BurnsFamily Blog

The San Jose R.A.C.E.S. team asked for volunteers, as part of the Santa Clara County Mutual Aid Communicators (MAC) program, to assist the Lance Armstrong LiveSTRONG 2008 bike race this past week.

Our job was to ride along with the SAG vans to communicate their status, important events, and overall “eyes and ears” to race coordinators. MACs are trained emergency communicators who assist the local government during disasters, but we also help run public events such as this. We fall under the “Planning and Intelligence” organization if you’re familiar with ICS terminology.

Volunteering for public events like this allows us to continuously test our training and equipment so we’re ready for “real” disasters. The event was large enough that San Jose could only muster half of the number of required ham radio communicators that they needed. The balance were MACs like me from neighboring communities. Here’s a few pictures of us getting ready (at 0630!): Read more … »

When it’s 115˚ in the sun, it doesn’t matter where you are: THAT’S HOT!

We wanted a water fountain for our backyard but we couldn’t find anything we liked in the stores or online. So we decided to build one ourselves. It took a while to find out how to make one properly: refills itself automatically, features of a good fountain pump, requires little-to-no maintenance, the proper materials to use to ensure watertightness, etc. The real “deal maker” was finding out how to add water to the reservoir automatically without any supervision.

I found this auto fill valve for $15 from a local aquarium store: it’s tied into the 1/2″ drip irrigation system’s mainline so that when the drip system is running and the float valve determines a demand for water, the reservoir receives water until it’s full. (We timed it, it takes about 10 minutes to completely fill the reservoir — much less than a normal deep, drip irrigation program.) During a recent 2-week hot spell (90˚ and 100˚ days), the whole unit performed flawlessly: the system was half-full after 3 days of running without a fill-up. Not too shabby. And the small pumps uses about 20 watts of electricity — that’s about half the power than a 17″ LCD monitor running. We couldn’t find an inexpensive solar cell to power the pump, but we’ll keep looking.

Here’s the original sketches we drew of the water fountain. We knew what we wanted and how we wanted it to look, but we couldn’t find anything in stores that we liked (and could afford). Once we finalized our plan, we went shopping for parts…but we didn’t really know what parts would fit our plans or where to get some of these parts. The game was afoot!

Once we had all the parts we needed, we started testing and the initial assembly. Here’s the picture of the parts, labeled so you know what we used in case you’re interested in building one yourself. The most difficult part to find was the black globe on top: that was specially designed to be used for this purpose since it came with holes pre-drilled to accept a pipe running through it.

We’re quite pleased with the final outcome. It has the look and sound we were looking for: Read more … »

Welcome to our new backyard!

We expect to throw lots of BBQ parties, relax after a hard day’s work, and just general “spending quiet time”. We’ll give you the virtual tour to help explain what you’re seeing. Read more … »

Welcome to our private garden! That cobalt blue planter you saw from the front porch provides the guest of “hints” of what they can expect to see  in the rest of the garden as you walk through…

It’s a nice, quiet place: the fence panels block the view from the street but because there’s access from the front porch, it’s now a welcoming path to greet guests into the back living space.

This is the side garden: We have big plans for this area, but right now is not the best time to plant new vegetables or herbs. Oh, and we don’t know anything about growing edibles, so we’re looking forward to spending time out here just puttering around and ENJOYING the new yard we put in. Can’t wait!

For now, check out the four raised beds… Read more … »

Our goal was to be done by Memorial Day and to throw a celebration BBQ. Secretly we also set that deadline as motivation to make sure we finished and did all the little “clean up” tasks that always seem to linger and never get 100% done.

We’re proud to say that we hit our goal and had a great time with our friends! Ready for a tour?

Read more … »

We turned the 90+˚ heat wave into pure productivity. We started the day off with 6 cubic yards of bark nuggets (but really, who doesn’t?) then proceeded to lay out the plants in their positions: Read more … »

This weekend we completed the landscaping project’s last major construction phase: enclosing the “garden” area next the house, just off the dining room. It looks great! And it feels like we’ve added a new living space to our house. We used to call this our “rose garden” because there were so many roses planted there. Unfortunately, those didn’t survive the remodel, but we plan to plant edibles here: herbs and vegetables. Read more … »

When is a chop saw, a laser level, and lumber considered part of landscaping? I don’t know either, but that’s what we’re working on for this phase of the landscaping project.

Here’s a sneak peek at the next stage of landscaping.

Can you figure out what we’re building? More pix tomorrow…

Read more … »

Tonight Julie and I finished installing the main drip irrigation which will water all of the backyard’s raised beds and ground cover. (Psst! Wanna know the trick to slip drip irrigation tubing together with barbed slip connectors? Read more … »