Ready, even though others are better at it

Today's cool and damp air reminds us that summer doesn't last forever. The weather will get chilly again, even cold, and we'll need heat from a variety of sources.
Ours is hybrid house of sorts with wood, hot water heated by oil, and some electric baseboards. We get most of our heat from a wood stove in the family room. We burn between four and five cords a season. During the ice storm, when we were without power for 11 days, the stove kept even the most remote regions of the house above freezing.
My mother lived with us for the last years of her life. Along with my in-laws, she literally kept the home fires burning during the work day. After her death, when Sandra and I were both at work, and the in-laws decided that winters in Canada were almost a good idea, the family room got quite chilly. So, we added a loop of hot water heat to keep the temperature steady.
The rooms where my wife's mother lives have electric baseboards, providing quick but expensive heat. Those rooms were added in the 80s and not connected to one of the many small cellars in this nearly 200-year-old house, so running hot water pipes wasn't practical.
We got a good price on greed firewood from a guy named Ed. His big truck broke down in the early spring and so brought our order in half-cord loads, a lot more handling for the same amount of money.
There are, of course, lots of people who do all of this better. Son Adam has new wood-fired boiler that burns cleanly and gives his family all of the heat and hot water they need. Friends Liz and Robert have solar panels that reduced their electric bills from $100/month to about $4. My father and his father before him wore long underwear.
As I write, the temperature has dropped to the mid-60s with a steady rain. We might even need a small fire at suppertime to dry out the chill. Funny weather, this, but, as a New Englander, we come to expect it. Tomorrow, it'll be 90.

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This post originally appeared in Karl Hakkarainen's Holden Blog on OntheCommon.com .

What price cable?

I think that this is the first time that the road to our camp has made it into the newspapers. I wish it was for better news than this.

via Cable linesman hurt touching power line

We've been without television at the camp since the digital changeover in June of last year. In the fall, we made contact with a very helpful man, Miguel, at Comcast who said assured us that cable could and would be strung to our property. Through the fall and winter and spring, he navigated through the approval processes and change requests that led to a work order to begin installation this week. The poles, dating back to the Rural Electrification project of the New Deal, are jointly owned by the power and telephone companies. National Grid finished its make-ready work a couple of weeks ago, clearing away branches around the poles and lines and making other adjustments. We needed a new, taller pole on our property, which was installed in June.

Last Saturday morning, an installation crew from Comcast showed up. They first pulled a wire from our pole, the last on the line, back toward the last cable connection a dozen poles away. During the week, the crew then installed the cable that would carry the precious signals to our 25-year-old television. (With the installation, we will also get Internet access. Currently, we have a wireless gadget that I have to hang in a particular corner of the house to fetch a signal.)
This morning,  we'd just read the news about the accident in the newspaper when I received a call from Miguel. He apologized that the project would be delayed. OSHA had investigated yesterday. He would be meeting with an engineer from National Grid on-site to review plans for changes to the power lines to ensure safe completion of the installation. I assured him that safety of the workers is paramount to us. Work is hard enough as it is without the dangers of injury.We sent along our wishes for a speedy recovery to the linesman. TV can wait.

More on Great Laws

I've been thinking about Hakkarainen's Law of Great Events^™ lately. The law, briefly restated, is that, in any great event, such as a death, wedding, divorce, or other crisis, someone close to you will unexpectedly let you down.
Most recently, with the death of Sandra's father and the subsequent return of Sandra' mother to Holden, the wonderful people in our lives have delivered prodigies of compassion, comfort, and service. We've received notes and calls from afar and casseroles from family and friends nearby. People have inconvenienced themselves for our sake, bringing good works and sage advice.
Measured on these days, the state of the world's soul is pretty darn good.
And so, the ones who let you down with willful silence, the ones who quickly shift the focus from sympathy to self-centeredness ("I'm sorry for your loss. Now, let me talk about what's important to me."), those folks can take over one's thoughts if we're not careful.
And so, a way through it is two-fold: be grateful for the gifts we've received and act on that gratitude.
Acting on that gratitude, for me, requires that I remember thank each person for each gift and, more importantly, pay better attention when great events come to family and friends. That's easy to remember now, when the feelings of gratitude are strong, but not so much later, when life gets full and what's important to me takes center stage. As has often been said, "I may not be much, but I'm all I think about."

Google does many things right, but not these

1. The latest version of Google Docs appears to have removed the ability to add words to the spell-check dictionary.
   
   
2. The Google Docs spreadsheet doesn't have a simple way of displaying just the month and year of a date. You can write a formula that will do that, but Excel allows you to specify custom display fields easily.
3. Google Chrome doesn't allow you to use multiple Google accounts for email and other apps. Firefox has a nifty extension, called GMail Manager that monitors as many GMail accounts as you want, including those in different Google domains.
   There are reports that Google is rolling out a feature that allows you to log in to multiple Google domains and keep those logins active simultaneously. See Google Tests Multiple Accounts Sign in. I've not seen that feature in my account(s) yet.

Additional meaning to " haista napa"

Kids of Finnish heritage and their fellow travelers usually remember just a few words and phrases of Finnish by the time that they're adults. One such phrase, haista napa or "smell my belly button,"survives long after it makes sense.
Anyway, a recent study indicates that the location of the belly button, if not its fragrance, is an important indicator of sports performance. The navel marks the center of gravity. A higher center of gravity is favorable for sports that involve running, while a lower relative center of gravity favors swimming. Athletes from West Africa typically have longer legs and higher navels. As a result, runners from this region tend to do better than Europeans.
The article, AFP: Belly-buttons key to success in sport: study, notes that some scientists are uneasy about drawing major conclusions from these findings because our troubled history of assigning attributes to racial or ethnic groups.