Saturday, February 22, 2025

Domestic Matters

Blue House in Snow

We really lucked out with this house in a lotta ways. I've been here since the mid 1990s, and the house was built in 1905. Yet so far I haven't had to replace the roof. There's like a double layer.

I do have critters in the rafters and have used a ladder and like chicken wire to block the one ingress and/or egress I could find, northwest corner, near where we used to have that TV aerial. The dish is unused. The house gets 99% of its TV from optical fiber, with digital broadcast receiving another option, used less often.

Mostly those critters are squirrels. Do the neighbor's chickens attract rats? They'd be around anyway. More exotic: racoons.

The property has a detached garage, which I don't use for my car, a 1997 Nissan, highly weathered, still with a healthy a powertrain and new tires. I've got some boxes of C6XTY components in said garage and no, that's nothing dangerous, inert shaped plastic, designed in Oregon, manufactured in China. The components assemble into the sculptures at the front and to the rear of the main building.

The previous house we just rented (own this one) was only a block or so away, around the corner, and it would flood really badly if the sump pump had problems. It was also much more permeable to the elements. We had it checked, as a student thesis project. The wind throughput was considerable. In contrast, this "new" place (since mid 90s) has a leaky basement, true, but that's Portland. The furnace is not endangered. With palettes, stuff stays dry. The space is pretty high humidity though, and low ceilinged except in the washer-dryer area.

After we moved in here, we replaced all the doors and windows with highly insulated hardware, and sprayed insulation into the wall spaces. Yes, the furnace burns fossil fuel, which comes in a tank truck. The fuel tank is under the driveway and when I want to know how much fuel is left, I lower a wooden stick and read the height. Very National Geographic.

My upstairs office was space for successive daughters, who painted it aquamarine and bright red respectively. It's still bright red, with yellowish trim. That sounds kinda loud for an office but the lighting is muted, sometimes is no more than computer screens. There's no bed. This is not a guest room. 

Some years I let my agent fill out the IRS schedule whatever to declare my home office, and its portion of household expenses. The guest room, was Carol's room, sleeps one, although I do have a spare bedroom upstairs that's only habitable outside peak summer, as we don't do upstairs air-conditioning. The office gets hot too but is fine with the deck door open, and a fan.

Yesterday I was out front on my hands and knees repairing the bottom northwest corner of the C6XTY tetrahedron. The stuff gets brittle in sunlight and parts will pretty easily snap off. Solutions were within reach when the prototype run ended, and the product got shelved and time capsuled. My sculpture garden showcases how far Sam got with this spatio-temporal rendering of a scale-independent implementation of a lattice. This blog is full of information on Flextegrity, as are some of my Github repos.

Home Office