Thursday, August 30, 2012

New House Blog: Episode XXXV - Mysteries

In the previous Episode we planted our potted plants in our carefully prepared garden plot.  We are happy to report that after less than a week in the ground they are all still alive, although some of the peppers continue to look a bit pale.  We have high hopes for all of our garden plants.  Two plants that have not yet made it to the garden are our basil and our thyme.  The basil looks pretty bad and may be beyond saving, but I'm not sure why we didn't plant the thyme.  Maybe we just forgot about it.

Mystery 1

I arrived home from work the other day and discovered a cat food bag in the kitchen, where cat food bags don't normally hang out.  Upon closer inspection of this bag I discovered a rather large hole in the side, as if someone, or some thing, in our new house had chewed through the bag to get to the sweet sweet cat food inside.  What or who could it have been?  We don't have mice or rats, do we?  And Becky has shown no interest in eating cat food.  She was off running errands at the time, so I couldn't ask her what she knew of the situation.  Upon even closer inspection I noticed several smaller holes, almost like someone, or some thing, had been biting the bag.  Just as mysterious was the fact that all of the cat food had been drained from the bag and was not anywhere nearby.  The best explanation I came up with was that a cat had bitten and chewed through the bag, but that didn't explain the missing cat food.  Surely one cat couldn't eat an entire 7# bag of cat food in one sitting, could he?  All three cats working together couldn't even do that.  When Becky got home all was cleared up.  A cat, probably Daisy, had indeed bitten and chewed through the bag, and Becky had put the food into another, almost empty bag of cat food.  Mystery solved.  Here are pictures of the ransacked cat food bag.



The poor bag never had a chance.  On the plus side, at least one cat really seems to like this food.








Mystery 2

A day or two later we found another bag of cat food that had been chewed through, but this time the food was still in the bag.  It was less of a mystery this time, however, as Daisy was confirmed to be the culprit. What remains unconfirmed is how she knew to chew through a supposedly sealed bag of cat food.  Did she somehow smell the food through the bag?  Did she simply recognize the shape and size of the bag as being a food container?  Why did she not simply eat from the ample supply of cat food already in the food bowl?  Can we ever trust her with a bag of cat food again?  Here are pictures of the second victim.


Yummy yummy































More Mysteries

The next series of mysteries are from our continuing series - Back Yard Archaeology.  Several excavations are currently in-progress (in this case several = at least 3), and they have turned up some mysteries that we have yet to solve.  You will recall from this Episode that we were excavating a PVC conduit that contains romex.  Our continuing excavation has uncovered and traced the conduit as far as we can uncover and trace it directly.  As suspected, it runs all the way along the edge of the back porch, turns ninety degrees toward the house, and runs into and under the concrete of the walkway by the house and porch.  You will also recall that so far I am the only one doing any archaeological investigation in our back yard.  Since the conduit goes under a concrete walkway I was unable to excavate it further.  Neither of us (Becky or Bish) wants our walkway broken up at this time.  However, I believe I know where the conduit and romex run, and what they connect to, but I will not reveal that until I have investigated and confirmed my theory.  I also discovered that there was more water in the conduit near where it runs under the concrete walkway.  Who put this water into the conduit?  Why was it put there?  Is it safe to drink?  What did the other end of the romex connect to?  Here are some pictures.  I remind you that some (all) of the cracking and breaking of the conduit is possibly (definitely) the result of my excavating.

After two days worth of excavating

Still going

Turning the corner

Running into and under the walkway

The end of the line?






















New Team Member

Before we continue I must introduce a new member of our Archaeology/Gardening/General Digging team.  Meet Pick.  Pick is a one-hand pickaxe thing.  The handle is some kind of plastic, about 18" in length.  As you can see from the picture below, the head is showing some signs of use.  This is because pick has been assisting me with my excavating.


Continuing With The Mysteries

In another part of the yard I discovered and dug up what I am calling the Leaning Post Foundation.  I call it this because it was jutting out of the ground at about a 75-degree angle, and it is a foundation for a wood post.  It is the largest post foundation dug up to date.  We don't know its age precisely, or the precise age of any of our excavated artifacts so far, but it is believed to be between 10 and 40 years old.  How did it get where it is?  Why was it leaning so?  Why was it sticking up out of the ground?  Was it the result of a seismic upheaval?  Social unrest?  Subterranean sinkholes?  These are just some of the mysteries surrounding the Leaning Post Founation, or LPF.  Here are pictures.

Here you can see the LPF pre-excavation.  Notice how it sticks up at a jaunty angle.
 Here you see it post-excavation.  Note its immense size and weight.
 Here is a view from its other side.
Despite being potentially decades-old, you can still see the wood grain inside the post hole.









Nearby the LPF I discovered, and started excavating, two PVC pipes coming out of the ground.  They are adjacent to another post foundation that is lying flat in the ground.  Where do these pipes go?  What were they originally connected to?  Are the part of some mysterious refueling operation?  Why was PVC chosen as the pipe material?  Why are the two pipes not the same diameter?  Pictures of the excavaion-to-date.

 This is how they appeared before the digging began.

This is as far as the excavation has gone to-date.  The digging at this site was interrupted by an unexpected and unanticipated find.





And I will tell you about that unexpected and unanticipated find right now.  As I was digging out these pipes, and trying to keep them intact and undamaged, I discovered a third pipe crossing these two.  This third pipe is made of what appears to be rusty corroded metal (why they would choose to use a rusty, corroded metal pipe is a mystery), about 1" in diameter.  I decided to dig up this pipe, and it led me to an even bigger, even more unexpected and unanticipated discovery.  But first, pictures of the pipe.

 This pipe was buried quite close to the surface, and pulling it up was quite easy, but it is quite fragile so I had to be careful.
Here's another view that shows the relative positions of the PVC and the rusted metal pipes.  So far this is the only metal pipe we have found buried in the back yard. Its rusty, corroded condition may explain why PVC was the material of choice for all of the other buried pipes found so far.










The even bigger, even more unexpected and unanticipated discovery is a monolith, which I am calling The Monolith.  The Monolith is one large, contiguous piece of concrete that is in the ground.  The rusty, corroded pipe appears to go right into The Monolith.  The Monolith appears to have been used as some kind of foundation for something.  It has two square post holes, and a mysterious piece of metal sticks up from it about an inch.  This metal is not at all rusty or corroded, it appears to be silver-white, and it is slightly flexible.  I haven't had this metal professionally analyzed, but I can tell you that it is like no other metal found so far in our back yard.  Take a look at The Monolith.

 This is the largest piece of concrete found in our yard so far. The long main section is laid out almost exactly north-south, according to the compass app in my phone.
Here is another angle showing the pipe connecting to the concrete.  If you look closely you may be able to spot the mysterious metal embedded in the concrete. 




On the one hand, such exact north-south alignment shows that this concrete was poured by members an advanced civilization.  On the other hand, the crudeness of the pouring and the roughness of the concrete seem to indicate that this concrete was poured by members of an ordinary civilization.  A contradiction, and a mystery.  Who really poured this concrete?  Was it poured here, or poured elsewhere and transported here and buried?  Why was it buried?  Why is it aligned so precisely?  Is the compass app on my phone to be trusted?  

Next up is a photo of some miscellaneous artifacts that we have uncovered or found lying on the surface in our back yard.  

What you see here is a rusty metal bolt of some kind, some pieces of what seem to be ceramic tile, and a mysterious circular object made of white plastic.  The rusty bolt would seem to indicate that the pre-Bishopians had some knowledge of either metal forging or metal buying/trading.  The tiles are another mystery.  Most normal, human-formed tiles are squares or rectangles.  These tile pieces have complex curves and angles.  And they're really small.  What kind of technology could produce such tiles?  And what is that mysterious circular object?

Concrete, rusty metal, and PVC are not the only things I have dug up in our back yard: I have also dug up real wood, ancient support timbers I believe.  Note that they are in remarkably good condition for being buried in the ground for years or decades.  Just as remarkable is the fact that the termites who live in the area didn't completely eat these timbers.  See for yourself.

Note also the small pipe segment.
What were these timbers used to support?  What was their former length?  Were they hand-formed or machine-formed?  Were they at one time part of a buried wooden ship?

With that I'm going to wrap up this Episode of our New House Blog.  As you can see, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the mysterious artifacts that are being unearthed in our back yard.  We'll keep you all posted as the excavations continue.  Please note that we still have not found any verifiable evidence of either aliens or tin hats.

It is a puzzlement.
       bIsh

Monday, August 27, 2012

New House Blog: Episode XXXIIII - Into The Garden

Once again it is time to share with you the things we have been doing at our house recently.  I'm glad to say that we finished up a big project, and smaller projects are in the works.  Also once again, Becky's awesome sister, Amy, was a big help to us in completing the afore-mentioned big project.  Thank you Amy.  In the comment section of the previous Episode someone suggested that the conduit/romex and rivet gun were possibly used for communicating with aliens and constructing tin hats to block brain waves.  While we can't 100% rule out that possiblilty, we have to point out a glaring weakness in this theory: if the people who laid out the conduit and romex wanted to communicate with aliens, why would they also want to block brain waves?  Wouldn't such hats, if they ever existed, impede human/alien communication?  No evidence of either aliens or tin hats has been found so far.

Someone else commented in person that we might have to engage in more battles with stumps.  We have, in fact, four stumps in the front yard that will need removing.  Each stump removal promises to bring with it a thrilling tale of battle and valour.  That's four thrilling (and valorous) tales to look forward to in addition to our exciting, continuing feature, Back Yard Archaeology.  This Episode, however, will not deal with BYA.  Excavations continue, and we will post updates in the near future.

Into The Garden

The large project that was completed was the creation of our garden.  We dug a roughly square pit (very roughly), manually tilled the dirt , mixed it in with a lot of gardening soil, and planted our potted plants in the ground.  Additionally we built a brick retaining wall to keep in some of our new garden's soil.  This was necessary because the garden is not in level ground - there is a gentle slope from the back of the garden area to the front, and in order to create a roughly level garden we had to lower the soil level a little in the back and raise it up a little in the front.  We have not planted any new seeds yet, and because of the time of year of this Episode we will be postponing the planting of most of our seeds until the spring.  There are, however, some fall-plantable seeds among our collection.

As I mentioned, all of the garden soil was manually tilled.  We know of the existence of rototillers, and Bish has used one or two in years past, but we don't own one and we don't know that any of our friends has one. And we don't mind a bit of manual labor.  Here's what the garden area looked like before we got started.  Remember the stump from this Episode?  It was right about near the middle of our garden area.

Before
Here you can see the three amigos, Longspade, Shortstaff, and Spike, as the garden pit is being dug.  These three were instrumental in excavating this site.


The next three pictures show the progression of soil tilling, starting with the freshly-dug garden pit and showing the progress of tilling and filling the pit.  Tilling and filling was done in stages and not all at once, and the process took several days.

The empty garden pit

Partially filled with tilled soil

All filled in and roughly level

















Brickwork

I'm giving the brickwork its own section because it was a project by itself.  Hauling and hefting into place 20# bricks can be a lot of work.  In the pictures below you will see the progression from the foundational corner, across the front of the garden, and up the sides a bit.  The extra bricks that you see lying around are going to be mostly for a border and not for structure.

The foundational corner

Extending out from the corner

Almost all the way across

All the way across
As you can see, the retaining wall is not quite a strait line.

Back Into The Garden

With the retaining wall structurally complete we were ready to plant our potted plants in the ground.  It was during this planting process that Amy mentioned something called, "weeding."  I may have heard this term before, in the distant past, but I may have to look up its meaning.  Becky claims to know what it means.

Our first transplanted plant was our strawberry plant.

Becky's feet can be seen for size comparison.
 Next we translplanted our peppers (6 bells and one pimento) and our tomatoes (one grape and one composed of various small varieties).  After that came the catnip (two catnips).  All were given a healthy watering from our conveniently-located water spigot and hose.

Our new garden

The plants look kind of droopy and sad in this picture.  Most of them didn't seem to do too well after we moved, and we're hoping that the new location, new soil, and new room for root growth will give them their second winds, so to speak.  The strawberries, however, seem to be thriving.


Lighting The Way

We installed some lights in our back yard, and one in our front yard.  They're little solar-powered LED lights on stakes.  The stakes and housings are silver.  Nine are set up along the edge of our back yard patio, two are set up in the front corners of our garden (if you look closely you can see them in the above picture), and one is set up in the corner of our front walkway.  Their placement may change in the future.  We have pictures of them in the daytime and at night.

Daytime






















The same lights at night

It can hard to take a good photo of lighted lights at night.



















More daytime
More nighttime











































The lights in the garden

The front walkway light






















Bonus Picture

And now for a bonus picture.  This is a photo of the first stir-fry stir-fried in our new house.  Included in this stir-fry are peppers and tomatoes harvested from our garden.  The beef, olives, and water chestnuts are not from our garden.  The noodles are also not from our garden.


We eat tonight!
   bIsh

Monday, August 20, 2012

New House Blog: Episode XXXIII - Back Yard Archaeology

Welcome to Episode XXXIII.  In this Episode we are introducing a new feature: Back Yard Archaeology.  This will be an ongoing feature chronicling our efforts to excavate the yard's past and reconstruct (figuratively) the structures that once existed and the reasoning (or lack thereof) and method (or madness) behind their construction (literal).  As this is an ongoing project, we will be deviating from our normal pattern of only revealing completed projects, and we will be providing updates over several episodes (we hope, depending on how well this new feature is received).

Speaking of ongoing projects, we do have some ongoing projects of which we cannot now speak, but we hope to share them soon.  Some of you may know what one or two of those projects might be, and we ask that if you are one of those people, or think you are, you kindly refrain from spilling the beans.

Bish's Office

One project we can speak about is Bish's office.  The paint in said office was revealed in this Episode, but everything was still protected by plastic sheeting and we couldn't really show it off, so to speak.  Here is Bish's office with furniture and computer finally set up.  Yes, I am once again typing on a regulation keyboard and using my awesome Kensington Expert Mouse.  As you can see from the picture there is still some unpacking going on.

Yes, Bish has more Garfields than what you see here.
Wireless Upgrade

Setting up Bish's computer highlighted an issue that we have had since moving into our house: the wireless networking signal is not well-received by the computers in the offices.  This issue is mainly because our wireless router has to be located in the big room, because that's where the Comcast cable comes in, and the computers are in offices far, far away from the wireless router.  To put it simply, we had weak wifi signal in our offices, and our computers were having connection issues.  To resolve this we installed a wifi range extender.  We had never heard of this device (although Bish thought that such a device was theoretically possible) until we went to Best Buy to purchase some long USB extendsion cables.  The range extender works, and now our wifi signal is much stronger in our offices.  No, we won't tell you the SSID (network name), or the type of security we have set up, unless you come visit us in person and need to get on our home wifi.  Here are two pictures of the installed range extender.

From the kitchen side

From the fireplace room side

































Happy Cats

Here are some pictures of our happy cats.  We love our cats, and it's important to us that they are comfortable and happy.

Happy Satchmo and Daisy

Happy Mr. Miles









































Back Yard Archaeology

And now for the new feature you've all been waiting for, unless you skipped ahead by scrolling down, Back Yard Archaeology.  This first edition of BYA will focus mainly on items that were recently dug up in our back yard.  The first item that was dug up in our yard is a seemingly-random length of romex in PVC conduit.  We first noticed this romex-and-conduit when we first looked at our house, on our very first day of house-hunting.  It was sticking out of the hard, clay-like dirt and we mostly ignored it, but a man can ignore partially-buried conduit for only so long (so far, Bish has done all of the archaeological excavating) .  The time had come to be rid of it.  This conduit-and-romex ran under the dirt for several yards and then stopped: nothing was connected to either end.  Here's a picture, post-excavation.

As you can see, the conduit is pretty beat-up.  Some (most) of the breakage may have been caused (definitely was caused) by my excavating methods.  I am not a trained archaeologist, and therefore my methods may not be quite as gentle and civilized as one would expect to see at an archaeological dig site.

What were this conduit and romex used for?  What, if anything, were they connected to?  What kind of people would bury them so carefully and then abandon them so quickly?  The mystery deepens.  I found another piece of romex sticking out of the dirt, separated from the original dig site by a few feet.  There was also PVC conduit encasing this romex.  Could they at one time have been part of the same contiguous electrical line?  If so, where are the missing lengths of conduit and romex that would have connected the pieces together?

Time for more excavating.  I began to dig, and by dig I mean I used Spike to break up the dirt and then used Longspade to remove the loose dirt.  After digging into the ground around this second conduit I found an artifact, a black plastic-coated handle of some sort. It was buried about six inches deep, and it obviously was broken off from a bigger artifact. More digging revealed the rest of the artifact.  It appeared to be some sort of ancient, primitive tool.  At first we could not make any kind of definitive identification (I showed it to Becky), but we each had our favorite pet theories. A little research revealed the answer.  Here are the pictures of the mystery object.  For full effect, scroll slowly so that you are only looking at one picture at a time.  That will make it seem more mysterious and it will make the final reveal more wonderful (I hope).

 In this first picture you can see the general shape and size of the object.  It is quite rusted and corroded, and one of the handles is actually corroded through and separated from the main body.  I had to speculate as to where the broken handle would have attached, but I think I guessed correctly.
 Here is the device on a round garden/yard brick.  As you can see, under the dirt is a label that is mostly legible.  Removing the dirt is the research I mentioned above.
The truth revealed.  It is/was a manual rivet gun.  I had only ever seen one other rivet gun in my life, and it was brand-new at the time.  Never had I seen one this ancient and corroded.


But who put this rivet gun next to the conduit before it was buried?  And who left it there to get buried?  And why would anyone be using a rivet gun near electrical conduit and romex?  Is that brand of rivet gun still being produced?  Questions.  Questions that have answers.  Answers that we don't know.

Back to the 2nd romex/conduit excavation.  This excavation is more involved than I initially thought it would be.  It seems that the conduit extends under the dirt for quite a ways, and I have only uncovered a portion of it so far, as the pictures below will show.  You will also see in the pictures that the conduit is damaged, said damage being probably (definitely) caused by my excavating methods.  You will also see some electrical tape around some of the romex.  Was this used to join two romex sections together?  My digging also revealed that there was water in the conduit.  How long had it been there?  In what era had it first collected in the conduit?


The mysterious object at the bottom of this picture is merely the blade of our hand spade.
At least it's well-buried.

This is the extent of the excavation so far.  And there's a nice view of that hand spade.
Mmmm....Electrical tape.....
Also excavated were some concrete post foundations.  What were these foundations holding?  Why are they scattered about willy-nilly in our yard?  Why was the supported object removed?  Where is it now?  In the pictures below, you can see one of these post foundations, before and after removal.

The foundation, in-hole

The same foundation, out-of-hole and split in two















As you can see, the foundation split in two when it was excavated.

We actually do have a clue about what these post foundations once supported.  If you look up our house on Google Maps you can see what looks like sauna/hot tub in the back yard.  This is only visible in the 45-degree view of Google Maps, not in the straight-down view.  No we are not going to reveal our address here. If this sauna theory is true it would explain many things, but not everything.  For instance, was this hot tub built according to code?  Did it have the proper permits?  Were the neighbors allowed to use it?

Here are two pictures of some of the random debris in our yard.  What story do these bits and pieces tell?  Who used these items?  Who used them last?  Who left them for us to clean up?

What are these ancient, mysterious objects?

Does their placement have any deeper meaning?

































Questions, more questions, and
   bIsh