-line (the network connection in her dorm was dead while I was there) send her a How-di-doo!
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28 August 2000:
Hey, we're back from vacation!! Nine days driving around Nova Scotia - and I do mean AROUND!!! The four of us were getting a bit of cabin - er - van fever towards the end. We drove 1650 miles - not counting the miles on the ferry - too much for nine days. We found ourselves more than once hurrying past beautiful scenery to make it to the next B&B before they gave our rooms away. We saw some spectacular stuff though - Nova Scotia is one beautiful part of the world - especially the Cabot Trail across the top of Cape Breton. I have tons of pictures, but I have to find a place to host them first before I can add them to the web site. Maybe soon.......
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14 August 2000:
Its been a slow summer, PLUS MediaOne managed to break the FrontPage extensions on their web server and they don't seem to know how to fix it (I offered to fix it for them, but.....) so I've been lazy in updating these pages. Lots of stuff coming up though: our family vacation is soon, and then Audrey is off to college as a Freshman, then Megan moves in to her dorm, then Lynn and I are off to Colorado for a week, then back to Audrey's college for Parent's Weekend, then I'm off to Brussels for a week, then I turn right around and head to MD for a week - and all this happens before November starts! It's going to be a hectic fall..... no time to enjoy the empty nest!!
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18 July 2000:
I bought a new hard drive today - 15.2 GB for $99!! Unbelievable! The bottom of the Computers page has an updated cost-comparison through the years..... quite an eye-opener!
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02 July 2000:
We've been invaded!! My sister, her daughter, and her daughter's two sons (5 & 8) are visiting from Denver (sheesh - that makes me their great-uncle!!). It's been a while since we had little ones around the house continuously, and never boys before!! Quite an experience! It should be a lot of fun - I'll get my fill of playing catch in the next week or so...;)
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23 June 2000:
We've had an incident with our dog Buddy, who is the most lovable and playful dog in the world 99% of the time. But that other 1% has been troubling, and got very troubling recently..........
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17 June 2000:
More playing with JavaScript. I dropped the graphics messages that popped up under the tree, and added pop-up boxes that hover with the mouse. Let me know if you like them, or hate them, or didn't even notice.....
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13 June 2000:
Finally - The complete Graduation 2000 Page Set, including lots of photos, is ready........
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4 June 2000:
Hot off the press (actually, hot out of the digital camera) - here's a photo of the graduate with her proud mom and dad!!
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4 June 2000:
We're off to Audrey's graduation in a few hours!! I also found a few more old Christmas Newsletters to add to the collection......
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27 May 2000:
More playing with JavaScript. I've added hover-messages to the front page. Let me know if you like them, hate them, didn't notice.....
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25 May 2000:
Pictures from the Class of 2000 Senior Prom are here....
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19 May 2000:
I'm playing around with JavaScript code on the web site. I'm trying to set up an active message when something has changed since your last visit. If cookies are enabled in your browser, then the main page sets a "Last Visit Date" cookie and stores it on your machine. The next time you visit, the JavaScript compares the "Last Visit Date" stored on your machine with the "Last Modified" date for the web site. If the web site has been changed since your last visit, a little pop-up window will appear, telling you that something new has been added since your last visit. If the web site has not changed since your last visit, we say nothing. If cookies are disabled on your machine, we ignore the whole process and say nothing, ever.
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15 May 2000:
Mother's Day 2000 - and the VOGTs continued their Mother's Day tradition. Traditionally, Mother's Day is is when we all plant the marigolds along the front walk. We do it as a family, with lots of helpers with the preparation (more prep this year than usual) and an assembly-line approach to planting the little plants every six inches along either side of the 40-foot front walk. It looks great when its done, especially after a few weeks when the little plants become bigger plants and begin to fill out. After all the hard work, the girls made dinner for mom, and we ate out on the deck! Mom had a great day!
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8 May 2000:
It's official, the letter is in-hand! Audrey has been accepted to her First-Choice college - Wilson College For Women!! We visited the school in October 1999, and we were all very impressed. Now it's official - Audrey's been accepted, and that's where she wants to go! Why not send her a congratulatory email?
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7 May 2000:
Audrey has a ferret. Actually, she's had him for a month or so. His name is Oscar, and he lives in a big ferret-cage in Audrey's room.
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26 April 2000:
What a difference 24 hours makes...... Its Snowing This Morning!!! Not the latest its ever snowed here (that record belongs to the date May 9th) but definitely out of season. Here's 2 side-by-side pictures, taken 24 hours apart.......
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19 April 2000:
We just got back from visiting old friends and haunts in Germany! Lynn and I flew to Stuttgart on 29 March, flying through the night and arriving on 30 March. Lynn and I took a week's vacation and we visited people and places we remembered from our four years in Germany (1991-1995). Lynn flew home on 6 April, and I stayed for an extra week doing work, returning on 14 April. I'm compiling photo-logs of our all-too-short visit. Here are pages for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 6............. Parts 3-5,and 7-8 will follow.
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25 March 2000:
Out with Winter, in with Summer. I need to have my head examined - I mowed the lawn today. Not all of it. Just the front part..... as an experiment. I bought a new lawn mower, and of course I had to assemble it and test it out (works great!). But I also heard that trimming the lawn very short before it starts growing does two things; one - it gets up a lot of dead grass, almost like thatching (and it did), and two - it gets sunshine to the new growth quickly and makes it thicken up and be healthy quicker. So I cut the front on the lowest setting with the sharp new mower (boy is it short! like a golf green!) and I left the rest of the lawn as is. We'll see how the cut section does in the next few weeks...........
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19 March 2000:
News on the Genealogy Front..... My niece found a bunch of old photos in her family's attic. Two in particular were most interesting. One depicts my grandfather at work - he was a freight handler for the B&M railroad. The other was a group photo taken circa 1905 in a photography studio in Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland. One of the nine people in the picture I recognized as my grandfather's brother, the rest I was not sure of, but there was a family resemblance. So, I wrote a letter to my cousin in Tralee, and enclosed a copy of the photo. She collaborated with her cousin (it turns out that very same photo had been in her cousin's sitting room when she was a child) and identified the rest of the people! I am truly lucky to have cousins I communicate with on a regular basis back in the "Auld Sod!"
An excerpt from her letter: "When I saw the picture, I knew immediately that the people in it weren't the ones you thought they were, except, of course, No. 1 who is Uncle Jerry McGrath. I sent a photo copy of the picture on to Sr. Gemma of Baltovin. She and her brother Fr. Tom were greatly moved, because, as she said, it was a photocopy of a photo that they had in their sitting room in the old house (next door to my home). I'm enclosing a key to the picture which she forwarded to me. The venerable looking old man (#9) is Jim McGrath, uncle to your grandfather, so he hailed from Knockbrack - a farm was bought for him in Baltovin. The old lady (#8) is his wife, Kitty Crowley. Sr. Gemma thinks #7 is her brother (father of #3, Jerry Crowley). #2, #4, & #6 are children of Jim & Kit McGrath. Fr. John McGrath (#4) was a priest in Boston! Eugie Culloty (#5) is the husband of Ellie McGrath (#6). Finally, #1, #2, #4, & #6 are first cousins. I know that your niece and yourself will be disappointed, but at least, five members of the group are related to us.
"Fr. Jim (Gemma's brother) is in a home in Tralee. He asked her to frame the copy she showed him (I sent her two), he was so excited and pleased to see it again."
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17 March 2000:
Well, Old Man Winter still has some life in him yet...... We got 4 inches of messy wet snow today, a day that's supposed to be GREEN, not GREY and WHITE....
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15 March 2000:
Hey!! The peepers have arrived! That's a sure sign of spring! They're peeping up a storm out in the swamp across the street as I type this! Actually they were out in force last Thursday (9 March) when we had 70 degree weather for a day, but it got down to well below freezing the very next day. I thought they all froze to death, but they're out there peeping away tonight.
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1 March 2000:
First college acceptance is in the pocket for Audrey..... Framingham State College. Its a small state school with a BS in Biology and a focus on Pre-Vet, so it fits the bill. One down (or rather, up), two to go.
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18 February 2000:
Audrey's a bit of a hurting puppy these days - she had all four of her wisdom teeth out today (does that mean she's no longer wise??). She's doing quite well, considering, but solid food is still a distant dream for her right now. She's living on milk shakes, clear soup, and yogurt. Her jaw is swollen - more on one side than the other - so she looks a bit like a lopsided chipmunk. I have a picture but she made me swear not to post it on the web site!
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30 January 2000:
Pictures from my recent (27 January) visit to the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral in Florida are on the Fridge..... (also available in low-tech format from there too)
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21 January 2000:
Lynn got another new car!!
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16 January 2000:
Another European business trip - A week in Stuttgart (9-12 Jan) and Brussels (12-15 Jan).
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08 January 2000:
The telescope that was the Family Christmas Present for Christmas 1998 has had some accessories added for 2000: Meet Mongo-Lens!
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1999 |
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16 December 1999:
The 1999 Edition of the Vogt Family Christmas Newsletter is on-line!
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26 November 1999:
My prize for being named the Best Family Web Site in MediaOne New England arrived today - a MediaOne polo shirt and a trophy! (26kb JPEG Image)
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09 November 1999:
Hey Cool - Way Cool!! Check it out!! For the 2nd year in a row, the Vogt Family TreeHouse was voted the Best Family Web Site in MediaOne New England!! Read all about it!! If the site is blocked for you because you're not MediaOne, then you can read it here (I stole the announcement and copied it).....
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09 November 1999:
Information about our 1999 German Exchange Student.....
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07 November 1999:
Woburn's 1999 Halloween Parade images are "hanging on the fridge....
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17 October 1999:
I've recently changed the way I present family tree information on this web site. Previously, I had four trees output in the now-common HTML format that many genealogy software programs produce automatically. That's ok, but those formats produce lots and lots of HTML files, and they take up lots and lots of space. For example, the four family trees I had (nowhere near my entire database) composed over 700 files, and took up 3+ MB of web space. I've recently come across a shareware JAVA applet called GenViewer from Gen Viewer Shareware that is spectacular. It reads in ZIPzed GEDCOM files directly as its data source, and outputs a number of visual formats, including a navigable tree. Try it out by looking at any of the four trees listed on the Genealogy Page. You'll be amazed, as I was.
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13 October 1999:
I've modified the permanent bottom menu on the web site - it now includes permanent links to our Travel Page (on the left) and our Exchange Students (on the right).
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10 October 1999:
Pictures from my trip to Germany - Glatt & Haigerloch in the Black Forest, and Cannstatter Volksfest!
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06 October 1999:
Pictures from my trip to Germany - Oktoberfest in Munich!
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05 September 1999:
Another college school year starts. Megan got moved into her U-Mass Lowell dorm today.......
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21 August 1999:
Gain a car, lose a car. Audrey had a fight with a telephone pole on the way to work this morning. She lost, the pole won.
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04 July 1999:
And what a party it was!! We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary! Instead of escaping to some romantic place by ourselves, we decided to throw a party!!
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14 June 1999:
Lynn got a new car!!
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26 May 1999:
Woburn High School Senior Prom 1999 Pictures are on-line - even before the prom is over!!
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16 May 1999:
Audrey and friends at the Woburn High Talent Show
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12 May 1999:
Hey - we've got a couple of new Buddy-pictures!
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11 April 1999:
Junior Prom Pictures are back!! Audrey and her gang rented a Party Bus for the Junior Prom and the entire crew rode together! These kids know how to have fun!!
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14 March 1999:
Audrey worked hard as assistant Stage Manager for Woburn High School's Musical, Fiddler On The Roof! See some great photos at Joe Brown's Fiddler web site.
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14 March 1999:
And the ancient artifacts just keep on comin'!! I've dredged up a Family Christmas Newsletter from way back in 1981!! Back before Audrey was even BORN!! Unbelieviable!
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21 Feb 1999:
The rest of the photos from Saskia's visit have been scanned and added!
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8 Feb 1999:
Introducing Journals of Our Travels In Europe! With the expansion of my storage space for this web site (my prize for winning the Best Family Web Site award - Thanks, MediaOne!!) I have more storage space for photos and stuff!
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8 Feb 1999:
The Christmas Newsletter Archive is on-line! Just what you've been waiting for!! ;)
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| 1998 |
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Nov 1998:
Another German Exchange Student has come and gone. Saskia Gerlach was a member of our family for 2½ weeks, and we had a great time!! She was a delightful person and a pleasure to have as a member of our family. She got to practice her English, and we got to butcher the German language! We only hope she enjoyed her time here as much as we enjoyed hosting her!
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Oct 1998:
Hey Cool! The Family TreeHouse won an award! We were named Best Family Web Site at the MediaOne Homecoming 1998 Fest!
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Sep 1998:
Not all family news is happy. We've had a family loss - Lynn's mom passed away in September after a number of years of declining health.
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June 1998:
Audrey's working as an Animal Care Specialist and Sales Associate at the Family Pet Center at the Burlington Mall!! Drop by, say Hi, and buy a puppy!!
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May 1998:
Exclusive Woburn High School 1998 Senior Prom photos (before and after - not during)!
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Feb 1998:
We now have expanded and more extensive photo albums of Europe! It's still not complete, but there's a lot more than there used to be!
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| 1997 |
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Dec 1997:
We now have on-line web-based genealogy databases for my ancestors, Lynn's ancestors, and the first six generations of descendants of our earliest known VOGT ancestor, Jean Nicolas VOGT.
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Nov 1997:
Photos and information about our 1995 (14 images, 239kb) and 1997 (1 image, 38 kb) VOGT Family Reunions, and our 1996 (5 images, 93kb) and 1997 (5 images, 125kb) German Exchange Students.
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