Vanquished!

"I have vanquished the drain!"

This was Jake's proud announcement this afternoon.  We were having trouble with the drain in the kitchen sink, which came to our attention because my Mom noticed it.  Well, what she noticed was all the wet in the cabinet under the sink, and also that it was the fault of the sink drain (not the faucet).  FYI, my Mom will make sure that something is broken find something that is broken if she stays at your house.  Just ask my brother's garbage disposal, freezer, and washing machine.  Yikes.  She has quite a track record.

And thank goodness for this blog, for it is by the magic of searching the blog that I discovered that my Mom was suspiciously also here the previous time we had sink trouble (though that was with the faucet, in 2007).

But seriously, we are glad she noticed it.  The situation under the kitchen sink has always been a bit, well, suspicious. I really wish I had taken a picture of it before, but rest assured, there was a strange "venting" situation involving a piece of rubber tubing that was cinched off with a clamp.  Just cinch it up.

Thanks to the internets, our friends at Ace Hardware, our neighbor Lisa, and our handy friend Matt, Jake was able to get all the information he needed to take the drain out of the sink and put in a new one.  The one he was removing, however, was not really exactly like the ones that appear on the internets, which are, well, new and easy to attach and detatch.  While removing the old one, something broke into something else, and, well, there was need for a hacksaw.  I realize that a hacksaw isn't typically a tool one uses in plumbing, but in our house it is.  One of our previous (thus far undocumented) Adventures in Plumbing (TM) involved the simple removal of a shower head, which ended with the shearing off of a pipe, which required a call to an Professional Plumber to fix.  (Happened on a Friday afternoon, after business hours, of course.  We waited until Monday for non-emergency plumbing hours.)

But Jake has emerged victorious from this Plumbing Adventure, and without recourse to a Professional Plumber at all.  Three cheers for Jake.  He has vanquished the drain.

In other news of vanquishing, I have just sent off the article that I have been working on; it was my main goal of the summer to get it completed.  And it's still July!  I am very pleased.

And in other, non-vanquishing, though also awesome news, Lucy has begun ukelele lessons.  We're all very excited about this development.  More details in an upcoming post.  But for now, here is a Conversation with Lucy (TM) that Jake got to overhear at the lesson:

Lucy: My mom plays the violin.

Marieke (her ukelele instructor): That's right! She mentioned that.

Lucy: Well, she's not good at it.

Wow, kid, thanks for the vote of confidence.  I've been vanquished by my own child.

Oh, and if you'd like to read about Lucy's ukelele lesson from her teacher's point of view, you can read about it here:
https://storytosong.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/lets-play-ukulele/
(She asked for our permission to write about it, and we were delighted to see what she did!)

You can't go home again

This post brought to you by the not-so-long-lost past, as viewed from Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  That's where I grew up.  We were back there for a visit in June and had a lovely time.  But it was a bit shocking to see how many things have changed, just since our previous visit (back in Fall of 2012, so not that long ago).

The first big site to see (or see no longer) was the big factory, Carlisle Tire and Wheel, that's in the block behind my Mom's house.  Here's the intersection one block away from her house:

Yup, that sign says "Factory Street," the street that runs right behind my mom's house. It maybe should now be called "Pile of Rubble Street," but I guess that's not really likely.

I don't actually have any photos of this factory, because it was the kind of thing I didn't really think I would need to have in a photograph.  Friends from my high school worked there sometimes during the summer, and many of my friends' parents worked there, too.  I mean, I figured it would always be there.  It's FACTORY street, after all.  And it's not just this little corner: it's a 9-acre parcel of land.  I didn't realize it was that big back then, but it spans several blocks that I walked every day to school.  Here's a map

So "B" is my Mom's house, and that huge rectangle in the middle is where the factory was (interesting that google maps shows nothing in that lot on the map, but the street view shows the factory there!).  Note: "Smitty's Homebrew Shop" was not there back then.  What was there was a small business run by a guy who fixed and restored player pianos and those crazy music machines that you hear/see when you ride a carrousel.  More on that in another post.

I did manage to find, on googlemaps, this photo of the intersection (the intersection I pictured above):

So that building was there last fall (and whenever it was that the google car passed by) but is just a pile of rubble now.  There's a whole website with updates on the progress of demolition, which you can check out here.  Apparently, there are plans to make a bunch of medical offices here, and also perhaps a senior living community of some sort.  There's a bit more about all that, plus pictures of it pre-demolition, here.

And here are a few more of my post-demolition (or should I say mid-demolition, since it's still not done):

So in addition to tearing down Carlisle Tire and Wheel, a few blocks in the other direction, they're demolishing Masland Carpets, another massive parcel of industrial buildings.  So here's the full map of destruction:

"A" is my mom's house, and you can see, on both sides, there are huge swaths of industrial land that are....well, who knows what they are actually going to become once the rubble is cleared.  There was a massive fire at the Masland site back in May of 2012, but the factory wasn't really in operation anymore.  It had been a big employer since it started in 1919, and I had a few friends who worked there at times.  There's some trouble with the demolition progress, which you can read about here, but apparently they're going to build a hotel and various other businesses on the site.

It's kind of shocking to see these things being torn down.  I mean, I wasn't really attached to them or anything, but they just seemed like they would always be there. Here's where progress was as of June 2013:

So in addition to these industrial sites, one more demolition hit a little closer to home.  This tree, in the backyard of my Mom's house, was the subject of an extensive report that I wrote in the third grade for Mrs. Drachbar (my totally awesome third grade teacher who I also ran into when I was visiting):

But despite its literary significance, the tree has been removed.  Sigh.  See here:

Now you see it (and me, frolicking in its leaves!):

Now you don't:

I should note that although I am happily raking leaves in that picture, at no point did I really enjoy raking leaves from that tree, except for when it was to make a pile to jump in.

 My Mom even got a few shots of the thing after they took it down:

It was huge.  But it was causing problems, including the fact that it was shoving its thirsty roots into the foundation of the house and wreaking some havoc there.  We're sad that it's gone, though.

But perhaps the most disruptive destruction I encountered on this trip was the shocking and outrageous discovery that our very favorite potato chips in the world -- Kay & Ray's -- have been discontinued, forever.  I'm really feeling bad about this one, because I even had a blog post in my head to write about them.  When we were in Carlisle back in the fall, we had bought a bunch of them (as we often do) and brought them back for various taste tests, gifts, and party fun.  I had a whole thing to say about their "dark" chips and whatnot, but now, they are gone.  And I can't even find the photos I had of them.  This one from the internets will have to suffice for now:

Kay & Ray's, RIP.

Well, as long as I'm being all nostalgic, I'll end with a favorite picture that I just scanned from the pile I brought home:

That's me and my brother and my grandparents' dog, Heddy.  Please note that I am rocking a Lehigh warm-up suit, and my brother is rocking the Lehigh hoodie with plaid pants.  There's no date on this photo, but I'd put it at about 1982/3-ish.

That's it for today's walk down Memory Lane, Carlisle.  Stay tuned for more updates from the past.

Guest Post from Lucy

Today we have a guest post from Lucy!  She is dictating to me and choosing which pictures to put up.  Here goes:

This is Dragon-Man.

He can breathe fire.

OK, so this is Gak-Man:

He can squirt Gak at you.  Gak is glue mixed up with paint.  It's just really sticky.

This is a unicorn next to a rose:

He makes flying hearts go around the rose.  Unicorns aren't real.  But Narwhals are.  We've been reading about Unusual Creatures, like the aye-aye. the blobfish, the echidna, and the blue-footed booby.  Those are all real creatures.

This is also a real creature:

Mom found it in front of the house.  It is huge.  His name is George.  Its last name is Fred.  So his name is George Fred.  Those names are from Harry Potter.  So George Fred was held captive in a tupperware for a day, but has since been freed to do beetle-y things, like get eaten by a bird.

At Dad's Birthday party, we made ourselves into Curious Creatures. This is Ruthie, my Best Friend:

She is wearing her fairy antennae and a fairy necklace.  She is also wearing a fluffy white flower in her hair.

This is me:

I have a mustache bracelet and a mustache.  Carter is behind me.

This is Rich:

He invented the pipe-cleaner mustache.  He started the whole mustache craze during the party.  He is also wearing one of Matt's invention, the phone ear earpiece.  So everyone at the party was a mustache-wearing telemarketer.  It was great.

Here are the girls wearing our telemarketing ear pieces:

That's me in the middle.  Ruthie is on my right, and Audrey is on my left.  We are making things with pipe cleaners and pom poms.  All these supplies came from Grandma!  Here's Grandma:

I'm sitting on Grandma, and Pillow Pet is sitting on me.  Pillow Pet is another Curious Creature!  Thanks, Grandma! Sorry about the creepy bug!