Basement video tour!

I decided to do a video tour of the basement now that most of the walls are down. You can see isolated piles of stuff, but it's mostly cleaned out and nearly ready for the new walls!



Did you spot my secret beer storage?

Cleaning out the chimney

Last night I decided to clean out the chimney base, where the ashes from fires collect. I've been in the house for 16 years now, so I figured it was probably time.

So I opened the door in the basement and started shoveling the ash into a large heavy duty garbage bag. Scoop after scoop of ash until I surprisingly filled the whole bag. I thought, wow, that's a lot of ash.

I grabbed another. And filled it.

And another. Filled it.

And another. While shoveling, I found a barely burned piece of paper. I read it, and it was a letter from Gerald Ford, dated 1976, requesting money for the republican party.

I thought, wait... This hasn't been cleaned out since before 1976?

So I filled that bag and thought "I'm only doing one more bag". So after filling 5 bags with ashes from fires from probably the last 50-75 years, I called it a night.

It's amazing how any job I tackle in this house turns out to be a much bigger job than I had planned on. I thought I owned my house, but in reality, this house totally pwned me!

Homemade Tomatillo Salsa

I visited a farm market stand last weekend and behold, a basket of tomatillos! After sampling the tomatillo salsa at Salinas, and making pints and pints of my own regular tomato salsa, I've been dying to try my hand at this alternative.

So I found a recipe that looked reasonable at http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/tomatillo_salsa_verde/ and got to work



Tomatillos, in case you're not familiar with them. They have a husk and the skin is a little sticky under the husk requiring washing them in warm water.




All ready to go into the broiler to blacken the skin.



Mary Grace at the helm of the food processor, combining the onion, jalapenos, cilantro and tomatillos



The first batch, looking good



Awwwwwwww, yeahhhhhhhhh! Outstandingly delicious. It'll be my new best friend during the Bills game tomorrow.

I made each of the kids bite into a chip with a little salsa on it with the offer that they could spit it out if they didn't like it. They both spit it out. :(

No sound from applications such as Amarok or KSCD using Kubuntu

After long hours of searching for a solution to my lack of sound in KDE's premier music player "Amarok", I discovered the solution to my problem in the KDE forums.

I have two sound outputs, Internal Audio Stereo and Digital RV570. I had somehow configured KDE to send Amarok output to the RV570, which I had no speakers connected to.

I used the tool "pavucontrol" that has a GUI to configure what applications send output to what outputs. The kicker is that the sound-generating application has to be running and generating audio in order to configure its output.

So, launch Amarok and play some music. Next, launch pavucontrol. You should see the Amarok application in the Playback tab. Configure the output by clicking on the button showing the current output.

New ductwork: I didn't do it, but I do like it!

As part of our basement project, we needed to redo some of the ductwork in the basement. The old ducts and trunk hung down quite low and would have made the future dropped ceiling even lower.

So, behold a new trunk tucked up as high as it will go, and new oval duct work to replace the old 6" rounds.

Looks like I'm on a freakin' jet!

Removal of another wall

The latest wall to come down separated the old laundry room area from the old paint room and general basement area. It was composed of tongue in groove 1 inch planks on one side and plaster and lathe on the other.

It came down pretty easily with the help of an electric reciprocating saw (compared to my cordless) and a new wood cutting blade.

Again, Anne and I are both pleased with how much removal of this wall opened up the space. Anne is starting to think about decorating (she's a confirmed pre-decorator).

We have the HVAC guy coming early this week to redo the ductwork to move it higher up and also to correct the limited cold return air situation.