Tag Archives: home

Another Clouds Time-Lapse

Posted on by
2

With clouds in the valley before dawn, I set up a time-lapse camera to capture the cloud movement throughout the morning.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love time-lapse movies. They make it possible for us to see movement that is normally too slow to perceive.

On October 31, 2024, there were thick clouds in the valley below my home. I know from experience that our winter thermal inversions can put on a good cloud show and those inversions are happening earlier and earlier every year. I set up a GoPro in Hyperlapse mode and let it run all day. Here’s the first few hours of the cloud show, sped up with the hyperlapse as well as a 400% increase in speed in video editing. The result is a smooth, high-speed look at what the clouds did that morning.

Enjoy!

The Crate

Posted on by
Comment

The story of a piece of “furniture” I’ve owned for 41 years.

The crate arrived in the US in 1981, delivered to the Manhattan home of the parents of the guy I was dating back then. It was a large crate, but it arrived from Hungary containing only 12 bottles of Hungarian wine, all nestled in tightly packed straw. Even after the careful packing and protection, one of the bottles arrived broken.

The crate was well made of solid wood pieces. It was heavy — probably about as heavy as the wine it contained — and, as you can imagine, a wealthy couple living on the Upper East Side with a view of the Queensboro Bridge had absolutely no use for it once the wine was removed. Their son, a senior at Hofstra University did, though. He was living in a dorm room and it would make a nice piece of furniture.

The Crate Becomes Furniture

So he brought it back to the dorm, put a pair of hinges on its lid to make a door, and installed a shelf and some cup holder hooks inside it. He then stood it on one end and put his dorm-sized refrigerator on top of it. It made a nice addition to his 9 x 12 dorm room.

I don’t remember if I came into the picture before or after its arrival. I dated Stew for about a year, breaking things off not long after we graduated. I seem to recall him adding the hinges, which means it arrived after I did. But I don’t recall getting the big thing from Manhattan to Hempstead. So who knows? It doesn’t really matter.

When we graduated and moved out of our dorm rooms, he offered up the crate, since he planned to go back to his parents home in Manhattan and definitely didn’t need it. I took it. I liked crate furniture. (I still kind of do.)

The Crate in My Homes

Between my college graduation and today, I’ve lived in exactly five homes.

The first was my first apartment right out of college, which I moved into in spring 1982. It was in a sketchy area of Hempstead, NY, on the sixth floor of an apartment building with windows that included a view of the Hoftstra dorm towers. It was a large studio apartment with separate kitchen and dressing room/closet between the main room and the bathroom. In hindsight, it was actually a nice place, although the area, as I said, was sketchy. A few of my friends were afraid to come visit me. I never had a problem there.

I fixed up the studio into two rooms by placing three tall veneered particleboard bookshelves between my sleeping area and my living room. I had my original bed — the twin I’d grown up sleeping in — and a lot of junk furniture. The crate became my “coffee table,” sitting right in front of the Ikea fold out sofa.

In summer 1983, I met my future wasband. In January 1984, he and I moved into our first apartment together, a third floor walkup in a row of houses right over the Cross Island Parkway in Bayside, NY. The crate came with us. I honestly can’t remember where we put it in that three bedroom apartment. It may have been in the spare room, which became a cat hair infested storage space until I was forced to find homes for my two cats — my future wasband was allergic and had asthma. (To this day, I wish I’d kept the cats and found a home for him.)

Two years later, in January 1985, we bought our first house together. It was an interesting home made entirely of reinforced poured concrete with something like 40 jalousie windows — that’s the kind you crank with a handle to open slats. Built in 1926, it was unique and would have been a fixer-upper if you didn’t mind working with a sledgehammer. On a quiet street in Harrington Park, NJ, there was a Conrail freight train line just beyond the backyard. For 11 years, I lived with freight trains literally a stone’s throw away from my bedroom window.

The crate became the coffee table in the TV room. It was probably around then that we started storing board games in there. By this time, it was used lying on its long side with the hinged lid on the top.

In 1997, my future wasband and I made the move from the New York metropolitan area to Wickenburg, AZ. This was a huge life change. We bought a brand new spec house on 2 1/2 acres of horse property for the same price as the old house along the tracks in New Jersey. Our cost of living plummeted and our quality of living soared. I was in my late 30s and it was my first full-time taste of living away from a metro area. I loved it. (I thought my future wasband did, too, but after hearing from my sister about some of the places he’s lived since we split, I’ve begun to suspect he prefers suburbia.)

My Crate
Here’s the crate in my previous home. Both it and the comfy brown leather sofa that was in that room made the move with me to Washington state.

The crate came with us. It became the table in our TV area on the second floor. We still stored games in it. And I even have a picture of it there, since it was mentioned in an old blog post I wrote while going through my divorce.

In 2013, as my divorce dragged on, I packed up the crate and moved it into storage. When the movers came in September of that year, they took it with everything else all the way up Washington State, where I’d leased a hangar for my helicopter and had plenty of room for my cars, boat, and storage of furniture and household items. The crate — and most of my other stuff — lived in storage for nearly a year.

On May 20, 2014, we broke ground for my current home. By my birthday at the end of June of that year, the shell of my home was finished with the concrete slab laid. I had a party and my friends helped me move just about everything out of the hangar, across the river, and into my new garage. Including the crate.

As my various posts about building my home detail, I did a lot of the interior work on my home myself. Once I had a space to get work done, I started collecting tools. Eventually, I needed a miter saw so I could cut lumber to build a workbench and other things. The saw I bought did not come with a table. I decided to use the crate as a miter saw station — after all, I had more than enough furniture from my old house and wouldn’t need the crate as another coffee table. I put wheels on the bottom of the crate — nearly everything in my garage has wheels so I can move it — and mounted the miter saw on top. I put new shelves inside the crate to store saw blades and related parts.

And since then, I’ve used the saw on its crate table to build all kinds of things out of lumber: a workbench, 8 garage shelving units, a jewelry bench, two chicken coops, and small tool tables. I also used it extensively while finishing the upstairs of my home to cut Pergo for the floors, lumber for stem walls and rails, and trim throughout my home. The beauty of the saw on that table is that I can roll it anywhere I need to in the downstairs space when I need it and then roll it out of the way when I’m done.


Here’s the crate and its saw in its current location. I’ve set aside a 12 x 12 section of my garage as a workshop for building and repairing things. The crate has been the home for my miter saw for 9 years now.

The Crate Today

I’m in the midst of a huge garage reorganization project and I finally found what is likely to be the “forever home” for the crate and its miter saw. I’ve been tooting my progress on social media — Mastodon — with photos. This morning, I looked at a recent toot that showed a photo of it and thought about my history with this crate. I think I’ve owned it longer than just about anything I currently own. I can’t remember a single thing — other than a handful of keepsakes from my childhood and college years — that I’ve owned longer.

And that inspired me to share this blog post.

I have no real emotional attachment to this crate — please don’t think I do. It’s just its utility that makes me respect and keep it. Someone took the time to build this out of nice, strong wood. It crossed an ocean carrying just 12 bottles of wine and came close to being discarded. Instead, it’s had a long life as part of my life — and it continues to serve me to this day.

How many things do you own that you can say the same about?

It’s April. Here’s What I’m Up To.

Posted on by
9

I’m still on board Do It Now, but paused to take care of some business and now prepping to come home.

Here’s what I’ve been up to for the past month or so.

Northbound

Cruising, of course, on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. That’s the mostly sheltered series of rivers, bays, inlets, and canals that runs from Florida all the way up to New Jersey.

When I last blogged here, I was in Georgetown, SC. Since then, I’ve been to Bucksport and North Myrtle Beach, SC, and then Southport, Carolina Beach, Hampstead, Morehead City, and New Bern, NC. I’m now in Oriental, NC, where I’ve been for a while, taking care of some business.


The red dots indicate my stops along the way since my last blog post here in in March.

Although I was ahead of the Looper pack for most of the past three weeks, I’m now part of the leading edge as other Loopers catch up with me. My boat buddy friends are, unfortunately, still quite a way behind me. That’s my fault since I needed to head north at a quicker pace to make a deadline. I’m hoping to make some new friends as I continue north from here in a day or two at a more leisurely pace.

Captain’s Training Done

Today marks another little milestone in my life: I finished a required 56-hour Coast Guard approved training course and took (and passed) the required tests to get my OUPV (Six Pack) Captain’s License.


Here are the study guides I bought and barely used. They are in mint condition and I’d like to sell them for $95. (I paid $150 for them.) Contact me if interested.

This is something I’d been wanting to do for more than a year now — in fact, I purchased some study guides all the way back in November 2021. While I could have done it online, I knew from experience that if I didn’t sit in a classroom every day with an instructor there to check off my name on a list, I’d never get it done. So I looked for and found a classroom course that ran eight consecutive days with the test on the last day. It was a bit tricky. Although there are classes all along the east coast, where I’m currently cruising in Do It Now, timing was an issue. I missed a class in Stuart, FL by two days and wound up with the one that started March 31 in Oriental, NC. That’s why I’m here and have been here for over a week — my longest stop yet.

Sadly, I was not impressed with the quality of training, the study materials they provided, or even the classroom facility. And the instructor, although a very nice man who probably has a lot of great boating stories to tell, could have been a lot less deaf and a lot more animated. So I can’t recommend the training organization. But I also can’t deny that they got results. I’m pretty sure all of the attendees in my class of nine experienced boaters passed their tests. I know I did and I now have the certificate to prove it.

What’s next? I still need two pieces of the puzzle before I can submit all my paperwork to the Coast Guard and actually get my Captain’s License: a physical exam (similar to what I need as a pilot) and a drug test (which I also needed when I ran my own helicopter charter operation).

In case you’re wondering why I decided to chase down this certification, an OUPV Captain’s License will enable me to legally operate charters on my boat for up to six paying passengers at a time. (Ironically, it’s similar to the Part 135 certificate my business, Flying M Air LLC has, but it doesn’t involve the FAA (or Coast Guard, for that matter) breathing down my neck and making unreasonable and often costly demands. I sold Flying M Air last year, so the FAA can breathe down someone else’s neck.) I plan on using it to offer one-on-one training for people who want to learn how single-hand a boat like mine or women who want to learn more about boat handling from someone other than a spouse. The next logical step would be to offer multi-day charters along the Great Loop, but I’m not sure if Do It Now is well-suited for that mission.

Prepping for a Summer at Home

As much as I like to think I’m retired, I’m technically not. I still do cherry drying work.

What’s that, you say? How can I still be flying helicopters when I sold my helicopter and I sold my charter business?

Well, the truth of the matter is that pilots are pretty hard to come by these days and I’ve got access to pilotless helicopters that I can fly for cherry season. Right now, it’s a matter of finding the right match. And whether I personally fly or not, I’m still managing a team of pilots to provide cherry drying services to my clients. This will be my 16th season (!) and I’ll be honest: I hope it’s my last. I really do want to retire. I’m hoping someone on my team will buy me out this year. It sure would be nice spending the summer of 2024 on Do It Now cruising the Canadian canal system.

In addition to that, I still make and sell jewelry. I’ve lined up four consecutive weekends at art shows in Washington in May, before cherry season starts. That means I need to get home to build inventory and do those shows.

To that end, I booked a flight for myself and my pups on Alaska Air on April 27. I’ve already given my house sitter the news so I can sleep in my own bed when I get home.

I hope to get my boat up to the Annapolis area by April 25 and put it on the dry there until I get back. I’ll get the bottom checked (and possibly painted); take a look at the prop, rudder, and other bottom stuff; and possibly have the zincs replaced. I’m also hoping to find an electronics guy to install my new Garmin Black Box 800 for AIS transmission capabilities and a Nebo hard install. And, if the stars align just right, I’m hoping I can find a good canvas company to enclose my entire rear deck in a screen/vinyl/canvas enclosure that’ll really increase my usable living space.

If all goes well this season at home, I’ll do a few more art shows after cherry season and be back on the boat by mid-September.

(I still laugh when I think about the family members who advised me not to buy the boat because I’d “never use it.” Since buying it, I’ve spent more nights sleeping aboard than I have in my own bed at home. Hell, I’ve been onboard nonstop since November 25. My house sitter spends more time in my house than I do.)


Here’s Do It Now under way in South Carolina. A passing Looper took this shot and texted it to me. (I sent them one of their boat, too!)

A Day at a Time

Now that I’m finished with the Captain’s training ordeal — for lack of a better word — and I don’t have to worry about practice questions invading my dreams anymore, I can do what needs to be done to get up to Annapolis and get Do It Now tucked away for its summer vacation. I’ve already planned my next week or so of travel, which will get me to Chesapeake Bay. I’ll be taking them on, one day at a time, until my winter travels end and I’m back home in Malaga.

And as for that other blog — well, I haven’t written a word there in over a week because of my class schedule. I’m farther behind than ever. But I’ll catch up if it takes all summer to do it.