Thursday, February 7th, 2008
I took this little video today before we were attacked by the dog. We were in a good mood, but that was ruined by a true idiot. I guess I am still venting.
Anyway, there is a pretty nice little river that runs parallel to the road we walk on. We can hear it for most of the way up the road. It actually keeps the road about five degrees colder than the rest of the area. About a week ago, this stream was totally covered with ice. Not so much anymore.
Here is the video…
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Monday, January 7th, 2008
Today was an awesome day. It was one of those days that makes it worth it to live in the Northeast. It was 60 degrees today. Weather.com said it was only 57 outside, but my thermometer said it was 60, and that was in the shade.
I had a bunch of things to do today. One of them was to pick up the rest of the sheetrock that was laying at the end of the driveway under some black plastic. I had about two garbage cans worth.
When I first went outside, I was in a short sleeve shirt. I was working away, breaking up the sheetrock, putting it into the garbage cans. I was working so hard, I started to sweat. Because of this, I had to take my short off. Some cars drove by and were probably wondering what the weird guy was doing in the driveway with no shirt on. Whatever. I think I am the only guy in the neighborhood who takes his shirt off when working outside. I think we moved into a conservative area.
It was so nice outside, I thought it would be a nice idea to share a short walk in the woods with my faithful viewers. Now, this is not an exciting walk, but you do get to see what the woods in back of our house look like and you get to hear my voice. So here goes…
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Monday, January 7th, 2008
One of the main reasons I wanted to get this new Sony Handicam Camcorder was to take videos, and videos I am taking.
I am on the internet quite often looking for nice towns throughout the United States. Every so often, I bump into some bright and intelligent genius who takes video while driving through various places in various towns. I really like this because it gives a nice picture of what the towns are like…the main street, the traffic, the types of cars parked on the sides of the roads, etc…When I search YouTube to look at these types of videos, I really like it when I actually find one.
With that in mind, I decided to take some video yesterday while driving through Ellenville and Stone Ridge, NY. These videos aren’t the greatest, because it was kind of cloudy yesterday and there was dirty snow all over the place. That actually might be a good thing because it shows what the town actually looks like at a certain point in time, good or bad.
Anyway, onto the video driving through Stone Ridge…
…and the video driving through Ellenville.
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Saturday, November 24th, 2007
Ahhhhh…this is my last one.
I am trying to upload all my old videos and this is it. Thank freaking goodness. Now, I can erase this from my todo list. One of these days, I am going to get rid of that list altogether.
One summer long ago, Laura and I decided to visit the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. You know, it’s part of the ridge. Anyway, I took some video in the back part, near the lake. That’s the best part anyway. That’s the part everyone comes to see. One of these days, we are going to paddle around in one of those canoes.
Here is some video…
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Friday, December 29th, 2006
We have a new Christmas tradition in our house. We are going to go for a hike. Now, I completely understand that this may be a one year tradition because this year’s Christmas tempurature was in the 50s, but if this Global Warming thing is correct, there may be a few more years to go. By the way, wouldn’t you just love to see Al Gore and George Bush in a boxing match?
Anyway, we decided that Sam’s Point Preserve in the Shawangunk Mountains of Ulster County, New York would be the best place to start, because it is fairly nearby.
We drove up RT.52 towards Ellenville and made a right at the sign that said, “Cragsmoor.” After a few miles of crossing the top of the ridge, we found and parked in the parking area. I took a walk over to the big map and saw that there was a lake about one and a half miles up the trail. Ok, let’s go see that.
We walked for a while and could see the cliffs on the right. They were getting lower and lower to the ground as we continued on. When we finally got to the top, I took Holly (the dog) and jumped up on top of a rock for a view.
The first thought I had was, “What an odd place.” Right from where I was standing, you had a 360 degree panoramic view of the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. Also, there was the lake all right…in the middle of this short pine tree forest. I felt like I was either walking on the moon or walking in Florida somewhere. Again, very odd.
I took Holly down to the edge of the water and came across a weird little area. It must be a spill over or something. It seemed a bit out of place because I was wondering how they would get any machinery up here. I guess it must’ve been a while ago. Also, I was wondering if maybe there was any cave entrances around. I kept my eyes peeled.
We totally forgot what the map looked like, so we only continued to walk for about another mile. We walked out and turned back for the two mile trip back to the car. When we got back there, we realized that a loop actually went around the lake and we were closer to the car at the point we turned around. Whoops. Next time we are going to take the trail from the other direction and take some nice pics from the top of the cliffs.
Till then!
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Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
I happen live live in a very beautiful area of New York. The Shawangunk Ridge is absolutely spectacular and visiting the Mohonk Preserve has become a favorite activity. Unfortunately, it seems that the western side of the Hudson River has water that smells like rotten eggs. I know there are towns on the eastern side that have this problem, but I know of more over here.
We moved in to this house on the hottest day of 2005. I am not exaggerating. It was honestly the hottest day. I remember it well. We unpacked half the truck and I was sweating bullets. I stopped because I was out of breath. I asked anyone if they would like a glass of water, they accepted and I walked in the house to get some out of the faucet. I filled three glasses and walked back outside and handed my friends the glasses. We put them to our lips at the same time…and all at once we said…”Eeewwww, rotten eggs!” Boy, what a delight! We had sulphur in our water!
As with any problem I am confronted with, I immediately say that I can fix it and then my mind starts to go. I thought of the biggest and the best carbon filter I would get. After I put that baby in, there would be no more smell. Well, my friend Craig tried that up in Oneonta, NY, to no avail. My father also tried that in Wilmington, NC and he is always changing the filters. If that doesn’t work, what was I supposed to do?
We lived with the smell in the water for about a week. We weren’t too far past the closing on the house, so I wasn’t too thrilled with dropping a bunch of money. I asked around at work and got a nice wide variety of answers. No one seemed to know what they were talking about. Things were getting worse because when we got out of the shower, the smell would follow you until you completely dried. This had to change FAST!
The next day I got on the phone with a few water purification companies that I found in the yellow pages. Most of them said that there was iron in the water. I said, “No, you must be mistaken, I have Sulphur in the water.” They said, “Yes, but Sulphur is created by Iron.” What? Well, apparently, they were correct. The way it works is this: Water with small traces of iron enter the house through the well. Then, the water sits in the hot water heater. Somehow, the heat changes the iron in the water to sulphur and then, whalla, stinky sulphur water! I am not too sure of how this works. My friend Paul wrote a much more informative entry in his blog about water treatment.
The answer to my problem was to get a Whole House Iron Filter - a Manganese Greensand Filter. I was talking with my neighbor about this problem and he recommended a local water guy to do the job. He said he was the most reasonably priced in the area and new what I needed. I gave this fellow a call and he came out and tested my water. He said, “Yep, your water isn’t hard, but you do have iron in it.” I said, will the filter you install get out 100% and make every thing perfect?” he said, “No, but about 95% will be taken out and you won’t have the smell anymore.” That sounded good to me. My only concern at this point was how much I was going to have to give this guy to fix my problem. I had to have him install it because I didn’t know the first thing about it, didn’t know where to get the filter and had no way to get it to my house. He told me it would cost $1100, said and done. I told him that was fine, just get over here and do it ASAP. The picture below is the actual filter he installed.
The water guy told me that this filter was one of the best on the market. No shortcuts were taken and it would last for about 20 years.
He did a great job installing the filter. The soldering of the copper pipes looked good and he ran the backwash line to the septic pipe in the basement so it wouldn’t make a mess outside when it backwashed the greensand with the Potassium - water mixture. It does this about every 4 days at 2AM.
He also flushed out my electric hot water heater and put some bleach in there to kill any bacteria. He told me to put about 2 cups of bleach in our well every year. I have done this and it’s amazing how good the water smells after I do it. I am happy to say that ever since this very maintenance free water filter was installed, my rotten egg smell has just about disappeared!
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