An Autumn chill has crept into the nights and we have closed up most of the windows in the house to keep the warm daytime air in. The cooler weather is a welcome respite from the heat and humidity that has dogged us for the majority of the summer. On Sunday, after we waved goodbye to the grandparents, a tale for a different day, Shae and I set to work on planting fall perennials and spring bulbs around the house. Frugal Boy moped inside, he had a serious case of the blues and missed Grandma and Grandpa.
Before we rebuilt the porch, it was surrounded by perennial mums. A year and a half of construction had killed off the majority of the plantings surrounding the porch, so we picked up almost 100 bulbs plus 16 quart sized yellow garden mums from Menards. The home improvement store was running an 11% off sale that made the mums an attractive $1.11/ea. Tulip bulbs were 19¢ a piece and giant alliums were 20¢ each.
We spent a couple of hours relocating two dozen hostas from the front of the house to fill in other areas. Then we laid out a two row pattern of hyacinths and tulips for the flower bed in front.
Next Spring we’ll probably need to add in some Summer and Fall color to this flower bed.
Next, we dug a trench around the southern and eastern porch edges to plant giant alliums, tulips, hyacinths, and yellow mums. Mums are a fall perennial so my hope is that as one plant dies off or loses appeal, another will take its place. Experienced gardeners call this layering and know what they are doing. I took a more spray and pray attitude.
With any luck, everything that we planted will come back for years to come.
Desktop tower computers have gone the way of pickup trucks. You can still see them chugging along in work environments, but you probably won’t find many in homes unless they are ancient and collecting dust. Most consumers only need a machine capable of browsing the internet, playing videos, and sending emails and those types of machines can easily be crammed into a touchscreen tablet (a convertible) or a laptop (sedan) or even a smartphone (mini smart car).
The last computer that I built was put together in 2011. I needed something cheap to do eight hours of work on a day. I believe I spent $700 on parts back then and it had served me well enough as a stop gap. Five years of constant use can be tough on a computer, just like it is on a truck. Eventually the physical hardware was just falling apart. I could have thrown parts at it, but computers age like large breed dogs.
I knew this day was coming over a year ago when my first DIY computer build was starting to give me signs of failure, so I had been setting aside money to fund a replacement.
This time around, I splurged, and spent about $1100 on parts. So what does that get you in 2016? (Yes, this should be a funny post to re-read in 5 years).
I salvaged the following parts from my first computer
NVIDIA GTX 960 SSC Graphics Card
2 Monitors
VESA 3-way Monitor Mount
2.1 Speaker Setup
Keyboard
Mouse
1 250 GB SSD
1 320 GB HD
1 500 GB HD
I trashed the old case and sold the old motherboard, CPU, RAM, and heatsink on eBay for $80.
My goal for this build was to make a compact, powerful, and quiet running system. I chose an itx motherboard and case. ITX just describes the size of the case and motherboard.
I liked working with this particular case because it was very flexible. For instance, both hard drive cages could be removed to make extra space.
The motherboard only has two RAM slots, so I won’t be able to add extra RAM later on. I feel that 32 GB or RAM should be enough to get me through the next five years.
The CPU came with a heatsink and fan (below left), but I purchased an aftermarket unit (below right) that does a better job of cooling the hottest part of the computer.
Installing the CPU into the motherboard is a simple affair. It only fits one way.
Then you lock it down with the little metal lever and spread some thermal compound on top of the CPU. The thermal compound is a heat conductive material that helps transfer the heat from the CPU to the heatsink.
Then the heatsink gets installed on top of the CPU.
The two sticks of white RAM get installed onto the motherboard next.
With the CPU, heatsink, and ram installed, it is a good time to install the motherboard in the case.
Next I installed a couple of SSDs on the case side panel. Storage options have really taken off over the past few years offering larger drives with faster speeds. The particular motherboard that I selected even has a port on the backside for a super fast blade style M2 drive.
The power supply and case fans get installed next.
Then once you connect all of the cables, the user manuals make it clear as to what goes where, you can boot the computer up for the first time.
You’ll likely see the BIOS screen.
This is the little operating system that comes with the motherboard. You can configure some of your hardware with these screens and the motherboard manual will have more information on all of the options.
Turning off the computer, I installed the 3 salvaged hard drives and the graphics card.
The BluRay drive also gets installed and then the whole thing gets closed up.
Hook up all the cables in the back and you are ready to install your favorite OS.
My new computer is about 5 times faster than the old one. I did use all 32 GB of RAM when I was working on a promotional video for one of my Apps. Adobe After Effects is a memory hog.
As a strange tangent, I did recently read about one crafty individuals experience creating a ‘new’ computer in the Cloud so he could play the latest and greatest video games without having to build a new physical computer. You can read more about his 60¢/hour Cloud gaming rig here. Forewarning, it is pretty technical jargon heavy!
I wanted to do something a little more memorable than Chinese takeout for Shae’s birthday, so for this long weekend, I packed up the car and we did a little road trip to two of my favorite childhood state parks in Indiana, Turkey Run and Shades. The two state parks are situated in West Central Indiana near the Illinois border. They both operate in the Eastern timezone.
Given that it was a holiday weekend, the park campgrounds were full, but I was able to make a reservation a week ahead of time for a primitive campsite at Rockville Lake Park. RLP is a private campground just 15 minutes south of Turkey Run and about 5 minutes east of the town of Rockville.
We arrived a bit before dinner on Friday night and decided to set up camp before looking for food. Who really wants to be a camp cook after a day of work and driving multiple hours.
I made Frugal Boy help pack the car, so he was excited to see those packed items come out and be used.
It didn’t take long for him to become a camping expert and start doling out advice on how best to secure the tent.
With camp secured, we drove into town and ate at a mom and pop restaurant. I had forgotten to stop at an ATM and only had $28 in cash in my wallet. Shae never carries cash and relies on the A(ndrew)TM whenever she needs it. I was a bit worried when we sat down at the cash only restaurant, but then remembered how cheap food is in rural Indiana. At $7 or $8 for an entree with two sides, we weren’t exactly pressured to eat miserly. Now I know how my middle brother, who spent a decade on the east coast, feels whenever I am bitching about the cost of staples.
The campground did not have an easily accessible supply of potable water so we stopped at a grocery store and bought a few jugs of water along with an evening treat.
A 4 pack of Smores drumstick ice cream cones was cheaper than buying a bundle of wood and having a campfire. You’re not supposed to transport fire wood because of all the critters that can hitch a ride and invade a new ecosystem and you are also not supposed to collect down branches and twigs in the campground because it depletes nutrients from the forest (my ecologist sister can correct me in the comments).
We turned in early that night because we were dog gone tired.
I woke up in the morning to an empty tent. Sometime in the night we acquired a couple of new neighbors. My stomach was growling, so I set to work making breakfast.
We had packed a cooler with half a dozen eggs, cheese, and an assortment of snack food. For car camping, I love the incredibly simple and rock solid single burner propane stove that I bought a decade ago at Wally World.
You have to buy the propane tanks separately, but they seem to last forever. The stove is strong enough to boil a few cups of water, so you can make quite a variety of foods on it. I had to take a picture of this particular propane tank because my parents gave it to us when they cleaned out an outbuilding. I remember these old tanks from my childhood, but they still work!
Shae had taken Frugal Boy down to the lake to go play.
When they came back, breakfast was ready!
I knew that Turkey Run was going to be popular on a Saturday, so we made tracks and got their early. The suspension bridge over Sugar Creek is always a favorite spot. A few kayakers and canoes drifted by below us while we crossed.
Inside, the spirit of adventure tugged at us to move forward.
Frugal Boy found a hiking stick
that he promptly lost, but talked about the rest of the day.
We found a cave (more like an overhang).
We hiked through streams
and climbed up ladders.
By lunch time, we had covered about 5 miles of trails, Frugal Boy was carried for some of that, but we made him walk even when he didn’t want to.
At lunch a bee landed on my hand. Frugal Boy asked what it was and I explained that it was a bee and it could hurt me. If I stayed still it would leave me alone and leave. We watched as it flew off and around and landed on Frugal Boy’s hand. My lesson apparently went in one ear and out the other because he tried to squish it. Maybe he is a first hand experience learner.
After lunch, we did one last trail. It was nearly empty and tucked away behind some cabins, but I thought it was one of the best trails we did that day.
When we left around 2pm all of the parking lots were full and the line of cars waiting to get into the park stretched out onto the highway. Just like the Shedd Aquarium, it pays to be there early.
We took a nap back at camp, and walked around the grounds. It was interesting people watching. Most of them were glampers, or people that were glamping (glamorous camping). We saw many satellite dishes, ginormous RVs, and flat screen tvs.
I made dinner on my trusty single burner camp stove.
I’m still trying to figure out what chain of events happened that made me the de facto camp chef. Some where history went wrong.
Frugal Boy has been doing very well with using the potty, but he still has some things to learn, like how to pee standing up. He got a primer on this camping trip and his only words were Awesome! and Again!
In the morning, we broke down camp quickly and left RLP so we could get to the canoe outfitters in time for their first run of the day. The outfitters was a well oiled machine that was processing hundreds of people. For $22 we had a three hour canoe ride down Sugar Creek. I could only surmise that the only way the outfitter made money was by sheer volume.
We got a different view of the suspension bridge that we crossed the day before.
We took one grainy selfie before we reached the pullout spot, a red covered bridge.
There is something like 48 covered bridges in this part of Indiana. I have never done it, but there is a covered bridge festival if that is something that interests you.
Back at the outfitters, we took one last picture of Frugal Boy and the canoe. He was really excited and wanted to go again.
From there we drove up to Shades State Park. The difference was night and day. Shades didn’t charge an entrance fee, even though it was listed. The parking lot was half empty at noon, compared to overflowing. The trails were sparsely populated. We ate lunch and hiked two more trails before declaring ourselves completely tuckered out. Frugal Boy loved the tricky ravine hiking and slept the entire car ride home.
If you are looking for a fun place to hike in Western Indiana, then I would recommend Shades or Turkey Run. There are some fun trails.
Life has been busy and I haven’t found a lot of time to write, so I will be keeping it short today.
Frugal Boy has slowly been collecting his summer reading bag goodies. Shae and I have been working on his walking endurance. He is so cute when he finishes a walk and is beaming with pride. “I did it!”
I gave him the coupon for a free pineapple-on-a-stick, explained what it was for, and he dutifully held onto it for the half a mile walk to the store.
Success!
On Saturday, we continued on our family tradition of visiting the Shedd aquarium while expecting. The last time Shae and I visited was three years ago.
It was a different experience with a toddler in tow. He wasn’t terribly interested in many of the exhibits because he wanted to play with the information tablets that littered the exhibit halls. I know the administrators meant well, but given the choice of screen time vs viewing exotic fish in the flesh, a small child is probably going to pick the screen. Sometimes an old school paper card is the better option.
Some of the exhibits were hands on, including the starfish and stingrays.
In an attempt to keep the outing frugal, we packed a lunch and had an amazing view of the beluga whales. The whales were quite camera friendly and seemed willing to stop and pose for groups of people.
By the time we left around 1:30, the line was way out the door. You can easily skip the long line by buying your tickets online. It is the same price and you can go straight to the information desk for admission instead of waiting for an hour plus.
The crushing summer heat and humidity are on their way out. We have been relying on three box fans to help keep the house from getting too stuffy this summer, so it was very noticeable when one of them broke.
To be more specific, the little plastic speed dial had fatigued and the teeth inside it that grip the motor post had snapped off. You could twist and twist all day long, but it was no longer turning the post below that connects to the motor.
I could have gone to Wally world and spent $15-20 on a replacement fan, but I figured there was a cheaper fix. Using a little hot glue, I re-attached the dial with post below it.
After letting it ‘cure’ for 30 minutes it was as good as new. Super glue also probably would have worked, but I knew where the hot glue gun was.
