Spring break continued

Warm sun. Blue skies. We saw one day of rain when we first arrived in town, and then the weather was just about perfect after that. Spring break in Florida is always a good idea.

Here is Nick in front of our favorite restaurant, the Sweet Tomatoes on Dale Mabry:



Anna got in her photo op on the little back porch behind my mother-in-law's house, which is a spot where we've been taking pictures of the kids for many years now:



We spent some time during the week working on Mary's house, pictured here:



Mary has been staying with us here in Philadelphia for several months, and is going to come back and stay with us a while longer. In the meantime, she is hoping to rent out her place. So we got started with some painting and some trim work:







Spring break also marks the beginning of Nick's annual birthday season, during which we celebrate his birthday in Tampa and then again in Philadelphia. Lucky bugger:



On Saturday we spent the day with our Tampa friends, the Chapmans, who have daughters the same age as Nick and Maria. We went out to Clearwater Beach briefly, though a standing 25 mph (40km/h) south wind was blasting us with sand and bits of seashells:









Because of the wind the beach was deserted:



So we retreated to the swim club at Carlouel, a private club and neighborhood at the north end of Clearwater Beach:



That night we had another birthday celebration for Nick, this time at the Chapmans' house. The Chapman girls gave him a Manchester United jersey, which he was delighted to receive:



All good things must come to an end, of course, and the following morning we began our drive back home. We stopped for an early dinner in Atlanta to visit with Chelsea's dad Tom, her grandmother Frances, her cousin Mandy, and her aunt Pam. Here are Tom, Mandy, and Pam together on the front porch of the Cracker Barrel:



Chels and her dad:



Chels and Grandma Frances:



From Atlanta we pressed on, heading north and east through South Carolina and North Carolina before stopping for the night in Dublin, Virginia. That put us on I-81 right around the 100-mile marker, leaving us with about 7-8 hours of driving for the second day.

It was a great trip, and we're glad to be home! Chelsea took a ton more pictures than what I have, so I'll see if I can snag those and post them over the rest of the week.

One more before we go dark

I'm able to grab a wireless signal while sitting here on the porch at Mary's house, so I'll post once more before we disappear for the weekend and our drive back home. This is Nick hanging upside down in a bouldering room at the rock gym back home in Doylestown:



That photo has not been altered in any way! That is indeed my son standing on the ceiling of the room. It's hard to see in the picture, but there is a big grab handle hanging from the ceiling. Nick figured out that if he could plant his feet on the ceiling, he could grab that handle and "stand up" for a few seconds.

We went rock climbing last week while our friend Bethany was in town to visit. (This visit coincided with our bathroom repair adventure. C'est la vie.)

Here is Nick, right side up, doing his best Spider-Man impression:



Anna is learning to climb too:



Three guesses which of my kids is the most fearless on the rocks:







Chelsea and Maria even raced each other to the top:



I am not so fearless, but I like to climb a little:



We love family rock climbing!

On the road again

It's been a while since we took a big road trip, so everybody was excited when we rolled out of bed early Saturday morning and started making our way to Tampa. We broke the trip over two days. On the first we drove from Philadelphia to Bryson City, NC (700mi/1,120km), where several of Chelsea's relatives on her mom's side of the family live. The second day we drove from Bryson City to Tampa by way of Atlanta (600mi/1,000km). It's a long drive!

Fortunately, the route we take keeps us off the busy Eastern seaboard corridor. We travel further inland, taking the PA Turnpike west to Interstate 81, and then following I-81 all the way south to Tennessee before dropping into North Carolina. For much of the first day we essentially had the road to ourselves:



The kids spend their time in the car watching movies, playing video games, and reading books. We usually put Nick and Anna together in the back row, and Maria in the middle row. The seat behind Chelsea usually gets left empty so that she can recline for naps. Here are the kids in our typical setup:



Just less than half of the total drive on the first day is within the state of Virginia, which has about 325 miles (520km) of mileage on I-81. It feels endless. Here we are stopped about two thirds of the way through heading south:





As the kids get older, road trips like this are becoming easier for us. They can more easily keep themselves entertained, and they're also more comfortable with dozing off for a nap from time to time without us coercing them into it:



I-81 takes us alongside the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Great Smoky Mountains, both part of the Appalachian Mountain range that runs south to north along the East Coast from Georgia to Maine. We mostly drive in valleys until we turn to enter North Carolina, at which point we go up into the range. The border between Tennessee and North Carolina on I-26 is at an altitude of about 3,500 feet (1,100m) above sea level, and even this is low ground between peaks:



We stayed for the night with Chelsea's cousin Jessica and her family. They built their own house on some family land several years ago, and the view from their property is spectacular:



We arrived around dinnertime, and the first order of business for the kids - big and small - was to jump around on the trampoline:









Thanks, Jess and Scott, for hosting us!





Sunday we had a big breakfast and set out for Atlanta. We drove out of the mountains and into the rolling hills of north Georgia:



We met up with Chelsea's dad and his wife, Alison, for a late lunch at a Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta. We were remiss in taking photos:



After the late lunch it was time for one more big push. We encountered a lot of traffic between Atlanta and Macon, which is par for the course. But as the sun set and the road opened up, we made good time and got into Tampa late that night.

I'll have more pictures and a recap of the whole trip next week. I will not be online tomorrow, so this will be the last update until we're home again in Philadelphia. See you again soon!

Breaking bad: Update

A quick update on the bathroom: We made enough progress before leaving last week that the bathroom is fully usable once again. We have major work ahead of us, to be sure, but at least we can take showers and brush our teeth. The following is how things looked when the plumbers were done with this round on Thursday.

The floor in the bathroom is torn up and will need replacing, but the toilet is back in place and functional:





We have a nice new PVC pipe serving as our soil stack:



We replaced everything from the bathroom down to the horizontal run in the basement, a portion of which was previously updated with PVC before we bought the house:



The drive time to Florida has been useful for thinking about our options. I'm hopeful we will reach a good outcome in the end.

More pictures on the way!

I ran out to Target over lunch and got a card reader that will allow me to get pictures off my digital camera even though I forgot the connection cable. Woo hoo! Best of all, the card reader only cost $5. I love cheap technology.

We're still in Florida and the weather is fabulous today, after a cool and rainy start yesterday. I'll be posting photos in earnest over the course of the week. Meantime, I had this cute one of Anna that I wanted to be sure to post:



I use this telephone headset for work because I'm on conference calls all the time. Anna came into my office the other day and stole it away from me so she could try it. I told her if she wanted to keep the headset, she had to learn PowerPoint. Also, she would have to use the word "synergy" at least five times a day.

She gave it back.

Florida, here we are

We arrived in Florida late last night, and have started to settle in for our week here. I took many pictures on the way down. I also realized that I didn't bring the cable to connect my camera with my computer, so I will have to figure out some other means to upload photos. Back soon.

Breaking bad

This was the view from our second floor bathroom to our first floor dining room Wednesday night:



It was an interesting day.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that last month, Nick and I did some sleuthing to discover the source of some moisture in the basement. We found that our soil stack pipe in the dining room wall was cracked, and I was able to patch it so that we didn't have to make an emergency call to a plumber during the weekend.

After getting a couple of bids, we went with a plumber named Joe DeMarco for our work, and he came Wednesday to get started. Here's a look at the pipe (with the fully opened wall) just before they got underway:



Joe and his brother had been working for about an hour when they brought us some news: The T-joint connecting the bathroom fixtures to the soil stack was also cracked, meaning that it, too, had to be replaced. This would require ripping into the bathroom wall and floor in order to get at the misbehaving pipe. So we said sure, why not? We love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Here's the bathroom, sans toilet, getting ready for its close-up:



The toilet ended up in the hallway, just like a bad college party:



No more soil stack in the wall, at least for a day:





Some damage to the foyer side of the wall from removing the pipe:



Bad pipe. Out to the yard with you:



Ceci n'est pas une pipe in the basement:



Now, for the T-joint:



Getting it out required shearing off the ends of the sink and tub lines, which fortunately had been replaced with PVC by a previous owner:



Partners in crime, now in exile:



I got some new riser valves for the bathroom supply lines out of the deal... someday I'm going to buy my own acetylene torch:



We're back up and running now - I'll take and post some pictures of where things stand today. Having returned the bathroom to service, albeit with great collateral damage to the house, we can now decide how much further we want to go with our impromptu bathroom remodel. Thing is, the floor has to come all the way out now, and the rest of the bathroom was not in fabulous shape to begin with. This may have effectively been the point of no return on a remodel.

As Gramps says, it's never a good time for anything.

Spring break plans

We're getting ready to take a trip to Florida for the kids' spring break, which actually started late last week for Anna, and begins in earnest tomorrow as Nick and Maria start their break. We are driving down beginning as early on Saturday morning as we can manage. Saturday night we will spend the night with Chelsea's cousins in North Carolina, and Sunday we will finish out the drive.

Our plan is to spend about a week in Tampa. We'll be doing some work on Chelsea's mom's house so that she can either rent it out or sell it. We will also take a few opportunities to enjoy the 80-degree sunshine, maybe with a trip to the beach. Nick has already submitted a request for baseball practice while we're there, so he and I will look for some batting cages and will also get him practicing his pitching.

I am hoping we can visit one of the YMCA locations in Tampa that has a rock climbing wall - rock climbing up here is expensive, but if you're a Y member in Tampa, even a visitor, there are several facilities which feature climbing walls that are free for members.

And then there's Sweet Tomatoes, our all-time favorite salad buffet restaurant. (They operate in California as Souplantation, and it's the same thing.) We have an abiding love for Sweet Tomatoes, and over the years we've hoped in vain that they would expand north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Driving with the kids is getting easier as they get older. We also have copious amounts of technology to keep them entertained, including portable DVD players, Nintendo DS handheld games, and iPods. Shockingly, they even read books in the car sometimes. So old-fashioned.

Rittenhouse Town

The last stop from our whirlwind weekend was Rittenhouse Town, which is along the banks of the Wissahickon Creek on the twisty part of the Lincoln Drive. We stopped there on a lark while heading home from the Art Museum, mainly because we wanted to get outside and take a walk while there was still daylight and some reasonably warm air.

All of the buildings were closed up, but still picturesque:







A brief walk creekside led us to the Forbidden Drive, which runs from the edge of the city down to the Schuylkill River at Manayunk. The kids and I have ridden on the Drive in the past; Maria still remembers riding in a child seat on the back of my bike, down the Forbidden Drive to the Reading Terminal Market on a Saturday morning.

Here are Chels, Mary, and the girls on the Forbidden Drive:



At one point we climbed uphill from Forbidden Drive to a stone wall that had been built into the hillside. It actually looked like it was supposed to be a dam, since it was built into the valley between two steeper sections of hill, but it had an arched passageway through the middle. We couldn't make head or tail of it, so we reverted to our usual mode: photo op!





You could walk on top of the wall, which had a curved top and seemed to be part of a hiking trail. Between the curve of the wall top and the absence of rail or guards, it was an unsettling feeling. Naturally, Maria went out there with no trouble at all:



With that we had just about run out of daylight, so we headed home. Just wait until the weather really gets warm and sunny! We'll be taking 500 pictures a day as we ramble through the countryside.

Last weekend: Philly Art Museum

Another weekend has passed since then, but I'm still sorting through photos from our action-packed first full weekend of March. Sunday afternoon we went to the Philadelphia Art Museum - it was me, Chels, Maria, Anna, and Chelsea's mom Mary. Though our kids have limited stamina for art museums at this point in their lives, we are determined to give them some exposure, with the hope that they will return on their own as they get older.

We started out in the Asian galleries, and marched the girls down to the Japanese Tea House to see if that would pique their interest. This is a set of traditional Japanese houses arranged in an indoor gallery:







We also saw some beautiful Indian artifacts in the Asian wing:



To the surprise of no one, though, Maria was more at home with the Degas collection:



And for Anna, the best part of the day was the transportation:

Been traveling this week for work

I was up in Boston for a couple days this week, taking some meetings for work. I flew home on Thursday from Manchester, New Hampshire, because Southwest flies there. (Southwest starts service to Boston Logan later this year, which will save me the drive to and from New Hampshire. Woo hoo!) Turns out the hotel in which I stayed Wednesday night looks out over the stadium for the Manchester Fisher Cats minor league baseball team:



The field was covered in snow... hopefully that clears off by Opening Day.

Lorimer, Masons Mill, and potluck

Saturday morning we woke up to gorgeous weather - sunny and on the way to about 72 degrees. It was a perfect antidote to the cold, dreary gloom of late winter. Anna woke me up as usual, and Nick was milling about as well, so we grabbed our wagon from the garage and drove over to Lorimer Park for a morning walk:



We skipped stones along the creek:





We saw a Canada goose up in a tree, which is something we don't think we have ever seen before:



And we took some pictures at the big rock, including the most beautiful picture Anna has taken in quite some time:





In the afternoon we got a chance to socialize with our friends the Lesters (Greg and Aly) and the Killenbecks (Eric and Michelle). They each have, I don't know, fourteen kids or something, so among the three families we seemed to have enough small children to form a college marching band.

We started out by meeting at Masons Mill Park, and the joint was jumping even though the sun had given way to clouds:



My kids ran around nonstop for the better part of two hours:







Here are Greg and Eric, looking stoic about fatherhood:



The Lesters and the Killenbecks then came over to our house for a summer-themed potluck dinner, which (because of the weather) turned out to be more timely than we ever would have guessed when we picked this date. Chelsea's mom whipped up a feast for everyone - burgers, hot dogs, bratwurst, two kinds of potato salad, roasted corn, and more. Our dining room table was completely covered with food.

After dinner, Greg read a book to Anna and his daughter Julia:



The kids eventually started to fade, and the adults were soon behind them. All in all, this would have ranked as a great Saturday any time of year. To have it in March was a real treat.

Action packed weekend!

We had lots of things going on this past weekend, or at least lots of photo-friendly things, so I'm going to start with replacing our cooktop in the kitchen, which I tackled after work on Friday.

For about four years now we've had a glass/ceramic electric cooktop in our kitchen, which replaced the Eisenhower-era stove that was in the house when we bought it. That one had a faulty burner on it, and bought itself a one-way trip to the landfill when the faulty burner caught fire. The fancy glass one was on clearance at Sears. We liked the smooth top, but grew to dislike the arduous cleaning process that followed every use.

One morning last week I was making lunches for the kids and discovered that the glass surface had cracked. It was a long thermal crack across two of the burners - meaning the surface material had weakened from many cycles of heating and cooling over the years. Sears offers a limited warranty on the surface itself, but you have to pay for the labor to replace it, and before you even get that far you have to pay $75 to have a technician come out, look at the crack, and decide whether it qualifies for the warranty coverage at all. Sears could send someone out the following week to have a look.

We like cooking and eating food just about every day, so for less than what the Sears rigamarole was going to cost me, I was able to buy a new cooktop. I installed the glass one when we bought it back in 2005, and so I installed this one too.

What I've learned about appliances over the years is that for the most part they're not very complicated - you have to be comfortable working with electrical components, and you have to be able to get the right parts when you're doing a repair. The Internet has been indispensable for providing part diagrams and step-by-step repair guidance. I've repaired our washer, dryer, fridge, and stove in the past couple years, probably saving us a lot of money in service calls.

Anyway, the new stove. The first order of business is getting the old one out of there, which means shutting off the circuit, pulling everything out of the cabinets underneath, unwiring the old unit from the electrical connection, and pulling it out. Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to snap a picture of my starting point, but here's how it looked when I got the old stove out of there:



Next, installing the new unit. You can see we went back to electric coils - they're becoming harder to get as the manufacturers shift to the higher-priced smooth surface models, but I didn't want the eventual hassle of another thermal crack, and anyway we're hoping to renovate the kitchen in a couple years, at which point we're going to convert to gas:



Wiring in the new stove was a snap - probably took less than ten minutes. Next order of business was to put everything back in place. I discovered that the drawers directly underneath the stove no longer fit in place, because the dimensions of the basin underneat the new stove were different from the old one.

The first drawer I put in won't close:



And this picture is blurry, but you can see what the leading edge of the drawer is just about 1/4" (0.6cm) too tall:



So I was going to have to trim the drawers. At this point I was out of daylight, and I'm not really set up to do saw work in the basement or the garage, so I had to wait for another day. Meantime, the stove was up and running, ready for grilled cheese service:



The next day I was able to get out my jig saw and do the necessary cutting. Photos are courtesy of Maria, who was snapping some great pictures without me even really noticing at the time:





In this one I look like I'm about to trim down my own fingers... sorry, Grandma, it really was safer than it looks:



And that was it, although I was foolish enough not to take a picture of the finished job, just as I forgot to take a picture of the start. The stove is working beautifully and all of the cabinetry is back where it belongs. We also took the opportunity this week to replace our kitchen faucet, which had been leaking prodigiously and causing water to run down into the cabinet underneath. Never a dull moment!

Here's a preview of our next adventure from this weekend, which will be the subject of tomorrow's post:

Anna likes to work in my office

One of the things I've come to appreciate in writing this blog (and taking pictures of everyday life) is that Anna really enjoys working in my office. Hers she is earlier this week, working with some play-dough that a classmate gave her for Valentine's Day:



I should get her a desk and chair in here. Then the world headquarters of Sperger.com would be twice as big as it is today!

Family tree

Maria is in third grade this year, and a major unit in third grade at her school is family history. The kids map out their own family tree and learn the story of their family's roots. Their studies culminate in a trip to Ellis Island in New York, through which some of their ancestors may have once passed.

Last week Maria got down to business creating family trees for each side of her family - Chelsea's and mine. I never really considered before just how many great-aunts and -uncles she has. I have one sibling, and Chels is an only child, so the kids are short on aunts and uncles in my generation. Go back one generation, and hoo boy, the page fills up quickly.

Here is Maria coming to grips with the dense foliage of her family tree:

Sledding

Nick, Anna, and I went sledding Monday night. Conditions were outstanding - the snow was hard packed and very cold, so the hill was very, very fast.

Here's a picture of our favorite local hill:



You can barely make out in this picture that the sledding paths worn into the hill extend far out into the field at the bottom. The first time I went down the hill, on a saucer, I couldn't get over how fast I was going. I ended up about 100 yards out into the field at the bottom of the hill. Same thing for Nick and Anna. If you got up a good head of speed on the way down, you just kept coasting forever.

This was the first time we've gone out to a big hill and had Anna going down all by herself. Here she is on the saucer... not sure if she was closing her eyes for the ride or because of the flash:



Nick, meanwhile, had brought along a snowboard:



Occasionally he wiped out:



Here I am, bundled up for the cold and wind:



Our last run of the night, all three of us got on the saucer together. There are no pictures of this event. However, I will not soon forget the sensation of holding the kids in my lap, rocketing down the hill as the saucer rotated backwards, and leaning uphill to keep us from tipping over and wiping out. It was touch and go. If we had crashed on that ride I don't think Anna would have ever gone sledding again. With the weight of all three of us, our momentum carried us incredibly far into the field. It was a breathtaking ride.

Nick and Anna were none the worse for wear afterward:

Late season snowstorm

We got a decent helping of snow Sunday night into Monday, and it was enough of a sure thing that Nick and Maria's school e-mailed us Sunday evening to let us know there would be a snow day. Looked like about six inches (15cm) when I did the shoveling.

This week I'll post some photos from our sledding adventure - Nick and Anna went out with me to our favorite local hill, and there we found the best sledding conditions we've seen in years. For now, here's a picture of snow monster Anna invading my office yesterday:



It's hard even in this picture to see how much mass the snowsuit adds to her frame. It's not quite as bad as an infant or toddler one-piece snowsuit, but it's probably a good four inches (10cm) from the outer shell to her skin. She lumbers around the house in her snowsuit like an offensive lineman.

Great Wolf Lodge

Like my dad said, we went to Great Wolf Lodge. It was very cool, I loved the lazy river(Will and i weren't very lazy in it). We would be in a tube, each by our selfs, then go under them and come up in another one. The Lazy River was the thing I did most. There was this huge bucket that dropped a ton of water down and it said on the rules board that it dropped 1,000 gallons each time. I went under that a few times(the pressure of it hurt, but it was awesome!). There were these semi small slides that you could race in and I beat people I raced mostly(not trying to look good, just had the least points of friction!). There was a wave pool, that had rather small waves, but Will and I would ride them in(like the beach!). There was a huge blue slide that went out of the building(creepy, right?), and you would ride in a huge blue circular tube for up to about 6 people. That was very scary to me because whenever there was a turn, the raft went up the side of the wall and felt like it was going to tip over. Then there was a "roller coaster" one, that was the highest of the slides, and went up and down. I went on it with my mom and Will, and it was okay. There was this one pool that had three or 4 float things, and they were very slippery. and in the other half of that pool, were basketball hoops, the balls were little plastic pink ones, but the were the right size and they worked well. Then there was the arcade that had a lot of games, but were pricy. That was fun, except i was trying for a big bouncy ball, but didn't get it. :E( (sad man with mustache) there was an ice cream shop, and the ice cream was good, but they didn't label the ice cream to show what kind it was. There was this thing called MagicQuest or something, and it looked boring and dumb, but at the same time I wanted one to see what it could do. there were all these things that would happen if a MagicQuest wand was waved at it. The wand itself was $20.00(pricy!), for a style thing, $14.00 and the stuff it did, looked odd. On friday we went to Friendly's for lunch, and that was good. The whole thing was very fun, and I think everyone had a blast(except the klorine gave me a rash around the stomach.).

Great Wolf Lodge

My folks had a great idea this past Christmas - they gave us a family gift in the form of a visit to Great Wolf Lodge in the Poconos. Great Wolf is a resort hotel with a huge indoor waterpark. The first one opened in Wisconsin about ten years ago, and there are now several of them around the US. We've been wanting to go to the one in Pennsylvania since it opened in 2005, and we were all very excited finally to have the opportunity.

When you're slogging through winter in the Northeast, it's really good to have this sort of fun available to you:



We reserved a room for Thursday night, so we pulled the kids out of school around mid-day on Thursday and drove up there in the afternoon. (Took about two hours to get there.) The hotel is set up for families, so the room we reserved had space for seven people. Longtime followers of this blog will recognize right away that with room for seven in the hotel, and room for seven in the minivan, we couldn't pass up an opportunity to bring extra people with us. So we had two honorary Spergers along with us: Nick's friend Will, and our cousin Maddie.

We arrived around 4:00, and checked into our room. Because of the waterpark, Great Wolf has a funky room key system. You wear a bracelet that counts as your admission pass to the waterpark, and it contains an RFID tag that serves as your room key. You simply hold your wrist up to the doorknob and your door is supposed to open. We had to, um, practice a little bit before we managed to get the door open:



Soon enough we were settled into the room, changed into our swimsuits, and headed down to the waterpark:







We stayed in the waterpark until just before 9:00, when we headed back up to the lobby for an audio-animatronic show at the clock tower. This was a little weird - kind of a farm-league Disney knockoff - but I think Anna enjoyed it:



We all crashed for the night soon after that, and got up and did the same thing on Friday. One nice feature is that even though we were only staying one night, we had access to the waterpark for the whole day after we checked out. We played until dinnertime, washed up, and hopped in the van to head home.

Thanks again, Mom and Dad!