So much for retirement

Who knew when I took early retirement from The Indianapolis Star 18 years ago today that I'd be a regular on the front page of The Lebanon Reporter?

Owning the front page

Once again, I own the front page of today's Lebanon Reporter.

So much for being retired.

Actually, it feels good to be busy again and to see my name in print once more.

Maria is short-handed this week, so it's up to me to step up with stories and photos.

On another topic, Duke Energy, the entity that supplies Thorntown Utilities with electricity, put the word out a few days ago that they would cut our power for about two hours starting at midnight last night to make repairs to the grid.

I took them at their word and made sure my desktop computer was shut down in time for the blackout. And promptly at midnight, the power went off. I didn't note the time when I heard the air purifier turn back on, but checking the blinking clocks on the range and microwave this morning I deduced that the power was off for an hour and 41 minutes.

Now I get it

I've been puzzled for years by the term "cafe racer" when applied to a certain style of motorcycle.
It was the word "cafe" that had me confused. Why would someone want to race from or to a coffee shop.
Then I watched a documentary on the history of motorcycling in England and now it's clear.
In the 1950s, a new generation of British motorcyclists developed a culture around racing on the highways from one cafe (what we would call truck stop) to another. They weren't cafes as we Americans understand the term.
Aha! Now I get it.

Grandma Dietz and her chickens

This is my Grandma Emma Dietz with her chickens on her farm near Deer Creek, Ind. sometime around 1930.

The original image was a snapshot my mother had. I did a high-resolution scan and sized it proportionally for a 16x20-inch display and sent it off to canvaspeople.com. I had it done on a special offer and the cost was less than $40.

I've wanted a canvas blowup of this photo for years and it arrived on my front porch this morning. O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

I posted this photo on Facebook, along with an offer of the original scan for free to any of Charles and Emma Dietz's Groninger descendants, including three cousins and their families. I was stunned when nobody took me up on the offer. I guess they don't care as much about their heritage as I do. Or else they're not tech savvy enough to understand what I offered them. Whatever.

Shut down barking in less than a day

Our dogs, especially Dora, bark incessantly when they're in the fenced portion of our back yard.

The barking has been a source of embarrassment because we know it annoys the neighbors. Now that the neighbors on the north side of our house have their home on the market, it's even more important not to have noisy dogs driving down property values.

But the barking has ceased, thanks to this ultrasonic anti-barking device that I got from Ebay for a mere $30.99. It runs on a 9 volt battery and has three intensity settings. I hung it on the back fence around noon yesterday and have heard only a few barks since. It has a microphone that listens for barks and responds with a high frequency tone that only dogs can hear. And it works.

I am amazed and relieved and wish I had bought this thing a long long time ago.

Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FPF511L/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Big and on canvas

I had the pleasure of giving Maria's parents a 16x20 wrapped canvas print of her mother's Italian-American family that I ordered online from Canvas People.

The original image was a snapshot that had blemishes and creases and not enough material around the edges to make a successful 16x20 warp. I initially told them it couldn't be done. Then I got the idea of cloning portions of the edges to extend them in all four directions so that the important parts of the image would remain front and center.

The Post Office delivered it to my house today and my in-laws were over the moon when they saw it. Now Maria wants one.

Breakfast at Denny's

I had breakfast at Denny's in Lebanon this morning - the first breakfast I've had there since Saturday, Oct. 27, 2007.

That was the day a UPS truck picked up the last of our moving pods and Pete and Ruthie and I drove to our new home in Arkansas.

I went to Denny's with some reluctance because I remember it as a place with poor service and lots of cigarette smoke. I decided to roll the dice again this morning because I have a hearty dislike for the other two Lebanon breakfast options - Flap Jack's and Bob Evans.

I ordered off of the senior citizens menu and was pleasantly surprised with the service, presentation and flavor of the food. I might even be persuaded to go back someday. Maybe.

This has been a miserable, cold and rainy three days. We're had nearly 4 inches of rain since Thursday evening and it has continued into this afternoon.

I can't seem to get motivated to do anything, although there is still plenty to do in the way of shifting boxes and preparing to move our bed upstairs and out of the dining room.

Correcting the date of construction

Our next-door-neighbors to the north have put their house on the market.

We've had the pleasure of living next to them and their five kids for a year now and will be very sad to see them leave. They have been excellent neighbors and have tolerated our barking dogs better than most people would have.

I looked up their online listing this afternoon and noticed that the Realtor asserts that their house was built in 1925. That's an error.

This photo was shot shortly after 1903 and shows our house in the foreground and their house next door to the north. It's the same house, although the upstairs balcony/porch is no longer there. If you look closely, you can see the rails and electric wires of the Indianapolis & Northwestern Traction Co. (interurban) like just to the south of our house, which dates the photo considerably earlier than 1925.

Our understanding is that these two houses and the next one north were built by the man who owned the local sawmill for his three sons and their families around 1903. He used premium wood throughout the three houses. Ours still has the original quarter-sawn oak flooring in the living room and oak and hemlock throughout the house.

Same plane, same reporter

I had the pleasure last Thursday of flying in a 90-year-old Ford Tri-Motor that inaugurated transcontinental air service back in 1929.

Interestingly, it was the very same plane I flew in back in 1974 when TWA was commemorating the 45th anniversary of that aviation milestone.

Both rides were on media flights - the first when I was a reporter for The Indianapolis News and the one last week as a "special correspondent" for The Lebanon Reporter.

I sat on the starboard side of the plane both times, watching the huge right radial engine throbbing along.

I think I wrote a better story this time than I did in '74.

It was named City of Reno back in 1974.

Nice shirt

My soon-to-be son-in-law Edgar is cleaning out his closets and other areas of his house to make room for Morgan. Maria went down to help over the weekend and came back with a bunch of beautiful high-end shirts and pullovers, including this Chaps shirt by Ralph Lauren, all fresh from the dry cleaner and on hangers.

Thanks, Edgar!

Pressure washing

My original plan today was to pull both bikes out of the shed so I could get the mower out. The grass inside the fence, i.e. dog country, needs a mow.

But the K1200GT's battery was too low to start. Happily, the K75S fired right up, so I backed it out of the shed, realizing this made it possible to access the pressure washer that was in the back corner of the shed.

Hayden and the neighbor kids marked up the sidewalk yesterday, so I figured it should be easy work to blast it clean.

I was gratified when the little Honda pressure washer engine fired on the third pull - the first time it's run in more than a year.

After cleaning the walks and also some chalk artistry on the front porch, I dragged the stuff to the back and attacked what is left of the deck. The areas furthest from the house have suffered the most from 10 years of weathering and hot sun. Several boards need to be replaced, but I wanted to see how much pressure washing would improve the overall appearance. Turns out, it makes a rather substantial improvement.

I flirted with heat stroke and dehydration before I came in and got rested and hydrated. Later, when about half of the east-facing deck was in shade, I hit it again. Again, gratifying results.

Having my own pressure washer is kinda cool. Maybe when we get the rotten boards replaced, I can put some kind of weather seal on the deck and coax a few more years out of it.

Pulling staples, pulling the cork

When we returned to our 1903 vintage house a year ago, we were horrified by what the renters had done to it.

I won't recite the whole list, but one of the more egregious insults to the house was their letting their dogs use the upstairs carpet for a toilet. Days after we moved back in, we ripped out the reeking carpet and dragged it out to the curb for the trash collection. Shortly after, Maria, her daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law realized their legs were covered with flea bites from working with the carpet. So we called in an exterminator to deal with the fleas.

The master bedroom was still unusable because of hundreds, maybe thousands, of staples left from the carpet. We left them there while we did other projects, but the time has come to free the hardwood floor from its burden of staples. Once that is done, we can move our bed upstairs, which will free up the dining room for dining room stuff and open up the living room. This will make it possible to consolidate our stored furniture and belongings into one storage unit instead of the two we've been renting for a year.

The stapes, then, are the cork in the bottle of progress.

I'm waiting for a call-back about a newspaper story I'm working on this afternoon, so I busied myself with pulling staples. I didn't count them but they represented a line across the center of the bedroom, length-wise. There is still much pulling to do, but it feels good to make a dent in the problem.

I gave up trying to work on all fours because it amounted to doing a prolonged one-arm push-up. So I got out my automotive creeper stool, used it to support my upper body and used a small flashlight to illuminate the staples from the side while I pried and yanked them out with a small screwdriver and needle-nose pliers. I'm surprised at how fast I can creep across the floor.

As I work, I can tell where the renters' dogs peed because the staples are rusted in those spots. Ack!

New gas bill

I remembered how costly it was to heat this 1903 Victorian barn of a house when we lived here 11 years ago, so I made a point of putting us on the gas company's budget plan.
That way we could spread the cost out over a whole year and avoid the ruinous winter gas bills.
Based on the previous year's consumption, the gas company fixed our monthly bill at $190.
So, imagine my surprise yesterday when I opened the gas bill and discovered it was for $85.10!
I guessed this would be a one-time adjustment and next month's bill would be maybe a tick lower.
No, this is the rate for the next 12 months!
Holy crap! That amounts to an annual savings of $1,270.80.
I can only suppose that replacing all of the windows last November is what made the difference. They're going to pay for themselves faster than I ever imagined.

Hard to put on, maybe hard to get off

I'm testing a pair of Adidas Men's Adizero Ubersonic 2 Tennis Shoes this week for the Amazon Vine Program.

When I first tried to put them on yesterday morning, I was wearing heavy socks and I finally gave up after several minutes of fruitless struggle. The reason is the ridiculously small opening and the absence of a heel loop to facilitate entry. If you look carefully at this photo with the Adidas on the left and my comfortable old Nike on the right, the difference is readily apparent. The absence of a tongue also hampers entry.

After reading what other reviewers wrote, I only found a couple who complained about this so I decided to try again this morning, with lighter weight socks. I finally succeeded with the aid of a clothes brush/long shoe horn I inherited from my dad. Once on, they feel fine on my size 11 feet.

Now to put a few miles on them.

Oooops

I wonder how many other members of the BMW Riders Association noticed the stray type fragment on the cover of the July-August issue of the club magazine, OTL.

The way it was in 1968

This is how newspaper writing was done 50 years ago.

This is me in The Indianapolis News City Room, hammering out a story on my Royal typewriter while smoking a cheap cigar. Notice the Indianapolis phone book. When was the last time you used a phone book?

More work for the mechanics

This is one of the rare occasions when I'm on a motorcycle without a helmet.

In this case, I'm just putting my K1200GT into the storage shed and passed in front of the all-seeing eye of the trailcam.

I've spent every morning this week dealing with automobile maintenance. On Monday, I took the Subaru in to see why it was making a disturbing noise that began in April when I had a right front brake caliper replaced. It had gotten so bad that I forbade Maria to drive it to work and it sat parked for about three months before I had time to get it looked at. Turns out it was a defective caliper and was replaced at no charge under warranty.

Tuesday morning's work was an oil change and lube on the Lexus.

When Maria went to drive the Subaru to work this morning, the battery was dead. Probably a result of sitting for three months, even though it did start for me on Monday morning. We jump started it from the Lexus and I drove it to the auto repair place and left it for battery testing and possible replacement, along with an oil change and lube.

Keeping our vehicles in good operating condition is turning out to be a fulltime job.

Family portrait

I celebrated my 73rd birthday today with a nostalgic trip to Delphi, Ind., my hometown.

Naturally, I had to drop in on my parents.

Dodged a bullet on mower repair

Maria and I loaded the John Deere LA125 lawn tractor onto our trailer and hauled it down to the Renolds Equipment John Deere dealership in Lebanon on Saturday morning, fearing the worst.

They called Tuesday and reported the starting problem was just a horribly corroded battery cable. I asked them to replace it and give me an oil change and lube.

I drove down this afternoon and collected my mower for a paltry $164 and change - something just short of a miracle! And I saved more than $120 by using my own trailer instead of their pick up and delivery service.

That trailer turned out to be a smart purchase.

Jack thought he had been insulted

I'm evaluating this dog bowl for the Amazon Vine Program. It's designed to make a dog eat more slowly and the little projections are supposed to clean the dog's teeth.

Jack is the oldest and probably the most in need of a teeth cleaning, so I'm trying it out on him.

His first impression? He looked at us with a mix of disbelief and insult. How could we play such a mean-spirited trick on him?

I fully expected him to overturn the bowl to get at the contents, but after a time he started nibbling away at his IAMS kibble and after a few hours of off-and-on eating, had consumed it all.

That was yesterday. He seemed reconciled to the bowl this morning and immediately set to eating when I brought him and Dora in for breakfast.

I'll keep an eye on his teeth to see if there is any improvement, since he's overdue for a cleaning.