Get Off My Lawn!

My almost-career as a CSI investigator

/ Shane / Leave a comment

At the very end of my short career as a surveyor, I almost found myself in another career entirely; that of a crime scene investigator.

We were on our way back from posting the no trespassing signs, when I saw Rachael’s dog Luna doing something in the bushes. I assumed it was “that” something, but it turns out it wasn’t.

Suddenly, Luna burst from the bushes with a straight up skeleton in her mouth.

It appear to be some sort of full size leg bone, one segment clamped in her teeth, and a second bone (a femur if you will) was dangling by a knee joint. The bone itself was a beautiful specimen, picked clean and bleached perfectly white, with knobby ends and everything, as if she had stolen it off the pages of a medical text book. The whole thing was at least 2 1/2 feet long. As she bounded towards us, grinning gleefully, the skeletal leg dangled and danced beside her, like some kind of spooky Halloween lawn ornament. Except this one was not made of plastic.

I literally expected a skeleton to come hopping out of the woods on one foot after her, cursing his luck.

As the dog pranced around my sister with her prize, I said, “Rachael, grab it!” to which she replied, “You get it, I’m a vegetarian!” When I finally managed to pry it out of Luna’s mouth with the claw of a hammer, I hurled it back into the woods. We then spent the next few minutes trying to keep Luna from chasing after it.

“Rachael, we have to see what this is. That looked like a human bone!”
“No way, I’m not going back there. Lets just pretend we didn’t find it.”

I let myself be convinced to leave well enough alone, when I realized we were no more than 100 feet from our camp.

“Rachael, we have to go look. I’m not going to camp here if there’s a body on the other side of the hill!”

I forged a path to where I had seen Luna digging, with Rachael trailing reluctantly behind. Luckily, it did turn out to be some kind of animal (deer I expect, although the skull was pretty damaged) (not damaged enough to know for certain it wasn’t a human though). Luna managed to snag one tasty mouthful before we were able to pull her away, which she crunched with great relish once we got back to camp.

Alls well that ends well, I suppose, although I suppose it would have made a much better blog post if it had been a body.

My short career as a surveyor

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I mentioned that one of the things we did up at The Haven was to post “no trespassing” signs around the perimeter of our property, but I didn’t mention the “how” of it, which is actually a story unto itself.

We knew where the stakes were in the front, and we were told there were stakes marking the back corner, but we had never actually seen them. I know from experience that it is very, very easy to get turned around in the woods, or to think you are walking a straight line to your destination while blithely walking in exactly the wrong direction, or at a right angle from where you think you are going. There have been times where we were at the exact opposite side of the property from where we thought we were. There have been times where I would have sworn the road was in one direction, and I was completely wrong. There have been times when I have stumbled on a path that I would have sworn wasn’t on the map, or not found a path even though I would have sworn it should have been *right there*.

Therefore, we had planned to use my sister’s GPS to make sure we were staying on the property line. I know GPS isn’t 100% accurate down to the millimeter, and it’s possible that it wouldn’t be able to get a good signal in the woods, but I also know that my head isn’t even 10% accurate, so it couldn’t have been worse with the GPS than without it. Unfortunately, the GPS was a complete failure. It worked perfectly in our trial runs along the road, but as soon as we moved into the woods, it just completely stopped. It insisted that we must be on the road, and wouldn’t even update the latitude / longitude indicators. It was worthless.

I really, really wanted to get the job done, but I really, really doubted our ability to wing it. We decided to make do with what we had, and give it a shot. We would lay the signs in a line where we thought they aught to go, waiting to nail them in until we were sure we ended up in the right place. If we ended up being off, we could work our way back correcting them until we had a more or less straight line.

What we had was a simple compass and some yellow caution tape. We went to the road, where the GPS was working, and paced off 30 yards. Assuming the GPS was right, we now had a roughly 90 foot long “rope” of caution tape (we had been planning 100 feet, but we figured 90 was close enough). Then, I positioned myself on the stake and used the compass to ensure that Rachael was walking a straight(ish) line. When she got to the end of the tape, we laid a sign down and did it again.

Here’s the thing though, we had a lot of room for error. First off, all of our assumptions were based on the fact that the tape was 90 feet long, which we didn’t even know for sure. Second off, the compass was very fickle, and I could get about any reading I wanted, within maybe 20 degrees. The tape would often need to be bent around trees or tossed over bushes. And there were times when I couldn’t even see Rachael to see if she was on the line or not. (I had the “holding the compass” job by virtue of the fact that Rachael had a pink shirt, and was thus much easier to see in the woods than my navy blue.) Even if we were off by only a little bit on each spot, the small error could propagate to a large error after repeating a dozen times.

When we got to the back of the property and found the stake was directly on our line, it was probably one of the greatest moments of my life. We were sweaty, we were tired, we were scratched up, we were dirty, we were thirsty (we didn’t bring any water with us because we didn’t expect it to take 2 hours!), and we were absolutely sure what we were doing wasn’t going to work. There it was, right where it was supposed to be.

It just seemed so crazy that we could do it without any kind of technology. I have to say, I became an absolute believer in the compass that day.

When we got back to camp, everybody was over working on the raspberries. “You know,” I said, “if we have to walk back there, we might as well go on the edge of the property and put some signs up. Just to the raspberries. That would save us some time tomorrow…”

A few minutes later, we were back in action on the other side of the property. When we got to the raspberry patch, everyone had already left, so we decided to just keep on truckin’. That side was infinitely more navigable, not to mention that we had refined our system a little bit, which means we finished the entire side in 30 minutes, rather than the 2 hours it took on the other side (to be fair, we also didn’t have Evie “helping us” on that side either). Well, at that rate, we might as well do the short(er) distance across the back, right?

It was a long, difficult day and I was absolutely beat, but the no trespassing signs were up, and mentally I felt great. It was such a sense of accomplishment to crawl through bushes for two hours and then suddenly find out the fruits of your labor paid off! It was great to see all the little ins and outs of the property that I hadn’t gotten to see yet, especially the very back corner. And there is something psychological about fencing in the property that really makes you feel possessive. It was great to clarify where exactly the property line was in a few ambiguous places, and it feels like we now have a safety net to help keep us from wandering off our property or getting lost.

Without a doubt it was the most satisfying project I’ve done on the property.

Special thanks to my sister and co-surveyor, I definitely couldn’t have done it without her. Repeatedly, she had to climb through brambles and bushes to keep the line straight, only to have me stroll around on an easier path once the marker was set (did I mention we were wearing shorts during this?). She did it without complaining. Even though we didn’t really chit chat, I felt like it was a nice bonding moment. Especially when we found that first stake, my friends. There was a lot of hi-fiving, let me tell you.

A very Haven weekend

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Another amazing weekend at The Haven.

This was our most ambitious weekend yet in terms of what we wanted to accomplish, so it felt super-extra good to get it all done. We posted no trespassing signs around the entire perimeter of our property. We cut down not one, not two, but three trees and got them all cut up and stacked for firewood. We planted not one, not two, but something like twenty raspberry plants. We pruned and opened up the area around not one, not two, but at least a dozen blueberry plants. And all of this on top of a million other little things, like chopping branches and scything ferns to make paths, preparing food, washing dishes, watching the kids, etc.

I truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart send a special thanks out to everyone who helped us accomplish so much. I honestly thought that we had planned way too much work for one weekend, but it didn’t feel like we did nothing but work (at least not to me). Every time we work on the land, it feels a little bit more like it’s really mine.

Actually having so many people up there (8 this time, counting the kids, plus a large dog) was actually pretty fun. It was almost crowded in the clearing, with 4 full sized tents, a screen tent, the fire ring and the new “slide platform”. It almost felt like a little city or something. We actually had a half-way respectable ring of people around the fire, reunion style.

It didn’t go off without incident, however.

On Friday, I took the kids up to The Haven by myself, while Nathan and Amanda swung through and picked up Sara after work. By the time everything worked out (including digging up all the raspberry cuttings, thanks again guys!), Sara didn’t end up getting up there until about 1:30 a.m., long after the kids and I were asleep. This meant that she wasn’t around to help get the kids into bed, which is why I was hiking in the woods to the bathroom tree in the dark, alone with two kids.

The clearing was pretty bright yet, but as soon as you cross that threshold into the trees, night crashes down hard. Add to that all the night sounds coming out around you, and the kids were clinging to my legs like they were the last two lifeboats on the Titanic. I tried to be extra cheerful to set a good example, but oh my god you guys the woods are so creepy at night! So I tried to act like there was nothing to be worried about, and concentrated on trying not to trip as I dragged two small children through the woods.

I was sort of in a hurry to get out of there, so of course Oliver had to do some business. Not only does that take a long time, but it also necessitated digging a hole to bury the evidence. Perhaps it was my raw brute strength, or perhaps it was the fact that my mind was preoccupied wondering if that was a pair of lightning bugs or possibly Sasquatch eye-shine, but whatever the reason I somehow managed to stomp down on the shovel hard enough to rip the handle out of my hands and lever it full speed into the side of my face.

The last thing I saw was my glasses hurtling off into the forest.

The pain was staggering and disorienting. It felt like I had just been kicked directly in the side of the head. When I finally recovered from that, I realized that I *could not see a thing*. Without my glasses my vision is practically non-existent to begin with, but when you combine that with the darkness of the forest at night, I was not-literally as blind as a bat (because a bat can see at night, and I didn’t have echolocation).

I knew which direction I had last seen my glasses traveling, but I was afraid to even walk in that direction lest I step on my glasses and crush them. I couldn’t even see my own feet. Trying (and failing) to keep the panic out of my voice I said, “Evie and Ollie, I need you to come over here and help me, right away.” Ollie immediately grabbed the shovel and said, “I’ll help you!” so I let him struggle with that so he would stay out of our way.

“Evie, I lost my glasses and I can’t see anything. I need you to find them for me. Is it okay for me to take a step?”

Luckily, Evie leapt to the challenge admirably. Luckily for us, the inside of my glasses are light blue, so that showed up against the gathering gloom a little better than the dark blue exterior. We quickly found my glasses, and I was able to finish digging the hole and get out of those cursed woods with only a large red mark on the side of my head to show for it.

And other than that, we all had a great time…

Who writes this stuff anyway?

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie recently won a book in a drawing at the library. The pickings were pretty unappealing (mostly character books, or I should say advertisements for television shows disguised as books), but I didn’t want to sway her opinion, so I let her pick whatever she wanted. It was her prize after all. She ended up picking a “ready to read level 1” book, and I was relatively happy with that. Very appropriate, and better than most of the choices.

She was pretty excited about it, and started looking at it as soon as we got back to the car. “Daddy, what does c-h-r-y-s-a-l-i-s spell?”

Seriously? You call that “ready to read level 1”?

The first name you encounter is in the book is Eigen. Eigen?? There’s also a Nia. In fact, there are so many kids introduced in the book, Evie couldn’t even keep all the characters straight. Isn’t repetition a better way to teach a kid to read? I understand wanting to display diversity in a kids’ book, but lets focus on teaching them about one thing at a time. I’ll pick a “ready to learn about diversity level 1” book if that’s what i want.

One of the kids is named Michael, which is at least a common name, but that isn’t good for a beginning to read book either; Michael is not a name you can sound out. I don’t think it’s a good time to explain that Michael is a special case where ch doesn’t make it’s usual “ch” sound. They could have at least gone with “Mike”.

Say, here’s an idea, how about limiting it to two characters with simple names? Lets say Dick and Jane. You can sound those out easy enough, and then the two of them could do all kinds of easy-to-read things, like “run”.

You’d think that writing a “ready to read level 1” book would be about the easiest thing in the world. Maybe it’s harder than it looks?

The Great Computer Upgrade Debacle

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Alright, you’ll have to excuse me for today’s post, but I need to complain.

For about 5 months or so, my computer has been complaining to me that it cannot install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or Internet Explorer 9. These are two huge updates that are very important, but in particular Sara has some major, major problems with Internet Explorer 8, so I would love to get the new version for her. However, my computer cannot install these updates, no matter what I do.

It’s embarrassing. I make my living on computers. I have a Master’s Degree in Software Engineering. I pull the strings and the computer dances. And yet, I just can’t do it.

Every month or so, I would roll up my sleeves and say, “That’s it, this is not going to beat me. I am going to do whatever it takes to solve this problem.” After a day or two, I go down in flames and give up again. Rise, wait a month, repeat.

I have googled, I have downloaded, I have installed for hours and hours at a time. There is a specific “System Readiness” program that I run every time I see the version change. We’re on something like version 22 now. It doesn’t fix my problem. From all my googling, I know that this is a common problem that many people have. Why can’t Microsoft fix my problem??

So the other day, I rolled up my sleeves and said, “That’s it, this is not going to beat me. I am going to do whatever it takes to solve this problem.” I got down and dirty. I was looking through Microsoft support posts, I was looking in obscure log files, I was installing, downloading, uninstalling, and rebooting for hours on end.

I seemed to make some progress. If I am understanding properly, the root of the problem came down to this:

Failed to parse package manifest: \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy3\Windows\Servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Client-LanguagePack-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~nl-NL~6.1.7600.16385.mum

Now, as you can clearly see, that means I didn’t have the Dutch language pack installed (obviously). Why would I need the Dutch language pack installed? Your guess is as good as mine. Nonetheless, I found some illicit tool to install the Dutch language pack and cleared that error. Lookin’ good, but no installation.

That’s okay. The instructions told me to expect that. Now I simply have to try to install, check the logs for errors, and clean those errors up one at a time. You simply scroll through for obscure log syntax, see which Knowledge Base article had a problem, then uninstall that update and restart. What could be simpler? The people in the forums had to do this once or twice, and eventually they were able to install.

I did it for four hours. FOUR HOURS, and I didn’t get to the bottom of it. Eventually I had to go to sleep, so I had to give up. Maybe I could devote another day or two to trying to solve the problem. But wait: while I was sleeping, Windows RE-INSTALLED all of the “important updates” I uninstalled trying to get this to work. As far as I can tell, all of my work was undone by my super-helpful Windows 7 installation. Thanks Microsoft!

If I can’t figure out this problem, who is going to be able to solve it? Do you think Average Joe Windows User is going to dig through logs and install Dutch language packs? Is he going to spend 20 hours trying to solve this?

No, he’s not.

But I am, because if I allow a computer to beat me, then my whole life is a lie. Besides, I think if I just solve this *one last problem*, it’s all going to go smoothly…