What's New(s) At The VOGT Family TreeHouse
All the news that fits in print!
21 Dec 2005: Far too long between updates, but I've got a bit of an excuse - I'm revamping the Family TreeHouse web site! It'll have an all new look-n-feel, and there'll be new information and new sections, and a (hopefully) better navigation system so you can find things easier. Look for it sometime after the first of the year. In the meantime - HAPPY HOLIDAYS Everyone!!! |
|
30 Oct 2005: I've begun building a new server for the house. I picked up an MSI (P4MAM2-V) motherboard and a new-style Intel Pentium-4 (2.66 GHz, with a 533 MHz hyper-threading bus) CPU bundled together on sale in September for $80 ($110 off list). A week or so into October I found 1 GB DDR DRAM boards for $119 on-line, so I picked up one of those. I had a spare 200 GB drive, and an old CD-ROM drive that came out of my main machine when I bought the DVD-Writer. All I needed was a chassis and a power supply, and MicroCenter had them on sale this week ($20 for the mid-tower chassis and $40 for a 450W power supply). So my new 2.66 MHz hyper-threaded P-4 with a Gig of memory and a 200 GB drive cost me about $260 total. I put it together last night and I'm configuring it now. I've been traveling a lot lately, and more to come in November. I made 2 week-long trips to CD in October, and so far I'm scheduled for 3 more days down there the first full week of November, and then a week down in Fort Walton Beach FL the week after that. The only good part is that I'll easily make my Silver Preferred frequent flyer again with USAir. Tomorrow is Halloween. We'll do our usual set-up for the kiddies; spider-webs all over the front door area, cover the lights with orange cellophane, put a scary-looking witch-dummy sitting on a small chair by the front door, then wire the whole place for sound. We play scary sound effects and Halloween music, and when kids come to the door, the witch talks to them because the sound system is also a PA system with a microphone in the house! This is what the decorations look like around the front door. It used to be that we were the best- (only?) decorated house in the neighborhood for Halloween night. A bunch of neighbors have caught up with us over the years, and some have surpassed us (strobes, fog machines, coffins, headstones, etc.), but we don't feel the need to ratchet it up to keep up. It's enough as it is. |
|
18 Sept 2005: |
|
05 Sept 2005: |
|
13 Aug 2005: We spent an overnight at our friends Peter and Linda's house down in the Providence area recently. Saturday night we went to the WaterFire festival down along the Providence river. Pretty neat! As usual, I took a bunch of pictures. |
|
09 July 2005: |
|
04 July 2005: |
|
01 July 2005: |
|
25 Jun 2005: BUT... While we were moaning and groaning about the haze, Lynn pointed up high in the SW and said "What's that one? It's not twinkling either" (planets tend not to twinkle as much as stars). It was Jupiter - high up in the sky and clear as a bell (well, far clearer than the convergence). We re-aligned the telescopes (we had three set up; a Celestron F80 EQ WA, a Meade ETX, and a Celestron FirstScope EQ60) and got a clean view of the big gas planet and four of its moons. I had the digital camera attached to the Meade ETX table-top telescope which comes with a sidereal drive so I was able to get decent time-exposures of Jupiter and its moons, attached. For those perfectionists, yes, sidereal drives are meant to track stars and deep-space objects, not planets, but for short periods of time (measured in seconds) it's a good approximation, and far better than nothing at all! ;) This Jupiter shot (heavily cropped to eliminate most of the black sky) was taken from the parking lot of Northeastern University's Burlington Campus (the old Nike missile site up on a hill off South Bedford St., for those who know the area) at 9:39 pm (the EXIF time is off - I forgot to reset the camera for daylight-savings time), with a 4-second exposure at ISO 400. The Meade ETX used as a lens works out to be about an f/13 at 1250mm, if I remember my previous calculations correctly. Turns out when I did much longer than 4 seconds, the wind blowing across the parking lot - and the non-sidereal motion of the planets - caused a blurring of the images. This experiment was fun, but it makes me appreciate all the more the great clear photos of planets taken with giant telescopes and planetary (not sidereal) drives! |
|
11 Jun 2005: The Family TreeHouse has transformed into a bit of a nature preserve recently. We had a rare stretch of dry weather a couple of weeks back, so I picked up some Thompson's Water-Seal to treat the wood deck out back. As I was moving plastic things that might get stained by any dripping liquid out from under the deck, I heard a squawk and looked up to see a mother robin glaring down at me from a nest she had built up under the decking, with 4 beaks poking out from under her. Since dripping wood waterproofing probably doesn't sit well with baby robins, the treating of the deck was postponed. Here they are mid-week this week, almost ready to fly. By this morning the nest looks empty, so I can remove the nest and wait for another stretch of dry weather so I can finally get to treat the deck! We also had a visit from a cast member of Watership Down out under the deck as well - this is a picture Lynn took from inside the closed cellar door! |
|
08 May 2005: A lot has happened since my last update. Megan recently had some unwelcome excitement - her car was vandalized. Someone threw a boulder or two through the back window. She's pretty sure it was some of the brat kids who live in her apartment complex. The police even have a witness, but nothing's come of it so far. She's still working for Pizza Hut, on track to become assistant manager sometime in the near future, hopefully. Speaking of managerial positions, Audrey has been offered the assistant manager's job at the EBGames store she works at. It pays lots more than CVS, so she'll probably be leaving CVS. She still wants to go to pharmacy school, but she doesn't get paid enough at CVS to allow for saving for college. Lynn and I are re-doing one of the bedrooms upstairs into a real quilt - sewing room for Lynn. She has been using the middle small bedroom, but we gutted the corner bedroom (a little bit bigger, 3 windows, south-facing exposure), ripped out the carpet, pulled up all the baseboards, put in two set of track-lights in addition to the ceiling fan and light that was there, re-wired everything, added a second multimedia drop (phone, internet, and cable TV) on the wall opposite from the original drop. We'll paint the walls and woodwork and lay down Pergo© laminate flooring instead of carpet. Once all that's done, we'll set up the middle bedroom as our guest room. Winter ended and yard work began without any transition. I'm mowing the lawn weekly now, and with all the rain we've had lately, I may have to up that to every 4-5 days. I still have a second raised garden to build at the north end of the pergola (where the blue tarp is in the photo), and we're starting to replace the line of rubble rock along the side street side of the yard with a similar raised bed, for Rose of Sharon bushed and other similar things. |
|
20 Feb 2005:
Lynn and I had a second trip to Florida last month. We returned to the same area as before so Lynn could get a medical assessment for jaw problems. For the past 10-15 years, Lynn has had jaw problems (as did her mother, it appears to be hereditary). She has TMJ (Temporo-Mandibular Joint) disease, where the jaw joint on either (or in Lynn's case, both) sides deteriorates. It causes a lot of pain when talking or eating, and alters the position of the lower jaw and screws up the bite. We went to a world-renowned Maxillo-Facial Surgery specialist down in St. Petersburg (recommended by our local dentist) to get an assessment of the problem and the possibilities of fixing it from his point of view. Fascinating visit. She had an MRI and a CT scan done, plus positional portraits (mug shots - emphasis on the jaw) and a Doppler sonogram (records the amount of noise coming from the jaw). She also had two mouth casts made, and had three blocks (Novocain in a nerve); one in the occipital nerve in the back of the neck, one directly into the TMJ joint in the face, and another into the sympathetic nerve in the front of the neck. It was a busy day, to say the least. This guy down in St. Pete does a radical repair procedure that no-one else (apparently) does, where he transplants fat tissue into the jaw joint to replace the destroyed disks. If that weren't weird enough, once you have this done you have to have the jaw immobile (think Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs) for up to 6 months or more. We'll be getting 2nd and 3rd opinions too, but our dentist (whom we both think highly of) said this guy was the best, so we figured we'd check it out. |
|
02 Jan 2005: We rung in the New Year in our traditional fashion, at our friends' house with other folks as well. There was three parties in one this year; old duffers like us, out-of-college folks, and high-school-senior folks. Another great time was had by all, including the annual viewing of Dinner For One, a German New Year's tradition! Also, the 2004 edition of the VOGT Family Christmas newsletter is out. You can read it (and past ones too) here... |
We also have a What's New(s) Archive!
Enjoy!
Copyright © 1973-2021 by Eugene F. Vogt. All rights reserved. Last modified 02-Jan-2021 2:49 AM ET. Send questions or comments to the Family TreeHouse WebMeister. View our Privacy Policy.