New Addition to the Family

After D inadvertently caused a scandal with his blog title earlier this month, I thought I'd continue the theme and tell you all about our new addition: a beautiful new vacuum. (No offense, blog readers, but you will not be the first to know should any *real* new additions join the family.)

We've tried for years to figure out the best way to clean our floors, which range from wood to tile to area rugs to wall-to-wall carpet and are spread out on three floors. We finally gave up on our Dyson upright, which just couldn't handle the hardwood or tile very well and relegated it to the basement's wall-to-wall carpeting (no more having to drag it up and down two flights of stairs) and bought this pretty fellow:

A Miele C1 Titan, retail price of a hefty $600. Fortunately someone we knew recently got theirs using airline miles and when I noticed that I had about 75,000 about to expire at the end of the year, I knew I should go that route too (get it, route?). With no trips planned, this felt basically like free money.

While I have nothing but hatred for airlines and for flying, using my United Miles for this was surprisingly easy. I was short a few miles, so they charged me $60. I kept expecting to see more fees or expensive shipping tacked on while going through the purchase, but nope - just a flat $60 to make up the 10,000 or so remaining miles. This is way cheaper than trying to buy or gift miles to purchase an actual flight.

How does it work? So far so good:

We haven't had to replace the bag yet (yes, this one has a bag - how old-fashioned) or vacuum anything particularly challenging. But it seems to work well transitioning between rug and wood, so we don't have to sweep as often, so that's a win. We still use a sweeper on our fancy hand-knotted rug to get the cat fur off, but we can set this one on low suction to get rid of crumbs without feeling like it's going to destroy the rug.

I guess we'll just have to see if it stands the test of time. But at $60, I'm not quite so concerned about whether this was the right decision.

Back That Branch Up

I committed a blog sin by forgetting to take a "before" picture, but trust me when I tell you that the big magnolia in the back yard was starting to crowd our garage roof.

D originally wanted to have the tree removed entirely but I enjoy its shade and fragrant flowers (though not the giant pods that seem to fall constantly and are large enough to cause a twisted ankle). In any case, we decided we would try to trim it ourself with an extendible tree pruner. With a freshly installed sharp blade, we went to work attacking the branches leaning on the roof. Fortunately none were so squashed up against the roof to make us fear the falling branch would grab a slate on its way down.

 You can sort of see the problem branches from here....a little. If you use your imagination:

 The sharp Fiskars blade made surprisingly quick and satisfying work. We removed 3 branches (D did 2 and I did 1) in about 10 minutes.

Here's the "after" picture from the angle we should have used first. You can see none of the branches  are touching anymore

It took longer to trim the branches, especially after we realized that our handsaw was incredibly dull. A 2 day delay to wait for a new 15'' handsaw from Amazon, and we were set:

We're saving these for firewood so D cut it into usable pieces, all stacked and ready for winter.

This was a very exciting project, given that we started out getting estimates to remove the whole tree for about $500 and spent a total of about $20 for new saw blades instead. I'm sure I'll continue to curse the tree out when I'm cleaning up the pods, but I'm glad we decided not to take it down. At least now I know how easy it is to take off a few low-hanging, annoying branches.

Little Brother

We never seriously considered getting a full-service security solution after being robbed. Way too expensive and hopefully not very necessary. But we did toss around the idea of self-installing something. The serious self-rolled security systems involve setting up a server to record video along with several expensive cameras. Just too much money and hassle. Should we ever make our house part of the internet of things, we may install cheap motion sensors on the main entry doors and ground level windows with some kind of hub (this or whatever Apple does?). But there's too much flux and uncertainty about which system will win out. So that project is on hold.

Our main concern is that packages get left on our stoop. Since our street is so highly trafficked, we are always worried about something getting lifted. So some kind of video camera or still capture system would work. A super popular one is the Dropcam. But this works by streaming all of the video through your home internet connection to Dropcam. So should Russian or Chinese hackers compromise Dropcam, they could watch your home camera from the comfort of their desks. But worse, Google bought Dropcam. Which means that eventually Google will decide to use the video streams to figure out how to sell things to you. So we wanted something we had some control over.

My brother is using this camera to monitor his front door and recommended it.

Nothing fancy. 640x480 resolution. IR sensors for night vision. Wireless network connection. But what I liked about it was 1. it's really cheap and 2. you can log directly into it and control it. We have it setup to transmit photos whenever it detects motion to an email account. D-Link isn't involved at all. The camera can't be accessed from outside our network. So it is (sort of?) secure. 

I originally put it in our bay window but the IR sensors don't work through the glass and I couldn't get a angle on our porch. I did a little bit of googling and it seems that a bunch of people are using them outside without too many problems. It's really cheap, so I think it's worth a try. 

Our walkway. The camera was originally next to the potted plant in the bay window. Now it is behind the gray pot center right.

Shielded pretty well from the elements from the bay widow overhang and the pot. It's also right on top of the outlet. 

The capture photo resolution is pretty lousy. But better than nothing. I think it'd only be useful for a actual theft for capturing the time and a general description of the thief. Unless the thief had really distinguishing tattoos. Since the emails get sent a minute or two after it gets triggered, I could conceivably catch a robbery in action.

Unfortunately a spider has decided that this location is great. Apparently a little spider walking right in front of the camera is enough to trigger the motion detector. Each morning I have a dozen or so captures of this little dude walking around.

Here he is during the day. 

I've removed his web several times, but he is quite clever. He immediately drops to the ground and scrambles away when I touch his web. A few hours later, a new web appears. I guess I have to keep knocking his web down to discourage him. 

Aside from spiders, the camera seems to work fine. The resolution is terrible, but there's a fairly steep price penalty to get a HD camera. We plan on getting at least another camera to cover the basement entrance.