Tag: life

  • This New Old House Part 22: Porch Upgrade (That Happened to Coincide with Lockdown)

    Our kit house came with about a dozen front-entry options. Most of them weren’t really porches at all — they were flush to the house, or very slightly recessed with some nice trim work. A couple had actual covered entryways, but those weren’t the style we chose. So we ended up with a flush entry…

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  • Aphantasia, Dyslexia, and ADHD: How I Made a Career in a Visual Industry Without a Functioning Mind’s Eye

    There I was on 87, Ubering one of my kids to a travel baseball tournament in New Jersey — kid in the back with headphones on, or asleep, which amounts to the same thing. Half-listening to NPR because it’s either that or the silence where my own thoughts live. And a Radiolab episode came on…

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  • Why Have I Started to Smell Like A Frito Corn Chip?

    I’ve been noticing something for the past few weeks. I smell like Fritos. Not after eating Fritos. Not near Fritos. Just as a default condition of existing. I’ll be sitting somewhere, not doing anything corn-adjacent, and I’ll get this whiff and do that thing where you look around the room trying to find the source…

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  • Updated My Travel Fit, Watch Out Portugal

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    If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a list of things to replace. Well, I’ve replaced most of them. This is the follow-up I promised — what…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 9: Death, Taxes, and Everything In Between

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    Part 9 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about all the other fees: the ones below the line on the bills I have already written about, the surcharges and convenience charges and service fees and resort fees and processing fees that have become…

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  • This New Old House Part 15: Flooring – Wide Plank Heart Pine Dreams vs. Reality

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    After painting came flooring. And I had a very specific vision: wide plank flooring with exposed face nails, just like colonial homes from the 1700s. Old growth wood with character. Reclaimed if possible. The authentic historical look. The Connor Homes kit included flooring as an option. It was beautiful — I think it was reclaimed…

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  • How I ignored a broken well tank for two years

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    January 9, 2026 Looking back, I think the well tank bladder had been broken since at least summer 2024. It might have been failing for a year or two before that. What I was noticing: the water pressure would drop a little, then go back up when the pump kicked in. I thought the pressure…

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  • When GPS Dog Fencing is Not Accurate: A $600 Lesson in Canine Trauma

    I bought a PetSafe Guardian GPS fence for our bernedoodle Hobbes in September 2023. Six hundred dollars. I used it for two or three months before I quit. I should have quit sooner. We live on a rural property the wrong size for an underground wireless fence — too big to bury affordably, too small…

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  • This New Old House Part 9: Plumbing – PEX, Paying Twice, and Poisoned Septic Tanks

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    Winter 2009-2010 After electrical was complete, it was time for plumbing and HVAC. My friend, who had been coordinating most of the work, had apprenticed to learn plumbing and HVAC. But because of all the equations for sizing units and the complexity of the systems, he suggested we hire the professional he’d worked with. Since…

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  • 450′ Gravel Driveway: A 15-Year Journey of Expensive Mistakes

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    Plus an Ariens Sno-Thro 926053 Hydro Pro 28 Review The last few days of snow and clearing the driveway stirred up this memory… We built our new old house back in 2009 and, in what seemed like a great idea at the time, set it at the back edge of a small hay field. This…

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  • This New Old House Part 3: Land, Surveys, and Driveway Drama

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    Spring-Summer 2008 With our house design settled, we needed the actual, you know, land to put it on. The Land Hunt Finding land was actually easier than finding an existing house, probably because land doesn’t have a leaky roof that sellers are trying to hide with strategic bucket placement. We found a property that checked…

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  • In Defense of Smart People (And Against Shopping Cart Abandoners)

    I’m not the smartest person. Not even close. But I’m also not the dumbest person. I think. Maybe. The jury’s still out, and frankly, I’m not smart enough to serve on that jury. I do, however, really like smart people. I like people who understand quantum physics even though there’s absolutely no way they could…

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  • What’s Old is New: My Dad Was Basically Elon Musk (Just 40 Years Too Early)

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    My dad died in 2007, which means he never saw the Tesla in my driveway, the heat pump in the basement, or the solar panels on half the houses on my road. Which is a shame, because everything he did in the 1970s that we found weird at the time has, in the intervening fifty…

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