Rants from the Hollow

I like having comprehensive records, so I use Quicken, but I dread the inevitable changes in financial system accounts that will mean phoning a ‘support’ number and begging them for help getting their statement downloaded.

I started using a modem connection to Columbus in 1994 for bill paying and credit card statements. For my Sovran, I mean my NationsBank, I mean my BankofAmerica account, along with my investments, I kept a big stack of paper statements on my desk, which I manually typed into Quicken once or twice a year, or before I did my income tax, whichever happened first. As retirement accounts multiplied, as financial service firms bought each other, as securities spun out subsidiaries, split, renamed, went out of business, etc, at an ever-increasing rate, it became more and more complex to manually type in all that stuff. I knew that someday it would all be electronic, and life would be easy.

A couple years ago, financial service firms started falling all over each other to support Quicken. Living in Europe, with accounts in the USA, paperless online accounts were especially appealing, so I paid my bi-annual tax to Quicken, twice, updating to a version that almost all of my financial service firms promised to support. After a couple weeks of diligent work, virtually my entire portfolio of mutual funds, savings accounts, and credit cards could be automatically downloaded into Quicken.

I was downloading from USAA the hard way, logging into their web site and manually downloading files that would launch the actual Quicken download. I had to do one for the cash accounts, and another for Elizabeth’s IRA. Every time I did it, Quicken patiently suggested that I setup one step download. Wanting to avoid the hassle of setting up a login and PIN that was different from the web site login, I avoided this for 18 months. USAA is a wonderful company–everyone should marry a military brat and get access to their services–but Quicken is Quicken. Even if you know that you are going to be speaking to polite and intelligent people whose native language is almost English (best way to learn a language is in bed, which is why I understand Texan), it is still going to be painful. If Intuit hadn’t yet again forced me to change my Quicken credit card account yet again, I would have limped along with USAA indefinitely.

So Quicken takes their logo away from Travelers, I mean Citi, and gives it to Chase Manhattan, I mean Chemical Bank, I mean JP Morgan Chase, which sends snail mail to the address that I explicitly was NOT using because I had electronic statements. Note from the photo that they take credit for holding my account for all 14 years. 6 weeks later, when I figure this out, I crank up Quicken, and it immediately offers to download an update, which I accept. After getting the update, I initiate a one-step download, resulting in a message from my new Quicken card provider explaining that I need to follow certain steps before I update Quicken. It includes a pointer to a Chase web site that doesn’t exist. Using Google, I find the document from Chase explaining how to convert my credit card account in Quicken. After getting a fatal error half way thru that process, I phone up the Chase phone number provided as part of the Quicken update, which actually rings thru to Citi, who give me Chase’s number.

I can hardly understand the non-native English speaker who asks me if I’ve done everything that I was supposed to do. When I say yes, she transfers me. 10 minutes later, the system hangs up on me. I phone back in, this time they lead me through by the hand. Eventually, I get Quicken connected, although there are no transactions to download, because I just got the card last week.

I try one last time to get our USAA accts to update the new way. It barfed, and after fussing with it for 30 mins, I figured I might as call USAA. When I explain that I’m not Elizabeth, they very politely told me that I needed to get my own login (to see the exact same info). I get that. It still doesn’t work, and I phone back. After we try a couple things, the support person suggests that I try to update a different USAA account, and suddenly, all the funny corrupted messages are gone, and the connection goes through. Even better, it updates savings, checking, and the CDs within Quicken.

So, now I’ve got one-step update to all our US accounts, except Elizabeth’s USAA IRA, which for obscure reasons I still need to download the old fashioned way (Quicken scolds me with “You are already downloading all the accounts for this account number” which isn’t the case at all–I’m downloading all the accounts for MY account number, not Elizabeth’s).

And of course, none of this works with my UK accounts. I’ve got 2 pensions from my first employer here (still using the same name, but I worked for HQ), one of which just moved to a new provider, but my second employer (just acquired for second time) didn’t help with retirement at all. My current employer (just buys other companies) mostly has only 1 pension, but they switched providers and for reasons that I’ve never figured out, I actually have 2 accounts with them–or is it 3. I still enter that stuff manually.

How did we ever get along without PCs? Could I have possibly accomplished all this in less than 110 minutes the old fashioned way?

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You’d think that home repairs would be pretty much the same everywhere, but this turns out not to be the case. There are lots of differences in construction convention, and when you don’t grow up there, home repairs become very mysterious.

Take something simple like drilling holes in a wall. In America, the walls are all made of a sort of solidified cottage cheese, covered with heavy paper. You can drill a hole in a wall with a toothpick. Moving to Austria in ’01, I had this romantic and eventually frustrated notion that I’d be traveling all over the continent, buying gourmet organic hand tools the likes of which you just couldn’t get in America. The few I’ve found, like PB, a Swiss brand of screwdrivers that are made like surgical instruments, are now available in the US, so where’s the prestige value of that? (www.pbtools.us/)

We arrived in Vienna without furniture, a temporary situation that resulted in two marathon 8+ hours in IKEA (I’ve spent hours in business meetings speaking German, but still don’t know how to fluently say “My wife says that your other store has a removable cover for that couch in a darker shade of gray with a heavier texture.” What’s the word for couch? Davendingsbumm?) Suffering from chronic tendinitis (see subject Computers Will Break Your Heart), one of my first metric tool purchases was a rechargeable Bosch drill and a set of screwdriver and hex bits. If you’re going to do a lot of screwing, you gotta have the right tool.

The drill worked well until Elizabeth wanted me to put a hanging on the wall. Our apartment was in a lovely and newly renovated building that, unlike some of its neighbors in the neunzehnten Bezirk, had lived through the war quite nicely. Teutonic speakers like to build things to last, and apparently this one was especially Teutonic. My first attempt to drill a hole with the cheapie twist drill from the DIY store barely put a dent in the wall. So I tried a smaller bit and I pushed harder, which snapped it off. So I got wise, and bought a masonry bit. The walls still could have been made out of diamond, for all the good I could do using my suddenly feeble ni-cad powered hand tool.

After a couple weeks of complaints that I wasn’t fulfilling my husbandly role of drilling holes in walls, I found a used 1-HP Binford hammer drill. 220Volts!! Man, I HAMMERED those walls. First the white dust came out, then the red dust came out, and then your drill bit bottomed out. ZOOM! I quickly ran out of holes to drill, and only used that drill in Austria one more time. I did try it on an IKEA project, but the screw went in one side of the shelf and right back out the other. Swedish pine just doesn’t need as heavy a touch as Austrian cement.

I pretty much kept my hand off the electricals in that apartment, in contrast to my later experiences in England. In order to touch anything electrical in Austria, you need to be a Diplom Ingeneur. Unless you’re from Yugoslavia and paid in cash–then you’re allowed to do anything. We’d never get anything done without a constant string of moonlighting guest workers. In Austria, your apartment doesn’t come with light fixtures–you have to wire them in yourself. From a wife’s point of view, this is a marvelous opportunity to go shopping. From a husband’s point of view, this is a royal pain in the ass. I guess I should consider myself lucky that we didn’t have to install the entire kitchen, which is not uncommon.

We were the first ones to move into the apartment, so there were some repairs and projects already in process under the sponsorship of Frau Magister Doktor Zimm, our landlord. More than once I came home to find Elizabeth and some Yugoslavian guy, neither of whom spoke much German, pointing at the electrical or plumbing diagrams in a Duden Bildwörterbuch (picture dictionary), each with a half-finished bottle of Stiegl beer.

Not only were the ceilings higher than my ladder, but I admit that the electronics of the place were mystifying. The wires weren’t the colors and configuration I was used to in America, all the fixtures where lights were supposed to attach were different than American fittings. Being 220V, you would be twice as dead if you grabbed a bare wire and jumped into the bathtub. Of course, you can’t do that most of Europe, because they even put the light switches outside the bath, just to make it that much harder to electrocute yourself.

In another of the gross contrasts with our upcoming English experience, the electrical panel was of 21st century design. A gleaming, blinking example of Teutonic technical glory, it apparently ran itself, because I never had to touch the thing, which was good, because it had no instructions.

The floor heater in the kitchen had no instructions, either. An extremely minimalist, it only had one button on it, although the temperature could be controlled to a precise degree on a rotating schedule based on a clock and calendar. Elizabeth cracked the code before Frau Magister Doktor did, subsequently waking up every morning to toasty feet. The lack of instructions were probably an advantage in this case.

Unfortunately, the economy didn’t really cooperate, and I called a premature end to our Austrian experiment in Sept 2001, when I found a new job in London. This turned out to be a huge opportunity to learn all sorts of new things about DIY.

When Kirk was 12, we had our first father & son trip to London. We trained into London Waterloo, we tubed up to Tottenham Court, we bought comic books at www.forbiddenplanet.com, we saw the www.suttonhoo.org exhibit in the www.britishmuseum.org, we found a little cafe that served lox & bagels (salmon bagels are still hard to find in London), and then we went to Leicester Square to see The Fellowship of the Ring (www.lordoftherings.net) on the biggest screen in the UK. We had a great time and it was a memorable day. In subsequent years we followed it up with The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, which were stunning on that huge screen, especially the siege of Rohan. It was fitting then, before he heads back to the States for college, Kirk and I had last LOTR London experience, catching the stage musical on its final performance day.

Words can’t really describe how uninspiring the musical is, but let me try. How about ‘Not memorable’? If it seems that I’m able to provide a level of detail contradictory to that assessment, it is only because I was taking notes during the performance. www.lotr.com claims ‘unforgettable music and heartfelt performances,’ but I can promise you that the music is completely forgettable, and we didn’t feel that the performance was heartfelt at all, with most of the cast totally lacking in presence–at least until Galadriel Powerboobs appeared. Parts of her had significant presence, although not as much as I was hoping for after seeing the publicity stills. But let me describe it in order:

The show begins with the Hobbits on stage, merrily capturing fireflies. Not a feature of the book as I remember it, but as a stage setter, it establishes that Hobbits don’t have a big impact on events in Middle Earth. Aging bachelor Hobbit Bilbo Baggins throws his own birthday party, concluding it by slipping on the one ring and dramatically vanishing. A rude way to treat your guests, it neatly serves to alert all the dark forces that the ring is in the Shire and Bilbo has it. Bilbo immediately leaves town.

17 years and a quick prop change later, an incredibly pompous wizard named Gandalf Ben Kenobi tells Bilbo’s bachelor nephew and heir, Frodo, that the ring is key to the fate of the free world, and he really needs to take good care of it, suggesting that the party is over, and it would be a good idea to leave town. Everybody ought to have a maid, but Frodo is served by the stout Sam, who accompanies Frodo into the woods with Merry and Pippin, ending up in a pub. Despite Gandalf’s warnings to keep a low profile, Frodo provides a rousing drinking song for the master of the house, and perversely puts the ring on his finger, instantly making him visible to the dark side.

Sort of like goth panto ponies, the Nazgûl prance around and act menacing. Strider, whose lanky long hair and face paint makes him look more like an American Indian than heir to the throne of Gondor, attempts to limit the damage of their attack, but the elves save the day by flushing the panto horses down the river. Apparently, the director wanted to portray the elves as being fey and otherworldly, but we thought they were just weird. They can’t talk and especially can’t sing without constant and annoying balletic hand jive. Elrond makes pompous pronouncements in stilted English while constantly signing. Fortunately, Sam provides several welcome moments of comedy tonight.

In spite of long-standing racial differences and a depressing history of cultural conflict, an obviously incompatible team is created by adding a dwarf, elf, wizard is provided to keep the Hobbits out of trouble. They immediately get trapped in a snow storm. They immediately decide to avoid the snow by going underground into a haunted dwarf cave. Gimli sings about how nice it would be if we could all live underground, and the fellowship is immediately confront by a huge demon. Gandalf forcefully suggests “you shall not pass!”, the entire house is choked with stage smoke, there’s a large whoomp, and tissue paper Balrog bits rain down on the audience. The first act is over.

The remaining cast members immediately end up in the elven realm of Lothlórien. Tolkien totally avoided sexuality in his novels, an omission rectified by the Lady Galadriel, a well-breasted elf who descends from the ceiling in a sheer skirt with platform pumps, hand-jiving away. Pompous and spastic, she’s a welcome visual treat in bustier and headdress. Accompanied by a couple of sopranos and a chorus of pseudo-mythic types hanging from elastic ropes, it feels almost Wagnerian, with a touch of Cirque De Enya. Frodo gets all googoo eyed over the shapely elf queen, and bares his feelings by kneeling and offering her a ring. Giving them each an anorak, she kicks the fellowship out of Quidam. At this point, the flakiest member of the fellowship, Boring MacStewart, explains to Frodo that he could make better use of the ring, so Frodo puts it on, immediately drawing the attention of all the forces of the dark side. The Jets use crutches to attack the Sharks. Merry and Pippin find their corner of the sky with the Ents who say ni. Megalomaniac Saruman is cast down by Gandalf in a lightstaff duel and his army of crippled Orcs are treed. The best effect in the whole play involves Gollum descending a sheer wall, face down, to confront the reluctant Sam and the increasingly apathetic Frodo. Gollum sings a song about how pathetic it is to have lived in a cave for hundreds of years and still not own any real estate. The second act is over.

Although she’s a hot and immortal elven babe, and he’s a nerdy human pretender to a throne empty for a millennium who has just spent a century or two creeping around the mountains with half a sword and no shower, Arwen is perversely drawn to Strider/Aragorn. Remaining in Rivendell, she sends him her hologram and they sing a sappy duet. Doesn’t it seem like once in every show, there comes a song like this? Totally geeked by her support, and finally in possession of a usable weapon, Aragorn makes a rousing speech, suggesting that the cause is futile, but explaining that from this day to the ending of the world, we shall be remember’d. Aragorn, Gandalf and the remaining band of brothers, accompanied by recruits from Gondor, engage in futile battle with the forces of the dark side. Frodo and Sam have a bad time of it, but eventually reach the crack the Crack of Doom, at which point, Frodo decides that maybe he would like to be the Dark Lord after all. Gollum takes the ring from him, conveniently falling into the pit of doom, thereby saving the free world, but not ending the performance. Its been a long day, and bells are ringing.

I never realized how little actual meat there is in LOTR. The essentials are neatly captured in the now-closed London production: ring found, discussion, quest, near miss, ring destroyed. Kirk did express disappointment that Tom Bombadil didn’t make a personal appearance, given his musical aptitude, which would have added some needed talent. Admittedly, the packed house of this final matinee did provide a standing ovation, but reviews have been mixed, and I have to believe that if the audiences had been consistently enthusiastic, the show would have run for more than 14 months. That said, Cologne is expecting a German-language version for next year, and I think Kirk and I ought to see it.

I don’t want to give the impression that we didn’t have a fun day out. We had some good laughs–several times during the show. We started with dim sum in Chinatown for lunch, followed by a visit to Kirk’s favorite Chinese grocery for snacks. We spent some time wandering around Forbidden Planet, which moved into a significantly bigger space sometime between The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. We wandered around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square, and bought way too much junk at www.cybercandy.co.uk. We walked back to Waterloo, stopping first at Kirk’s favorite Japanese takeout for rice balls and sushi, before catching our train to Ascot. After a 20 minute walk home from the station, we put up our feet and ate our sushi while watching Princess Mononoke.

Kirk and I have had some great days out in London. Besides the LOTR films, we’ve also seen a couple of the Star Wars movies. We’ve stayed overnight a couple of times, once with college friend Rick Martin and his son Richard, who live nearby. We’ve ridden the Routemaster, we’ve gone Christmas shopping, and once after I lost Kirk in www.hamleys.com I had him paged. We’ve had multiple short trips to the British Museum, we’ve spent hours in Forbidden Planet.

I’ll miss him when he goes to school next month.

All activity in Heiser Hollow revolves around our half acre pond. Its a constant source of aesthetic pleasure and entertainment, hosting countless fish and frogs, and playing guesthouse to an ever-changing variety of visitors (turtles, herons, otters, ducks). You can fish in it, you can swim in it, you can float in an inner tube drinking beer, or you can just stand and look at it. However you choose to enjoy it, the pond remains by far the most interesting part of the Hollow. My parents park their motor home next to it, we pitch our tent on the dam, and if we build something permanent, it will be within site and sound of the pond. There are at least two different varieties of frog–bass and tenor.

We built the pond in 1976. After extensive consultation with the state ag agent, and a series of disappointing test holes, it was decided that the only practical place to put a pond would be several hundred yards up the Hollow, towards the small and intermittent water fall. Although it would have resulted in a much larger pond, the lower meadow where we’d been parking a travel trailer just wouldn’t hold water. As it turned out, the smaller site would be an inspired one. Its only looking back at the pictures from 30 years ago that I can truly appreciate the significance of the engineering effort to build our little body of water. The dam stands 40 feet above the original ground level. It was once a big sterile pit of mud, and now it is thousands of gallons of life It took a number of months to fill with water, and it wasn’t ready to be stocked with fish the first year. That first summer, before stocking it, the pond magically became a haven for tiny tadpoles. Once we’d stocked the pond, these became become bluegill fodder.

Nasty clumps of algae were a problem during the first few years, requiring regular treatment with copper sulfate. Cattails grew up around the edges, which were scenic, but not necessarily healthy for a small pond like ours. However, after a few years, the water became increasingly cloudy, eventually reaching a balance that keeps most of the weeds down, so the pond requires very little maintenance. Willows have been a chronic problem along the face of the dam, but we haven’t seen any for several years.

The pond does leak, and dad had somebody bring in some clay once to try to fix it. It didn’t make any difference, and I’ve decided that the leak is a blessing in disguise. Although it can look pretty sad by the end of a dry summer, a large puddle surrounded by a brown layer of dried mud, the pond is deep enough that the fish are not inconvenienced at all. My pet theory is that the fluctuating water level cuts down on weed growth and the bluegill population. Most years, the dry parts of the pond include numerous depressions that had been created by the panfish for nests.

Unlike most ponds, ours is not surrounded by grass–its in the middle of the woods, which gives it a totally different sort of feel. Although the center of the pond is in the bright sun during most of the day, the sides are shaded by trees which come right down to the water. The elm trees, which are always opportunistic where light is involved, seem OK with getting their feet wet.

A few years ago, the overflow pipe finally rusted through, and dad hired someone to repair it. As long as we were performing surgery on the pond, we decided that we might as well enlargen it a bit. Some Amish guy spent 3 days with a large backhoe, scooping 30 years worth of sediment out of the back of the pond, and continuing a couple feet deeper. One side of the rear of the pond has a very steep hill, but our heavy equipment artist was able to stretch the back and eastern edges out farther, carefully arranging some sandstone boulders around the edges. He also dug a 20 foot long sediment pit behind the pond to catch most of the sand.

Unfortunately, the guy who dug up the dam to patch the pipe wasn’t quite so skilled, and he didn’t do a very good job of compacting the clay when he replaced it. Not only do we have a depression on top of the dam, but the base of the dam has sprung a small but obvious leak. It has been dribbling in this new, visible spot for two years now, and the pond is fuller then ever. I assume that it should be repaired, but how do you know the next guy won’t make it worse? You could drain the pond, spend thousands on lining it with clay, rubber, or some newfangled spray stuff–all of which kills the fish and sets you back 5-10 years–and you still might have a leaky pond. I guess lots of healthy natural things leak. All in all, its a beautiful little pond, leaks and all.

Yesterday, I circumnavigated the 55 almost square acres of Heiser Hollow. I like to walk the bounds every year (at least since the neighbor had the southern property line surveyed), but this summer, I was especially curious about the storm damage, which cut two narrow swathes of trees across the entire width of the property.

The storm damage started on the western edge, parallel to the drive, topping a couple of maple trees, one of which the guys from the power company helped us clear last week. A couple hundred feet further south, 3-4 tall white pines were topped, about 30-40′ in the air. A sort of sickly looking cherry tree was down next to them, not topped, but with the root ball pulled out of the ground.

Several trees came down alongside the road leading down into the valley, and they’ll have to be chainsawed if we want to use the road any time soon. One tree was down in the valley, and then there was no damage for several hundred feet. Along the path we call the Ridge Trail, which parallels the eastern property line, a group of 5 trees were all snapped off at about 40 feet in the air. This is the strangest storm damage I’ve ever seen at the Hollow. It looks like a rotary blade descended from the sky, chopped off some trees, and then retracted.

A couple hundred yards to the north, the damage was very different, but more extensive. Instead of topping the trees, it toppled them. The combination of wet soil and high winds resulted in at least a dozen trees pulling up roots and falling over. Mostly leaving the useless aspen and poplar untouched, the freak wind concentrated on valuable hardwoods

In this picture, Elizabeth is standing next to a 20″ cherry tree which has fallen on the root ball of a 2nd cherry, which itself is lying on top of the roots of a 3rd tree. In addition to the cherries, at least one ash came down, which is especially sad given that ash in other parts of the state are struggling with borer.

There are probably enough timber grade trees down to make it worth having a small lumber operator coming in and harvesting them.

The map below shows a simplified view of the damaged (red) and downed (yellow) trees. It looks very much like two separate wind cells, several hundred feet apart, cut parallel paths. We heard that a funnel cloud was sighted about a mile to the east.

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For someone who thinks that suburban lawns are a silly and wastefully affectation, I take far too much pleasure in nuking brush with a tractor. It comes down to this: as far as woods are concerned, I like that freshly grazed look. Lacking cows, goats, horses, or sheep, the only remaining choice is diesel.

When we first bought Heiser Hollow in ’71, it hadn’t been lived in for a couple decades, and most of the flat parts were jungle like. We could get part way up the drive, but beyond that, it was a wall of weeds. My folks bought a scythe at the hardware store in Killbuck (another victim of Walmart), and started at it. They actually made quite a bit of progress, getting as far as the woods, where we camped in pup tents the first time we stayed overnight.

Then my dad either got smart, or totally frustrated, hiring a young farmer up the valley to come in with a vintage Fordson and a bush hog. Bush hog is a generic name for a heavy-duty mower that attaches to a 3-point hitch, allowing you to power it, and raise & lower it. It doesn’t mow lawn flat–for that you need an attachment that sits under the center of the tractor. What it does is mow hard, chopping up grass, weeds, saplings, ant hills, and anything else that gets in its way. Tractors are heavy and have sturdy wheels that crunch up bushes and sticks. Small trees fall prey to the loader bucket, or the chassis, and get chopped up by the bush hog. Logs and even downed trees can often be pushed aside with the front end loader.

Eventually, Dad bought his own tractor, a Kubota. It’s only 15 HP or so, but with 4 wheel drive, a 3-point hitch pulling a bush hog, and a front end loader, its amazing how much work can be done on a gallon of diesel oil. One pass down a trail makes it grandmother-friendly, whacking down all the weeds, chopping up loose sticks, and even flattening some of the humps in the ground. There are a lot of places here you just wouldn’t go if Dad or I hadn’t bush hogged it first. I especially enjoy mowing down multiflora rose, an especially annoying introduced species.

Kubotas are pretty handy, but they can’t do everything. Tractors tend to be tippy, so they don’t work laterally on hills. Ours has the front wheels mounted as far out as possible, and the back wheels were mounted in reverse, increasing the wheel base, but it still has a relatively high center of gravity, and you need to be careful to avoid an accident. Big stumps are a problem, and need to be avoided.

Big trees are down on trails in several places, and only a bulldozer would be able to flatten out those root balls and fill in the holes. Or time. If you wait long enough, whatever falls on the trail will decay to the point where the Kubota can break it up, push it out of the way, chop it up, or drive over it. I was able to get to the upper meadow last year for the first time since the ice storm 3-4 years ago, crunching through a tree that was downed over the trail. The trail makes a switchback and begins a steep ascent up to the end of the trail, which was the worst possible spot for a large tree to fall, filling the trail with a trunk too big to drive over, a large ball of dirt and root, and a Kubota-eating hole. Last year, I was very carefully able to detour by taking an even steeper route straight up, but this week, it was too wet, and I couldn’t get enough traction.

Today: singing milkweed beetles, scarlet tananger, ruby throated hummingbird