Happy Holidays 2018!
Along with Dean’s sister Martha, and a good friend named Hazel, I (Nina) am a reader. We all three subscribe to some of the bargain book sites and pore over their emails. The result is that Martha and I, being short on willpower, have down-loaded between 500 and a thousand books to our e-readers. (Hazel has more willpower and better sense.) Considering our age and that inventory, and counting library check-outs, accumulated purchased hardcovers and paperbacks, etc., there is clearly not enough lifetime left to get through even the e-reader bunch. That has led me to wonder if one can bequeath ebooks as one can printed books. Clearly, it’s possible to will away the whole reader, but what about individual titles? There are unexpected challenges in the electronic world.
The other day, I explored further on Amazon for a book I'd seen a recommendation on, set in Colorado in the 1800s. (The period and location grabbed me.) It even had good reviews. But when I "looked inside" (bless Amazon), I was appalled by the first couple of pages. The novel was set at about the time of the closing of Fort Collins, which is no longer a fort but survives as a town in northeast Colorado. The characters were questioning why the War Department was closing the Fort, since the two recent Apache attacks they'd fought off showed it was still needed. That did it. Apache attacks? In northern Colorado? I know the Apache were fierce, but they lived mostly in Southern Arizona and Mexico. I would believe Shoshone or Arapaho or Cheyenne. I would have bought Blackfeet, although they are a tad north. I’d have bought Ute, although they are more southern Colorado. I might even have swallowed Comanche, since they were a horse people and it’s at least conceivable they could have made it that far, although god knows why they would try. But Apache? I promptly closed the "Look Inside" window, signed off Amazon, and went off to sulk about the sad state of literature these days.
One of our plagues this spring was that our printer died. The best replacement choice at our local Walmart, which provides not just our upscale but only shopping here, was a Canon, so we bought it. We couldn't install it. I (Nina) called Canon, and they couldn't install it. The usual ensued. Five days of back and forth, ending with a chat during which they and I gave up all hope. As I closed the chat window, a survey popped asking how the chat had gone. I gave them a zero rating, and a candid exposition of my five days with one or the other of them, including 7 hours with them the day before. As Mark Twain said of one of his characters in Roughing It, I used both the words and the music. I finished by telling them I’d be returning this Canon printer and never coming near another. I invited them to discuss this with me.
It wasn't five minutes before the phone was ringing. Not just Canon, but the head of engineering. He asked if I would be willing to let them try again, and I told them I'd give them an hour and a half. And, between a lapsed physicist and Canon’s head engineer working together, we did get it printing in an hour and a half. I know you stopped reading when you first hit the word “printer,” but I gave you more so you will be aware installing a printer can take five days and eight people, but Canon evidently will stick with you.
This year (or really over the 2017-2018 winter), we finally bit the bullet and redid the kitchen in Alaska, which I’d been threatening for many years. We decided on an over-the-winter overhaul while we were snow-birding in Kentucky to avoid the demolition, debris, lack of plumbing, etc. We emptied the kitchen down to bare surfaces, stowed the packed boxes in the bedroom, turned keys over to the contractor, and took off to the Lower 48.
Over the winter, Dean’s sister Martha told our joint nephew Don (Florida, and also redoing his kitchen) that I was redoing the Alaska kitchen from 5000 miles away, and he expressed what I am going to interpret as amazement, but may have been astonishment that I had lost my mind last summer and he had not heard until last week.
(That nephew, by the way, got married this year. When the news reached me of the engagement, I immediately launched congratulations to Don and felicitations to his affianced, since Emily Post or Miss Marple or somebody says one never congratulates the bride, only the groom, and I don't want to lose my position in the Prissy Society, where I am not only currently in good standing but an officer.)
Because of Alaska prices, I decided to go with IKEA cabinets, about a quarter the cost, but unassembled. IKEA doesn’t ship to Alaska, so I had to find a freight forwarder in Seattle who’d load them on a ship and ferry them across the North Pacific to Anchorage. Lots of opportunities for trauma, and there was some. I discovered I had THREE pallets of HUNDREDS OF BOXES that might, someday, by dint of contractor magic, become an assembled kitchen. We cleared a place in the living room to stack them and ended with a stack eight feet long, four feet deep, and four feet high, weighing 3000 pounds. Later, Dean confided to me that he had thought to himself, “There’s no way anybody can make anything out of this that makes sense.”
I was a little nervous myself, and not just about the assemble-and-install part. When we redid the kitchen in Kentucky, I knew it would be beautiful and it is. But I was nervous as a cat about this one. I chose black cabinets, white counters/back-splash, and a terra cotta tile floor and terra-cotta-colored end wall. I lived in fear that it would look like I chose a Hallowe’en color scheme. My contractor, who clearly was doubtful, ratcheted up my fear, but he sounded like the type that only likes white walls, so I tried to discount him. (He did come around later.)
It took three months beyond our normal return date before we had working plumbing and wiring up there, so we were very late returning. We missed sockeye salmon opening day on the Russian River, the first time in lo-these-many-years. But we got a kitchen. And it turned out very well. We got enough compliments that we decided to enter a periodic contest run by a magazine called Alaska’s Best Kitchens. They called to break the news to us that only kitchens designed by professionals were eligible. But, they went on tell us they loved the kitchen so much they were going to feature it in the magazine anyway. They’ve photographed and interviewed, but we don’t yet have a publication date. On grounds that they will publish eventually, we have been walking around with our heads so swelled up there’d hardly be room to pass each other in a concert hall. If you see two people who look like the Hindenburg on legs, that might be us.
Right before we headed off to Alaska to greet the new kitchen, we finished a documentary called Chair Caning and Storytelling. KET, our state PBS affiliate, was kind enough to pick it up, and it has run several times. It will air again on KET-KY on the 19th of this month at 4:30 pm. If you are not in KET’s broadcast range but would like to see it, you can find it, along with our other two PBS documentaries, on YouTube. Just google Youtube Dean Cornett. It was a fun project, because we got to go out in the woods and film our Appalachian caners felling a hickory and stripping the bark to make the chair seat. Fascinating and a real skill, besides hard work.
This fall, our alma mater, Berea College, christened a new science building, and were kind enough to invite us to attend. A lot more modern than the old science building I took classes and labs in, and a nice trip.
And last but not least, ###EARTHQUAKE###. Specifically, the magnitude 7 Alaska earthquake around 30 November which was centered practically under our place in Anchorage. You may have seen the TV coverage showing roads wrenched apart or subsided into holes. It didn’t do our place any good either. We were by this time snow-birded in Kentucky, but friends and neighbors checked the damage for us. A glass-topped table in the foyer fell and shattered into a jillion pieces. A big bookcase which was screwed into the wall nevertheless worked loose and is occupying the center of the bedroom floor. There are books scattered everywhere there, in the living room, and in the kitchen. Our TV is face down on the floor, and every surface that held something is now clear and the somethings are on the floor. But, no windows are broken. No cracks in walls and ceilings. No broken water pipes. No broken gas pipes. So (pending the thaw and what that might reveal about the roof), no structural damage. We were lucky.
That’s our year. Hope you had a good one and will have a better 2019.
Along with Dean’s sister Martha, and a good friend named Hazel, I (Nina) am a reader. We all three subscribe to some of the bargain book sites and pore over their emails. The result is that Martha and I, being short on willpower, have down-loaded between 500 and a thousand books to our e-readers. (Hazel has more willpower and better sense.) Considering our age and that inventory, and counting library check-outs, accumulated purchased hardcovers and paperbacks, etc., there is clearly not enough lifetime left to get through even the e-reader bunch. That has led me to wonder if one can bequeath ebooks as one can printed books. Clearly, it’s possible to will away the whole reader, but what about individual titles? There are unexpected challenges in the electronic world.
The other day, I explored further on Amazon for a book I'd seen a recommendation on, set in Colorado in the 1800s. (The period and location grabbed me.) It even had good reviews. But when I "looked inside" (bless Amazon), I was appalled by the first couple of pages. The novel was set at about the time of the closing of Fort Collins, which is no longer a fort but survives as a town in northeast Colorado. The characters were questioning why the War Department was closing the Fort, since the two recent Apache attacks they'd fought off showed it was still needed. That did it. Apache attacks? In northern Colorado? I know the Apache were fierce, but they lived mostly in Southern Arizona and Mexico. I would believe Shoshone or Arapaho or Cheyenne. I would have bought Blackfeet, although they are a tad north. I’d have bought Ute, although they are more southern Colorado. I might even have swallowed Comanche, since they were a horse people and it’s at least conceivable they could have made it that far, although god knows why they would try. But Apache? I promptly closed the "Look Inside" window, signed off Amazon, and went off to sulk about the sad state of literature these days.
One of our plagues this spring was that our printer died. The best replacement choice at our local Walmart, which provides not just our upscale but only shopping here, was a Canon, so we bought it. We couldn't install it. I (Nina) called Canon, and they couldn't install it. The usual ensued. Five days of back and forth, ending with a chat during which they and I gave up all hope. As I closed the chat window, a survey popped asking how the chat had gone. I gave them a zero rating, and a candid exposition of my five days with one or the other of them, including 7 hours with them the day before. As Mark Twain said of one of his characters in Roughing It, I used both the words and the music. I finished by telling them I’d be returning this Canon printer and never coming near another. I invited them to discuss this with me.
It wasn't five minutes before the phone was ringing. Not just Canon, but the head of engineering. He asked if I would be willing to let them try again, and I told them I'd give them an hour and a half. And, between a lapsed physicist and Canon’s head engineer working together, we did get it printing in an hour and a half. I know you stopped reading when you first hit the word “printer,” but I gave you more so you will be aware installing a printer can take five days and eight people, but Canon evidently will stick with you.
This year (or really over the 2017-2018 winter), we finally bit the bullet and redid the kitchen in Alaska, which I’d been threatening for many years. We decided on an over-the-winter overhaul while we were snow-birding in Kentucky to avoid the demolition, debris, lack of plumbing, etc. We emptied the kitchen down to bare surfaces, stowed the packed boxes in the bedroom, turned keys over to the contractor, and took off to the Lower 48.
Over the winter, Dean’s sister Martha told our joint nephew Don (Florida, and also redoing his kitchen) that I was redoing the Alaska kitchen from 5000 miles away, and he expressed what I am going to interpret as amazement, but may have been astonishment that I had lost my mind last summer and he had not heard until last week.
(That nephew, by the way, got married this year. When the news reached me of the engagement, I immediately launched congratulations to Don and felicitations to his affianced, since Emily Post or Miss Marple or somebody says one never congratulates the bride, only the groom, and I don't want to lose my position in the Prissy Society, where I am not only currently in good standing but an officer.)
Because of Alaska prices, I decided to go with IKEA cabinets, about a quarter the cost, but unassembled. IKEA doesn’t ship to Alaska, so I had to find a freight forwarder in Seattle who’d load them on a ship and ferry them across the North Pacific to Anchorage. Lots of opportunities for trauma, and there was some. I discovered I had THREE pallets of HUNDREDS OF BOXES that might, someday, by dint of contractor magic, become an assembled kitchen. We cleared a place in the living room to stack them and ended with a stack eight feet long, four feet deep, and four feet high, weighing 3000 pounds. Later, Dean confided to me that he had thought to himself, “There’s no way anybody can make anything out of this that makes sense.”
I was a little nervous myself, and not just about the assemble-and-install part. When we redid the kitchen in Kentucky, I knew it would be beautiful and it is. But I was nervous as a cat about this one. I chose black cabinets, white counters/back-splash, and a terra cotta tile floor and terra-cotta-colored end wall. I lived in fear that it would look like I chose a Hallowe’en color scheme. My contractor, who clearly was doubtful, ratcheted up my fear, but he sounded like the type that only likes white walls, so I tried to discount him. (He did come around later.)
It took three months beyond our normal return date before we had working plumbing and wiring up there, so we were very late returning. We missed sockeye salmon opening day on the Russian River, the first time in lo-these-many-years. But we got a kitchen. And it turned out very well. We got enough compliments that we decided to enter a periodic contest run by a magazine called Alaska’s Best Kitchens. They called to break the news to us that only kitchens designed by professionals were eligible. But, they went on tell us they loved the kitchen so much they were going to feature it in the magazine anyway. They’ve photographed and interviewed, but we don’t yet have a publication date. On grounds that they will publish eventually, we have been walking around with our heads so swelled up there’d hardly be room to pass each other in a concert hall. If you see two people who look like the Hindenburg on legs, that might be us.
Right before we headed off to Alaska to greet the new kitchen, we finished a documentary called Chair Caning and Storytelling. KET, our state PBS affiliate, was kind enough to pick it up, and it has run several times. It will air again on KET-KY on the 19th of this month at 4:30 pm. If you are not in KET’s broadcast range but would like to see it, you can find it, along with our other two PBS documentaries, on YouTube. Just google Youtube Dean Cornett. It was a fun project, because we got to go out in the woods and film our Appalachian caners felling a hickory and stripping the bark to make the chair seat. Fascinating and a real skill, besides hard work.
This fall, our alma mater, Berea College, christened a new science building, and were kind enough to invite us to attend. A lot more modern than the old science building I took classes and labs in, and a nice trip.
And last but not least, ###EARTHQUAKE###. Specifically, the magnitude 7 Alaska earthquake around 30 November which was centered practically under our place in Anchorage. You may have seen the TV coverage showing roads wrenched apart or subsided into holes. It didn’t do our place any good either. We were by this time snow-birded in Kentucky, but friends and neighbors checked the damage for us. A glass-topped table in the foyer fell and shattered into a jillion pieces. A big bookcase which was screwed into the wall nevertheless worked loose and is occupying the center of the bedroom floor. There are books scattered everywhere there, in the living room, and in the kitchen. Our TV is face down on the floor, and every surface that held something is now clear and the somethings are on the floor. But, no windows are broken. No cracks in walls and ceilings. No broken water pipes. No broken gas pipes. So (pending the thaw and what that might reveal about the roof), no structural damage. We were lucky.
That’s our year. Hope you had a good one and will have a better 2019.
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