Blizzard Nemo

A'yuh, here in New Hampshuh, we got a bit uh snow.
 

Our snowblower-equipped neighbors were out in force to save the neighborhood. Much thanks for their help!
 

All bundled up, B finds a fun snow bank. I was tempted to pitch her off the porch and into a snowbank. For fun, you see.
 

We found that we could not open our back door to let Jasper into the yard this morning, so we cut a path to it by way of the gate.
 

Jasper the wonderdog LOVES the snow. Here he is reenacting the battle of the Somme from WWI.
 

Being near the fence, the snow tended to drift into high piles on the raspberry path. Look closely and you can see the horizontal wires for training the canes: those are 18" apart, and there's one that you can't see that's 18" off the ground!
 

The back door has snow piled about halfway up the lower pane. Fun drifting, too.
 

 

Jasper likes bounding and rolling in the snow. Here, he wades.
 

Brynna did make it to the swingset eventually, slid once to clear the slide, swung once to clear the swings, then gave it up.
 

That's a 4-foot fence. The pile on the raspberries comes almost level with the top!
 
Actually, my favorite part of the storm was last night around 11 pm. I pulled on my backcountry skis (I rock the old-school 3-pin bindings, no heel strap) and went cruising around the neighborhood. Great weather for it, and I had the streets to myself for the most part. The wind was up (sustained approaching 20 mph, gusts up to 30), temperature in the mid-teens, and snowfall over 1" per hour of fine powder. Heading down towards a local park was fine: in places where a car or truck has passed in the last hour, the tire tracks made a nice packed surface. In the park the powder parted around my shins. Heading back home was tough: into the wind. Had I planned a bit better, I would have had a balaclava and ski mask. As it was, the headwind and snow made things quite uncomfortable. As I returned home, I noticed that my outbound tracks down the middle of our street had been completely obliterated by wind and fresh snow - all in less than an hour!

Kickstarting a Bakery

There are several places downtown to get baked goods of one sort or another. However, the hours are a bit spotty (compared to our hectic schedule), and one could always use more choices. A new bakery, which had been using rented kitchen space north of Concord and selling through retail outlets, it looking to move into a vacated storefront on Main St. To do this, they have secured financing in a variety of ways, including raising over $4000 through Kickstarter.

Can't wait for our delicious brownies and bars!

Firefighter Brynna

My mother is rather handy with the needle and thread. She's produced many a fine piece over the years with speed, skill, and apparent ease. Knowing how Brynna loves the "beep beeps", my mother whipped up a firefighter outfit for her recent birthday. To complete the look there was also a fire hat, and of course, a fire engine for her very own (which, of course, makes all kinds of noises). Behold the cuteness:







We've now got Halloween all figured out for this year, too!

Wind

You may have heard about it on the news: New Hampshire got hit with some serious wind on Thursday night. We managed to get through more or less unscathed, but apparently that was not the case for nearly half the state. You can get all the gory details from your news source of choice, I'll just add our own experience. Being an engineer, I've made a graph:
Although the wind was heavy and the rain was spitting against the windows, things weren't all that bad until late in the evening. The only real downside was that the noise kept Brynna awake late. However, have a look at the above graph, right around 22:30. That's me taking Jasper out for an evening walk. In the rain and 40 mph gusts. Our road, like many, has power cables strung alongside, and quite a number of tall conifers on what tonight was the windward side. So while trying to avoid getting rain in my eyes, I was keeping an eye on the heavily swaying trees above, bracing with every howling gush of wind, hoping that I'd have enough warning before a falling branch dashed my brains in. I've been in gales on mountains before, but that didn't concern me as much as this. This was more reminiscent of getting caught in a thunderstorm above treeline than a walk down around the neighborhood. Pretty wild.

There was a moment of panic when, three minutes from home, the whole sky turned a glowing, under-the-sea green color. Great, I thought, I'll miss getting hit with a downed powerline only to get hit with an exploding transformer! That was followed by an exceptional dark when all the street and houselights went out. They came back after a few lengthy seconds, but it was definitely time to get indoors.

The electricity held out long enough to watch the end of the womens' figure skating competition, then started getting intermittent. Each flicker, brown out, or momentary loss signaled yet another power line getting snapped somewhere in the nearby grid, till it went out quite definitely around midnight and stayed out for some four hours.

Still, by morning, we had power back and there was no damage to the house. The tree in our backyard didn't seem to shed too much. But, when I took Jasper for a run Saturday afternoon, there was a whole lot of debris and trees around. Some had been visited by chainsaws already; many had not. I passed two downed power lines, and more than a few humming generators within a few blocks. So yes, it was pretty exciting, and the party is far from over for a whole lot of people across the state.

Cold Weather Play

Winter comes, the snow falls, the wind is up, and what do the moosesofthenorth do? We go out to play, of course. Taking advantage of the fresh powder, we got all bundled up so that we could go for a walk down to the park.

Brynna ready for her moon shot.


Our neighbors from down the street gowned up and came out, too.


Brynna, as it turns out, is very skeptical of the toboggan. You may noticed that, in a brief moment of forethought, we brought the baby backpack in case we needed to carry her. It is well we did bring it: about halfway down to the park Brynna began launching herself off the toboggan into a nearby snowbank.


The girls got tired of the slide pretty quick, and decided they wanted more wind in their faces by swinging. Negotiating those legs into the swings with clonkin' boots is no easy task - only surpassed in difficulty by getting those legs back out.

Unfortunately, the waning daylight, the increasing wind, and just plain time spent outside meant the girls started getting too cold for their good spirits to last. Brynna was by this point about an hour late for a nap, which didn't help. We ended up beating a hasty retreat back to the warmth, by which time Brynna was well on her way to a total meltdown.

Jasper, of course, is unfazed by the snow. He does, in fact, love it.

I hoped to take enough video footage to be able to put together a montage similar to this autumn one, because the characters and setting were largely the same; only the seasons change. But, the bevity of the outing, the difficulties of handling a camera in the cold with (or without) gloves, and fewer hands to watch the B made this impossible. Perhaps next month!

Gassed Out

Someday, someday, we will end our nomadic existence and finally stop moving around. One might think that owning a house would go a long ways towards that goal. By and large that is true, until a day like this. We are having hardwood floor put into the living room, and the existing floor in the adjacent dining room floor refinished to match. The plan had been to have the wood installed and everything sanded down one day, stain put down early the next so that it could air out all day, then everything sealed up the following day.

Unfortunately, our guy didn't put down the stain until about 4 this afternoon. As a result, the house reaked of volatile organic compounds. We did truly want to use a less hazardous product, but it just wasn't in the cards this go around. We were able to more or less sequester the bedrooms, and thre open the ground floor windows and doors, but it wasn't perfect. We could keep the air in the bedrooms fresh through the night, and thus spare Brynna from a nasty exposure, but it required blowing in cold outside air. That, too, could have worked for the night, but we wanted alternatives. A hotel that would accept Jasper was an option, but a pricey one. We had one more choice: our old apartment. Our lease runs through the end of the year, so we're still paying rent, and hoping mightily that our landlords could find new tenants soon. No luck yet, so it's still ours.

And so, here we are. We just got the last of our stuff out two weeks ago, and yet here we are, back again. We hope very much that this is just for the one night, and the aromas of petroleum byproducts will tomorrow be locked under layers of non-smelly, water-based, no-VOC urethane. After that, we can finally move into and unpack the living and dining rooms, and just maybe begin living in our house, instead of merely occupying it.

Pay As You Throw

Concord has in the last month implemented a new municipal trash collection program: pay as you throw. It's pretty straightforward: you purchase these purple trash bags from local stores, which are picked up curbside as usual. Other trash bags and open containers of trash will not be collected. The bags cost about $1 for a 15-gal, and $2 for a 30-gal, and are bought in packs of five. Yes, that's a costly piece of plastic, but it buys you trash disposal. It works, in other words, much like a postage stamp: the purple bags have built into them a fee for a service. Previously, trash collection and disposal had been paid for through municipal taxes (or, for things like apartment buildings businesses, private contractors). According to the Concord Monitor, the average cost of trash collection and disposal for the single-family home was $195, of which $106 was paid through property taxes; the rest was subsidized through business taxes.

In conjunction with this purple bag rollout, the city has upped their co-mingled recycling pickup, which is free, from bi-weekly to weekly. They'll take most anything of any recycleable value, which means that there's actually a lot that needs to get thrown out. Hilary and I barely half-fill one 15-gal bag per week, while our blue recylcing bin is full to the brim. We eagerly greated the weekly recycling collection, as we'd easily overflowed our recycling bin with bi-weekly collections.

So far, it seems to have been a success. And yet, from reading op-eds in the local paper, you'd think that we were being subjected to eco-facism. Being New Hampshire, many thought this a drastic over-reach by the local government (will the trash-cops be handing out fines)? Some bellyached about the hardship of refraining from automatically throwing everything into the trash. One major downtown supermarket refused to stock the bags, because they cannot make any profit on them. Others wondered if they would next start charging for the air we breathe (impossible), the waste we flush (they already do), or the water we drink (they already do). One person complained about the economic hardship it places on his family: five 30-gallon trash bags a week! One argued that this is little more than an unfair regressive tax that burdens families with children and the poor (a debatable point). Yet another voiced about the only valid concern I've heard: that people will illegally dump their trash in surrounding communities.

Hilary and I have no problem with this program - we actually look favorably on it. It boils down to a simple matter of economics: if you want to discourage one type of behavior (throwing everything away pell mell), make it more expensive. If you want to encourage another type of behavior (increased recycling), make it free, convenient, and easy. Even were the bags to cost the same or less than ordinary trash bags, the simple fact that you need to put some thought into it raises one's consciousness about what, and how much, one is throws away. The city instituted this program largely because the cost of municipal trash collection and disposal was rising faster than tax revenues could support. Instead of a broad tax, which treated wasters and recyclers equally, and is thoroughly invisible to the end-user, this system is fee-based: pay as you throw. The more you throw out, the more you are required to chip in. Even better than that, you'll know that you are paying more for throwing out more; you see the full cost, and are thereby encouraged to change your behavior.

New (Old) Home

Well, yesterday and today saw us working long and hard to get the bulk of the move finished. We had lots and lots of help, which is really what made it possible at all - we wouldn't even be out of Minnesota yet if left to our own devices.

After a very entertaining drive across southern Vermont and New Hampshire in the heavily loaded truck (with trailer) on winding and steep roads, Da, Jasper and I arrived in Concord not long after Hilary, her folks, and the B showed up. Friday afternoon and evening was spent trying to unload as much from the truck as would to into the apartment, and trying to sort what would go to storage on Saturday. Recall that we were moving out from a house, fully furnished, into an apartment we had more than half moved into and filled back in December. A bit less than half the contents of the truck would go straight to storage, augmented by not a small amount of stuff already in the apartment. Alas, due to timing and the practicalities of how the truck got loaded, the stuff to go into the apartment and the stuff for storage were all intermingled. Likewise, the stuff for storing from the apartment wasnt all in one place nearly staged. What is more, we were going to change the layout of some of the rooms. It made for a tiring Friday night as we tried to sort as much of the truck as possible while making some changes indoors and ensuring the place was still livable. Things were made a bit better by my Mom's lasagna - good for a crowd.

Saturday started off with more of the same. We had hired a pair of movers to assist with some of the heavy lifting (some of the furniture was murderous), reloading of the truck, and packing up the storage unit. They were really fast and efficient. Even though I am not old by most measures, the loads they manhandled for three hours were really astonishing and made me glad to leave it to the young'ens.

That set us up well to make headway in the afternoon doing some unpacking and making the place tidier and more livable. There's still a pile of work to be done in that area, but it is now to the stuff that Hilary and I just need to sort out on our own. That will occupy us for quite a while, but we have definitely arrived and are settling in comfortably.

Sent from my iPhone
(because Comcast sucks and we don't have Internet service yet)

Sad, empty house

This is me, eating the last of Hilary's chocolate graduation cake, sitting on the bare floor of our now very empty living room. Although it took longer than hoped, my dad and I rolled out of Rochester driving a 17' U-Haul full to the brim (well, we did have acwhole six inches to spare) and towing my Jetta behind. I locked the door on the way out - for the last time, for we are leaving Minnesota.

Hilary and the B left a few hours earlier by air with her folks, leapfrogging us to CT. They'll meet up with us at the end of the week, in Concord. Brynna has gotten busy enough and assertive enough that a three-day journey in her carseat sounded like a disaster.

So, once again, I'm blogging from the road. Jasper is such a good dog, as always. He is curled up between us in the cab of the truck, squeezed into an unfortunately small space. Due to our late departure, we'll probably get no farther than Chicago before calling it a night. Note that I didn't say we'd crash, because that brings up all the wrong images with this much moving mass.

Busy Little B

Brynna, Dad, Jasper and I are getting settled in here in New Hampshire. I've had a week of public health classes up at Dartmouth—unfortunately the registration process broke down for us "special students" and we never got the first week's worth of homework assignments. Now it's a scramble to catch up!

Yesterday I started in the family medicine clinic, where I will work a couple of days a week. It was great to be seeing patients again, and I especially enjoyed the Teen Clinic, which does confidential birth control counseling and STD testing for teenagers.

Brynna has been quite busy too.

Here she is exploring a new sleeping arrangement, with Jasper keeping an eye out for trouble:


(This was the weekend we arrived. It was the quietest place in the apartment for a nap while much unpacking and organizing occurred.)

She has been exploring Concord on foot with M:


She has also figured out that she can move forward on her belly if she rolls back and forth from side to side. We call this her corkscrew maneuver. She is pushing up very high on her arms and occasionally tries to get her knees under her, so I don't think it will be too long before she gets up on all fours and then starts crawling.

Unless she decides to skip that part! Brynna is also a very accomplished stander:




She will lean up against something like this for many minutes, playing with whatever is on top. We keep our hands near her since she can topple over if she leans too far to one side, but she's very stable standing straight up.

As you can see, Brynna is also putting some energy into growing some hair. Strawberry blonde so far, but maybe it will turn red later on?

And she is doing a lot of yoga:


The other day she triumphantly crammed all five of the toes on her right foot into her mouth. At once.

So, that's the news from the New Hampshire branch of the moose family. We miss Alex like crazy and can't wait to see him for a visit in ten days!

Trip to Concord

We are soon to reach a splitting point. H, B, Jasper, and Mark will be spending the next couple months living in Concord, NH, where Hilary will spend her time alternately at the local hospital and taking classes in public health at the Dartmouth medical school in Hanover. I, on the other hand, will hold down the fort in Minnesota.

So, on the 30th and 31st, I was up in NH setting up the Concord franchise. Mark had very nicely scouted out a few places weeks ago, and I signed the lease for one of them late on the 30th. I movers weren't expected until the following morning, so I spent the evening camped out in our new, empty, dark, curtainless apartment.


I sometimes envisioned this as the spartan existence of some hot-shot fixer - being jetted from place to place, put up in empty, just-that-afternoon-leased offices, living on pizza and beer while hacking away on a laptop and earning fabulous amounts of money. The reality isn't even as interesting as that description. At least such a person would have an internet connection.

Before our great eastward trek of the last few weeks began, movers came to our home and carted away a load of stuff that Hilary will have with her in Concord. We had, we thought, made arrangements for them to deliver late on the 30th. Turns out they hadn't told the driver this, so at the last minute we learned it would be the 31st instead. So, early the next morning, clipboard and inventory in hand, I supervised the offloading of all that stuff as snow began to come down. They worked quickly and were finished by about 11:30. So, instead of an empty, echoic apartment with no curtains and a padded toilet seat, we have an apartment filled with boxes and all the rest. This is how it shall remain until this weekend, when Hilary and Mark come back up to begin unpacking and settling in.


It is well that they finished the unloading quickly, because the weather was getting a little treacherous for travel. I set out to return to Connecticut around noon, slowly making my way in a long train of other cars over snow-covered roads across southern New Hampshire.


I suppose I should count myself lucky. Though slow going, at least people in NH know how to drive in the snow. I could have been in Washington, for instance, where the first half-inch would have brought the roads to a gridlocked halt.

Turns out the highways were hardly better. This is I-91 near Hartford, CT. The white stripes between wheel tracks are actually 1-2 inch thick snow bands that made lane changes tricky to say the least.


All in all, the trip that I was able to make in a bit less than 3-1/2 hours on the 30th took me more than 5 hours the day after. I returned, tired but pleased to be back, to ring in the New Year with family and friends.