Downhill slope?

Found a few sunrise pictures on my phone from a while back. The days keep getting longer and the views keep getting better!

We finally got more than a half-inch of snow and made sure to do some real outdoor winter activities while the opportunity was there. There is a whole snow-man family not shown and I was told one of them is a chicken.

I also had a indoor project to do. I've made a key-holder with a bonus place to put sunglasses. The idea and general design came from a furniture studio in Carbondale and I put a few extra magnets in the corners.

Here you can see some of the holes. Most of them are for neodymium magnets and the large ones are for the knotted end of the elastic cord.

(Warning, crappy low-light cell-phone picture ahead) Here's the finished product with items hanging on it. I used 1/2"x1/4" grade-N48 magnets. The holes are drilled leaving about 1/16" wood thickness between the magnet and hanging object. If a person had truly massive bundles of keys, more power would be needed but it works great as shown. 

I used 1/4"-diam. shock cord for the sunglasses part and it will quite easily hold cell-phones too.

Soon after, we had an even bigger snow which fell with nearly no wind so it piled up on all sorts of things, even thin wire fencing.

This was followed by a fantastic bluebird day! We've had a few of these days this season which is a wonderful break from the weeks of overcast and frigid nonsense we are used to. I'm a huge fan of the idea of seeing a huge storm come in with feet of snow and then enjoying the following week outside in clear 60° weather.

2014 Wrap-up (make-up for laziness?)

Somewhere around the start of summer, I seem to have stopped posting things here. I suspect it might have something to do with the first few pictures here. We scraped and painted our whole house and when we were done with that, we roofed our garage. It was all quite an undertaking.

We've lived in our house for over ten years but have never painted so we don't know when it was last done. Some of the paint was so checked that it looked like the varnish on antique furniture. The internet told me that if you make sure to re-paint as soon as the paint is getting chalky on the surface, you don't have to scrape the old off in order to re-coat. Good to know, my guess is that it was chalky when we bought the house. What you see here was a pretty typical average, where about half of it came off down to the wood. Thankfully the siding is original redwood so even the bare parts don't rot or anything.

I'd noticed a while back that the insulation in the roof of the garage was starting to look saggy and then later it started to pull its staples and fall down. There was obviously a moisture or ventilation problem but this didn't make sense because it'd been fine for the last 8+ years, why is is screwed-up now?

Enter the '90s roofers. This was a crew which laid nice straight rows, trimmed all the ends to be even, put on a good ridge-cap, all without noticing that they didn't use a starter strip on the end of either eve. This meant the grooves in the three-tab shingles on the first row had nothing under them but tar-paper! Credit where credit is due - that tar-paper and later, sheeting, held on for a long time. What I discovered was that I now had a roof which looked like brand new underneath except the end 8" or so was pretty much non-existent. I could actually look through from above and see the board under the eve. I can't imagine how moisture was making it's way in there.

Thankfully the previous owner kicked in some extra cash when building this garage to make sure it would last - all the eves are fiberglass/composite underneath and cedar on the ends with all cedar trim. Other than a couple rafter-tails, nothing but the actual roof sheeting was rotten! I just walked down the ends with a circular-saw, cut it off, and patched it in with strips.

Then it was cyclocross racing season again! We hadn't planned to do much of this in 2014 but were inspired by working at our Pella race and started up shortly after.We did a pretty full circuit and traveled as far as the East end of the Quad Cities. It was, as usual, fantastic and I enjoyed all of it. Traveling, racing, spectating, it was all great and I look forward to next year!

These pictures should pretty well summarize how Corrine's season went. She spent a LOT of time on podiums and has now upgraded to the next higher race category! Nice work!

Then it snowed and winter was here:

And that meant it was time for stouts: