JoeRocketh

From Around The House

2011-06-23T20:38:00.000-04:00

Sir Elton stands guard at the front door.

The kitchen...as it usually looks like.

A desktop in my office...cluttered as always.

Sir Elton's backup on security duty.

My Wife...Playing With Her Food...Again

2011-06-07T18:45:00.002-04:00

A Good Read

2011-06-06T21:51:00.000-04:00

USA Today: Tornado lessons could lead to stronger buildings

This article was a real eye opener for me...especially this quote from Tim Marshall, a meteorologist and engineer studying the damage from the recent tornado disaster in Joplin, Missouri:

"Except in hurricane-prone coastal regions, the average U.S. home is built to withstand a 3-second wind gust of 90 mph and doesn't have much chance in a rare EF-5 tornado with 200-mph winds, such as the one that hit Joplin."

Ouch. Reading this story brought back memories of the September 2008 windstorm that caused so much damage in our neck of the woods here in Southwest Ohio. We easily had many gusts that day at or above 80 miles per hour, and I knew some of those gusts were well over three seconds long. We've also been prone to very strong wind gusts in the thunderstorm complexes that visit us on a regular basis during the spring and summer months and during winter windstorms spun up by strong low-pressure systems. Someone down the street who had spent time moving here and there in the military said that he had been through the Santa Ana winds in California and the Chinook winds in Colorado Springs, but that he never saw winds like he did here in Ohio that horrific day. We lost a few shingles and had some other minor roof damage as a result of that storm, but thankfully nothing more.

In my inspections of our building, it looks pretty solid with plenty of metal bracing throughout. And we have a safe place identified in our house well away from windows with several walls between that space and the outside and a concrete foundation wall close by. Still, I keep thinking how we can do better in protecting ourselves should the unthinkable happen.

And thinking how ironic that last sentence sounds.

Nice To Know I'm Loved

2011-06-05T19:03:00.002-04:00

...But My Wife Can Handle Snakes Just Fine!

2011-06-05T07:36:00.000-04:00

Snakes Alive!

2011-06-04T16:28:00.003-04:00

Around 10:00 am this morning, I was relaxing upstairs in the loft, digesting a personalized breakfast my wife Deb painstakingly made for me. I had been talking with her about how the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) was trending on Twitter this morning for whatever reason. My breakfast reflected the topic, and I became the first (and only) person in the world to eat at our new in-home diner, DEBHOP. I feel very honored and privileged with this fact.

Things were about as calm and peaceful as they get around this house, as I relaxed while my wife was tending to her property in FarmVille, dressed as a Viking courtesy of Capital One. She told me last night that she had to change the costume on her avatar in order to harvest her crops. Same with the placement of a Visigoth statue on her farm. This is why I don't play FarmVille. But I digress.

Things were wet outside after a morning thunderstorm moved through the area and the skies were lightening back up in its wake. Suddenly the doorbell rings. I asked my wife to answer the door as I was upstairs and she was closer to the door. I thought it would simply be a door-to-door salesman or someone from the local school involved with some kind of fundraiser. But before I could think about vacuum cleaners or having multiple subscriptions to Vibe, I recognized the voice at the door. It was our neighbor from just up the street. He had just left his house with his wife when they came across an unexpected visitor to our neighborhood...

Needless to say, this isn't necessarily something that comes around every day. My wife, who possesses a zoology degree and experience as a Girl Scout leader, quickly identified the snake as a non-poisonous (thankfully) male slithering around our neighborhood after the storm. The neighbors wanted to see if she would be able to take him, or otherwise coax him, back into the woods. My wife tried for ten minutes trying to get him to latch on to a stick of sugarcane that we had recently purchased for a display of nature in our living room. She was eventually able to get this critter half-way back to the wooded area behind our home until he fell off the stick and slithered into a pine tree. We figured out he was happy where he was and just left him be. Thankfully he will be somewhere in the woods tonight, and not on our dinner plate.

The wife swears it tastes like chicken; I'll take her word for it.