Joy, or “Just Wait?” by Katie Wetherbee is maybe the best thing I have read about parenting and being parents in a long time.
I can only hope that I bring that same joy to new parents when they talk to me in the future. This was the one paragraph that grabbed me and describes parenthood in a nutshell:
Of course, now that my kids are teenagers, I know the truth. Parenting is complicated; it’s wonderful and challenging. Exhausting and gut wrenching. Heart warming and heart breaking.
When we bought our house over a year ago, we knew that the plumbing was going to need an overhaul. The galvanized pipes a both in terrible shape and the wrong size for the house as well. The sheer number of Ts that they used in different areas to add fixtures is alarming.
You get the idea.
One thing I was not expecting was to have no outdoor water. Sadly, due to them not draining the pipes sufficiently, the outdoor cooper pipe burst at an elbow, leaving us with no outdoor water.
It is hard to try and grow grass during a drought with no outdoor water. Ours did not.
So, with two projects in the horizon I ordered the first bit of tools and materials a for this huge and ongoing project. I will be switching everything from galvanized steel and copper to PEX tubing. While I will not be running individual lines to every level, I will probably use a number of smaller manifolds to keep a more constant pressure around the house.
We are fortunate that most of the plumbing is relatively accessible. Besides the second floor bathroom, everything else I can easily get at from the basement with no demo needed. I will also be working in stages, using transition pieces in order to by myself time and keep water flowing to the rest of the house.
The “opening shots” of this battle will be adding a new frost-free sillcock so that we have outdoor water again. Hopefully all of the needed supplies will be here this week and the project will go smoothly.
Otherwise, this could get very interesting very fast.
As my wife can attest to, it is no secret that I am a huge fan of the Nest Learning Thermostat. Duncan Davidson has some pictures of his Nest along with his initial thoughts on the device.
I echo his hope that this is only the beginning of home automation offerings from Nest.
Marco Arment has announced the releases of Instapaper 4.1 for iOS.
It looks gorgeous.
Right now I’m trying out Proxima Nova as my font. All of the new choices are excellent and just make a great app that much better.
If you are not using Instapaper: shame on you.
While I am not expert, I really liked the slides from Justin Searls’s presentation called The Mythical Team Month — obviously a riff off of The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks.
This is my favorite slide:
How often are we just asking the wrong questions.