I, for one, welcome our new German laundry overlords

We replaced our aged washer & dryer yesterday. Our old units were getting less & less effective. The old washer used too much water and left too much of it in the clothes, and the dryer was really slow. The new ones use a fraction of the resources. It's especially amazing how little water gets used. It's also very quiet.

The new ones don't really have interior lights that color. I used a pair of remote flash units inside bounced off of some colored foam.

Splash 2: the coronets

Here are some more water droplet photos. I'm experimenting with some different techniques. I have a few more refinements in mind for the next time.

Splash

I've wanted to try this for a long time. There are a million web pages on how to do it; here's one. There are a few tricks to it. One is to shoot a lot, since most of them will be duds.



I was hoping to get that classic crown splash, but this is about as close as I came. Actually, I had one that was a better splash, but the lighting was terrible.

Inside the Hammond L-100

After more playing and reading, I decided I really needed to get those drawbars working properly. There are numerous resources on the web with a wealth of information on Hammond tonewheel organs; this page describes what I did tonight.

Nearly all of the drawbars were really noisy when moved, and for a handful of them sound would drop out entirely on some settings. As I mentioned yesterday, the fundamental tone for the upper manual was one of these. It worked OK at lower settings, but from about 6 to 8 it would go silent unless I pushed down on the drawbar. Typically that drawbar contributes much of the tone of whatever my right hand is playing, and since my left hand is nearly useless, this was not a good situation.

So it was off to Radio Shack on my lunch hour to get some spray contact cleaner/lubricant, and tonight I opened up the organ once more.



It's a pretty complicated machine, and you can't even see the most complicated part of all, the guts of the tone generator.

Here's the back of the tone generator. Inside are dozens of gears and wheels and coils and magnets.



The spring reverb.



The synchronous motor, which is synchronized to 60 Hz AC power, and the reason these things never go out of tune. Note that it's attached to the tone generator via a spring; apparently the motor pulses a little, which would affect the sound in a bad, 60 Hz kind of way. The spring takes care of that. In some Hammonds, there's a second starter motor on the opposite end of the tone generator. Those models have two power switches that have to be turned on in a particular way; the L-100 just has the one.



Glowing vacuum tube goodness!



Here's the business end of the drawbars. I sprayed a little contact cleaner/lube in each of them, and worked the drawbars a little to clean them out. They work much, much better now. There's no noise or dropouts.



As far as I can tell, everything except the A flat pedal works now, though the mysterious "brilliance" tab doesn't seem to do a thing. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do; add brilliance, I guess. If you heard me play, you'd know that I could use a little brilliance.

A new instrument arrives

On Friday an old Hammond L-100 organ took up residence in our library. Grandma Thvedt saw an ad in the local paper and thought we'd like it. Grandpa and I went to look at it several days ago, and it was in pretty good cosmetic shape, and it functioned well, too, so Grandpa bought it as a gift for the kids. I think it was a pretty good deal at $25. We planned to come back later and wrestle the thing over here, but by Friday I'd thought better of that plan -- it weighs a ton -- and called a local moving company. It cost more to move it than to buy it, but I'm still well pleased with the bargain.

Since the arrival I've had a little time to read up on Hammond tonewheel organs, and to try all of the available settings. It has a few problems, but nothing really serious. The worst is probably the non-working A-flat pedal, but even that's not so bad. The pedals cover only one octave anyway, so they're already pretty limited.

Today I opened it up to do a little maintenance. They're meant to be oiled once a year. On the inside of the back panel, somebody had noted two dates when it had been oiled -- once in 1988, and once in 1992. I don't know for sure, but this organ probably was built some time in the first half of the 1960s. I'm a little curious about the care it's had over the decades.

Some of the drawbars, which are pretty much the whole reason you'd want an old Hammond, need their contacts cleaned, including most especially the one that controls the fundamental tone for the upper manual. I'll be opening it up again in the near future to tackle that job. I'll try to remember to take some pictures of the inside -- it's really something.

We're really having a lot of fun with it. I caught Thomas making some wild sounds on it by turning it off and on while playing. I put the kibosh on that. I read that Keith Emerson used to do the same thing on his L-100, but he also stuck knives between the keys to get sustained notes and some other pretty crazy things.

The new kindergartner

Bear Mountain Lookout

Here's the view from atop Bear Mountain Lookout in the Black Hills. This is a composite of 11 photographs. I used Hugin to stitch them together. Click the photo to see a slightly bigger version.

Kristopher clued me in on Hugin. He has some nice panoramas on his blog. I like this one of the HHH Metrodome.

UPDATE: I replaced the photo with a bigger one. Click on it to see.

Also, some notes on how I made this: I didn't use a tripod. I was fairly careful to keep the horizon straight as I turned and took each photo. I was on manual exposure to avoid differences between the sections of the final result. I was not on manual white balance, though I probably should have been. In this case, it didn't seem to matter much. I took many more photos than would be strictly necessary -- I think about double. That probably made for better results. Another thing I wish I'd done -- take the photos in portrait mode rather than landscape. I could have included more on both the top & bottom of the photo.

I found Hugin very easy to use. I had previously tried version 0.6; the current 0.7 gave me much better results, and is easier to use. It has weird display problem: when selecting control points (this is where you tell the program where the same point, e.g. the tip of a tree, is on two adjacent photos), it would sometimes obscure part of the screen with a partial copy of the photo. I worked around it by just knowing where the hidden "add" button was, and clicking there. I don't know if this is a Mac OS X-specific problem.

I didn't read any of the documentation or look at any examples. I was clicking away ignorantly the whole time, and it still gave me pretty good results. If you look very closely, you can find a spot or two where the stitching doesn't quite match up. I went back and added a few more control points in one case, which made it better but certainly not perfect.

Bottom line: Try it! It's really fun. You might want something faster than an old memory-starved iMac G4, though.

Potting plants for Mother's Day

Stupid flash tricks

I bought an old Nikon SB-26 flash on Ebay, and, serious photographic artist that I am, the first thing I tried was a dumb, gimmicky shot.

Squirrels

Johanna pointed out some squirrels on our deck today. I thought perhaps she would go outside and slay them, so I grabbed the camera. She stayed inside, and the rodents escaped with their lives.

The IKEA way

It was time for a new bed for Ava, so we stopped by the IKEA in Bloomington, MN on our way back from the Twins game last week. Our house would probably be full of their furniture if we lived near one of their stores.

The bed came in three packages, two of which were much too big to fit in the van along with all five of us. We strapped them on the luggage rack, and soon found out the resonant properties of our tie straps at 70 mph. The straps beat the top of the van like a snare drum. While I was adjusting them, it started to rain, which continued most of the way home. Lucky for us, corrugated cardboard isn't as leaky as it looks, and the bed survived the trip.

Today was finally the day to put it together. My Swedish-line-drawing-to-English translation skills are spotty at best, but I'm going to say this bit means "work alone, and you'll live a life of despair; find somebody to help you, and you'll achieve Nirvana."


So I found a helper:

The wordless instructions were really pretty good, and the design, materials, fit & finish were all good, too. The only problem I had was one of the screws:



A little tricky to drive a screw when there's no slot. I encountered that one early on, and set it aside, confident that there would be an extra. Alas, no. I guess you don't get to be one of the world's richest men by giving away extra screws.

It took about 4 1/2 hours. There were a couple of steps that would only have been sensibly attempted by two or more adults, which wasn't an option. Those slowed me down quite a bit. And there are a lot of parts.

The design is a little unusual, with both drawers and a trundle, though I guess it's not really a trundle. It can expand to twice its width. The downside is that there's no storage for the second mattress. I guess you'd just stack them if you had two. For our storage-starved house, that's a good trade-off.


The finished product:

This is April 25?

Would you believe there was a 5k road race this morning, before the rain turned to snow? Well, for me, a 2K. My left calf seized up on me shortly after the start.

Frosting

Ava's preschool Christmas party.

Devil's Tower

Our last full vacation day included a stop at Devil's Tower.




The remnants of a wooden ladder built in the 1890s.


One of many climbers we saw.


Ava was a little tired that day.


Nearby was a large prairie dog colony.

ND, MT, WY, and UT (or, How to Drive and Drive and Drive)

We recently took a long vacation to North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. Most of Joseph's family were there as well. Here are a few photos. As usual, click on them for a bigger version.


The kids' second cousin Levi gave his last performance at the Medora Musical.



Next we drove to Big Sky, MT. On a short walk, I kept yelling back to Thomas to catch up. I guess Ava was tired of hearing it, so she shouted "Mustard up!" Here he is, mustarding up.



Big Sky is a short drive from Yellowstone. We spent two days there. It's the leakiest place on earth.



Johanna wandering near a river.



Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.



Midway Geyser Basin.



Ava cooling off.


Next we drove to Park City, UT, which was the site of several events in the 2002 Winter Olympics. We stayed very near Olympic Park, and spent a day there. They have freestyle aerial and ski jumping, as well as a number of rides.



Emma, Joseph, and Andrew on the zipline.


The most intense ride, by far, was "The Comet" summer bobsled ride. We renamed it "The Vomit Comet" for Tami's post-ride experience.


The Right Stuff?



That's Paul getting ready to push us down the mountain.



Ava had to settle for the alpine slide, since she wasn't over the minimum weight for the zipline.


It was really a terrific vacation. We hope all of the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents had as much fun as we had.

2nd Triennial Bee Photo

The bees have arrived at our crab apple tree again. Who knows if they'll make it back to the hive.

The wind made it tricky to get good shots, but I lucked out and got this one in mid-flight.

George VI

What's more annoying than getting Canadian coins in change? I always think "Well, there's another coin I can't use in the vending machine to buy Cheetos!"

Canadian pennies are OK, though, since U.S. pennies are just as useless, Cheetos-wise.

The other day I glanced at my change, and saw the familiar maple leaves -- wait, this is a Canadian coin. Make that "leafs." It looked a little old, but I didn't bother to look at the date. I flipped it over, and saw not Queen Elizabeth II, but King George VI. I flipped it back over again, and saw it was from 1942.



I took these photos with our brand-new used Nikon D50, my old Nikkor 35-70 2.8D lens in macro mode, and an improvised light tent made of a table lamp and a piece of white paper. Aperture-priority auto exposure at f/11, +1.0 exposure compensation (the backgound, our kitchen table, was much lighter than the coin, and so threw off the exposure a bit). 3 seconds for the obverse; 2.5 seconds for the reverse. ISO 200.

UPDATE: The "KG" on the reverse refers to the designer, George Kruger-Gray. "GEORGIVS VI D:G: REX ET IND:IMP:" on the obverse is for "Georgius VI, Dei Gratia, Rex et Indiae Imperator," or "George VI, by the grace of God, King and Emperor of India."

Princess Johanna Turns Four

A week in Brainerd, MN

[Click on any photo to see a bigger version]

We spent last week on a lake near Brainerd, MN.

The water was very shallow for as far out as we cared to go. Thomas probably would have liked it a little deeper, but he had fun anyway. Here he's sitting on the bottom.

For Ava, on the other hand, it was just perfect. She really loves the water, and is teaching herself to swim.

We often had the beach to ourselves.

Johanna spent a lot of time on the monkey bars.

Mini golf. A hole-in-one for Joseph; two for Tami.

Wearing Daddy's hat.

Around the campfire.