A Rough Start for the Red Maple

It was a little over a week ago we happily planted a new tree on the west side of the house. Last fall we cut down an old half-dead birch tree, and we've wanted to fill the space with something new (and not so dangerously close to the foundation!). Thanks to my Dad for his help and discount from Bachman's, we got a new Red Maple.

We found the soil to be somewhat clay as we dug the hole. Before dropping the tree in, we added water to the hole, but it didn't soak in very fast due to the dense clay-like soil. A few days later our leaves were wilting & curling, and looking pretty sad in general. We think it's a combination of over-watering and the shock of transplanting the tree.

As a last ditch effort, I picked up 10 bags of better topsoil dirt to put around the tree. I dug up the tree, still wet under the roots, and made the hole bigger and deeper for the new dirt. Our new Maple is now surrounded by 400 pounds of better dirt that should hopefully soak up water easier and help the tree. We may end up with a dead tree, but we'll let it go until next summer and see if it improves.

It's a Boy!

On the morning of June 26th, we saw the first pictures of our son, Nathan Benjamin, due to arrive on November 10th, 2009. He appears to be doing well, and is pretty much right on schedule, as the ultrasound determined he would be due on November 8th, only two days off of our original due date.


We got together with Beth's family later that night at the Sunshine Factory restaurant to reveal the sex of our baby. Every one of them guessed girl, except my 2 year old nephew. We had mixed predictions from my family a couple days later, but of course everyone was happy to hear the news and the name. Now we can start to prepare for a baby boy in November!

Twins VS Astros from Row 11

Big thanks to our friends Anna & Chris, who shared 2 of the four tickets they had for last night's Twins game. We enjoyed the game from Row 11, lower level behind home plate. We got pretty spoiled being so close, as we're usually in the upper deck.

We had dinner at Majors before the game, ventured downtown, and made our way to the Metrodome. The game turned out to be a good one. Kevin Slowey pitched and the Twins won 5 to 2.

BOTCO 2009

I had another good BOTCO fishing trip this year. For those of you who aren't familiar, the BOTCO fishing trip was started over 50 years ago with my grandpa & five of his buddies. We've continued the tradition every year at the same lake. The trip promises good times & good fishing, and this year was no exception. We rented out three cabins, and this year had 12 guys make it up for the trip, spanning 3 generations.

Dad and I and my brother in law made the drive up to Big Lake in Bemidji on Saturday morning. We had a little rain during the drive and when we first arrived. The rest of the trip was beautiful - sunshine & clear skies until we left on Tuesday after breakfast.

We enjoyed some good Walleye fishing and made a couple trips out just for sunfish, and were able to land enough so I could come home with a limit's worth of sunnies. My walleye catch wasn't much, but Dad landed the Walleye King traveling trophy this year.

My cousin Billy ran his annual bass tournament. Over the two-hour timeframe our boat managed to land a few small bass, which are fun to catch. We didn't recoup our $5 entry fees but left with a few door prizes Billy had gathered up for the tournament. My uncle Tom landed the largest bass at about 4 lbs.

When not fishing or relaxing, we enjoyed some excellent meals. The highlight each year is our afternoon fish fry. Much of the walleye catch from the first couple days was breaded & deep fried for the group on the afternoon of day 2. along with cooking the fish, we fried up a big batch of chopped potatoes, onions, and bacon, some baked beans, and a variety of homemade wine and sweets.

Overall, a nice getaway. I came back with a tan, lots of fish for the freezer, and had some relaxing time off from work.

Workbench fun - Repairing a broken USB device

My wife came to me after a day of teaching with a small crisis on her hands... or rather, in her hands. The RF wireless presentation remote she used every day (The Presentation Pilot Pro) was accidentally broken by a student. A helpful gesture of pushing in a chair happened to catch the USB receiver plugged into the back of her desktop, and snapped the plug right off, including a small piece of the circuit board. A new remote & receiver costs about $70, and to order just the receiver would still be $50, so any way to repair it and avoid that expense would be to our advantage. Of course this is my strange idea of fun, so I dove in and took it apart to survey the damage and see if it could be fixed.

The metal housing of the plug was actually soldered to the board for strength in two spots. One of those solder joints broke off the board, but the other joint held, taking a small piece of the circuit board with it when it was broken. As for the 4 connections for the USB, it wasn't looking good. I took several close-up photos of the damage since it was so small, and used my multimeter to try to find points I could solder to. Unfortunately the USB connections were solid, so when the plug was ripped off, it pulled off the metal contacts on the board and some of the substrate. This left me with nothing substantial to solder to, and I wasn't sure I could just put it back the way it was. I've done small repair work like this before, but this one wasn't so simple, so I decided to attack it from a different direction.

The largest chip on the board had a clearly written part number on it: "CY7C63723C" which after some Google searching turned out to be a "USB Combination Low-Speed USB and PS/2 Peripheral Controller." Jackpot. This was the USB interface chip, and in theory this is all I would need to connect the USB plug to. I found the spec sheet for the chip and found the four pins I needed, and double-checked the USB spec to make sure I connected it properly. To insulate and prevent any shorting, I covered the board by the connector with some electrical tape, and soldered the metal plug back in place. Using some small wires from Cat5E ethernet cable, I ran jumpers from the connector back to the USB chip. After some careful soldering, I was pretty thrilled to see that it worked when I plugged it into my PC! The device was recognized immediately, and I was able to move the mouse and use the buttons through the remote with no trouble.

With the receiver now working, I added some epoxy to the back of the board to strengthen the broken connection and fill in where the board was broken off. Lucky for us, the damage only affected the solder points for the plug and the structural part of the board for securing the plug. No traces were damaged, so I was able to bring it back to life with a little research and some careful fine-detail soldering. Now the receiver is working and has been re-assembled. The only signs of the repair are a couple wires visible through the hole for the indicator light.

Double Dose of the Twins VS The Royals

This weekend we hosted two friends from Kansas City: Beth's friend Jenny from college, and Megan, a friend of hers who is also a baseball fan. They made the road trip up to the cities to see us, and see their Kansas City Royals play the MN Twins of course. Friday night was a great game. We ended up with a group of 12 of us, many of which were other friends of Jenny's who came out to visit. There was plenty of action on the field, and the Twins ended up winning 7 to 5.

We enjoyed having house guests, and sharing the extra space in our house. Saturday we slept in and took it easy, and grabbed some lunch at Applebees. We had originally bought 5 tickets for Saturday night's game, but Jenny's husband didn't make it up to Minneapolis, so we invited Vinney to join us. Vinney and I left early and found some dinner at a cool little bar called Mortimer's where we savored some good cheap bar food. $2 special on cheeseburgers, some fries, and a cool Honeyweiss. The game was neck and neck for awhile as the Royals pretty much matched us run for run. Unfortunately this dragged out to a tie after 9 innings. Two innings later the Royals came back with 3 more runs to win the game. But at least we had good friends to hang out with... even if some of them were cheering for the wrong team :-)

Taking care of some overdue house projects

This past week I've gotten the bug to work on some house projects that have been on our list for a long time. Now that the weather is warming up, the temperature in the attic isn't ice cold, and not yet blazing hot, which works well for me.

We've been doing our best to keep the upstairs bathroom ventilated as we started to see mold appearing on the wall behind the door many months ago. That was taken care of with some bleach and mold-resistant primer and paint. Now I have a new bathroom ventilation fan installed in the ceiling. I picked up a nice little 70 CFM fan from Menards. After locating the right position up in the attic, I hooked up the wiring and ducting, and mounted the unit in place, and fished the wiring down through the wall to the switch box in the bathroom. As of now, I have a working bathroom fan. The only step I have left is to vent the air out through the roof. Installing the vent is a project for another day though.

Since I was already working in the wall outside our bathroom, I took the opportunity to install a second light switch in our hallway. Previously, we had to walk all the way down a dark hallway to reach the light switch. With some careful measuring I was able to fish my wires down into the walls without making any extra holes in the wall, which was very nice. It took some time to sort out the plan for wiring, but I was able to make it work nicely. Now I have two switches on our hallway light. A small convenience, but well worth the effort.