Smitten Kitchen is my favorite food porn site. Luscious sounding recipes with scrumptious photography. I’ve actually tried a couple of the recipes, and they lived up their photos.
Now Deb Perelman, The Smitten One (or Smiting One) has a cookbook finished. Well, not out just yet, actually, but she’s completed it, and it comes out in October. I’ve preordered.
You should too. Thanks, Deb.
One again, someone makes testable predictions. I’ll try to remember to come back in a year and see how it goes.
The 15 Housing Markets That Will Get Crushed The Hardest By 2012
Florida gets 9 out of 15. Arizona and New Jersey get 2 each, California and Nevada 1 each. I’m surprised California doesn’t get harder than that.
Top Five: Phoenix, AZ; Ocean City, NJ; Miami, FL; Las Vegas, NV; and number one, Naples, FL, expected to suffer nearly a 25% drop in median home price.
Meanwhile, Gregory Sullivan (who also runs Sippican Cottage) over at Rightnetwork explains just how godawful the implications of a cratering housing market are.
The housing industry I love is near death, but the structures themselves didn’t have much to do with it, though everyone with hands like a geisha girl likes to blame the houses and the people that built them.
A very complex web of laws, regulations, committees, guidelines, taxation, trade agreements, snail-darter set-asides, ratios, bureaus, and just plain white-collar criminality – with a generous frosting of Barney Frankincense on top –has been placed on the back of the noble camel of American housing for decades. That staggering poor dromedary saw the last straw coming at it in the corner of Hank Paulson’s mouth, and died of shame. Let’s stop blaming the victim.
Besides, it’s your turn to be the victim. A house doesn’t need you as much as you need a house.
Hmm. Upon reflection, that’s dead wrong. A house does need you as much as you need it. And therein lies the reason why the end game of this housing bust is going to be unlike any other in my lifetime.
I’ve been through quite a few housing booms and busts. I’ve renovated houses so old they still showed visible damage from King Philip’s War, so I’ve been exposed to every housing bust since wigwams, one way or the other. The early nineties were pretty bad, as I recall. The late seventies/early eighties were Armageddon. But they all mostly had discrete causes and effects, and in fairly short order Metacomet or Jimmy Carter or whoever was mucking up the landscape got run out of town, and something like normalcy returned.
This time I’m not so sure.
The unemployment rate in the construction industry was a mindboggling 27 percent earlier this year, according to the Associated General Contractors of America. That doesn’t surprise me, because unemployment in skilled and unskilled construction trades alike is always Depression-grade after a boom. And those figures are more of a WAG (accountant-speak for: Wild Ass Guess) than in most industries. You can get better response rates surveying the Cosa Nostra than men that don’t like to use a Porta-Potty at the jobsite because it’s too fancy, and use the bushes instead. Not to mention the illegal alien sort of person who’s been doing the scut work. They’re famously reserved. Construction’s a very informal economy in many ways, with almost all small players. The rate of unemployment in the general population would look like paradise in construction right now.
…
The Commerce Department estimates that 11 percent of the residential housing market is currently unoccupied. Yikes. The Mortgage Banker’s Association estimates that 1.2 million households were “lost,” despite a rise in population of 3.4 million from 2005 through 2008. “Lost” is a euphemism for mom’s basement. Empty houses and once and future households? Looks like a match made in heaven, doesn’t it? Not so fast.Why won’t these numbers converge into one big, happy cheap housing fiesta? Regular people are waiting out the Great Recession, hoping to someday get a job, form a household, and then buy a house. They are being told that when they finally emerge, that all that empty inventory of houses will be waiting for them in fine condition at rock-bottom prices. No it won’t. Because a house needs occupants, and the contractors they hire to maintain them. Houses left alone by absentee banks are going to slowly disintegrate. Entropy doesn’t take years off while you try to scare up a down payment.
…You got bad information before, and you’re getting bad information now. Listen to me: Houses are inexpensive, but they’re still valuable. Buy one before they’re only one of those things again.
Gods yes, read the whole thing. It’s the dust bowl coming at us again, except this time it won’t just be some dirt-scrabble Okie farmers; it’ll be all of us, and it will hit the cities the worst. See, for example, Detroit, beneficiary of Democrat and Republican socialist and union largess for decades.
So, my sister wants new blinds hung in her bedroom. Going by the Big Orange Box instructions, I measure top and bottom width (to check parallelism), diagonals (to check squareness), and height in the middle.
The openings are neither parallel nor square, although they’re not out by much; I’ve seen much worse.
I set about trying to find the widest blind that will fit in each opening. I can’t find an on-line calculator, and when I try to figure out an algorithm myself (while trying to chip the rust off my Python skills), it turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Any given case is straightforward, using Pythagoras, but there seems to be no general solution. And that’s assuming that the top and bottom are parallel and level.
I mention this at the dinner table.
“Why not just measure the old blinds?”
Good question, Mom. Good question.
I’m still piddling about with writing a calculator, just as an exercise. And I’d like to find an online calculator.
Note: the math might be a bit easier if you measure width of the opening top and bottom, length of both sides, true plumb height at both sides, and both diagonals. But I think you can do it with the usual top and bottom width, overall height (assume level), and the diags, and given that those are the measurements most window blinds sites ask for, that would be best.
Inputs and results to the nearest eighth of an inch, please. If you round, round down — a blind that is too large by the height of the drywall texturing, a sixteenth of an inch or less, will not work. Piss off with your sissy millimeters.
A command line calculator is fine by me, but it must work under Windows as well as Unix.
Awhile back I posted a snap of this little guy:
Well, “little”. Actually he’s about 4 inches long.
I sent the pictures to Max Anton, aka the Mollusk Man, who has a great website about mollusks in the Houston area. He identifies this ferocious beast as a Euglandina rosea, the Rosy Wolfsnail:
This is indeed a Euglandina rosea, though it appears to be slightly elongated, thus resembling an E. singleyana. It is a native species and poses no threat to vegetation. Because it eats harmful pest snails, it should be treated carefully and not be harmed. If you wish, you can place one in a jar and watch it feed on pest snails. It’s a pretty creepy thing to see.
As you have already noticed, RWS’s are audacious creatures, quick to ignore handling procedures and external stimuli. Few other species possess so bold a nature, allowing this snail to be a most excellent species to display for educational purposes.
I turned him loose next to the garden fountain and have not seen him since, but I presume he’s still there, guarding the flora against his fellow mollusks.
Thanks, Max, for the confirmation.
A brilliant synergy between the weighted foundation and the light tensile structure, this project impressed us with its attenuation of structure and bright interior spaces. The courtyard and formal entry are also well thought-out and provide a clear means of way-finding. Grade A+
More here.
Sometimes, you work hard enough that even though the result is boring, you want people to see how hard you worked.
I’m trying to dress up the space in front of my front porch. Probably futile, because a) It’s in deep shade and b) It floods if the gutters overflow.
So what I have, essentially, are two strips of dirt right at the edge of the slab, under the eaves. All the nutrients have been leeched out, and the remaining clay has packed itself down to just short of sedimentary rock.
First thing to do, then was to dig out a nice deep trench. (Eight inch concrete block for scale; the light-colored band at the top of the slab shows the level of the dirt before I started digging.)
[More images below the fold.]
(more…)
From Sherman, M. and Walker, I., “Can Duct Tape Take the Heat?”, lbl-41434, Energy Performance of Buildings Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:
Popular culture abounds with uses for duct tape in duct tape calendars, 101 uses for duct tape, duct tape books, etc. Unfortunately, it appears that duct tape should not actually be used to seal ducts.
[original here]
[Reprinted as an article in Home Energy Magazine Online, July/August 1998.]
[Report LBNL 53547, on revised testing methods, with excellent pictures, showing that UL-181B-FX, regarding flexible ducts, is not a good predictor of duct tape performance when it comes to sealing ducts.]
*sigh*
I’m working on a number of sealing and caulking problems around my house. It’s all crap, it all depends critically on exacting, nit-picky, fanatically clean installation techniques that cannot be achieved in the field (i.e. in a filthy dusty hot sweaty attic), the instructions never seem to apply to my situation, and it’s all required by code, which basically says, “do it” without really saying how.
By the way, I laughed when I saw the picture in the above report of the duct sealed with clear packing tape.
It was one of their top performers.
So, what am I supposed to do with this $15 roll of UL 181B compliant foil tape?
The one sealing solution I’ve found that actually seems to work is roof shingling, and there’s a simple reason why: its performance does not depend on adhesives and sealants, but on the physical integrity of the shingles, and on the straightforward installation principle that the higher row overlaps the lower row. There is some tar involved, but that’s an adjunct.
What opened this whole can of worms was reworking my inadequate and unsafe water heater exhaust duct. The new vent, using the double-walled pipe known as B-vent, was improperly installed where it went through the roof. I have pictures, which I’ll eventually get around to posting.
When I re-worked it, I discovered that it does not adhere to the shingle principle. It must be caulked or taped to seal the roof joint. Appalling. It will fail, eventually, and likely before the shingles do.
There’s a critical component called the storm collar, which exposes an upward-facing joint. I cannot find good clear instructions on sealing the damn thing. Apparently, what you do is run a thick bead of caulk (I used GE’s 50G.01 Silicone II Gutter and Flashing sealant, because it says not to use it on surfaces above 400 degrees, where everything else is limited to much less than 200) around the bottom of the pipe, then push the collar into that ring, then smear an additional bead of sealant around the joint. This joint is going to see a lot of movement, the application method seems contrary to everything I’ve read about good caulk joints, and it’s going to fail.
The original vent was unsafe, not intended for use as a combustion exhaust, but at least it kept the rain out without sealant.
OK, I’m just going to say it: I hate most of the examples of Le Corbusier work I’ve seen.
The Villa Savoye is an excellent example. There’s good reason, I believe, why this style became popular for soulless office buildings, but not for homes. Indeed, I was astonished to learn that Villa Savoye was intended as a home; I can’t imagine trying to live in it. Raising children there? I shudder at the thought.
A few days ago I stumbled on this video setting views of Savoye to a lovely little piano piece. The music was sad, even a little angry, with a compelling stumbling rhythm. It seemed like something that might have come from the Wyndham Hill studio in its heyday.
Instead, it turned out to be “In the End” from Linkin Park, a band I tend not to like. I don’t even like this song with their usual instrumentation and rap-like lyrics.
This spare piano, though, is lovely and moving.
It’s been said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. This video comes very close to showing how narrow that assessment really is.
The music perfectly, and beautifully, expresses the feelings Le Corbusier’s joyless sterility arouses in me.
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