BurnsFamily Blog

In a dryer?!? No, silly! (Yeah, that’s what I thought too…) Read more … »

If you read our post on grilled pizza, you know we like to put fresh chopped basil on our pizzas. The problem has been buying basil that lasts long enough in the fridge to be useful for more than one pizza at a time. When we created the landscaping design, one of the goals was to plan our own vegetables and herbs: “edibles”. (Historical: Here’s the build-out stage and the barren, but finalized edibles garden.)

Because we finished the edibles garden in the middle of the hot, dry  season the promise of home-grown veges and fruits will have to wait until next year.

So we buy “live” basil plants at the supper market, we try to grow them indoors, and within 2 weeks they start to shrivel up, attract bugs, then die. Read more … »

We’ll have to find a picture of what the inside of the pipes looked like. The incoming water supply lines were the original pipes…70 years old. Galvanized steel? Iron? Over time, that type of pipe collects sediment inside that adheres to the inner walls. Over time, the pipe becomes restricted. In our case, there was less than a pencil’s thickness for water to flow through it. Read more … »

Bill and his friend Dave decided to learn to surf. I mean, we only live 30 minutes or so from the Pacific Ocean, and ALL of the cool kids are doin’ it! Besides…how hard can it be?!?

It turns out, it’s not really that hard. But I think I had a few mitigating factors at play here…I do a fair amount of “core strengthening” exercises regularly, I also have very good balance, am in fairly decent shape, and can snowboard.

It turns out that surfing is very similar to snowboarding. But there a lot of people who surf but don’t snowboard (and vice verse). The notion of standing sideways on something that’s moving forward, and tipping your center of granvity side-to-side to advuse its course does take a little getting used to.

That said, I was able to stand up and “ride” a wave into shore a few times. The waves were fairly mild that day, so I don’t think I should declare myself a “surfer” yet. Read more … »

We were lucky enough to have the whole family get together and “ride the rapids” this year. Awesomely good time. Here’s a few pictures, although I forgot to capture the “Boat Eating Log” and “Eddy Currents of Doom”. Surprisingly, there were no capsizings this year.

Pictures after the jump: Read more … »

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.

We consciously picked plants and trees that would were “native” to California climates so that they would thrive with little-to-no fussing. We also picked specimens that would attract birds, bees, and butterflies. Read more … »

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 … »

Yum…Nothing better than handmade, grilled pizza.  We make the simplistic “margarita pizza” which is nothing more than fresh mozzerlla cheese, a little bit of sauce, and balsamic-marinated tomatoes. grill for 10 minutes on super-massive-blasting-hot, then sprinkle on fresh chopped basil and kosher salt. 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 … »