The Changelog

We had some wonderful weather yesterday. I've always said that I like snow. It can completely change the landscape in an instant. And it looks so beautiful.

Yesterday we had a nice snowstorm all day. Large, wet flakes. It was the most snow we've had at once in a few years right around here. It was beautiful just like always. It started early in the morning before we got up and continued until almost midnight. This morning, I went out into a big open area and measured the snow -- 7.5".

There are two problems with snow. One is that it's difficult to get anywhere. The other is that it blows into everything.

And guess what -- yesterday was our moving day.

Fortunately, on Friday evening, most of the furniture that needed to go in a pickup did. But we still had to wrap some things in plastic on Saturday. We didn't get everything moved that we wanted to. Between icy ground outside, travel at less than half the usual speed on the roads, and snow blowing everywhere, things were slow. But that's fine; we'll get the rest later.

This was the scene during the move:



Not long after that picture was taken, it was announced that church was canceled today. We kept moving things though.

Although we didn't get everything moved that we had hoped to, we got enough moved to consider ourselves moved in. We have one fully-functional bathroom. Jacob's bedroom and our bedroom are done. The kitchen will get its floor Monday and we'll get appliances Thursday. The only big thing left is guttering, plus there are still a few doorknobs and light fixtures pending. But it was enough that the three of us spent our first night here last night!

We're very appreciative of the help we got from family & friends, who helped us move and brought us food (since we don't have a fridge for the next few days).

Jacob doesn't like change very much (he cried when he noticed that some clutter in our apartment living room was gone). But he likes to learn about his environment. So today, he woke up at 6AM (and got us up at 6AM), spent an hour happily looking around, then promptly started fussing. That's how the day has been for him -- interest and crying.

At about 7:30AM, we were shocked to see a road maintainer plowing our road. Why shocked? Well, nobody else lives on this road for a couple of miles. It's not exactly a popular spot. And it hadn't been in all that great of shape before winter.

Later in the day, I went out to take some pictures. Here's one of our driveway:



Doesn't it look fun?

I decided to see if we could get out. The short answer is yes. The long answer is "yes, if you have patience." After rocking the car back and forth to get it turned around in the yard, I was able to keep up enough speed to get to the road and back. So Terah and I had lunch with my parents, then went into town to get another carload of stuff. There were children out playing everywhere, and well-worn sledding paths down hillsides. Too bad Jacob isn't old enough to enjoy this!

It was last April when we first started thinking about this. By June we had bought the property out here, and in October we moved to the apartment. It's been a long time feeling like we were living somewhere temporarily.

And, right now, it is great to be home.

It's been very busy lately. So here's an update on lots of things.

We move in to the farmhouse this weekend, starting this evening. It's not completely done, but close enough! That's exciting. But I spent 12 hours out there on Tuesday cleaning out the attic (took the day off work to do that). So I'm exhausted, and the moving hasn't even started yet.

The wood floors are all done and looking nice.

Jacob is starting teething. We have discovered that he likes both the taste and effect of infant tylenol. Though he's been better in the past few days.

More pictures of Jacob and the house will be posted once we have a chance to get them assembled.

My MacBook Pro at work finally can suspend to RAM! 2.6.19.2 with the latest mactel patches makes it work with uswsusp.

We'll probably be without Internet at home for a few days -- at least until I get the place wired up and the firewall set up.

One of our neighbors out by the farm died this week. He was out working with his tractor when it slipped off an icy road and landed on him. His wife had just moved from Tennessee last spring when they got married, and has enjoyed working with all their animals. I didn't know either of them very well, and had only met his wife. But she was interested in our house renovation project and stopped by every so often to check on it and chat (their animals are across the road from us). We were looking forward to getting to know them both.

You're raising money for a renovation project on a nursing home, you've got $180,000 left to raise, and a potential donor says, "Hey, that's less than a new combine!"

Today, Terah:

• Wrote about multimeters


• Linked to a website selling "the only combination impact and torque tool designed to meet your wire termination requirements"


• Linked to a site named vanguardpipe.com


• Mentioned that her favorite version-control system is CVS

And all of that in a single blog post (which is also very amusing). Oh, and on Tuesday, she wrote about debconf.

I think this is the surest evidence yet that both Terah and I are geeks. She claims that only one of us is. What does everyone else think?

I should also add that she has strong operating system preferences (OS X or Linux), likes OpenOffice, uses Firefox and IMP, used Pine as her first email system when she was a student at Purdue, remembers using telnet, uses ssh to this day, and is more bothered than I am when the Internet link goes down.

That's right, more bothered than a Debian hacker.

She's talking about forming a "wives of geeks" BoF at debconf. I think just a simple "geeks" BoF would be fine.

Yesterday I went to activate phone service out at the farm. It got me to thinking a bit about how things change, and how they stay the same, too.

Before I go on, I'll have to say that every one of my history books is in storage, so if I get some details wrong, it's because I'm not remembering correctly.

Anyhow, phone service came to our community via an unusual route about 100 years ago. It wasn't Bell/AT&T or some other company that brought it there, as it was most places. I'm sure they figured that a small, scattered rural community would cost too much to support. So the community organized, built, and supported the phone system themselves.

Even today, roads around here can be impassible after a good rain. I'm sure that, in the early 1900s, before heavy road-maintaining machinery, things were worse -- and, of course, transportation was a lot slower then anyway. There were real problems: getting the word out about funerals, being able to summon a doctor when necessary, or letting people know that church was cancelled because of too much snow.

People in the community saw a phone system as a real need. So did the churches, which have left a legacy that is still reflected in phone company territories today.

Once phone service arrived, it was used for all the things that people expected, of course. But it also proved to be an important part of the social fabric of the community. Since party lines were the norm, it was possible to announce things to every listening subscriber pretty quickly. Older people remember announcements of fresh fruit arriving at the grocery store, funerals, or other news of the day.

To place a call, you would pick up your phone and turn your crank. That caused a bell to ring at the telephone office, which everyone called "Central." The operator would connect to your line and ask whom you wanted to talk to. The operator would then send the distinctive ring for your party down their party line, and patch -- manually -- your call through to them. And, if he was busy, the operator wouldn't listen in on your conversation -- but others on the party line very well might.

Central's hours were published. If you were making a call in the middle of the night, you were going to wake up someone at Central to do it -- plus everyone on the entire party line. So calls after hours were rare.

Fortunately, while some of the old Central operators were still around, some people in the community wrote down some of their stories.

There were some people in the community that were notorious for eavesdropping on other people's conversations. Two brothers one time figured that they knew somebody was listening to their conversations, so they devised a code. One called the other, and said, "I'll be going to McPherson in the morning for band practice." That meant something along the lines of going to town to buy groceries.

A few days later, their prime suspect came up to him and said, "What on earth are you going to band practice for? I didn't know you knew how to play an instrument!" Apparently she realized she was had when he burst out laughing uncontrollably.

The Central operators learned to know the habits of telephone users. Sometimes they would connect calls without even bothering to ask who people wanted to talk to -- and seemed to always get it right.

The phone system supported itself for about 50 years. But as the rest of the world moved on provide direct dialing, this proved a controversial subject in the community. People liked having their operators. The people that worked at Central were everybody's friend. They were people that were there, 24 hours a day, to assist with any emergency. They would gather volunteer firefighters to help fight a fire, or be able to spread community news quickly. This wouldn't be available with the newer phone systems. How would the community be informed of events quickly now? Who would just happen to know whose house the doctor was at when he was urgently needed?

The change was resisted for some years, but eventually the finances of the telephone cooperative turned out to be in deep trouble. Operators grew to be much more expensive than automation, and in the late 1960s, the telephone cooperative was no more -- sold to a phone company from a small town more than twice our size, and a for-profit company at that! Central no longer existed. I remember reading about this event -- it seems people were sad about that for quite some time. They felt that they had really lost an important part of the community when Central went away. Some machine locked in a cabinet doesn't care for people the way Central did. Even today, the older people in the community sound a little sad when they remember telephone modernization, and get the wistful look of somebody that has just remembered something that they miss.

The phone company that bought the system wasn't an AT&T, though. It was a small, independent phone company. To this day, that phone company serves only the two communities. And it was this company that I called yesterday to establish service out at our house.

They had already upgraded our lines -- over a mile of new copper, benefiting only us, at no charge to us -- last fall. The box was already on the outside of the house. Just need to get it activated.

So I called the phone company. They said I needed to drop by their office and sign some papers. Uh-oh, I think -- this is a bad sign. Sounds like a bunch of phone company bureaucracy.

But not so much. I went to the office and signed up. They asked the usual questions: name, address. Plus a few that bigger companies wouldn't ask: who used to have service at that address? Of course, most people would know that answer in our community. I couldn't have told you in Wichita, Dallas, or Indianapolis.

Then they asked when I'd like service to be activated. "As soon as possible," I say, figuring that this would be a couple of weeks like it is with AT&T or Sprint. "Well, we probably can't get out there for a couple of hours. Would it be OK if it's on at about 3?" Yes, that would be fine!

Now, how about DSL? "Well, we're a little backed up on that right now." Uh-oh. Sprint took several weeks when they *weren't* more backed up than usual. "So it'll probably be Monday or Tuesday before we can get out there. Should I just have the installer call you and arrange a time when it gets closer?" Yes, that would be fine, too!

Now, how about finding a phone number.

Out comes a large paper book. Yep, paper. They paged through it, and told me that my grandpa's old number would be available if I wanted it. I said yes -- after all, we've got his old address, so might as well keep the same phone number. OK, no problem. She whips out some white-out, whites out grandpa's name, and writes ours in. Done.

Now, do we want any optional services? Caller ID, call waiting, voicemail? How much is caller ID, I ask. $5 a month. We'll try it for now. "OK". A box was checked on the form and that was that. No high-pressure sales pitch on taking "the works" for some poorly-disclosed price, providing a ton of services I'll never use and don't want. No confusing "discounts" for having The Works and DSL at the same time.

Then I ask about an unlisted number, or at least an unlisted address. We figure that anybody that we really want to be able to reach us will figure out how without using a phone book, and these things get in so many databases these days. Sprint charged almost $10/mo for a fully unlisted number, but only a few dollars a month to just keep our address off the directories.

Our new company charged 50 cents a month for a fully unlisted number. Done.

Now it's time to pay for the first month's fees and the setup. Oops, I've forgotten my checkbook in the car. No problem, the secretary says, I'll watch your baby while you go get it! Jacob was with me, but had fallen asleep, so I brought him inside in his car seat. I went to get the checkbook -- just out the door and close by. I was back in a few seconds later, and the secretary was already on the other side of her desk talking and playing with Jacob. "My baby's 12 now," she said, and for a second, looked like a person that was remembering Central.

In my other posts about Christmas, I wrote about my memories of Christmas awhile back.

In this final post, some more recent memories.

Terah and I don't really have a Christmas tradition yet -- things seem to keep changing.

Our first Christmas after being married was in Indianapolis. Our church there didn't have a Christmas Eve service, so we went to a different one. We also bought a tree from Tree Classics that year:



The next year, we moved to Kansas. Our church has a children's program on Christmas Eve, but Terah likes the more meditative lessons and carols service that her church used to have on Christmas Eve, so sometimes we've gone to a different church that evening -- or even to two different services.

This year, we're in an apartment, and we've got Jacob. That makes everything more fun. Here he is in a festive holidy mood:



Of course, the one thing that a festive holiday mood is sure to lead to in a 3-month-old is a not-so-festive holiday bout of fussiness.



Our tree this year is borrowed. Ours, along with all of our Christmas decorations, lights, and wrapping paper, is in storage. So some of our gifts aren't wrapped. But that's OK -- we enjoyed Christmas all the same.



In this, my last post on Christmas for this season, I wanted to follow up on my earlier post about my Grandpa Klassen. I wrote:

Grandpa was great with the harmonica. And the song I best remember him playing at is Nun Ist Sie Erschienen. I remember sitting on his lap many times listening to him play it. And I'm pretty sure it was a year-round song for him. Terah and I even had it sung at our October wedding -- if it was year-round for Grandpa, that was good enough for us. It's always special to sing the song in church.

I was going to have a picture of Grandpa with his harmonica here, but I didn't get it ready in time. So I'll have to describe it. Imagine a black and white picture of a gentle man, dressed conservatively, holding a harmonica in his hands. He's looking towards it tenderly -- it seems to be something important, and maybe it represented fond memories for him, too. I'll post the photo as soon as I get a copy of it.

Well, here's the photo: