kevin_standlee | Entries tagged with fernley house

It's a good thing that I'm working from home today (and the rest of this week) because The Dreaded Lurgi continues to fill my sinuses and lungs with green goo, and I would not have fancied being in the office in this state. Lisa is worse off than me and is spending a lot of time in bed.

However, we were able to pull ourselves together sufficiently to welcome

kshandra and

gridlore, just off the Playa from Burning Man, who arrived in a cloud of dust this afternoon. We gave them the tour of Fernley House and offered such hospitality as we could and traded our respective stories of the Burn and the Worldcon before sending them on their way back to civilization.

I even managed to get it together enough after lunch to go down to the post office and claim the bin of backlogged mail, some of which wasn't advertising circulars. On the way, I rolled a propane bottle on the hand truck and had it refilled at Hanneman Service. I asked them how the post-Burning Man Exodus was going. They told me that the volume is now so high that AAA contracts with a separate company just to handle that period of time around Gerlach, which normally is part of Fernley's service district. Even so, while they were filling the propane bottle, they got two calls from people needing tows from the Gerlach area, which they had to refer to the other AAA service.

I think I'll try and stick to working only eight hour days this week. It would be nice and restful.

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

Day Jobbe was only running at ordinary speed today, so, having started work at 7 AM, I expected that I could quit by 4 PM. Around 3:30, I went out to the garage, where Lisa was working on shelving in anticipation of us taking another shelf and more boxes to the locker. As I rounded the corner, a wasp flew at me and stung me on the chin!

Yeow! It wasn't a very deep sting, and the wasp flew away again, but it's the first time I've been stung in nearly twenty years. Lisa and I went inside immediately, where she applied a water-and-baking-soda patch after confirming that there was no stinger in the wound (they only good thing about a wasp sting as opposed to a bee). After a little while, I put an ice pack on it to keep the swelling down. It's not fun, but it could have been worse.

I finished up with Day Jobbe and gingerly made my way back to the garage. Yep, there was a wasp nest hanging from above the garage door. Wasp killer was now on the shopping list, but first, it was over to the locker for a brief round of logistics. I say brief because in 35°C heat, you really don't want to work that long if you can avoid it.

( More boxes, more shelves )

After the short, hot work in the locker, we went to Lowes, but we didn't like the look of what they had for wasp killer, and on the spur of the moment we decided to drive to Fallon to go to Big R. The fact that the AC works in my van but we still don't have it in Fernley House was a major determinant in this decision.

At Big R we bought wasp spray, some new gloves, and another box fan. We also learned that Big R has apparently finally been granted an occupancy permit for the Fernley store, and it must be pretty serious, as one of the Fallon staff who will be working at Fernley is looking to sell her home in Fallon and move to Fernley.

On the drive home, we agreed that we were both worn out, and stopped for pizza for dinner. While waiting, we chatted with a couple who were on a circular drive around the USA, having started from Saint Louis and gone to Southern California, then north through the Central Valley, over Sonora Pass, through Virginia City, and next toward Idaho. We wished them well and headed home with our pizza in hand.

After dinner, it was late into dusk, which the wasp spray said was the better time to spray as the wasps are less active. I carefully stood away and directed the spray at the nest, thoroughly soaking it and then quickly distancing myself from the nest in case I missed anything. I wasn't immediately set upon by an angry swarm of wasps, so maybe that did the trick. We'll see tomorrow.

Current Mood: pained
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

By dint of going to the office at 5:30 AM (and already having logged >40 hours by COB Thursday), I was able to leave a little after 11 this morning. Lisa was packed and ready to go when I got back to the hotel, and we left Mountain View at about Noon. It shows what a difference a couple of hours can make on a Friday afternoon that we had barely no slowdowns aside from a few miles of slow traffic around the top of Sacramento (where it was just getting to 3 PM when we reached the HOV lanes), and the rest of the drive home went amazingly quickly. Including stopping at Colfax so I could catch up on work e-mail that had followed me, and getting groceries in Reno so we wouldn't have to go back in this coming weekend, we still arrived home in Fernley before 8 PM.

The bad news is that, despite reassurances from AT&T that our DSL had been re-established, it was not working. Resetting the modem did nothing. Besides, when you pick up the receiver on an unfiltered phone line, you don't here the DSL static. Unfortunately, since the DSL people apparently only work 7 AM - 5 PM Central Time Weekdays, there is nothing we can do until Monday, and even then I suspect the best we can hope for is them sending someone to look into the problem maybe on Tuesday and more likely later. This is not good. However, I do have unlimited bandwidth on my smartphone, can bridge it to my computer for internet connectivity, and get surprisingly good data-transfer speed (enough to stream audio from Giants baseball games), so I should be able to manage more or less until we get the DSL restored. But it may take some doing to restore our faith in AT&T, which until now has given us very good service other than the cock-ups with U-Verse.

Unfortunately, Lisa doesn't have a connection (the smartphone only easily bridges to my work machine, not to the router and our other computers), and is very much missing being able to access ActiveWorlds, where she actively participates.

We are also grateful that the weather has cooled enough that we can sleep in the house again. However, the forecast is for warmer weather ahead, and if necessary we can again retreat to the "lifeboat" (the travel trailer) where we have air conditioning.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

I'm glad I got pictures of our rosebushes a week ago before my last trip home.

( Bushes in Bloom )

Because when I was home for my flying visit this past weekend I observed that the temperatures above 40°C had caused the roses to shrivel up in the heat.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Mountain View, California

It's a sign of how much working from home agrees with me that I slept in only an hour this morning, waking up before Amtrak's #5's normal pass of Fernley at 7:45. (It was two hours late this morning; I was there waving at it as it passed.) There was no reason to wake Lisa. I dealt with morning business over coffee and generally relaxed. After Amtrak's passage, I decided to walk down to the taco stand on Main Street and get one of their breakfast burritos. As I was walking back, I saw Lisa standing on the front porch. She had woke up while I was away, had noticed that one of our local rabbits was nibbling on some greenery right outside our front gate, and went to get the camera to take a picture. The rabbit had moved on by the time she came back, but she took a picture of me coming home instead.

( Photos behind cut )

Both Lisa and I are anxious to get moving to Oregon. Today we are running errands for things we need for the trip. Meanwhile, we've been making a list of things we'll purchase while we have an opportunity to stock up from stores that aren't in Nevada or the Bay Area and from the land of no sales tax.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

This was our second Christmas at Fernley House, and Lisa worked very hard today preparing the goose that we bought a few days ago. She decided to treat it about the same way she did the duck she cooked for Thanksgiving, only bigger and thus cooking longer. But before food, there were presents!

( Kuma Bear asks 'Where's mine?' )

With Christmas presents opened in the cold family room, we removed to the living room where the fireplace was making things quite comfortable. Lisa went to the trailer and worked on the Christmas feast, and I dealt with catching up on some things on the computer that I'd let slide through the long holiday weekend.

( Bring on the Roast Beast! )

Although stuffing ourselves with a lovely Christmas dinner would be a good excuse to fall asleep forthwith, we bundled ourselves up and went for a walk. As we left the house, a light snow began to fall, but didn't stick. We went clear down to the Fernley Nugget, where Lisa apparently couldn't lose, walking away from three different slot machines with more money than when she started, albeit about $5 ahead on $20 buy-in.

When we returned home, my blood sugar tested at 89, so I had plenty of "room" to have pumpkin pie and eggnog. Eggnog is typically so sugary that I generally only have one container of it a year, and thus we splurge on the really good stuff: premium nog from Strauss Family Creamery. I try not to think of the expense and remind myself that if it were cheaper, I'd be tempted to buy it more often, which would be a bad thing.

Lisa had been up since the wee hours of the morning and turned in relatively early, but I wanted to get these photos posted. While I was working on that, I looked outside and saw that the light snow had turned to relatively heavy snow. Unfortunately, the broom for keeping the walk cleared was in the trailer. I rushed down there and had to work extra hard to clear the walk since everywhere I stepped had hard-packed the snow.

Unlike the light dusting of snow we've been getting every day or two the past few days, this looks like a pretty serious snowfall by local standards. There's about 5-6 cm accumulated so far, and it's still snowing. I know that's nothing to people who live in serious snow country, including places like Norden in the Sierra Nevada, but Fernley is so dry that we don't expect that much snow. We can deal with it, but keeping the walk cleared is a chore. But hey, after all that pie and eggnog, I need the exercise.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

Lisa let me know this evening that the replacement for the broken door for the fireplace arrived yesterday. Unlike the first door, this one fit. (The first door shipped to us had the right part number on the packing list but was actually a door from a different model from the same manufacturer. The manufacturer sent us the correct door at no additional charge and is supposed to send us a UPS call tag for the return of the wrong door.) Lisa installed the replacement door and got a fire going in the fireplace for the first time this season. She's much happier now and much more certain I will be able to work from home over Christmas without freezing my fingers, Bob Crachit-like, in the living room-office. The only challenge facing us is that while the wood box (the one she painted this past summer) is full of 3/4 cord of wood, that's all we have, and it will be at least a month before we can afford to buy more, as firewood costs about $275/cord delivered.

But in any event, replacing the fireplace door (~$250) was much less expensive than buying a whole new fireplace insert would have been.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: San Jose, California

This is Lisa and my (and

travelswithkuma's) first Thanksgiving at Fernley House. This year my family didn't get together in Yuba City, although my mother did call and chat with me for a while this morning, so Lisa and I stayed home for the holiday. The oven in the trailer is too small for most turkeys, so we thought we'd try something different and got a duck from Whole Foods Market in Reno when she collected me last Sunday. Lisa worked very hard today cooking the duck, making stuffing, rice, corn, and biscuits. We could skip the other traditional fixings (neither of us like cranberries). She also cooked two pumpkin pies, one in each oven (there's one inside Fernley House in the not-fully-functional kitchen), although one of those didn't go that well because a misreading of the settings on the house oven. (Fortunately, the weather isn't as cold as it might have been, so venting the smoke wasn't too much of a hardship.)

We also were fortunate that the local grocery store was open today because when it came time to start applying the marinade Lisa wanted to do, she couldn't find any of the several jars of honey that she was sure we had. Looking meaningfully at Kuma Bear (who looked quite innocent), we popped over to Scolari's and supported local farmers by buying a jar of alfalfa honey made in Lovelock, Nevada.

Making something of an occasion of things, we ate in the living room (rather than our normal dining table in the trailer). Here's what things looked like just before digging in.

( Kuma Bear says, 'Hurry up and take the picture so we can eats!' )

We thoroughly enjoyed dinner. The duck turns out to have been just the right size for us, so we won't be having to work our way through days of turkey leftovers. We went for a long walk after dinner to the Fernley Nugget casino (about 4 km round trip), where Lisa sat down to play a slot machine, but not for long, because she hit a jackpot on the third or fourth pull and walked away $4 ahead before we headed home. My blood sugar level when we got back wasn't as low as I would have liked, but low enough that I think I can handle a slice of pumpkin pie.

Lisa says this is the best Thanksgiving she can ever remember. Lisa says she was very happy to be so domestic today.

Current Mood: full
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

Lisa has been filling the rooms in Fernley House with Billy bookcases; some that came up from the apartment in Fremont, and others that I bought new. After work this evening, I went up to IKEA in East Palo Alto to buy additional shelf material: additional shelves and five height-extension units, plus some additional hardware for connecting the cases to the walls. There was no problem getting what I needed. I just wish we'd bought them during the Tour of Oregon, because we would have saved $12 in tax, and it's not like the shelves are even going to be used in California. But it's hard to think of everything. It's just mildly annoying since we drove right past the Portland IKEA and probably could have managed to fit the accessories into the van.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: San Mateo, California