Nope, no particular excuse for the long dry spell. I continue to entertain hopes of revamping the ol' pages, but haven't quite mustered the time and mental alertness.

It's been mostly a fun year. We enjoyed a great weekend at the Clearwater Hudson River Revival Festival in Croton. Aside from having fantastic music, Clearwater is the most feel-good festival around. Anyone wants to attend this year, we have a sofa bed and an extra trundle. Our fave new music discovery from last year? Entrain, who will be coming back this summer. Fun band outta Boston. At the end of the summer we made the trek to Bethlehem, PA, for what seems like the biggest Celtic music festival ever, the Celtic Classic. There were six stages, a piping field and a stadium for highland game competitions. We stayed mostly close to the Grand Pavilion, which was probably the biggest honkin' tent we have ever been in in our lives. Cliff got to see one of his most favorite bands in the world, Old Blind Dogs. Twice. We saw a couple other bands, saw them later in encore performances, and had a generally good time. This is a clip of Hannah dancing to them here (Your playback experience may vary--I found that double-clicking the image began the video). Even Wales was represented--we met a fellow from Neath (now living in Ohio) and his wife, with a very nice collection of Welsh love spoons. And did I mention the festival is free! We're definitely going back next September.


It's Not That Easy, Being Green
In February of this year, we started looking into having solar panels installed on our roof. The good folks at The Solar Center (www.thesolarcenter.com--tell them we referred you and we get a bonus!) performed a site survey, and it turned out that we weren't eligible for tax incentives for solar electrical power because of a very large tree across the street, but that guidelines for solar hot water were slightly less stringent, which motivated us to order solar panels for our hot water system. Essentially, 2 1/2 seasons out of the year these panels accumulate enough heat energy to preheat our water before it enters our boiler, thus saving energy to bring it to full temperature, and in the summer the accumulated sunlight should heat our water almost entirely. A team of very nice guys came over and installed the panels, pipes and tank. Then the Town of Cortlandt (official motto, dating back to our Revolutionary War days: "No permit without a fight") requested an official plot survey of our property. The panels in question are four inches deep, installed flush with the roof, and the connecting pipes run under the eaves and down the side of the house. For this they need to know our property lines and offsets? This takes a week. Then the permit board asked for an engineer's report stating that our rafters would hold the weight. Each panel weighs less than any one of the workmen installing our roof last summer, so if it held their weight, I imagine it wasn't in any danger, but hey, bureaucrats have to be doing something. At this point, we were working our way into April. We waited. I received a letter--the permit was rejected due to "insufficient paperwork." Okay.... the permit office didn't bother telling the solar people the how and why, so our friend Jim at the Solar Center called to find out what exactly was their problem this time. Apparently the engineer wrote that our rafters met "international standards" for the task we were asking them to perform. The report did not say that the rafters met "New York standards" (which, coincidentally, are identical to international standards). So the engineer filed a new report. Which I believe the permit office promptly lost. They waited a few weeks, and after follow-up calls, claimed that they never received it. Now we're talking June, people. He re-submitted the report, and again they claimed to have never received it. Finally, they did get the third report, sent with UPS tracking,... and the system was installed in early August. It seems to be working great--we'll know more this summer, when we actually get to run it at full power and compare oil bills.


Another welcome development in the past year is that I've found a knitting group, the Northern Westchester Stitch n Bitch, which meets every Thursday evening at Panera Bread in Yorktown. It's a chance to get out among friends, and share the knitting knowledge. And this year the knitting enthusiasm was enough to drive me up to Rhinebeck, NY, for the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival, which you have to experience to believe. It's like the State Fair on steroids, with real-live sheep, goats, llamas, bunnies, and the occasional other animal, workshops, and row upon row of dealers selling fiber, yarn, spinning wheels and related paraphernalia, and finished knitted items. It's a little overwhelming--next year I'm going to adequately prepare myself for the journey before venturing forth. I've also tried my hand recently at hand-spinning yarn, which is another way to spend hundreds of dollars to create with manual labor something you can get at the store. Cliff laughs at me because my two big-ticket dream purchases at the moment are a spinning wheel and the new iMac 22-inch computer with a maxed-out hard drive and 4GB of RAM. Of course, I'm still really, really horrible at spinning (done presently on an inexpensive drop spindle, just like the pioneers used to use), so only time will tell if I become good enough to not die of frustration and want to continue spinning on a more committed level. I'm also continuing to freelance for the National Maritime Historical Society, editing materials and occasionally writing for them. As always, if you know someone who is looking for a commercial editor or writer, by all means, please mention my name ; ).

Hannah is doing great. She's reached the point where she no longer loves school; but she's doing fine, getting most-excellent report cards, and has several good friends. In her spare time she reads like a fiend (yeah--I wonder where she got that from?). She's been reading the Maybird series, the Lemony Snickets series, and a bunch of abridged classics for kids: The Invisible Man, The Swiss Family Robinson, Voyage to the Center of the Earth, etc. Her "treat" now on weekends is that she's allowed to read for an additional half-hour before going to bed. Hannah's other activities include Brownie scouts, an afterschool scrapbooking program, an informal dance class, and a Saturday-morning "Mad Science" class that teaches the kids scientific principles using fun props. She and Cliff still go to the coffee shop every Sunday for the music, as well as most Saturdays.

Cliff is, as always, dedicated, hard-working, and up to his ears in stuff to do. He continues to make our Saturday pizza each week, although he hasn't taught a master class in pizzology in a while. He's still working on the Encyclopedia, and articles, and many more projects. In June, he and a colleague will be taking a group of cadets on a study trip to Hundred Years War battlefields in France. Yeah, it's a hardship post, but somebody's got to do it.

Many of you have met Kosh, the smaller of our two cats. Last fall she escaped out the basement door. We scoured the neighborhood for days, passed out flyers... neighbors would call and say they'd seen her, but no luck. We even set out a small-animal trap, caught another neighborhood cat--twice--and the worlds' largest raccoon, but no Kosh. Three weeks later I'd nearly given up, when one night I heard meowing outside our back door (which is fairly enclosed). When I opened the door, the idiot ran away. We set out the trap next to the door the next night, and sure enough, it was our prodigal kitty. She was down to maybe 6 pounds, all skin and bones, but otherwise mostly okay. Now she looks exactly like she did before the great escape, so we're grateful to have her back. And she's let us know just how lucky we are to have her companionship once more.

Beauty and the Beast
Okay, most of you know we drank the TiVo Kool-Aid long ago. Once you go TiVo, life is just.... better. Which is one of the many reasons we've been hesitant to sign up for FiOS (for those outside the reach of Verizon's endless adverts: FiOS is fiber-optic networking, which supplies wonderfully fast broadband and also tv service, in competition with satellite and cable). We weren't at all sure whether FiOS would play nice with our TiVo, long a beloved member of the family. But we finally succumbed to the sales pitches of Verizon and got hooked up, now that they are offering discounted bundled services. The phone and internet are okay (and sometimes the internet is awesome--depends on what you're trying to do). But they hand you a Motorola DVR that is The Worst Product Ever Made. Really. I've heard people tell me anecdotes about a friend of a sister's neighbor, who had TiVo and then got the FiOS DVR and liked it better. No freakin' way is this true, and there's a reason you never talk to a real person who says they like it better. It never happened. Some amazing things this beast does:
--Let's say you recorded an episode of Stargate. You turn on the tv, start watching your recorded episode of Stargate. Then, 15 minutes later, it's 8:30 and your DVR is scheduled to record an episode of Spongebob for your child. The DVR not only begins to record Spongebob---it exits the episode of Stargate you were watching, and begins to play the episode of Spongebob, because apparently you weren't recording it to watch later, you must really, really want to see it live, as it's taping. So you have to go back to your "recorded episodes" menu, select Stargate, then select the right episode, and select "resume play" and then select "OK." You have to repeat this procedure every half hour, because you can't record just one Spongebob, you're recording four half-hour episodes. Are we having fun yet?
--The settings for recording and saving season passes is a one-size-fits-all for all of the shows you record. If you want to save a maximum of 5 Spongebobs, you're also stuck with a limit of 5 Stargates, and 5 Chucks, and 5 of everything else. Customizing recording settings? Forget it. SciFi channel has this nasty habit of offsetting their schedule so that their shows begin and end five minutes after the hour. TiVo allowed you to pad the recording time to end later. Not this monster.
--The button-response time on the remote is so slow that if you fast-forward through the commercials, you have to start hitting the "play" button in the middle of the 4th commercial and hope that after the 8th or 9th time you hit the "play" button it will eventually take the hint, stop fast-forwarding and actually return to playback mode. If it doesn't, you can fast-forward through the rest of the show, ending up somewhere in the end credits. The remote also doesn't appear to have a button that sends you directly to the beginning or end of a recording, so you have to either exit and re-start the recording (three more menu selections) or endlessly fast-reverse. Now I may be wrong about this--this remote has more buttons than a Victorian wedding dress, and I haven't deciphered more than half of them.

So we've hung on to our beloved TiVo, and suffer the indignity of the Beast only because we have to, making our poor baby coexist with it only until the eventual, inevitable switch to HD--when we can get an HD TiVo, which can get a card installed from FiOS and eliminate all other Verizon hardware whatsoever.

Oh, well, we all soldier on. I know some of you are only holding out for the pretty pictures, so you'll find those here, here and here.