That cold-ish time of year has come again, even down here in the south. On Wednesday it was almost 80*F, and now it looks like all that warm air is gone for now. One of the things we love about our house in the winter is our Lopi wood burning stove, but it takes a lot of wood too. Normally we cut and split wood all throughout the year, but the past year or two we haven’t really been able to catch up with the wood work so to speak. With all the trees down from the storm on Wednesday it’s too bad we couldn’t have just driven around Auburn and picked up all the wood, but instead I just cut my own up for today’s Friday Feet via my cell phone.
It was a little surreal driving around Auburn today in the sunshine seeing huge holes in people’s roofs, and massive trees down all over the place. I know there are still a lot of people in Auburn that are dealing with huge trees down on their property, and many with a lot of damage to their homes. Hopefully this will be the end of any more tornados for Alabama this year, this state has seen enough for 2011.
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This was a different kind of Friday for Friday Feet this week. If you are new to reading this blog, each Friday I do a post called our last trip down there was on our motorcycles in September 2006) for this particular Friday but as things go in life, it was not meant to be this week. It ended up being very cold down here this week (and today), and the timing just didn’t work out for us to go. So today, we just spent the day at home in the living room working on our computers together and we thought we would just go out for a nice dinner together on Friday night.
The day spent in the living room together worked out great, nice to take a day and stay home, but we perhaps never should have left the house. We ended up going to three different restaurants before we found one that had less than a 40 minute wait and it was our last choice of any place to eat between Columbus Georgia and our house, which would be Phenix City Alabama (yes that is spelled correctly for those not from around here, that’s how we spell in Alabama), not really known for all it’s great eateries, sorry).
We make the trek over to Columbus GA probably once a month so Deb and go to a few fabric stores that are not in Auburn. Each time we go, we try to remember not to go back because of the traffic and crowds. With the military base so close by (which is a good thing) the city seems to be so overcrowded at the main shopping centers. So in a huge shopping center which houses a Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, Lowes, Barnes & Noble, Circuit City (right now), Bed Bath and Beyond, Movie Theater and a lot more big box stores and tons of restaurants, to eat is a 40 minute wait (outside in the freezing cold).
We went over to Wal-Mart and picked up something for our favorite Superman in Birmingham (that is just in there to see if he reads my blog) and made our way over to Phenix City to eat. For some reason this restaurant was loaded with Bama paraphernalia so the first shot was for my favorite Bama fan (anyone want to take a guess where that shot was taken). On a side note, if you have a restaurant in the Auburn / Opelika area and would like someone to do a review for you, let me know, we love to eat, write, and review.
Never under estimate the greatness of spending the day at home with your wife and never leaving the house. We did this for probably 10 years straight, so I have some experience in that area, but as a friend of mine put it, sometimes a day at home is a very good thing.
All that to say, welcome to our living room. The feet shot was a vague attempt to sort of re-create a photo my grandfather took of himself (see Son of a Son of a Photographer?) that he took in 1938. I am sort of always trying to recreate that image in my mind but with 71 years difference in the photos there isn’t much other than perhaps the position that remains the same. The photo still fascinates me and it didn’t need a bunch of blabbering text like this to tell a story.
Winter is a strange thing down here. It never really gets a strong hold like it does in the north so we fluctuate between humid storms in the 50-60* and like it is today and tonight, freezing in the 30′s. Even so, the winter would be unbearable to warm loving people without our Lopi (see photo) wood burning stove that keeps it in the tropical range all winter.
In case you were wondering, after being in this house three years we have finally moved the lawn furniture out of the living room and that macbook on the oversized chair across the room is Deb and Ebby’s place (Blazer and I get the other side of the room away from the fireplace). Some days I still feel like we are moving in with boxes everywhere (literally) because of the last remaining remnants of our book business that takes up the entire garage, but it is getting better each week. When Deb starts her classes up again in March all will be gone and cleaned out.
Far more than I am sure any of you care to know but there you go, a mostly uneventful Friday Feet but in my usual long worded way. If any of you do your own Friday Feet post on your blog please let me know so I can link over to you. Have a good weekend everyone.
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Most things in our house are high tech as we can get, except when it comes to heating the house. When we built this house a few years ago we put in a wood burning stove (see Lopi, Lopi, and Lopi). Heating our home with a wood burning stove is great, except… you have to have wood of course. Since Deb likes the house to be WARM, we certainly save quite a bit on electricity over the winter (bill runs around $65 in the winter), it just takes a lot of labor to get it to the point of burning as you see below.
So, we spend many a Saturday afternoon in what turns out to be pretty tough work of cutting up wood, splitting, and stacking. Theoretically we should be working on seasoning our wood about a year out from when we are burning it, but so far we haven’t been able to catch up with the seasons and come summer time we really don’t want to be out there doing this type of work, so, we are doing it now.
This isn’t much of a technological post, other than the fact that I do have my phone out there with me, but this is what we did today. You will have to excuse the quality of the photos, all the images below were taken with my phone.
We have this sort of disaster area in the adjacent property our here. Early this year the logging trucks came in and clear cut the 40+ acres and left a huge mess of wood scrap bio-mass (mostly hard wood trees they didn’t want), and in the process gave us an almost endless supply of wood for our stove. Luckily we can’t see the mess next door from our house, and the owner of the property (which use to be a nice deer lease) was thrilled was wanted to clean it up a bit.
It was a totally exhausting day, but the end result is heat for the house.
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This week was one of the more crazy weeks in the past few months, but today Deb and I went over to Georgia and had dinner and that is my friday feet this week. The movie in case anyone was interested is With Honors (because my friend hasn’t let me borrow Dead Poets Society yet). One thing I have been trying to get to this week was to shoot a new profile photo (you can see the finished pic here) for various avatars and networking sites. The second shot here was when I got interrupted and Ebby joined me for the photo shoot. She certainly did not help at all, but makes for a cute photo I guess. Time to enjoy a few hours of Friday night and some work outside tomorrow. Being that it is two days from official winter, it will be over 70* tomorrow, time to cut some fire wood.
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This week my Friday Feet post is a little different. We had the boys youth group out to have a campout, cookout, and whatever else they do at that age. Being Friday I used this opportunity to get a Friday Feet shot in with some of the guys before they ate. It was absolutely pitch dark but those are my feet in the middle and Rusty Hutson’s one foot stuck in the side, Heath to my right with socks on, and everyone else that stuck a foot in at the time.
The boys play this sort of cruel version of a game that no one over the age of 25 should play called catch the flag. I was given the “easy” task of guarding our teams flag (this is pitch dark night at 30* by the way) and when someone came by I was to “get” them. After several sprints, tackles, and sumersalts that this body hadn’t done in a while I was exhausted.
The food was great. They brought out some fraternity grill on a trailer and cooked all night until we were all full. Breakfast was a different story. I learned you need to cook a normal portion times 10 for these guys, but it was all great fun.
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This weekend was busy but relaxing. Saturday was supposed to be a day for outside tractor work and various yard things we all seem to have to do on the weekend, but, it RAINED. Who’da thunk. We haven’t had rain in the southeast in what seems like years after last summer’s drought (in fact I think it has been a year). It was a nice rain shower and didn’t last long enough to rain out the entire grass cutting day.
The rain did let up enough for us a have a nice fire in our fire pit on the patio. We had this built into the patio when we moved in and we use it all the time. There is something about being able to sit outside around a “camp fire” that makes for a great and relaxing time. We sit around the fire pit on our patio all year round and enjoy it very much. If you don’t have one built into the concrete then you can do what we did before we moved in.
Get an old washing machine tub from a junk dealer (they will gladly give them away) or just dig you a nice whole in the ground and surround it with bricks. When we were building this house, the fire pit in the patio was one of the must have’s of the house, but really it is just a circle in the concrete. You would think such a thing would be an easy thing for a builder to get his hands around but nothing seemed to go that way with this house (see the category for house if you are interested).
The photo to the left here is actually a self portrait. Something I don’t do all that often but I had the camera flat on the ground and used the timer to trigger the shutter. The photo below is one I took of Deborah later on Saturday night. It is completely dark except for the fire in the fire pit. The image doesn’t show the fire because it would be to bright for the exposure, but you can see the spark trails of the fire just to the right side of her face. I did have her sit a little closer to the fire than she normally would so she was ready to move since her knees were a little warm.
She did real well to sit there through a 15 second exposure without moving. Thanks hun. It is a little spooky (not Deb of course) with the fire glow as the only light source but I love how it turned out. If you haven’t tried sitting absolutely still for 15-20 seconds at a time shot after shot after shot, you should try it some time. Deb did great as a subject with fire on her legs.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
We had a very nice service that completed the current series on missions. The rest of our Sunday was spent enjoy one of the most beautiful Spring days here in the lower south. We can now finally eat out on the patio without freezing to death. There is a new moon tonight, and I will try to take a few star trail images and see how they turn out for tomorrow’s post.
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Wow, today was a busy day of work. I usually wear many “work” hats throughout the day, today was no different, but there was a lot of heavy lifting on my part, mostly from boxes of books.
It started off by my normal reading of all my email and feeds from other blogs and as it would happen sometimes, I came across this really cool idea that ragamuffinsoul had about doing a time lapse of your day, A Day In The Life. Of course, I had to give it a try. I have to say, nothing like his, but it was pretty cool. I may just use it as my “welcome” video I have been putting off doing over and over.
A Fire in the Stove, In April?
The morning was quite cold for down here in the south, almost 40° when we woke up, cold enough that Deborah requested I get my act together and get a fire going in our wood burning stove. Yep, last day of April (in the far south no less) and we had a rip roaring fire. The exhaust temp got up to about 1,000° and the stove top temp about 350°, just about the same as dead of winter. We had the house built with a Lopi Wood Burning stove and we never have to run the heater.
Everything Else
I managed to get in a bit of practice on my E blues scale. I am getting a little faster at it but my bent up little finger on the end is having a hard go at the A blues scale. I am supposed to stretch it out, we’ll see. I was able to learn a nice little accompaniment to Hootie and Blowfish’s Michelle Post. All done pretty much with the g-chord, not to hard. After all that I still managed to get in about a 4 mile walk around the property before I was ready to collapse.
At the last minute I decided to join a small blogger group on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s that should be good, if I can find the time, and that post is over on d.amasc.us at Vagabond Blogger Small Group, I’m In.
