Busy, Busy Weekends are Tiring

It's difficult to focus on any one thing when there are too many things on the schedule. Even if those things aren't supposed to happen right away. This week was particularly difficult because Saturday was overbooked. As in, quadruple-booked.

Most people would just take these things as they come, deal with them as they come up -- but I prefer to worry about them in advance so that I can be a complete nervous wreck by the time the actual day of the event(s) occurs. Stressing about it. Stewing about it. Wondering if it wouldn't be better for the world to come to an end so I wouldn't have to deal with it.

Friday was supposed to be the beginning of the Men's Retreat, and while I hadn't paid any money or signed my name to any piece of paper, it was written as an "event" on the family calendar, and it was in the back of my mind as something in which I would be participating.

But there was also another "event" on the calendar for Friday, a musical dinner theater at Bayli's school, which was going to require that someone provide transportation for James to get there. And it sounded very interesting, especially for those of us who spent a lot of time in high school performing in the musical arts. And, gee, it has really been a long time since Cheryl and I were able to go out and enjoy something fun like that. It would be a nice counterpoint to all this "being sick" stuff we've been going through.

So -- forgive me! -- we decided to accompany The Boy to the dinner theater, and had a wonderful time. It went on for three hours or so, the performances were fantastic, the food was very good, and it was nice to just hang out with Cheryl (and Bayli's dad) for awhile.

Saturday was supposed to be the second day of the Men's Retreat ... but it was also supposed to be my Chinese class. And I'd received an "emergency" call from the lady down at the Public Museum to let me know that they needed Engineering Merit Badge counselors for a big Scout event they were having, and as one of the few counselors for that badge in the area, I was her "last hope"!

So -- forgive me! -- I went downtown to help out with the Scouts and had a wonderful time. It was only a few hours, but I met a wonderful bunch of kids, some just starting out in Scouts and others who had been in for quite some time; we got to chat about the joy of taking things apart, the wonder of how things work, and the amazing opportunities to learn more about engineering in a place like the Museum. I was truly pumped up and excited by the time I left.

Then it was time to head home to help kids out with projects, push them to get their homework done, help a bit around the house with dinner, drive up north across slick, snowy roads to retrieve James (who had been playing at Bayli's house with some friends), discuss our Bible reading schedule with the family, and do a little work on tomorrow's Sunday School lesson.

I'm looking forward to having a weekend off with nothing to do. If that ever happens.

An Ill Wind Doth Blow on Feb'uary's Brow

It's Wednesday, and Cheryl was still coughing all night. I'm not sure that she got any sleep at all. So, today, it's to the doctor for her!

It surprised and perplexed me, this recent illness. The rest of us seem to have come down with the same infection, but Cheryl bore most of the ill effects, and for the longest time. My episode is mostly complete, the worst day having been Monday when the entire day was spent in bed. James never seemed to suffer anything worse than a nagging cough. The girls, bless their hearts, ran slight fevers and coughed now and again, but nothing approaching their mother's symptoms. The jury is still out on Adam, who will not be going to school today owing to his fever and cough.

But I worry for my lady, who has managed to keep up on her feet most of the weekend and the week even though it sounded as though her lungs were taking a beating. Last night she decided that it wasn't getting any better, although her energy had returned. So today she is heading to the doctor to find out if there's anything medical science (?) can do for her.

Meanwhile, the three children who are feeling up to it, are off to school. Adam is staying home one more day, having coughed quite a bit last night.

February has always been the worst month for sickness in this family.

Snow & NyQuil

Cheryl has been ill for a few days, coughing and feverish. Today is the first day that the fever has abated, and she is feeling more energetic than in some time.

James started coughing a few days ago.

And today, it was my turn. Cheryl and James stayed home while I took the rest of the family in to church, but in a couple hours, I was ready to throw in the towel and head home. Coughing. Achy. Tired.

Today is also the day that another big snowstorm rolled in, so this afternoon, we've been watching out the windows as the freshly-cleared ground was once again covered by the white stuff. Cheryl and I watched from our bedroom window, as we were both trying to catch up on some sleep. The snow was pretty. The coughing was not.

The next couple of days will be interesting since the kids have their mid-winter break and will be hanging around the house while we're trying to get rid of this latest virus. James might spend the entire time in bed, resting - and texting messages on Facebook. The rest of them might come down with the virus as well. I'm hoping Cheryl will be past it by Tuesday at the latest. And maybe I'll get over it by Friday.

Power Restored, Part 1

The new 9-cell battery came today, and it was actually pre-charged 42% of full capacity so I was able to drop it in place and start using it right away. For about a minute. Just long enough to boot up the system and check the battery status. Then I attached the charger I'd "borrowed" from another laptop to see how long it would take to charge it all the way up.

It only took about an hour. Sweet!

So then it was time to go off-line (off the power line, anyway) to see how long the battery would last on full charge. The battery status software estimated two hours and forty minutes, but I didn't want to let it discharge all the way down to nothing, so I re-attached the charger when it was about twenty minutes shy of full power-down.

Can't wait til the real adapter gets here. It was shipped in from a different company, which is why it didn't come with the battery; but still, it's expected in the next day or two.

The Power Vacuum

When my Dell 1525 laptop was first purchased, it came with a 6-cell "regular" battery and a 9-cell "extended" battery. The assumption was that the regular battery would provide somewhere between 2 to 3 hours of portability, and the extended would provide 3 to 4 hours, giving a sum total of nearly 7 hours of life.

That worked well for about two years, and then the regular battery began to lose its potency; the available time dropped to an hour, then thirty minutes. As for the extended battery, it began to fade as well, but its demise was a bit more rapid, dropping from 3 hours down to 30 minutes within a very short span of weeks.

About a year ago, I looked into purchasing a new set of batteries from Dell, but the price was a bit steep for my blood: $150 or thereabouts. So the purchase was put off, and I made do with the batteries as they were, spending most of my time tethered to the wall via the AC adapter instead of experiencing the freedom of portability.

Then this weekend, after allowing my daughters to borrow the laptop, the AC adapter died.

{Naturally, I'm not blaming them. These things happen.}

It took me a while to comprehend that it wasn't working. The computer screen indicated that it was running on battery when it was obviously plugged into the wall. I checked the cords to make sure they were plugged in tightly. {They were.} The little green LED on the power supply kinda looked dim; it was catching reflections off the overhead lights so that it was difficult to tell one way or the other. I checked Cheryl's AC adapter, and that monkey was nice and bright, so that was a big clue that something was really amiss.

So out came the ol' voltmeter, and it proved once and for all that there weren't nuthin comin outta that adapter. Zero. Zilch. Nada. One hundred and twenty volts of pure-D electricity going in, and nuthin comin out.

Now it occurred to me to wonder if there was some kinda fuse inside that adapter thingie. If there is, it's completely inaccessible, but I still wondered. Us old-time engineers are used to thinking of things like that; we always put fuses in our designs. But we usually make 'em so that the ordinary user can replace 'em if necessary. But these here made-in-China, all-embedded plastic doodads, they don't care for the niceties, I guess. Fuses cost money, and the name of the game is to reduce cost (and who gives a hoot for Quality?), so I wasn't expecting much on that score.

Especially when the only way to get inside the thing, was to cut it open with a saw-blade.

That's what I learned after looking it up on the World Wide Web. These newfangled adapters are put together inside of these two plastic halves, and then the plastic halves are kinda welded or melted together, so there really isn't much for the owner to do. Unless he happens to also own a Dremel.

Took me about five minutes to cut my way around the outside of the adapter, then another five to pry it apart and see what's inside. There's a yellow rectangle what looks kinda fuse-like. I'll take a look at it tomorrow. No time tonight. Too tired.

Meanwhile, we found a new adapter and a new 9-cell battery on Amazon for about fifty dollars, so Cheryl ordered it up for me. Should be here by Thursday, so they say. Can't wait to see what happens after that.

I C Hill

We were done with the campout. We wanted to go home. There was only one thing standing (or lying) in our way.

The driveway.

Specifically, the thick layer of ice on the driveway.

The day before, we had no trouble coming down the driveway, even though it was a bit of a steep drop from the road above to the little valley below. There was a little bit of ice in the middle of the incline, but the length of relatively ice-free road near the bottom was enough to keep the vehicles from losing control and going off the edge of the road where it curved before heading back up again towards the house.

But overnight the water which had been flowing down the driveway froze solid, and thickened, and became an impassible barrier between the campers and the "outside world".

We didn't realize this until we took the fully-loaded church van and attempted to manuever it up the hill. We got nearly three-quarters of the way up the hill before the drive wheels started spinning and the van started sliding. And it slid, and slid, and slid; and no amount of braking would stop it. Indeed, it seems that the braking actually accelerated the slide. And shifted the direction of the slide. To the point that the van turned sideways, and then rotated another quarter-turn until the front end was pointed back the way it came.

It was certainly a thrilling ride for the teens who were inside, but the driver was not so much thrilled as alarmed. Thankfully, the youth minister is an old hand at snow/ice driving and handled himself with skill and grace. He completely missed the tree. And the light pole.

After the van had finally slid to a stop, we pulled out the shovels and started clearing the path so that the van could at least return to the place from where it had started, back toward the house. Clearing the snow out of the way, unfortunately, was not sufficient to get the van lined up properly. I had to pull out my 100-foot rope and wrap it around a couple trees, stationing some of the teens at strategic points to provide leverage so that we could hold the van in position while using the spinning wheels to line it up properly so that it was aimed correctly. Gingerly, we drove it back to the front of the house and parked it.

Not content to let sleeping vans lie, I foolishly attempted to do with my own van what the other van could not; I drove right up the icy hill, got nearly three-quarters of the way up, then stopped because the wheels had no purchase. Then slid backwards, just like before. Turning. Into the snow bank. Not nearly as bad as the heavier church van, but enough that the rope was required to straighten me out again. And then it was my turn to back my van slowly up the other side again and park in front of the house, defeated.

We called the parents of the kids and asked them to come out to the top of the hill to pick up their children. Which they did. One of the parents, in fact, took the youth minister and I along and dropped us off at home. But the vans remained behind.

It wasn't until the next day - Monday - that we were able to get the vans out. The road was sanded, the sun came out, and this time, there was no trouble getting the vans up the hill. It was as if there had never been any ice at all.

It was a perfect ending for a perfectly wonderful camping trip. Not.

A Winter Campout

I drove out to the property the day before we were scheduled to begin, in order to pick out the camp site and set up the main tent. The Big Blizzard of 2011 had come through just a couple days beforehand so the country roads over which I travelled were still coated with a thick mixture of slush and snow, and the woods and fields were sitting under nearly two feet of white powder.

It was beautiful.

The entrance to the property lies at the southern end of a cul-de-sac road atop a small hill; the driveway drops down into a little valley before curving to the right and then rising again to a second little hill on which the house is set. The driveway diverges before it reaches the house: part of it wends down and around to the back of the house where the barn is located; the other part continues upward to the front door of the house, ending in a circular drive not unlike the ones found in English country homes. It is a beautiful house.

Our campsite lay even further southward past the front of the house towards the woods. The yard drops away from the hill on which the house sits, down into bottom land which is somewhat swampy during the springtime, covered with low-lying shrubs and scrub oaks and pines which gather their nourishment from a wide stream which cuts across the property from west to east. At the base of the hill, just before the shrubs and scrubs begin, a bowl-shaped pit with three mounds of debris sits. A well-worn trail runs from east to west next to it, in winter marked by the flattened snow of a cross-country track. It was here that our campsite would be arranged, owing to the dearth of tree coverage and the relative flatness of the ground near the mounds.
The first task, digging out a rectangle on which the tent could be set up, took me nearly an hour. Two feet of snow in a rectangle roughly twenty feet by twenty feet, so that there would be sufficient room on the sides to place the supporting poles (and some room to walk around it).

The second task was to bring all the gear down from the top of the hill near the house, down to the campsite. This was not a trivial thing. The snow depth varied across the hill, ranging from nearly three feet in shadow-covered areas to barely a foot in the sunny spots; due to my reluctance to try to carry all the items one at a time, I used a plastic sled, loading it up with piles of gear and towing it beside me down the hill. That worked rather well, except in cases where I'd neglected to properly secure the load to the sled; with those, the sled's center of gravity caused it to roll over into my footpath (which was about two feet lower than the sled trail I'd made), spilling the contents out into the snow and further delaying my progress.

After I'd brought down all the equipment for the tent, I set it up.

Once that was set up, it was getting dark, and getting significantly colder (due to the drop in temperature or the amount of sweat I was generating, or both), and rather than stay to try and put up the kitchen gazebo, I elected to return home and wait until the next day to complete the campsite.

The next day, I returned early and started setting up the kitchen area. It took nearly the same amount of time to clear out a space for the gazebo as it did for the tent. Then it was another half an hour's work to put the gazebo together, followed by another hour or so to unpack and arrange the cooking area so it was ready for use.
Aftwerward, as the time was rapidly approaching when it would be necessary to make my appearance at the church to "gather the troops", I abandoned my plan to set up the 'warming' tent (which is a tent containing a heater used for keeping liquids above the freezing point during the extremely cold nights) and instead raced home to gather a few last-minute (and nearly forgotten) items before heading over to the church.

The first disappointment was waiting for me there; out of the fifteen or so people signed up for the campout, only three teens actually showed up. We had four adults and three teens. Seemed a bit of an overloaded ratio. And it meant that most of my activity plans were shot to pieces. Hard to do any team competition games when there aren't even enough people to form teams. But I had my backup plans, so we soldiered on. The youth minister took the kids in the church van and I led the way to the campsite (while the other two adults went on their own, since they already knew where they were going).

Once at the campsite, the kids used some additional sleds we'd borrowed from the church to bring their gear down the hill and toss it into the main tent while I set up the warming tent. The other two adults set up their tent on the opposite side of the campsite. Then one of them started a fire in the little fire pit area I'd selected. And I started boiling up some water for hot chocolate.

Another person showed up right before we were about to head off on our first little Adventure - a college kid, a grandson of the property owner. So I elected him to lead the Expedition into the woods (which would replace the Search & Rescue activity from my original plan) with the assumption that he was somewhat familiar with the territory.

To the teens, I handed out my crudely-drawn map of the area along with a compass, pointing out a few landmarks to help them get their bearings, and sent them off with their 'guide' on an hour's worth of hiking, with instructions to look for interesting and remarkable things. I'd already noticed quite a few things during my hike the previous week: two man-made bridges over the stream; several downed trees of incredible girth; various animal trails (deer, rabbit, dog, and some kind of large cat). They were instructed to mark the interesting items on the map so that our steps to those things could be retraced the following day.

While they were gone, it was time to start dinner prep. I had enough food for fifteen, and now had to cook for six; I had let the kids choose which of the three soups (chicken noodle, beef vegetable, potato with bacon) they preferred; far and away, they chose the potato and bacon. Being boys, they probably would've picked anything with bacon in it. Bacon has a nearly magnetic quality among males, especially when they are out in the woods.

The soups were still mostly frozen, so it took quite a while to defrost them in my little cooking pan. Due to the small size of my pans and the relatively large amount of soup to be cooked, I ended up cooking half, setting it aside in a container to (hopefully) keep warm, then cooking the rest so that it was ready to serve right at dinnertime; then while everyone was completing their first bowl, I re-heated the first container so that it was at the right temperature by the time they were ready for seconds. Which they all were.

I had been hoping (and planning) on several fun activities after dinner, before time for devotional; but the snow was too deep for real sledding, and too deep for our 2x4 skiing. Fortunately, it was just right for building snow forts, so that's what the boys did. They built a nice, big fort next to the kitchen area, even putting a tunnel through the bottom of it, and then commenced a snowball battle with the adults.

For some reason, the adults stayed right next to the fire pit, which meant that all the snowballs were flying between the fire pit and the kitchen and back again. So one of the adults was yelling at the boys to stop throwing snow in the fire (he was afraid it might put the fire out), while I was yelling at the adults to stop throwing snow at the kitchen (because they might knock over the cookstove or the lantern). It was very loud.

We never did get around to a devo that night. Because of this, I was sorely disappointed. But it is my own fault. I was waiting for the youth minister to say something, and he was probably waiting for me to say something, and in the end, everyone else sat around the campfire and roasted hot dogs (which one of the other adults had run out to purchase because, although it wasn't in my plan, he thought a campfire wasn't a campfire unless there was a hot dog attached to a stick and floating over the flames).

Afterward, we had another, briefer snowball battle, drank some more hot chocolate, and then the kids got into the tent and snuggled down for the night and went to bed.

The college kid decided not to stay because he was needed at church on Sunday morning, and didn't want to be late getting there. So he left.

The youth minister and I stayed up for while and talked about our plans for the next day, which included a devotional and Communion. I made sure we both agreed on this before heading off to bed myself.

---

The morning was cold, and there was the smell of snow in the air. I got up very quickly to start the hot water - and breakfast - and noted that the other two adults (besides myself and the youth minister) had left. They, too, had tasks to perform at church that morning. And they probably wouldn't be back. So it was just the five of us remaining.

Just about the time the kids were waking up, the bacon and eggs were ready, and some hot water for oatmeal. The kids surprised me by eating not only the bacon and eggs, but also two bowls of oatmeal each! But I suppose they'd burned a lot of energy keeping warm in the night.

After breakfast, we broke down the tents and packed away our gear and then sat around the now-relit fire and had our devotional, followed by a Communion meditation.

Then it was time to head home.

We thought.

The road had other ideas, however.

Obsessing

I'm obsessing again.

There's a creative genius (ha!) buried deep inside my brain, muffled by years and years of meaningless management drivel, who longs to create something wonderful and beautiful and practical; but every time an idea forms, it is overwhelmed by the day to day activities and responsibilities which are required for survival, and often comes to nothing. Or sometimes less-than-nothing, because what is actually produced is not worth the materials which have been slapped together.

About a month ago, all the memories of my wild, unhindered youth brought to mind an earlier obsession with electronics, and so for the next two weeks, I could think of nothing else. All my old electronics notebooks and references were pulled from the shelves, and my desk became cluttered with wires and batteries and transistors and various other technological detritus. Circuits were designed and built and measured and analyzed and discarded, and many hours were burned in a fruitless attempt to create something useful out of all the disorganized rubble.

Then it fell on my lot to arrange/plan/implement the Winter Campout for the Youth Group at church, and my attention was completely and utterly blown. Panic in the streets! Even though I've been on several Winter Campouts of the Scouting variety, it had never been my responsibility to put one together. And owing to my extremely strong desire (obsession?) to avoid humiliation and embarrassment, it is paramount that everything go off without a hitch.

Which means, of course, that I'm stressing out about it.

You'd think that a Winter Campout - especially here in Michigan, where it's rather ordinary - would be a simple matter. You take your tent, plop it in the snow, curl up in your -10°F sleeping bag, and sleep the night away in cozy comfort. Until your bladder wakes you up at 3 in the morning with an Urgent Message. At which point you put on all your heavy snowgear, tromp out into the snow, find an appropriate facility (for Scouts, it's very simple), and afterward, tromp back to the tent whereupon your fellow tentmates yell at you for making too much noise, bringing snow inside and waking them all up.

Ah, if it were only that simple.

There is one important and critical difference between the Scout campouts to which I am accustomed, and this particular Youth campout: there are girls involved. And the very first question asked by the girls when the campout was announced? I'm sure you can guess.

"Will there be rest rooms?"

The typical guy response is to laugh out loud and make rude comments about how girls always want to be pampered, and how they don't know how to "rough it". (And sometimes those rude comments come from other girls who actually enjoy roughing it!) And then everyone agreees that it would be difficult and pointless to go to a lot of trouble to provide something so unnecessary, and we move on. And a lot of girls decide not to go after all.

But there are a couple of things about the scenario that appeal to me. First is, I have two daughters, and I enjoy spoiling them rotten. And if I could convince them to go along on a campout merely by providing adequate 'facilities' for their use, I would do it out of a desire to spend time in their company. Secondly, though, I'm an engineer. And you never tell an engineer that something can't (or shouldn't) be done merely because it might be difficult. That is a gauntlet-in-the-face challenge to do it. So I'm going to do it. And it may be a complete failure, but at least no one will be able to say I didn't try.

I did quite a bit of research on the subject on-line, and was amused to discover the various methods that have been devised to provide facilities on campouts. Mostly for summer, of course. No one in their right mind would go out camping in the middle of winter. The flaw in most of the designs, at least as far as winter applications go, is the lack of adequate protection from the elements. Nylon mini-tents don't provide much insulation against the bitter winds (15°F on a good day!), and no one likes to do their business while shivering. So the first item on the agenda is to provide a secure, insulated enclosure, sizeable enough to handle an occupant wearing several bulky layers of down.

The next item on the agenda is practicality. Those tank-style RV toilets are not practical for winter camping. You really don't want to be lugging around a tank device in the bitter wind. Luckily for me, I have lots of experience with cats and their waste products. And my research indicated that it is actually an accepted practice to treat human wastes in a similar manner while camping, using various clumping compounds, deodorants, and germicidals, all of which are availabe at home. Meaning that at the end of the campout, we are able to toss our bags of de-toxified waste material directly into the weekly garbage. And no one gets grossed out by having to clean out any tanks.

So over the next couple of days, I'll be building the 'facility', and you'll be able to see what happens to a degenerate engineering mind as he goes completely bonkers in an attempt to prove that It Can Be Done.

Hope you enjoy it!

---

There is quite a bit more to the Winter Campout than just having a warm rest room, of course. There's also the part about having fun. And having a purpose.

For this campout, to make it as fun as possible, we're going to have a Scenario for the kids to play so that they'll be engaging their minds while they're engaging their muscles.

Here's the Plot.

The kids will be taken to the edge of the property and dropped off. They will be given a map and a set of instructions. The map is incomplete, containing only enough information to get them to the Base Camp. The premise (provided in the instructions) is that they are on an Survey Expedition whose purpose is to complete a map of the area, but their supplies (food, water, firewood) were accidentally scattered throughout the woods. The instructions will tell them that they are to use sleds (provided) to cart all their gear to the Base Camp and then set up. Then they must split into teams and go out into the woods to map the area. While they are mapping the area, they are to locate their supplies and bring them back to camp on the sleds. It will be necessary at times to traverse gullies and streams, so everyone will need to work together to avoid losing supplies or getting wet. After they have returned to camp with the supplies, each team will have to (1) start a fire; (2) boil water; (3) make hot drinks for their team. Then each team will provide a cook's helper to assist with dinner.

After dinner, we'll do some cleanup, then get the teams together to come up with a definite 'map' of the area, which we'll be using the next morning. Then it's time for a campfire devotional, with hot chocolate and cold-weather (i.e. high-protein) snacks), then bedtime.

Next day, we have breakfast, then cleanup, then devotional/worship time, then we'll use our 'map' to go on a meditative hike around the property before coming back to break camp and head for home.

Of course, it probably won't go like clockwork, but that's the general idea. I'm hoping to take lots of pictures, but will probably be too stressed out trying to make sure everything is going smoothly to worry about it. I won't relax til the cars are all loaded up and heading back up the road.