BurnsFamily Blog

We are a little late posting these photos, but we couldn’t be happier. Back in rainy January we decided to do a little cleanup in the garage until it was dry enough to work on the yard. For good or bad, the rainy weather didn’t last long and the garage project lingered.

Our plan was a quick insulate and drywall project. This would help with appearance and temperature management. Things were going pretty quickly until we got to the mudding and taping. That really slowed us down. But once the yard work was done, we put our full concentration on the garage. We finished the drywall and then hopeful that the epoxy will make the floors a little easier to keep clean. It was easy to apply, although we had to get up at 5 in the morning to do it. Of course the week we wanted to finish the garage we were in the middle of a heatwave and the paint sets up very quickly in high heat. At 5 in the morning we were at 72* so we had an hour and a half to mix and apply the epoxy. We finished in just about an hour.

Next up was putting everything back in the room. Julie got out the graph paper and drew up the room and each of the items that needed to go into the garage. With a little bit of time and playing around we were able to find room for all the tools and bikes and stuff and still have a little bit of room for Bill’s car.

We still have one picture to take, the one with Bill’s car in the garage, but it looks so nice and clean right now.

L.A. had a 5.4 (moderate) earthquake around Noon today. To folks who aren’t familiar with earthquakes, you can certainly feel one of those but modern-built structures typically are unaffected. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 4.0 is 1/10th the energy of a 5.0, for example. The USGS says that the Bay Area is overdue for a “big one” (meaning, something around a 7.6 — so ~100x more powerful than the one felt in L.A. today). The Bay Area had a 5.9 on Halloween 2007. There are 800 5.0-5.9 EQs every year, according to the USGS.

FEMA advises that in a crisis you should plan to be on your own for at least 3 full days. When your cellphone, landline, and internet access goes down, how will you communicate? Read more … »

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 … »