- 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.
- 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).
- 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 the morning of the 9th of October to see if it was a
clear morning (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?☺
- 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!
- 01 September 2004: We had
another troubling incident with our dog Buddy, usually the sweetest mutt
in the world. Read about it here...
- 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 on the fridge
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).
- 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
on the Fridge has the first installment of the trip record. It'll take me a while to compile it all so check back often!
- 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....
- 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!
- 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....
- 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!
- 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!
- 18 Dec 2003: It's
here.... the 2003 edition of the VOGT Family Christmas newsletter is
on-line...
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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 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...
- 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.
- 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!!
- 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!
- 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 on
The Fridge....
- 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!
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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!!!
- 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!
- 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...
- 09 February 2003: New pictures
in the ScrapBook (found on The Fridge)!
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.
- 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!!
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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 strings.
Looks pretty nice....
- 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.
- 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)......
- 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, on the fridge.
Enjoy!
- 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.
- 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!
- 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!
- 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.
- 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!!
- 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....
- 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.
- 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!
- 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!!
- 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.....
- 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!!
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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
- 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!
- 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!
- 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!
;)
- 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.
- 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.....
- 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!
- 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
scratch ticket
that didn't win anything!
- 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!!
- 01 January 2002: All of us at the
Vogt Family TreeHouse wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
- 01 January 2002: 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.....
- 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.
- 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!!
- Click here to view a large
(86kb jpeg) or small
(25kb jpeg) digital image of the
front walk light pole decorated for Christmas
- Click here to view a large
(42kb jpeg) or small
(13kb jpeg) digital image of
our small flag by the rhododendron bush out front
- 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.
- 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!
- 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 large
(198kb jpeg) or 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 (your choice of a 1.1
MB Windows Media file, a 6.9
MB RealMedia file, or a modem-busting 15.1
MB mpeg file).....
- 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!
- 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.
- 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...
- 18 September 2001: Words may never be enough
again.....
- 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!!
- 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.
- 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
(as well as more
frills for more money).
- 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!!
- 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.
- 13 July 2001: Christmas Cove pictures are in the
Scrapbook.....
- 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!
- 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!
- 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!
- 15 June 2001: At last - PERFECTION
has come to the web........
- 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!!!
- 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.....
- 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.
- 22 May 2001: Megan turned 21 yesterday.
Pictures from the party are in the
Scrapbook.....
- 08 May 2001: I'm trying out a new JAVA-based tool, an
outline system, that I'm using for a scrapbook. Click
here to see what it looks like (it may take a little bit
longer than normal to load, please be patient)......
- 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.
- 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!!
-
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.
- 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!)..........
- 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......
- 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!
- 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........
- 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.....
- 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........
- 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.....
- 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.
- 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.......
- 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.......
- 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!!!
- 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!
- 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.......
- 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!!
- 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!
- 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...;)
- 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..........
- 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.....
- 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!!
- 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......
- 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.....
- 25 May 2000: Pictures from the Class of 2000 Senior Prom are
here....
- 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.
- 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!
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.......
- 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.
- 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...........
- 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."
- 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....
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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)
- 21 January 2000: Lynn got another new
car!!
- 16 January 2000: Another European business trip - A
week in Stuttgart
(9-12 Jan) and Brussels
(12-15 Jan).
- 08 January 2000: The telescope that was the Family
Christmas Present for Christmas 1998 has had some accessories added for
2000: Meet Mongo-Lens!
- 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)
- 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).....
- 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.
- 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).
- 06 October 1999: Pictures from my trip to Germany - Oktoberfest
in Munich!
- 05 September 1999: Another college school year
starts. Megan got moved into her U-Mass
Lowell dorm today.......
- 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.
- 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!!
- 26 May 1999: Woburn High School Senior
Prom 1999 Pictures are on-line - even before the prom is over!!
- 16 May 1999:
Audrey
and friends at the Woburn High Talent Show
- 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!!
- 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.
- 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!
- 21 Feb 1999: The rest of the photos from Saskia's
visit have been scanned and added!
- 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!
- 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!
- Oct 1998: Hey Cool! The Family
TreeHouse won an award! We were named Best Family Web
Site at the MediaOne Homecoming 1998 Fest!
- 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.
- 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!!
- May 1998: Exclusive Woburn High School 1998 Senior Prom photos (before and after - not
during)!
- 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!
- 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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