Emergency Leak Control

Drip Control System
Originally uploaded by erink

Since Snowpocalypse! hit Pittsburgh and brought us 2 feet of snow in 40 hours, followed by another five inches two days later and another five inches six days after that, a lot of people are dealing with leaky houses.

My first rental duplex had a flat roof, so I have years of experience dealing with ice dams. My current house, which is otherwise pretty great, has aged box gutters that have been leaking for two years (mostly because I put off fixing them after the high-priced roofer did a bad job). That means that when we get ice dams, water leaks in some of our window frames from the gutters.

An ice dam is ice that forms in your downspout. Snow melts under the ice on the roof because your house is warm, but with the downspout blocked, there's nowhere for it to go. If you're unlucky, it goes down, through your roof or gutter and into your house. Unless you can get the downspout unfrozen or remove all the snow and ice from your roof, it's going to keep leaking.

So, not much you can do outside until spring. But inside, there are a few techniques you can use to control the water.

Obviously, you want to deploy buckets. But it's tough to get the buckets right under all the drips, and even when you have a well-placed bucket, once it starts to fill up there's a lot of splashing, and that gets your floor wet too.

The solution is plastic. Dry cleaning bags work great, and trash bags are good too. (If you don't split the trash bags open to cover more area, you usually can reuse them for trash afterward.) If you have big problems, you can try those plastic painting drop cloths, as long as they're not too heavy for the tape.

Here's what to do.

1. Tape the plastic bag up on the wall or window so that the dripping water falls onto it. You can use multiple pieces of plastic if you overlap the top piece in front of the bottom piece so the water falls down onto the second piece.
   
2. Make a plastic highway to the collection area (bucket or trash can or whatever). You actually can move the bucket several feet from the leak, as long as the bucket is the lowest point in the system and there's a clean path to the bucket.
3. Watch the water flow. If it's dripping off an edge, try to curl the plastic inward so that it funnels the water back toward the center.
4. If you still have trouble with splashing, move the bucket farther away from the wall. The more gradual slope will slow the water down and minimize splashes. Make sure you don't create a low point on the way to the bucket.

Here are some details of the drip collection system in my TV room.



The plastic is taped to the window frame with scotch tape. You can see the brown spots where the water was dripping. (Click through for a larger version on Flickr.)



Here is the bottom of the system. I had water leaking from underneath the bottom of the windowsill so I taped up another bag there. I used masking tape there because I was afraid Scotch tape would tear the paint (still not sure the masking tape won't, but whatever). I had to wait until the wall was dry to get the tape to stick. This picture also shows the transition from dry-cleaning plastic to trash bag. I taped the trash bag to the window to catch another drip, but you can just tape it to the top bag (it is also taped to the dry-cleaning bag, but that's hard to see).

If you're going to be away for a while, you can use a trash can instead of buckets, it holds more water. Also, drips usually stop a few hours after dark when the roof water refreezes, so that gives you a chance to regroup. But don't leave your bucket out of the system for long!

I've often wondered if strings would be useful, but I've never tried it. For example, if you have a drip on the ceiling can you tack up a string and get the water to preferentially run down the string into a bucket?

Oh, another few tips. If you can access your roof or gutters by leaning out a window (carefully!), you can sometimes help clear the ice. A hockey stick is a great tool for this. We use my old stick to flick ice out of the gutters and to chop up the ice into flippable pieces. Be careful not to damage your shingles, or to clobber someone on the ground. We also pour warm water into the gutters to melt the downspouts. After the first storm we were alternating pouring in buckets of water and pumping the standing water out of the downspouts with a tiny battery-operated pump (you could also use a straight siphon or a drill-mounted pump).

There are gutter heater cables you can use to help melt ice from your roof shingles and downspouts. They're not much help once the ice is up there, you have to have a roofer install them ahead of time.

So, hope this is helpful - or at least amusing.

Quest for Paczki - 2010 Edition

Much easier than last year. But still not as good as Jenny Lee's.

Joys of Working From Home

This is literally what just happened to me.

Every room in my house is nice and cozy, except the kitchen, which has two outside walls and a tile floor (and a bit of a draft around the floor). But the kitchen has the best light and a nice clear workspace, so I decide to work there. It's 12 degrees outside, so my feet are cold. I go upstairs to get a pair of socks.

On the way to my socks, I notice that the window in the TV room has started dripping again. We have elderly box gutters and were in denial about the drips for a year or so, which means that when snow starts melting from the sun, there are a few places where the water backs up and seeps through the box gutters and into the house at the window frame below the gutter. And we got 20" of snow on Friday night. I have a vast knowledge of how to rig dry-cleaning bags and buckets to deal with the drips, and we lean out the windows of the third floor clearing ice with a hockey stick and buckets of warm water. When you hear great crashing sounds, you know the downspouts are clearing and you're done.

So I head up to the third floor and start clearing the gutter above the TV room window. That goes pretty well, a little ice flicking and about four buckets of water, and I hear crashing sounds and the water drains well. I go to check on the other problem gutter, spend some time pitching ice out of it, and decide to use the tiny battery-operated pump (which I bought but never used for the basement flooding that has since been fixed) to drain some standing water out of that gutter. Okay. Third floor secured.

So I head downstairs to check on the TV room. And a mysterious water disaster has occurred. The bucket is askew and apparently a gallon or two of water has pooled on the carpet and run into the room, stopping to get soaked up by the big floor pillow we have there. Replace the bucket, pick up the floor pillow and get it drying in the bathroom, deploy all the ShamWows (you'll say "wow" every time!) I can find, along with some towels. Run downstairs to the basement twice, once for a plastic shelf gadget to get the bucket off the wet carpet and once for a fan to help the carpet dry. Hang soaked ShamWows in the bathroom to dry.

Check on the bedroom window for drips. Still dry.... Count my blessings. The front of the house didn't get much sun today.

Okay, everything's drying, nothing's actively dripping except some stragglers in the TV room that are going into the bucket. I need to change the wet band-aid on my thumb (I cut myself mysteriously while digging out my car yesterday). Okay. Back to the kitchen to work.

My feet are cold.

A Christmas Lesson

I loved this video. It really defused the jewelry ads for me too - apparently, it's possible that someone can actually love me and NOT buy me a diamond tennis bracelet (which I wouldn't use and ordinarily don't want at all). Now they're just funny.

Exotic Candies of Utah - Annabell's Look!

Annabell's Look!
Originally uploaded by erink

One of the unexpected perks of driving all around the southwest for vacation was finding regional candy in the gas station convenience stores!

Annabell's LOOK! was pretty tasty. It's nougat with dark chocolate on the outside and some tiny pieces of peanut embedded in there somewhere.

This is what it looks like on the inside:

Stay tuned for reviews of more nougat-based and cherry-flavored delicacies from the exotic southwest.

New phone...

Last post from my non smart phone!

Happy Hocktober!

To celebrate the opening of the NHL season, I give you:

Bears Playing Hockey



Living in the modern world, we don't have a good idea of how dexterous bears are, and how capable they are on two legs. I've seen old film of them riding bikes and doing all sorts of difficult tricks. Trained bears were part of Russian circus tradition until very recently, although they're very rare now (for good reasons). This looks to be a mid- to late 20th century European show.

Not many skill players on this squad, but if you make it to about 1:50, there's a fight! Close enough for me.

Protest This

(A stealth G-20 post.)

I was reading a story in the Post-Gazette just now and it's talking about some of the protesters out for the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh today. And they interviewed this fellow:

"I want to be part of a moment," said Sam Brown, 22, of Sewickley.

Mr. Brown is a recent graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where he majored in art history and Asian studies. Now the poor economy has forced him to move back with his mother in the Pittsburgh suburbs, he said, and he scours craigslist every day for jobs.

All I can think is, Dude, it's not the economy.

(The whole story: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09266/1000288-53.stm)

On Litter

A week ago I spent a few Saturday morning hours picking up trash along the highway near my house. It was a volunteer project supposedly related to the G-20 Summit coming to town late this week, though I have my doubts foreign dignitaries will be cruising I-376 between Forest Hills and Edgewood. Whatever. You know, company's coming, yinz gotta redd up n'at.

Here's what I found:

• Most common litter by far: Cigarette butts. There were just hundreds per square yard, outnumbering and possibly even outmassing all the other litter. No, we didn't try to pick them up. Somehow cigarette butts get a special status that makes them not litter in the eyes of smokers ... except they are.
  
  I remember this being a big problem on the beach at Waikiki. There were signs all over telling you to pick up your butts. I think if you dug down to any level of beach sand there you would find cigarette butts in waxing and waning layers depending on how fashionable smoking was in past years.
  
  I was trying to figure out ways to get rid of the butts. Maybe instead of paying the new fines for smoking in public areas we should give offenders the choice of community service picking up cigarette butts for a few hours? Can we invent a special tool to pick them up by the shovelful? Or could we put a deposit on them and/or offer a bounty? (We could tag each butt so you can count a big trash bag full electronically, right?)
  
  
• Number two most common trash by the roadside: Plastic car parts. They're everywhere. From little pieces of plastic to entire bumpers - there's even a ditch along the stretch we were working that I named the valley of forgotten bumpers because there were about eight partial front-ends down there.
  
  
• Number three trash category: Drink containers. There weren't as many bottles and cans as I expected, and this category includes a lot of fast-food cups and cup lids. Which do biodegrade, by the way, they get really brittle and fracture when you pick them up.
  
  
• I expected a lot of those floss-picks since you see them all the time in parking lots. (I mean really, what is the trigger in the grocery store parking lot that causes people to suddenly think about dental hygiene? And why can't they use the trash can afterward?) But I only found one. The personal hygiene product that was the surprise winner: Q-Tips. I picked up five or ten of them.
  
  
• The area with most trash was the entrance ramp. Lots of bags and large items. It's like they have to dump ballast to get up to highway speed.
  
  
• Styrofoam coolers are not a good thing to put in the back of your pickup truck. Even the plastic ones can get away from you.
  
  
• Road maintenance crews are not tidy. I didn't really expect them to be. They pour asphalt right over the trash and leave bolts everywhere when they replace the guide rail.

Though I thought the entire set of truck lug nuts and bolts was interesting, the only piece of trash I actually brought home was a large broken glass fragment almost 1" on each side. Trust me, I showed remarkable restraint.

So, I've done my part for the city's reputation. Don't you jagoffs mess it up again before Thursday!

Cigarette butt photo by Flickr user multisanti; some rights reserved.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tikun/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Plus Size Doctor

Plus Size Doctor
Originally uploaded by erink

Saw this in the craft store - in case you're inspired to dress up as an overweight physician for Halloween, they've got you covered!

How To Eat Produce At Home

A friend of mine was envying our farm share and our ability to turn it in to food. (Actually we have a mutual friend who does much better - our last eggplant rotted; she made baba ghanouj.) Hitting a farm market once a week or once a month is a good low-commitment option, but you still need to figure out how to work fresh food into your routine. Here are some ideas that work in my house.

Salad

Salad is a no-brainer, and even though I don't really like it a lot it's a good addition to most meals or a good quick meal on its own.

First, buy a head of lettuce. Romaine is my favorite. When you get home, wash each leaf and cut them up into pieces about 3 square inches apiece. You can tear it if you don't want to cut it, but cutting is fine. Put the pieces into your salad spinner (yes you need this) and dry them. Store the prepared lettuce in a large plastic container with a piece of paper towel on the bottom. The paper towel helps keep the moisture right in the container so the lettuce will keep for a week or more. This way you can grab a few handfuls when it's time to assemble your salad. Yeah, you can buy the bag lettuce at the store, but this is usually better.

Tomatoes - All my salads need tomatoes. Keep them out of the fridge, because tomatoes have a flavor chemical that degrades in the cold. I just wash the one I'm using right before I cut it up for the day's salad. Cherry tomatoes are an option too if you want to be able to control portion size (though I never have a problem getting rid of excess tomato after making a salad!)

Broccoli or Cauliflower - Broccoli is another requirement for my salads, and farm broccoli is way better than grocery store broccoli. Like the lettuce, you can get a bunch of broccoli and prep it that day then keep the salad-sized pieces in a plastic bin in the fridge for a week or more. Just cut the tops off and throw the stems away (unless you're crazy about broccoli stems, I'm not). I like to cut them really small, about 1" square or less, so they fit on the fork.

These are the minimal ingredients for a decent salad for me. These parts go without saying:

• Fresh black pepper
• Good dressing (Ken's Steak House Lite Balsamic Vinaigrette is my go-to dressing, but I also bought a nice Caesar recently)
• Pepitas or sunflower seeds
  

More things you can put in salad to make it good:

• Parsley - cut it up with kitchen scissors and mix it in with the lettuce
• Carrots - I'm not a big fan, but lots of people like this. Slice it or dice it small so it's not too hard to chew.
• Celery
• Cucumber - especially good with a ranch or bleu cheese dressing
  
• Onion - red or white sweet onions, chopped or sliced
• Pickled beets
• Hard boiled egg - you get to use those neat wire egg slicers for this!
  
• Tuna - if I'm making a meal salad I just drain a can and dump it on. When I'm eating it I tag-team between eating a little tuna and eating some lettuce and other stuff.
• Cottage cheese - again, I just dump it on and tag-team.
• Cheese - somehow I don't do this often, but sliced up swiss or muenster is yummy.
• Chick peas or other canned beans - you probably want to rinse them
• Leftover vegetables - the other day we cut up our leftover wax beans and they were yummy in salad. Might have been the butter....
• Nuts or other seeds
• Grapes, raisins (ew - not my thing) , or sliced apples
  

Cooked Vegetables

Most veggies can either be steamed in the microwave or sauteed in a frying pan. Tough greens like kale, chard, and collards are better in a pan. To sautee them, cut up the vegetables (take out the stems of those greens, or just start them earlier than the leaves to make sure they get softened enough), put them in a pan with some olive oil or butter and salt and pepper. Use medium heat and cook until they're soft (probably like 3 minutes for spinach but 8 or 9 for kale).

When steaming (broccoli, beans, asparagus) I usually just put them in a glass bowl and leave them wet after I rinse them. You might want a little more water depending on how much food there is. I have a plastic microwave cover that keeps a little extra steam in. Try 2-3 minutes to start, then keep going until your veggies are as soft as you want them.

Fresh fennel bulb is great sauteed. Also zucchini and yellow zucchini (is that a squash?), slice them up and season them with a little cumin. I think it's cumin...?

Veg and Rice Dinner - one of my big excuses for eating white rice! But you can do a more nutritious grain if you want (brown rice, quinoa, etc.) or even pasta like couscous. Basically I cook up some veggies and a pot of rice, then just chuck the veg on top of a bowl of rice with some soy sauce and sesame seeds. This is really good with chard or kale, or broccoli, or beans (I mean green beans or yellow beans).

Rice microwaves surprisingly well. So if you do a big pot of rice you can keep the leftovers in the fridge (with your leftover sauteed fennel) and put together a leftover meal really quickly.

Fruit

Yeah, it's not a huge burden to eat fruit, but sometimes looking at a big peach just seems like too much of a commitment. Also I don't like the fuzzy part. I found out that if I cut them up I like them better.

I keep a tiny cutting board next to the sink for cutting up fruits before I eat them. It's easy to rinse off and re-stow. You'll also need a paring knife, which is not expensive. In the spring I hull and slice a lot of strawberries for my cereal. (But now it's blueberry season and they're a lot easier than strawberries because you can wash them all at once and then put them back in their box in the fridge. Strawberries rot faster after you wash them so it's better to wash them when you use them.)

A yummy dessert or snack (or breakfast): cut up fruit (nectarine, peach, pear, etc.) or berries and throw them in a small bowl with some yogurt or cottage cheese. Ice cream makes a good dairy medium too. You can put in nuts or raisins or granola or wheat germ too. And a little sugar or honey is no crime if the yogurt is too sour. There's always banana to sweeten up the mix too.

I haven't quite got the hang of eating melons. I think the key is to cut up the whole thing when you get it.

Share and Enjoy!

So, that is my advice on how to eat produce at home. I'm no cook, but it's not that hard when you get the hang of it. You still throw things away, but at least maybe you'll use some of them!

Farm Share 8/11/09

Farm Share 8/11/09
Originally uploaded by erink

Someone asked about my farm share the other day, and I haven't posted anything about it for a while. This is what we got in our box from Kretschmann this week:

• A bunch of beets
• One onion (I cut off the top because it was in bad condition, but apparently there's stuff you can do with it if it's not)
• Two green peppers
• Four tomatoes (of moderate quality) - apparently there's a "late blight" causing farmers in the region to lose a bunch of tomatoes this year ... Bummer. So much for my insalata caprese dreams. I still have hope for my plants, though a friend four blocks away just lost his tomato patch.
• Lettuce - this week we got two bunches of something like romaine.
• Chard
• One tiny watermelon
• Green beans
• A bunch of curly parsley
• Carrots
• Two cucumbers

Seriously, Microsoft?

I am more than pissed off by these Bing commercials.

The premise is that web searches are no good at restricting their results to what you actually meant. And that's just not true. It hasn't been true for ten years. Get over it!

If search engines were that annoying they wouldn't be so popular. Millions of us would not be using a search-created homepage. Search works great. The only thing pissing me off about search engines now is Bing's marketing campaign.

This is fun, though. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Garlic Flower

Garlic Flower
Originally uploaded by erink

One of our farm shares two weeks ago included a garlic bulb with a stem attached that was like 5' long. Seriously. Well, at least four feet.

We kept it like that for a few days, because it was cool looking. Then eventually the beau cut the garlic off the bottom and put it on the counter where we keep garlic. But we didn't throw out the stem yet, because, well, it was cool looking.

A few days on, the flower bud at the top started opening. So I recut the stem and put it in a little vase. (The stem is down to about 3' now.)

The flower is only about as big as a quarter.

Our other farm share has been giving us garlic scapes, which are just the stem part. You can use them in salads and eggs and stuff, they're garlic-flavored and a bit more dense than green onions. But now I'm thinking maybe we should make them all into flowers.

Tiny Spiders

Tiny Spiders
Originally uploaded by erink

Something new turned up in the window box this morning.

They look like spiders, but I'm not sure. They might not have enough legs.

I kind of prefer them to the really big caterpillars that ate the petunias the last few seasons, and they're better than the ragweed that started growing in one of the other boxes. As long as I have window screens. Anyway, they didn't stay long.

Vive La Tour (or Cyclists Are Crazy Too)

Obsessively watching the Tour de France again. Here's a story from Stage 9 (Sunday).

Stage 9 was the last in the Pyrenees. There's a big HC (unclassifiable) climb, a peak named Tourmalet, about 3/4 of the way through the course. The descent just after the summit is a little tricky, down a narrow twisty mountain road. The riders went over in a few groups, two guys in the front, and then a group of 7 or 10 guys, and then the peloton (main field), followed by about half the race, who couldn't keep up on the climb, in variously sized groups of stragglers.

By the way, you might not want to be eating when you scroll down. I'm just saying.

Laurens ten Dam is a dutch rider who went over the summit with the second group. Apparently, he crashed like hell just after that. The TV didn't have video of the crash, but it looked like it must have been pretty impressive. This is what ten Dam looked like when he got back on the course:

This is a screen grab from a video I found on YouTube (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeU2HlDZFA) but I think you can still see the dirt and the fact that his jersey is shredded. He's also ripped up his left elbow and knee.

See, in the Tour, you don't get an injury time out. If you can't finish the stage, you're done. You go home. If you finish too slow, you're done. So you just have to go. In one early stage I saw a guy crash and ride the last 20 miles anyway with a broken wrist. Oh, my mistake - the TV just did a recap of injuries and it was Robert Gesink, and he actually rode 75 kilometers (46 miles) with a broken wrist. Right now I'm watching Kurt-Asle Arvesen, who's been grimacing and riding slow since a crash about 10 km earlier, hanging on to the doctor's car trying to decide if there's anything he can do to finish the last 40 km.

Actually ten Dam's crash probably wasn't very bad. It looks like he hit dirt pretty quickly, which is better than pavement, and he slid on his back a lot, which is better than sliding on your arms and legs. Oh, and though he didn't catch up to his breakaway group he rode the rest of the stage with the peloton no problem.

So here's the fun part. Laurens ten Dam is on Twitter.

Twitter is actually a great thing when it comes to connecting to "famous" people - or at least people with an inside view of things you see on TV. I follow two Mythbusters, NHL staff, some NHL players, Penn and Teller (he's actually quite chatty), and a bunch of pro cyclists. Especially for cycling, where there isn't a big US media presence, there isn't a lot of pressure for them to watch what they say. I mean, they do, of course, they're professionals, but also you get a lot of visibility into their lives. Like what they ate for dinner, problems with hotels and non-air-conditioned buses, and pictures of Levi Leipheimer in fluffy slippers.

Here's the photo Laurens ten Dam posted after Stage 9.

This is what you call "road rash." He also posted that the team doctor had to go shopping for more supplies.

Apparently the worst part of an injury like this is when you go to sleep, and you wake up and the sheets are stuck to you. Because, you know, your skin tends to ooze when it's like this.

So, road cyclists are officially crazy in my book too.

And you can read all about it on Twitter.

Vive la Tour.

• Laurens ten Dam's Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/laurenstendam
  
• Laurens ten Dam's photos: http://twitpic.com/photos/laurenstendam
  

Cow and Girls

Cow and Girls
Originally uploaded by erink

Was it "take your daughter to your underpaying, degrading work day"?

Bicycle Bell Ringtone

Found this in the Bike Pittsburgh blog. A local artist has been collecting sounds and publishing them as ringtones (for free!). She included this bike bell from one of the Bike Pittsburgh organizers.

http://www.locallytoned.org/tone/93

The bell, by the way, is wicked cool. Erok says he got it at Free Ride.

Bike Pittsburgh: http://bike-pgh.org/

The Number of Miroslav

Just a small thing, really, but one that should be known.

So there's this hockey player, Miro Satan. Yeah, Satan, but it's not pronounced like, you know, the devil; since he's Czech, it's got a sh- sound at the beginning.

Satan came to play for Pittsburgh last year as part of the neverending quest for Sid's winger. It didn't work out too well and Satan ended up getting sent down to Wilkes-Barre this spring to give the team salary cap room. But he took it well, went down and worked hard and helped out the youngsters, and then he came back up and had some good games for us in the playoffs.

Now. There's this website. Yahoo Sports includes data on all the NHL players. If you search for some player's name you will probably find his Yahoo Sports page which has his stats and news and such. And the URL for that page will be in the form "http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/players/[some random number]"

Only I don't think it's always a random number. Because to pull up data on Miroslav Satan, the number you have to put in there is "666".

I probably just made some database webmonkey's day by noticing.

Miroslav Satan on Yahoo Sports

First Week Farm Share

First box from Kretschmann Farms.