pure cuteness

Wow, these are the cutest photos of our kids and make me laugh every time I see them. Why did we not enjoy them more when our kids were this cute?

why do we do it to ourselves?

Somehow lack of sleep changes a person. I am normally pretty nice, or so I think so, but let me get a terrible night sleep or be sick and I somehow morph into someone else. I guess that shows what I am really made of. Sad but true.

Last night my daughter invited five other girls over for a "sleep over" birthday party. Sounds pretty harmless since girls are not as prone to trouble like we have seen boys get into in the past. We have had boy "sleep over" parties in the past, one of which ended with police ringing the doorbell and upon answering the door I found several police cars in my driveway. That event ended the boy "sleep overs". Plus in our previous house in Fuquay Varina, the game room/boy "sleep over" room had an adjacent wall to our master bedroom. Was that ever a bad design for a house! We just could not block out their talking, which frequently carried on into the wee hours of the night. It has been several years since we have had a big "sleep over" party as I think we forgot how little sleep we got in the last ones.

Nothing bad happened at all - just girls coming into the house about every hour from 9pm until 7am this morning. You know, when I was a youngster I pulled an "all nighter" only a hand full of times. I felt so tired the next day that it was not pleasant for me. We took the girls to a movie at 4pm and while they were in the movie theater we went out to eat with our oldest son at Dickey's BBQ Pit, which really reminds us of the Texas style BBQ we love. When we picked them up at 6pm, they were really wound up, so to calm them down we took them to Starbucks Coffee. That was probably a bad idea, but hey you only turn 13 once and we wanted to make the evening special for the last such event in our family. After the ceremonial cake with 13 candles, the present opening and everyone adorned in pirate scarfs, they ran out to play a dance party game in the sound proof shed. The only time we heard them was when the sliding glass door was closed as little girls came in and out all night long. What ever happened to the good old come to my party with birthday presents, eat some cake and then leave?

One more thought for the day...

I remember when our daughter was born 13 years ago, but just barely. In those good old days I would often get to work around 4am and then then leave early to be with the family. One time I got bronchitis from a viral infection and not listening to my body's cry for rest that quickly became pneumonia. The doctor told me it was walking pneumonia, but I could barely walk and for most days hardly get out of bed. The timing was horrible as my wife was pregnant with our daughter. Then came the due date and I was wondering how I would make it to hospital. My wife drove me to the hospital! Now that was sad. The good news was that the birthing room had a very nice recliner in it. I went right to it and put my feet up and promptly fell asleep. The gynecologist woke me up and told me to stand up and come over to see my daughter being born. It turns out with pneumonia that only the first couple of weeks are cause for alarm on being contagious, so that was not my concern. I just did not have the energy to get out of the chair. Somehow I pulled myself up and out of the comfortable chair and made my wife and the doctor happy! Oh the good old days!

good vs. mediocre

So by now you know I have teenagers, and with such an age comes unlimited curiosity. Combine that with the internet which never sleeps and it is just not a good thing. If we would let them, our kids would stay on the internet all night long either surfing the web or playing games with the internet connected XBox 360. Just to help them get to sleep, I had to limit their access to the internet. Plus is helps me get to sleep instead of hearing them all night long! So the big question is now do I limit the time they spend on the web?


I recently upgraded to a new LinkSys router as I saw they advertised a new access restriction feature that I did not have on my previous router. It does indeed let me limit the time, but it has an interesting bug in their traditional approach to user interface design and implementation. What I would really like to do is force the kids to go to get off the internet at 10pm every evening since they have to get up around 6:30am each morning to get to school on time. Easy enough as all I have to do is set the time from 10pm at night until 6am the next morning. I am sorry, you cannot do that since the UI has a check that 10pm is not before 6am. Well it turns out that it is if you are a human, but a non-human programmer decided to start the clock at midnight! My only work around is to start at midnight and go until 6am. Too bad, such an easy concept, but someone got a little too smart for me.

I actually called Time Warner as I thought maybe they would have a way to help me out. No such luck on that one. We had a DVR from Time Warner when we lived in San Antonio and it had all kinds of nice security and access restrictions built in, but the problem with that is it only affected the single connection through the DVR. We had other TVs in the house and the DVR settings had no affect on those TV sets.


When my wonderful Apple PowerBook died I did not have the funds to buy a new Apple model, so I temporarily bought an Acer laptop. It was the cheapest laptop I could find at the time and was on sale and I also had a discount that covered sales tax. I had heard bad things about Microsoft Vista and this was my first experience with using it. For the first several months I would get 2-5 daily patches to Vista updated on the laptop. In the past couple of months that has trailed off considerably. One of the nicest things about Vista is the built-in Parental Controls. It lets me do all kinds of wonderful things like define a web filter to allow/block websites and downloads, define time limits, control games allowed by rating and content, and allow/block programs from being used. I find a completely different UI under the Time Limits page. I just highlight the hours that I want to block and click OK and I am done. That sure is easy as it should be. What is sad about it is that this same interface could easily be done on a web page, which is what LinkSys uses for their control page pages.

Yet another example of how design works when done well and the effort is made up front to understand the intended audience.

Do you want to be a teenager?

Like The Last of the Mohicans or Custard's Last Stand or The Last Samurai, there comes a time for the final big event. Today is just such a day in our family as the youngest child is becoming a teenager. Of course there will be another big day in the not so distance future when we no longer have any teenagers, but we have to wait seven more years for that event. I am trying to remember this same day for each of our children, when they crossed the teenager line, but it is difficult to do so. Not different in a sentimental way, but a huge event like this seems big at the time but then later on it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things or the current worries of the day. I am sure it was a big deal for me when I turned 13; however, how it seems like the day never existed. What I do remember of being a teenager causes me to never want to be one again!

However, today we will live in the moment and enjoy the time with our daughter and her six young friends. That is why we will quickly shuffle them into the Acoustic Shed to let them go wild and be noisy while we get a good night's sleep. Oh the benefits of the multiple purpose sound proof shed are all becoming clear now.

Akbar to 81

This was an interesting weekend as this time of year we celebrate the combined birthdays of my wife's father and my daughter, since their birthdays are only a couple of days apart. Before leaving for Wilmington, we started the weekend off by seeing the newest Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar. Indian movies are so fascinating to me as they always seem to have an interesting point or are pure entertainment without bad language or sexual content. This was a movie of epic proportions - I am so thankful to have a wife who enjoys going with me as that makes it even more enjoyable.

I don't know what happened on the drive down to the beach city of Wilmington as I slept almost all of the way. Happily I was not driving! Once we arrived, my daughter was treated like royalty as usual. I think that is why she wants to stay longer when it is time to return. We had a few laughs over presents and times of reminiscing of life in South Korea for the Dietrick family. Then the subject of computers came up of which I quickly become the family expert. In the morning I tried to fix my wife's father's five year old laptop.

He was complaining about how slow it was and how he had no disk space left. I first looked at his Recycle Bin and noticed it was almost 1 GB. When I looked at the contents I saw it had never been empty since 2002 when he bought it. I am still amazed at how unintuitive computers can be to someone's who career is not working with them. After running Disk Cleanup, and cleaning up the trash can, the space was still not coming back. I then found a utility called Folder Size, and it pointed me right to the problem of 6 GB of temporary files on main windows folder. Then I found out that with all of the programs installed recently the disk was badly fragmented. When I checked Windows Task Manager, I found out that 400 MB of memory was allocated but only 204 MB of memory was installed. We went out trying to find matching memory and after visiting every store we could find we had nothing to show for it. In the last store the man was so helpful that he said we could substitute other memory for the one I was looking for, but they were out. We went back to the next to last store that we had visited and found another person to help us. He located memory we needed and once back home it actually worked! In the end, he had a computer with 7 GB more free and 640 MB of memory and a laptop he could actually use! This was my birthday present for him and it was greatly appreciated by the newly crowned 81 year old patriarch of the family.

Acoustic Music Shed

I really cannot come up with a name that describes what we built behind our house as I was speaking about in the last post. Let me explain the steps we followed as we built the shed mostly on weekends over a span of months (looking back I wish I had photos for each step):

1. Since we wanted an shed larger than 12' x 12' with a concrete foundation, we needed a $65 permit from the Town of Fuquay Varina. Filing the paper and getting the permit took about a month.


2. My middle son, who wanted to do all of the research on the internet found many sites that explained what were the best techniques (I do not have links since he was the foreman and I was the worker bee).


3. We found plans on the internet that explained how to build a 20' x 12' shed so we paid $45 to get the complete plans from Just Sheds Inc. This same site had free general instructions on building a shed, which really helped since we had no idea what we were doing. We had to slightly modify the plans as my son wanted to make the inside dimensions 19' x 14'!


4. The location we choose in our backyard had a wooden playset that had to be dismantled and a couple of mostly dead branches that needed to be trimmed. The wood posts for the playset were buried about 3 feet deep, encased in cement, so that was a fun beginning.


5. We had to dig out an area for the foundation as the ground was mostly level, but we had to dig down one foot for the concrete slab. Placing the wooden 2'x12'x14' edges and getting the level took us days and exactly at right angles was a chore.


6. Our neighbor drives a dump truck, so I asked him to get me a complete load of small gravel one evening on his way home. This filled the bottom of the dirt area we had dug out.


7. After leveling the gravel, we put think black plastic on top and then laid re-bar on top in a specific pattern.


8. I called the local cement company and they brought out a full dump truck of super high density concrete. When he arrove, we found out that it was our responsibility to pour it from the truck and to spread it and smooth it. Normally no big deal, but with high density concrete, this was really hard. The driver was so helpful in every way and without him we would have wasted $800 we spent on this part of the shed. The finished surface was not perfect, but good enough for me as it was level at least. This was the first compromise and my son got used to it eventually but he did not like the imperfections. Before the concrete dried you have to put in 1' long anchor bolts, on which the shed frame rests and is attached to the foundation. This is important since hurricanes come through this area occasionally.


9. Once the concrete dried and cured, we had to frame the shed. Looks easy when you watch workers building new homes. Guess what? They are professionals with tons of practical experience. Just trimming and placing the salt treated 2'x8'x14' attached to the anchor bolts took us several weekends. Once we had them close enough for my foreman son, although far from perfectly level and trim, we moved onto the actual framing of the sides and roof.


10. I think my son enjoyed the framing the most. Since we wanted extra thick walls we could not follow normal plans. We alternated 2'x4' studs offset from each other, one on the outside wall and one on the inside wall on top of the 2'x8' on the floor attached to the anchor bolts and separated from each other stud by one foot.


11. We hand notched the rafters and attaching them to the ridge pole was a challenge. Since most lumber comes in 14' lengths and our shed was 21' feet long that provided just the confusion we needed as newbees to the construction trade. We finally got them up somehow, but I mostly had to do it on my own since my son got so fed up with our imperfections. The whole framing process took us weeks to complete.


12. The roof and side sheeting was fairly easy and once all of the sheeting was in place we had a very sturdy shed. It was about this time that I really showed how little I understood. I called the inspector to asked him a question and found out that I was supposed to call him at each stage and get him to inspect that stage before we moved on. I had skipped about five inspections by accident. When the inspector showed up at house many days later I begged for forgiveness. Once he saw the shed and I told him what we were doing he was fine and approved all of the missing inspections. Just one of many shed miracles we witnessed during the many months of building!


13. With the walls all in place, the electrical lines had to be run all over the shed before we put up the insulation. This was such an easy job, my son did not want to be bothered with it and did more research on the best acoustical insulation.


14. The insulation was critical to our success in making the shed sound proof. We got special rock wool, which the most nasty thing I have used. I was covered head to toe with head covering and thick gloves with goggles protecting my eyes. Still that stuff got in my skin and itched like crazy. As we were weaving the rock wool insulation between the wall studs, you could hear the sound proofing working as we went along. In the ceiling we put the thickest fiberglass insulation we could find. I was so happy when the insulation was done as that was a dirty job.


15. A friend suggested an electrician for me to use as we needed a line run from the house to the shed. It could not just be an extension cord on the lawn! We needed real power in the shed. Another friend rented a ditch witch to dig an 18" deep trench from the house to the shed. I looked at the plans the builder gave me who built our house and decided where the lay the electric line. Turns out the builder had not followed the plans very well and the ditch witch ran right into our sewer line! Apparently this is just as bad as it gets as wet mud flying all over you is bad but when it is sewage, now that is not fun. We started all over and re-routed the new trench way around my original plans and this time we were fine.


16. It took the electrician about three major trips to the house to finish the electrical lines before we had lights and power at the shed. Since the shed is about 65' from our house, the normal activity was running a couple of extensions from the back porch to the shed every time we needed power for our circular saw or drill or lights.


17. The next exciting event was the drywall. We had to have the thickness drywall made at 5/8", which is called fireproof drywall. Then I learned from my foreman son that we had to make two layers all around the walls and ceiling! he made me feel better when he told me "real" music studios use four layers. The walls were straight forward except you have to stagger the drywall so none of the seams overlap. The ceiling was a really big challenge. I rented a dry wall lift from Home Depot to lift up this very heavy fireproof drywall to the ceiling. Since we used normal fiberglass insulation, my foreman son told me the secret to acoustic ceiling are that they are suspended. We bought metal tracks and attached them to the ceiling joists and then had to use special metal screws to attach the drywall to the tracks without going all of the way into the wooden joists.


18. Adding shingles to the roof was the part I had been dreading the most. The roof had a good 45 degree angle to it and if you stand inside the attic, there was about 6 feet of clearance, so the roof was steep. I did not buy enough singles, nor did I know what I was doing so I had to go back three times for more shingles. The roof does not look horrible, but I will always look at it and wonder what I was thinking when I was putting them on.


19. Somehow I had to find matching siding so the shed looked like it belonged to the house, so I found the local distributor of the siding we had on our house. They told me they do not sell to home owners and I would have to find an installer. They gave me several names and only one called me back. I explained to him that was son and I were building a music shed. He told me he would help me for free! He came by the house and met my son and then told me what I needed and bought it for me (I paid him for all of the material at least). Most of the family came out for the lessons on how to put up siding. He left and we began the process. We had the walls covered and looking pretty good. The siding expert returned to help bend the metal to cover the soffits and the trim around the edge below the roof. I would guess he spent over ten hours helping me and it was the most special miracle of the all.


20. There are no windows in the shed, as those are the worst thing you can use if you are trying to sound proof a room. And since we used such high grade insulation, the shed was liked a sealed can of tuna. We had to find a way to pump air into the shed all of the time. There is just such a thing called an Air Recovery Ventilator, which are normally used in doctor and dentist offices to keep the air clean and fresh. We bought the smallest model we could find. For the vents into the ceiling we built what I call coffins in the attic. They are really air dampers, which are boxes lined with special thick board insulation with baffles in them.


21. A good friend of mine installs A/C unit mostly for commercial uses, but he volunteered to help me install the mini-split in the shed. This is a special A/C unit that mounts on the wall at head level and the tubes are inside the wall and go out to to a fan unit at the back of the shed on the outside. This is to prevent sound house from leaving the shed. Or in our case very loud drums and guitar amplifiers!


22. Besides the paint and berber carpet and footer moulding to cover up our imprefections, the final task was a set of doors. What is interesting about that it the fact we only have one door to get into the shed! We have a solid core door on the outside and a solid wood door on the inside, so we have double doors. This took many weekends to figure this out and to get it to work. Even now the only place you hear noise coming from the shed when band practice is in session is from the doors. The oddest thing I found out is that there is special acoustical chaulk. There was nothing routine or normal about our shed building process.

It has been almost a year now since we have completed the shed and I am exhausted from typing about it. For my foreman son, I think it was the process that was important and we spent many father-son hours together on our creation. His older brother uses the Acoustic Music Shed all of the time for band practice as well as all night games and movie watching. The shed just cannot be cleanly named as it has so many purposes, but the best part is that it is sound proof!

The shed that is not a shed

Our boys are all musically inclined. They got it honestly as I learned how to play guitar and trumpet when I was in the 5th grade. I kept up with the trumpet through college as I really enjoyed the challenge. My wife knew how to play the guitar when I met her and our first Christmas together I bought her a Yamaha guitar. We have taken that 25 year old guitar all over the planet with us and now our middle son plays it constantly in his room sitting at the computer.

In our first house in Fuquay Varina, we cleaned up the shed and made it a music room. The problem was it was acoustically bad and did not dampen the sound at all, especially with drums. You know you cannot turn down the volume on a standard drum set? With the shed door and windows closed and the same in the house, we could hear them playing like they were in the house. When we moved to San Antonio, we took the '72 Rogers drum set with us and once there my son sold it to buy a guitar. The older boys quickly found someone with a huge drum set, who of course brought it to our house. They put it in the garage, but it might as well have been in the house as it was louder than our neighbors nitrous oxide induced racing Corvette.

With this history laid out, you can see why after 6 years of noise, we decided to take matters into our hands when we moved into our current house in Fuquay Varina. My Yamaha guitar playing son decided he would build a music room in a shed behind the house. A shed is not a very descriptive word for the final product. A shed is a small outdoor covering for tools and lawnmowers. Words cannot completely describe what we have built, so photos will enhance this experience for you.

We moved into our house in the early summer. By the fall after school started, my son was ready to go. I had to get a building permit from Town of Fuquay Varina, because of the size of the Acoustic Shed. Anything over 12' x 12' requires a permit and a concrete slab. Plus to get electrical work done you have to have a permit. How can you crank up the guitar amps without electricity? Got to have that. My son found shed plans on the internet that he modified to be acoustically sound using on-line bulletin boards that describe in detail how people accomplished similar projects. That is when I learned how serious an undertaking I had signed up for.