A good time was had by all...

This weekend we had very nearly my whole family over to visit.   My sister is still in Panama, but otherwise, my parents and all my brothers came in on Friday and got to stay through Sunday afternoon.

We had massive amounts of food and celebration; fortunately then we were able to send some of the leftovers home with them, otherwise we’d be eating them for a week and there’d still be some to go bad.   There is still a bit of birthday cake hanging around, though…  I’m looking forward to another piece of that carrot cake - yum yum.

Things are staying busy with the family these days - Mom and Dad are busy as usual; Ryan is waiting to hear on his acceptance to Georgetown grad school, Andrew got accepted to George Fox University and will be headed there in the fall…  and not leaving Aaron out: last week he bought a b-e-a-utiful Taylor acoustic guitar.  We had to keep a towel around just to wipe up all the drool.  :-)

I’ll post some pictures once I get them off of the camera.

Party Time

This weekend my parents and brothers will all be coming to visit. (My sister is in Panama doing missions stuff.) The occasion: the first of what will, God willing, be a long lifetime of birthday convergences: Addison has her first birthday on the 13th, and then I celebrate the big three-oh on the 14th. I’m sure we’ll eat far too much food, stay up too late talking, tell lots of bad jokes, and play innumerable rounds of Dutch Blitz or some other equally competitive game.

Good times will be had by all. Best wishes to everyone who reads this and their weekends!

In Praise of Good Customer Service

I’ve complained enough about bad customer service here on the blog (see: the OfficeMax debacle of a couple years ago) that I want to make sure I say something about really good service when it happens.

When I was in DC last week, I hit a shopping mall one night to wander around and pick up something for the girls. While I was in there, I ran across Paradise Pens, a neat little store specializing in, well, pens. They had everything from basic ballpoint to pens costing nearly $2000. I wandered in and struck up a conversation with a very friendly store manager. I mentioned an interest in fountain pens (I’ve often been curious, but never been to a store that sold them), and she took 20 minutes and showed me some different pens, let me try them out, answered my questions. Excellent service. I ended up buying a low-end fountain pen, cost about $40.

When I got back to the hotel and opened the pen, I found one issue: the pen cap, which is supposed to screw onto the pen body, was just a bit oversized. The cap wouldn’t screw on, it just slipped off. Well, that isn’t so good. I used a little bit of tape I had along to shim out the screw so it would hold, but that wasn’t a good long-term solution. And I didn’t have time to get back to the mall to return it.

Finally earlier this week I sent an email to the info address on the Paradise Pen website. After a couple of days I had no response, so I forwarded the email again. Who knows, maybe they are bad at checking email. Finally this afternoon I just decided to call the toll-free number they offered. So far, the service hadn’t been so good, huh?

I called the number, dialed the extension, and the phone was answered by a real person. She said her name was Carrie. I said “hi, my name is Chris Hubbs, and I…” and she started to tell me my story, that I live in Iowa and bought a pen in DC and the cap was too big. I was stunned. “So you got my email, I guess.” Yes, she said, she’d gotten both of them, and was surprised that the store hadn’t gotten back to me yet. I went and checked my email, and found that a message had just arrived from the store. The manager of the DC store was letting me know that they were sending me a new pen and a postage-paid envelope to return the faulty one.

I told Carrie that I had received the email, and that the solution was fine with me. She gave me her name, phone number, and extension, and told me in no uncertain terms that if anything wasn’t to my satisfaction, to call her directly. “I’m the one with the big stick,” she said. Wow, do I appreciate that attitude. I am looking forward to receiving my new pen and getting a chance to really use it. And I will now recommend Paradise Pens to anyone interested in buying a good pen.

Thoughts on Washington DC

Last week I traveled for business to Washington, DC. While my original plans left me little time for sight-seeing, I still managed to take a long evening walk and see the memorials along the National Mall. Then old man winter intervened and pushed my flights around, giving me an unexpected whole day to visit museums. Now, I could give you a step-by-step itinerary of my trip, but it would likely bore you to death. (Now I’ve set myself up to have to write something non-boring. Uh oh.) What I’d rather talk about, though, is the overall experience I had.

This was my first visit to Washington. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been a history and government junkie, so I was excited to get to see some of the places for real that I’d only seen in pictures. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s even more impressive to be there and see them. First, because many of the buildings are massive in a way that a photograph just can’t communicate. (The Supreme Court? Unbelievably immense.) But second, because all the buildings are so close together. You come up from the Metro, and bam! there’s the Library of Congress. Walk past it and bam! there’s the Supreme Court. Then turn the corner and whammo! the Capitol building. And on and on. Amazing.

As I started my journey down the Mall, I felt a little bit sheepish playing tourist; I seemed to be the only tourist around, everyone else was just finishing up work for the day. Still, I had fun snapping pictures and marveling at the architecture. Halfway down the Mall you reach the Washington Monument. Some 500+ feet tall, it’s a massive obelisk that dominates the skyline. I took a few pictures to try to capture the sunset off in the west and the ring of flags that surrounds the monument. I’m sure I didn’t really capture it, though - it’s just too much to take in with a camera lens. (At least, too much for me and my camera lens.) At the Washington Monument I finally saw a few other tourists, all doing the same as me, gazing up at this massive two-tone tower.

I continued my trek westerly across the Mall. From the Washington Monument you have a long walk past the reflecting pool until you reach the Lincoln Memorial. Coming from the east like I did, it isn’t immediately apparent what exactly the reflecting pool reflects. The pool is long, fairly wide, a few feet deep, and made semi-famous as the pool that Forrest Gump wades into at the end of the movie. (I heard two separate tourists that I passed on the walk mention this fact, so it must have been more memorable to them than it was to me.) It was also drained for the winter; there was just a little bit of water in the center of the pool where the snowmelt had run. It was anything but impressive as I walked by it in the winter dusk, but it made a comfortable walking path as I headed toward Lincoln.

The guidebooks all describe the Lincoln Memorial as the most popular of the memorials on the Mall. This was evidenced to me as I walked toward it that night - the frequent camera flashes reflecting off the inner walls of the memorial lit it up beyond the already-bright normal lighting. When I reached the Memorial, there was no shortage of tourists, even though it was nearly seven pm. Adults, small children, families, a school group, all in awe of the massive man of marble. And then I turned around.

As magnificent as the Lincoln Memorial is, what really captured me (and many of the others) was the view back across the Mall. So that’s why they have a reflecting pool: from the Lincoln Memorial you can see the whole Washington Monument reflected. Even in the snowmelt a patchy reflection lit the Mall. Far in the distance the Capitol was lit up brightly. What an amazing scene.

Now why do I keep bringing up the number of tourists there? Wouldn’t I have preferred there were fewer so there would be less crowding? Well, crowding wasn’t really an issue. But what got to me was this: even in these contentious political days, a diverse group of visitors could all stop for a few minutes and share the wonder. We could all appreciate the beauty and truth of Lincoln’s words engraved in the wall of the memorial. We could all feel thankful for past leaders like George Washington. We could all stop and feel the love of a free country, this country, our country. Amazing.

Rich Mullins summed up my feelings toward my country so well in his song Land of my Sojurn:

Nobody tells you when you get born here How much you’ll come to love it And how you’ll never belong here So I’ll call you my country But I’ll be longing for my home And I wish that I could take you there with me…

Getting back on track

It’s been a disorienting past ten days  or so; last weekend (10 days ago) we had the big storm, which meant church was canceled, which always really throws me off.  Then last week I was on travel, only in the office for a few hours on Friday.  So by Saturday night I had no real idea what day it was…  fortunately Becky reminded me that we would be going to church the next morning.

We had a bit of a backwards morning at church music-wise.  David Green, normally our bass player, was leading music from the piano.  He asked me to play bass with him.  So I hacked my way through it, and I think we managed OK.  A learning experience for both of us.

Now it’s Monday morning and I can look forward to a regular week at the office.   There are times I’m less than excited about coming in to work, but this week it’ll just be nice to have things back to normal.

Off to the market to buy a fat pig...

…home again, home again, jiggety jig.

I always seem to forget the beginning of that rhyme, but I quote the end of it often enough.  I made it home last night from Washington (via Minneapolis) thanks to the skill of the Northwest Airlines pilots who drove our DC-9 through snow and 30 knot landing winds to get us to Cedar Rapids.  Still, it was a late night - got home about 12:30, and many thanks go out to Daniel Garner for graciously agreeing to pick me up at the airport so Becky could stay home with the girls.

When I get a chance to stop and think, I’m sure there are a couple more blog posts to be written about this trip, but for now I’m just glad to be home.

Visiting Uncle Sam

This week is time for my first business trip in a while, and yesterday found me heading out of Cedar Rapids for Washington, DC.  While here I’ll be participating on an industry committee that will be developing guidance for Synthetic Vision and Enhanced Vision Systems for aircraft.   While I’m not in meetings, I’m hoping to do some sightseeing, since this is my first visit to Washington.  Most of the museums and stuff are closed after 5 pm, but at least I’ll be able to walk the Mall and see the memorials and such.

My flight made it in to Reagan National airport on time and I rode the Metro up to my hotel.  As I was nearing the hotel, I was thinking it looked a little dark…  when I reached the hotel lobby, I found out that the power was out for this and a few nearby blocks, and would be out until midnight.  Sigh.  They checked me in with pencil and paper, and sent me with a couple of glowsticks to my room.   I dropped off my stuff and then went down and asked for directions to a restaurant that would still have power.  I ended up at Pizzeria Paradiso, where I had a very tasty “Atomica” pizza and read a book for a while.  Then I walked back to the hotel, sat in my room in the dark, and had just enough laptop battery left to watch a couple of hours of Battlestar Galactica.  As BSG was wrapping up, the lights came back on, so I was able to really check out the room (very nice!), iron some clothes, and head for bed.

The combination of a late night and an unfamiliar bed made this morning come a little bit too soon, but the complimentary breakfast was tasty.  In a few minutes I’ll be headed out to walk the five blocks over to RTCA for the meeting.  It’s supposed to be up to 50 here today, so it should be nice for walking after we’re done today.  I’ll take lots of pictures, but won’t have any way to upload them until I get home…  so keep coming back here and eventually you’ll see some!

Finally done

Last night I used a jigsaw to cut two small notches, pulled the garage door opener up about another inch, reconnected everything, and it worked! So, 9 days, some very cold fingers, and one broken thumb later, we have a functional garage door and can park the vehicles in the garage again.

This opener has three working remotes, which means one for each car and one for the house… no more cold, late-night, barefoot trips outside when we forget to shut the garage door! The only thing still not working is our van, which is supposedly equipped with the HomeStar system, and thus should be able to be programmed to open the garage door from a button on the overhead panel. So far, no luck. But even if I don’t get that figured out, I can live with it. :-) It feels good to finally get that project finished.

Making progress

Yesterday morning  we got a guy out to fix the garage door, so it now goes up and down like it should.  So last night I spent most of the evening trying to get the garage door opener installed.  Close, but no banana.  The rail on this opener is a bit taller than the previous one, and with the limited space between the garage door and the rafters in the garage, it’s just too tight.  So my next step will have to be to use a jigsaw and cut a small (1/2" max) notch in the right spot in a couple of rafters.  Slowly but slowly, it’s coming together.

I fought the door, and the door won

Today was lining up to be a fairly unadventurous Saturday. I had a church basketball game in the morning - we got beat by a team who must’ve shot 85% from the field for the game. They were on. It was scary. Then we took the family to Hy-Vee for a late breakfast, and a few of our friends joined us. Finally, we headed home. My remaining task for the day was to install a new garage door opener. Our old one is probably 30 years old and has been slowly dying for a while now. We found a nice new one on clearance at Lowe’s last week and bought it. So, I was all set.

I got the new opener unpacked and assembled. Then I took down the old one. So far, so good. However, I noticed as I was taking down the old opener that the torsion spring for the garage door, normally attached by two lag bolts to the frame of the garage, had pulled out one bolt and was in the process of pulling out the other one. Here’s an example of a torsion spring:

No problem, I thought. A quick trip to Lowe’s procured two larger lag bolts, and I set about installing them. It was a bit tricky - I had to put some weight on the spring to hold it down into place, but I managed to get the first bolt in. Then I came back up to tighten it, and the whole thing let loose. I didn’t see exactly what happened, but my left hand was bleeding and swelling. So Becky called Janice who was a life saver and came over to stay with the girls, who were napping. Then we went to the urgent care clinic.

One hour and three x-rays later, the doctor decided that I had fractured the last bone in my thumb (the one at the end of my thumb). No stitches were necessary, they just used some pressure bandages on my thumb and index finger to get the bleeding to stop. And I’ll have to wear a splint on my thumb for 4-6 weeks until the bone heals. Here’s what it looks like now:

So, this will put a damper on a few activities. No more basketball for the rest of the season. I will probably be able to play the piano enough to lead worship at church next Sunday as planned, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the Bach fugue on the pipe organ for the talent show. It has been a bit of a challenge typing this post, too, but I’m starting to figure out how to type without my index finger and thumb on my left hand.

Mostly I’m thankful that it wasn’t any worse; it sure could’ve been. The Lord was watching over me, even in my poor judgment of what I could manage. I’ll be calling an overhead door company on Monday, and will gladly pay them to fix the torsion spring and finish the opener installation. Some things, I guess, are just better left to the professionals.