Summer Rundown

Here's what we've been up to recently:

* We got a new deck! Our old one was, well, old. And starting to rot. So we had it torn down and rebuilt. Here are the results:



* Wendy got me a super-cool birthday present a few months ago: a personal weather station. It measures wind speed, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, among others, and it connects to a computer. That, combined with a free service from Weather Underground, allows me to check the weather at our house over the internet. Check it out here.

It's a lot of fun to play with. Check out this chart from August. We were woken up by a morning thunderstorm. You can see right when the storm rolled through. Just before 7am, the temperature suddenly dropped, the air pressure started rising, the wind shifted direction, and then it started raining. Very cool!

* I took a continuing education class recently called Investigating Ghosts and Hauntings, taught by a local paranormal research group. It was very interesting, and as it turned out, a couple in the class were taking it because they thought their house was haunted. So we got to go and see the group perform an investigation. They used a staggering amount of equipment: multiple video cameras, eletromagnetic field meters, geomagnetic field meters, positive/negative ion detectors, random number generators, etc. It was quite a production. Nothing especially unusual turned up, but before we learned anything about the house we took a tour, and several of us felt that if any part of the house was haunted, it was the top floor. And we later learned that's where most of the unexplained events had occurred.

* Wendy's Mom came to visit a few weeks ago. We took a trip down to Chicago to see the Field Museum. We had planned on going on a Sunday, but thankfully the night before realized the Bears were playing a home game that day, so there wouldn't be any parking (the Field Musuem is right next to Soldier Field). We went Monday instead, and it turned out to be free admission day.

* Allergies have been terrible this year. I've wondered if it has anything to do with the trees around us; they produced a huge amount of acorns this year. We literally have a carpet of acorns around parts of our house. At times last month we could hear them fall onto our house and roll down the roof. Thank goodness for the gutter screens we put up last year!