Gardens

May 6th

Mowed the lawn; cold beer. Put out the houseplants & strung up the hammock.

Manitou Springs

Garden of the Gods

Buffalo Lodge

Pike’s Peak

Can it be?

Yes. The final installment of the bathroom saga.

It’s taken us about three weekends to finally completely finish the thing up. The tiling project was hugely time-consuming and I figure I glued about 275 individual tiles and did two rounds of grouting. Then there were hours and hours of removing excess grout. The end product looks great — but man, it was a lot of work. Which pretty much sums up the experience of the entire project, which we officially called at 3:00 yesterday afternoon, almost three months to the day from when we started ripping out soggy drywall. So here it is: the final chapter.

Just starting on the tiles

I spent a lot of hours crouched in the tub.

Meanwhile, Carol was installing the cubbies.

And installing the new toilet.

And it's lovely.

Starting on the grout.

Carol is now plumbing the sink.

The grout is finished!

The sink is up and running!

Grout is sealed, tub is caulked, and the new fixtures are in place.

Brand-new towels on their hooks.

Everything's ready to go.

And a nice fuzzy rug, too.

Clovis cache

I found out yesterday that a guy in Boulder, doing some landscaping last year, shoveling, literally, uncovered a Clovis cache 18″ under his front yard. The cache contained over 80 items, ranging from small tools to the characteristic large platters of stone found in other Clovis caches:

Can you imagine? Finding something like this in your yard? Thirteen thousand years old. And rare — Clovis caches are so rare. A quick Google search comes up with only seven other known Clovis caches. The only reason I know anything about this is because the Fort Collins Museum is one of the lucky holders of a Clovis cache — the Watts cache, donated in 1941 by Ira Watts, who found the pieces when plowing his farm field in nearby Timnath. The six pieces of the Watts cache sat unremarked upon for decades until a specialist in prehistoric lithics saw them and realized what they were.

But — what were they? Tools? Weapons? Raw materials? Offerings? Legacies for the future? Maybe all of those — and other things we can’t guess at, being so far removed in time. Some of the pieces in the Mahaffy cache from Boulder are fashioned from beautifully patterned and striped stone, which tempts you to think they weren’t just utilitarian. And imagine the landscape! Camels, horses, the American lion, the giant short-faced bear. Perhaps all now sleeping beneath our feet, our homes, our front yards.

I won’t reiterate the details of the story, the analysis that’s been done on the pieces and so forth; it is fascinating, so do read it if you care to. The part I really liked was the plan to re-bury some of the pieces, to put them back where they’d been left, 13,000 years ago. Someone was expecting to return.

Final word on Spring

This morning, out at the Coyote Ridge Natural Area, I heard my first meadowlark of the season!

Floored, again

Well, the new tile floor in the bathroom just turned out beautifully. We put it in this last Monday and Tuesday, and laid the grout down Wednesday. We absolutely love how it looks — well worth the time and effort.

Getting ready to lay tile

 

Carol laying tile

Terry squishes the last tile into place

 

Wall 2 wall

At long last, an update on the bathroom project.

I think the last time we checked in, we had just installed the new underlayment. After that, for many weeks, we worked on the walls. I had no idea you could do that much work on walls. We:

Put in new drywall (blue board, in this case). This involved

• quite a bit of jigsawing (measure once, cut twice)
• tons of tiny particulate matter settling on every surface of the house, repeatedly
• nailing and screwing
• seam taping
• joint mudding, smoothing, sanding, also repeatedly

We then primed the walls with something that smelled approximately like horse pee and reeked the house out for hours.

Next, the extremely exciting adventure of using the industrial compressor gizmo to spray texture on the walls (mostly in an attempt to hide my very bad drywall taping and mudding job). This machine was:

• huge
• heavy
• deafeningly loud (esp. in small bathroom)
• sprayed texture frickin’ EVERYWHERE (my job was to scrape/sponge it off of every place it wasn’t supposed to go, including the closet door in Carol’s office, like eight feet away)
• burped the liquid texture five feet into the air when turned off

Carol preps the texturizing machine

Carol spraying texture on the walls

Texture Warrior

At this point, we were forced to take a break from the project and go on a cruise for ten days. When we got back, we painted. Three times. With three different colors. Then we really started cooking: last weekend Carol installed the new light fixture, we put in the new medicine cabinet, and Carol got one of the recessed cubbies installed:

Et voila.

Next installment (so to speak): At Long Last, Floor.

WWVB in Fort Collins

I had one of those fantastic experiences today, serendipitous, where I closed a 35 year-old circle, quite unexpectedly.

I travelled north of Fort Collins this morning with my colleagues from the Fort Collins Museum and Discovery Science Center to visit radio station WWVB, which broadcasts the atomic time all over the country and the world (their shortwave signal, broadcast as WWV, has been picked up as far away as South Africa and the South Pole). Do you have a “radio controlled” watch or clock? It gets its signal from WWVB in Fort Collins.

We were visiting as part of our larger project of talking with the science and cultural groups in the area, which is in turn part of our exhibit master planning process for the new museum. Basically, we’re going on cool field trips to find out what’s going on in our community. Besides visiting WWVB, we’ve talked to New Belgium brewery, and are scheduled to meet with the Seed Repository at CSU, the folks at WaterPik, CSU’s Atmospheric Science research center, and the Vestas wind turbine people.

We spent several fascinating hours at the facility, which is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is ultimately part of the US Department of Commerce. The “official” atomic clock is at NIST in Boulder; but we learned today that the signal broadcast from the antennae in Fort Collins (there are two) comes from a duplicate “clock” on site here, which is synchronized several times a day to the one in Boulder. So, although the “official” time is kept in Boulder, the signal you get is generated by the clock in Fort Collins.

We learned just a bazillion fascinating things today, and probably that many more went over our heads. The guys out there were fantastic and showed us all around: time stamp generators, transmitters, the cesium clock itself, the antennae, and the immense gridwork of towers and cables that support the antennae. We honest to god saw the, I’m not kidding, switch that they throw — manually — to send the “bit” that goes out in the signal when it’s Daylight Savings Time. Some of — much of — the technology looks like mid-1960’s Star Trek. There are Dymo tape labels on the electronics cabinets and dot matrix printers. But this stuff was built to last — and when it gets replaced, often the “new” technology doesn’t last as long (as they found out a few years ago when a new support cable for one of the towers fatigued unexpectedly and snapped). We also learned about leap seconds; they keep track of the discrepancy between the atomic clock and the actual rotational speed of the Earth (which is tending to slow down), and when that discrepancy reaches a nice round number, in this case, a second, the “Leap Second” switch gets thrown and we get an extra second. We just had one not too long ago. Currently, the discrepancy is at .409 milliseconds, so it will be awhile before we need another leap second adjustment.

I could go on and on, even worse than I’m doing now. (It was just so dang cool!). But back to my “circle.” We also visited the shortwave signal generator, known as WWV. Besides the time signal, the shortwave also broadcasts an audio component — listen to a recording (not live) here. I’m such a geek, but it was so freakin’ cool to listen to the signal, right there in the room where it was being generated! And watching my atomic wristwatch tick along in perfect synch — it was like my watch had returned to the Mothership! But the best part was suddenly remembering, when I heard that sound, how I would take Dad’s shortwave radio out to my observatory, when I was a teenager, and listen to the signal while I made my astronomical observations. I reasoned, if I saw anything noteworthy, I would need an exact time stamp for my report! I haven’t listened to that signal for 35 years.

Second harbinger

Carol just called on her cell phone on her way to work to tell me that the sign at the drive-in theater has changed from CLOSED FOR THE SEASON to OPENING SOON. It’s freezing cold this morning with a couple of inches of snow, but I feel spring coming …